Indian Popular Cinema Research Articles

Transgressive Bodies in Dark Worlds: Female Gangsters and Film Noir in Indian Popular Cinema

Transgressive Bodies in Dark Worlds: Female Gangsters and Film Noir in Indian Popular Cinema

DARK IS THE NEW LIGHT: A PARADIGM SHIFT IN THE VISUAL NARRATIVE OF INDIAN CINEMA AND WEB SERIES

Indian ancient scriptures contain a rich array of rules, instructions, daily rituals, and customs, which is particularly suitable for a diverse country with its multiculturalism and diverse beliefs. Rasa theory, a fundamental concept in Indian aesthetics that has strong connections to early Indian performing arts such as dance and theater. Contemporary dark films explore themes of violence, crime, moral ambiguity, and the darker aspects of human nature. They often aim to evoke intense and unsettling emotions in the audience. Indian audiences have shown a growing interest in films that challenge conventional storytelling and explore complex and unconventional themes. Films and web series like "Gangs of Wasseypur," "Paatal Lok," "Sacred Games," and "Asur" etc. have received critical acclaim and have been embraced by audiences for their bold narratives and portrayal of darker elements. While there is an audience that enjoys dark narratives, the appreciation of dark cinema among Indian viewers is not universal. However, it has undoubtedly gained momentum and contributed to the evolving filmmaking culture in the country. The goal of this study is to analyze & explore the visual semantics applied in web series with dark themes, aiming to understand their influence on the audience. An exploratory study examines the visual elements employed in popular Indian cinema and web series that portray dark narratives.

Bollywood self-fashioning: Indian popular culture and representations of girlhood in 1970s Indian cinema

This article investigates how Bollywood cinema represented girlhood experiences in India in the early 1970s. It argues that the films during this time focused on representing girls who displayed a variety of new fashion styles and attitudes, some of which were borrowed from western cultures. This was a sign that there was a new way of representing girls which broke with the submissive, dull and melancholic sari-wearing Indian female stereotype entrapped within domestic settings. The immediate result of this was the emergence of new style leaders and popular icons in Indian popular cinema. This study uses Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Guy Mankowski’s idea of self-design to examine how Indian girlhood was renegotiated in the 1970s as an individual-centric idea with more agency and power. Here, self-fashioning refers to the way girls adopt new elements of fashion, styles and attitudes to distinguish their identity from earlier archetypal modes of representation in film and culture. It specifically analyses the emergence of Jaya Bhaduri inGuddi(1971) and Dimple Kapadia inBobby(1973) as case studies to understand the transformation of girlhood representations in early 1970s Bollywood that opened a new space for girls to redefine their selfhood through the assimilation of consumerism, western culture and fashion styles.

The Cinematic Feminine A Study of the Portrayal of Women in the Movie ‘Pushpa- the Rise’

‘You treat me like a slave, a pet dog. You want me at your beck and call. I can’t do it. I have self-respect’ this is a very famous scene from the Tamil film Kaatru Veliyidai from the maverick Mani Rathnam. Its Leela, a physician in a terror-stricken Kashmir hospital played by Aditi Rao Hydri mouthing these words of self-respect. A woman who not just by virtue of her occupation but by the space the character is located should be strong. The acceptance of her circumstances in just the one pivotal scene shows how the visual is manipulated to expect Women in these cinematic narratives show her as vulnerable and meek in contrast to her professional calibre (strong and decisive). As most women in not just south Indian popular cinema but Popular cinema across the subcontinent cinema is portrayed…. subtly vulnerable to male persuasion, domination. (Dasgupta, 1988).
 This paper aims to examine the following objectives:
 
 To examine the Portrayal of women in popular cinema that reiterate dominance, stereotyping and violence.
 To examine the portrayal of women in the film Pushpa that relates to ethics under the appellation ‘Visual Ethics’
 To understand the patriarchal subtexts in the movie Pushpa

Space, screen and the Indian multiplex film

ABSTRACT This article summarises my doctoral thesis on the multiplex movie theatre in post-liberalisation India, whose rise has fostered radical changes in Indian popular cinema. The thesis explores the intersection and interaction of this encounter, where the psychology of architecture influences the cinematic landscape, binding architectural topography to spectatorial life. Cinema is spatially moored to the cinema hall, and even though present-day digital technology makes its relocation to spaces other than the cinema hall possible, the primary intent of cinema production is the cinema hall, its exhibition implicated in a publicness that informs its experience. In exploring how the particular spatial dynamics and imaginative matrix of the multiplex space informs its cinematic narratives, the thesis attempts to examine, through a selection of ‘multiplex films’, the configuration of a new imagination, birthed by the particular social, economic and cultural vectors of the multiplex experience.

Contesting Culture: The Grammar of ‘Kaala’

Cinema as an art form vividly captures the aspirations and everyday life-worlds of the people in India. In more contemporary times, suffused with the global language of desire, popular Indian cinema has sought to project the nation as a global power, while invisibilizing the faultiness of caste, gender, race and ethnicity. The films are increasingly shot in exotic locales with the lead characters leading enchanted lives. Innovative technology is utilized to narrate stories in which the farmer/worker/maid/other laboring people are conspicuous by their absence. Very few films possess the courage to buck this trend to recount tales of struggle entwined with the language of rights and justice. My article focuses on one such film—Pa Ranjith’s Kaala (Black). The film interrogates the muscular religiosity, caste and patriarchy on which the nation state is tethered. The cinematic journey also infuses the locale of Dharavi in Mumbai, home to thousands of migrant workers, with an agency of its own.

Is everybody Kung Fu fighting? Indian popular cinema and martial arts films

ABSTRACT Hong Kong’s martial arts film have been popular in India since the 1970s (Srinivas 2012, 66) and they have had a profound influence on the Hindi action films of the 1970s-1980s, as martial arts were progressively integrated into their narratives. This article investigates the appeal of Hong Kong martial arts films, and of the figure of Bruce Lee in particular, with specific reference to the social, cultural and political context of reception in India. The context within which Bruce Lee made his entrance on the Indian screens was in fact critical for his success. In particular, the article examines the appeal of martial arts, and their incorporation in the Hindi action films of the 1970s, in relation to (post)colonial discourses of Asian masculinity. Drawing upon Yvonne Tasker’s examination of the ‘anticolonial narrative’ embedded in Hong Kong martial arts films, the analysis discusses the incorporation of a martial arts style of combat within Indian popular films as a response to colonial and orientalist tropes of Asian effeminacy and softness and argues that martial arts allowed the 1970s Hindi action hero to articulate an alternative, anticolonial, version of Asian masculinity.

Representing the LGBTQ+ Community: A Study of Indian and American Popular Culture in the Last Decade

Two discourses merit discussion in popular culture today: society’s attitude to alternate gender identities of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and whether forms of mass media should bear the social responsibility of equal representation for all. The conversation hinges on how society represents its gender/sexual minorities, and what that, in turn, reflects about the said society. This paper is a cross-cultural examination of these aspects in American and Indian popular cinema and web-series of the last decade. Through a close cultural analysis of select movies and webseries, the status of queer acceptance in both these countries, the secondary areas that the productions engage with, and the gender-roles assigned to queer couples have been examined. This paper argues that there are overarching similarities between the Indian and the American productions in terms of their choice of actors, the internal dilemmas of the characters represented, and their strong ‘educational’ intent. However, despite the global dominance of American mass culture, Indian representations and their reception by the audience also shows important deviations.

Terrorists and Patriots: Construction in Popular Hindi Cinema

Through this research we are trying to understand the construction of the patriot and the terrorist in popular Indian cinema. In all media artefacts realities are represented and not replicated. Certain metaphors are used to construct a reality which is guided by individual understanding and perceptions. Certain metaphors used continuously used for particular constructions tend to become normative and unquestioned. As a result in any analysis of representation, the question, whose reality is depicted? is significant.For the purpose of this research we have closely looked at four Hindi movies, Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992) and Dil Se (1998), Farhan Akhtar's Lakshya (2004) and Shimit Amin's Chak De India (2007). Through a semiotic and discourse analysis of these movies, we have attempted to understand the creation and representation of the hero and the anti-hero in the form of patriots and terrorists respectively. This construction is a part of the nation-building discourse that films participate in, and act as a site of this discourse as well. The problems of the nation are depicted in these movies and are represented in the characterization of the anti-hero. The patriot on the other hand acts as the saviour of the nation in its times of trouble.The research has brought forward the fact that the desires of the nation-state have changed over time. Initially, religion formed a basis of most issues. Communal disharmony was highlighted upon and national integrity was the call of the patriot through the film, as seen in Roja. By the time Chak De India was released the nation's problems shifted to regionalism, thus proving India's concept of unity in diversity a farce. It reflected upon the internal problems of the nation state which is so divided by its own wings and thus needs a patriot to defeat the enemy which lies within its own self.

Resurrection, Remediation, and Religious Fundamentalism in Contemporary Indian Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films

Resurrection, Remediation, and Religious Fundamentalism in Contemporary Indian Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films Anu Thapa (bio) In recent decades, as Indian society’s digital modernization has continued apace and Indian cinema has completed its transition to digital, Hindu fundamentalist nationalism has been resurrected in the mainstream socio-political arena. This fundamentalist political ideology, also known as “Hindutva 2.0,” has found a happy and dangerous convergence in the narrative and aesthetics of contemporary Indian sci-fi/fantasy films. This essay traces the contours of this convergence by juxtaposing the ideological resurrection of Hindutva alongside the popular Krrish and Baahubali franchise films in contemporary India. These franchise films, I argue, harness the entanglements between religion and cinema technology to produce a speculative and spectacular Hindu cosmology that resonates with Hindu fundamentalist ideology. The expansive visuals and excessive spectacle of these films encompass the theological and technological all within themselves, serving the technophilic avatar of Hindutva 2.0. Remediated by digital technology and abetted by the photorealist effects of digital cinema, this fundamentalist ideology has become inextricable from the aesthetics of contemporary sci-fi/fantasy films. As contemporary cinema gets embroiled in the process of sensing and sense-making of this iteration of religious fundamentalism, that has suffused India’s socio-political arena, Walter Benjamin’s warnings about the “aestheticizing of politics” has become ever more relevant.1 [End Page 289] Religion and Hindi popular cinema That there exists a connection between religion and Hindi popular cinema is not a novel proposition. Even a cursory survey of Indian cinema scholarship will show that religious ideology, religiosity, and notions of faith are crucial to the composition and the consumption of Hindi popular cinema. Indeed, the catch-all term “religion” has been variously deployed to make claims about the aesthetic distinctions of this cinema. Scholars like Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Geeta Kapur, among others, have underscored the religious symbolisms of early Indian mythological films to typify the aesthetics of Indian popular cinema as vernacular.2 Similarly, film critic, Andre Bazin, argued that the success of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) can be attributed to its aesthetic, which is markedly different from the “religious, social, and melodramatic music hall” of Indian popular cinema.3 Hindi popular cinema revels in inexplicable miracles and divine interventions rendered through over technological manipulations. The oft-referenced sequence in Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony (1975), depicting the miraculous restoration of vision represented through superimposition, exemplifies the fact that elements of deus ex machina have prevailed in this cinema. Over the years, Hindi popular cinema’s relationship with religion has changed alongside the socio-cultural and political impetus of the Indian nation. Its predilection for Hinduism and Hindu culture has remained a constant throughout, even as this cinema has incorporated Islamicate culture and Urdu language into its folds. In the early 1900s, Hindu mythologicals and devotionals provided the stories and the spectacles for the first films made in the Indian subcontinent. Hindu mythologicals, thus, became the formative genre of Indian cinema. Even during the Nehruvian era, arguably the most secular phase in the history of post-independence India, mainstream Hindi films retained their alignment with Hinduism. Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) is perhaps the most widely and bestknown example from this period. During the 1970s Emergency Era, amidst communal strife and sectarian violence, films like Amar Akbar Anthony engaged with notions of religious harmony albeit under the auspices of a Hindu nation. Following economic liberalization in the 1990s, overt engagement with religion seemed to disappeared from Hindi popular cinema. Instead, films like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) [End Page 290] relied on Hindu overtures to establish the NRI protagonist’s sociocultural affiliation with the Indian nation-state. Post-2000, Hindu fundamentalist ideology and popular cinema have collided in spectacular and, often, violent fashion, both on and off-screen. Emboldened by the political ascendency of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), right-wing Hindu extremist groups moved into the center, appointing themselves the cultural and moral overseers. Against the exacting standards of Hindu fundamentalist ideals, popular cinema and its role in imaging and imagining the Indian nation has come into stark focus. On the one hand...

Bollywood in Britain: Cinema, Brand, Discursive Complex by Lucia Kr�mer (review)

Reviewed by: Bollywood in Britain: Cinema, Brand, Discursive Complex by Lucia Krämer Kinga Földváry Lucia Krämer, Bollywood in Britain: Cinema, Brand, Discursive Complex. New York & London. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 296 pages, $130.00 hardback, $39.95 paperback $35.95 eBook. Public awareness of Bollywood, the world of popular Hindi cinema, has slowly but surely grown during the past few decades, and although this increase in recognition must clearly be seen as a global phenomenon, there are significant differences between the ways individual countries and social groups view this exciting universe. Lucia Krämer's thorough examination of the state of affairs in Britain is therefore not only an excellent addition to the already available academic writings on Bollywood, but it also offers a timely investigation into a previously unexplored aspect of this complex field. Even though Bollywood as a term has long become common currency both in popular and academic discourse, the author points out the considerable discrepancies among the diverse contemporary interpretations of the word. Interestingly, while the popular etymology of the term is well known ("Bombay + Hollywood"), the exact meaning of Bollywood is much less settled. It is sometimes used to encompass Indian cinema as a whole; at other times it is restricted to mainstream Hindi cinema produced in the Mumbai area. Some of these uses are neutral and non-judgmental, but the word is also frequently associated with a pejorative sense of spectacular lowbrow entertainment, lacking in artistic merit. Yet, as Krämer argues, the past decades have witnessed not only a broader global understanding of the heterogeneous nature of Indian cinema, but also considerable changes in Indian filmmaking as well, and this raised awareness begins to be reflected in the language of reviews, too. Since the volume is interested in the way Bollywood is perceived in Britain, it focuses on what Bollywood means for British audiences, and in what ways these meanings are created and disseminated in image and text, fiction and non-fiction, by amateur and professional reviewers and interpreters. Following its detailed discussion of the plethora of meanings associated with Bollywood, the volume goes on to look at the contemporary position of popular Indian cinema in Britain, relying on statistical evidence partly gathered by the author from a variety of target groups. As a result, the arguments presented are convincingly grounded in facts and figures, socio-demographic and industrial observations, rather than simply on hypothetical or metaphorical interpretations. Putting the Bollywood phenomenon in its socio-historical context, the author presents its changing themes and emphases on certain aspects of Indianness or the diasporic existence manifested in the cinema. Nonetheless, the film analyses that also form an inevitable part of the study, add similarly sound and thought-provoking aspects to the investigation. The book also sheds light on intertextual references between individual films, both Indian classics and contemporary diaspora narratives. One particularly praiseworthy feature is that these short summaries include not only the usual cinematographic details, but even more interestingly, translated excerpts from film lyrics and descriptions of their visual background ("song picturization") as well, which audiences often perceive as the most authentic, even compulsory Bollywood features. A detailed timeline illustrates how the 1990s brought about the first stage of Bollywood's visibility in Britain, followed by a Bollywood boom in the early 2000s, particularly the so-called "Indian Summer" in 2002, which gave way to a new, though more subtle and therefore less observable change in stylistic and structural elements of production and reception. Many of the films selected for in- depth analysis belong to the so-called diaspora films, thematising the concerns and anxieties inherent in diasporic existence, as seen from the viewpoints of both the mother country and the various groups of non-resident Indians. A central thematic element examined here is nostalgia, which the author also puts into theoretical perspective, before examining its textual and visual manifestations. Yet it is the second half of the volume where the endeavour moves into previously uncharted territory. Krämer undertakes more than just a handful of film analyses, and contextualises her argument by interpreting Bollywood as a brand, a label that points beyond individual works and [End Page 7] authors...

Recovering History: Gender, Anti‐colonial Militancy and Indian Popular Cinema

Recovering History: Gender, Anti‐colonial Militancy and Indian Popular Cinema

Bombay dreams and Bombay nightmares: Spatiality and Bollywood gangster film’s urban underworld aesthetics

The importance of the city in an articulation of Indian modernity has been central to the narratives of Indian popular cinema since the 1950s. Especially since the mid-1970s, in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a State of Emergency, Hindi cinema has explored the structures of power that determine Bombay’s urban city space where the hero of the film encounters exponentially communal, domestic, gang, and state violence. These films put forward textured views of the cityscape and address overtly its potential for corruption and violence. Focussing on Milan Luthria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), this article explores Hindi cinema’s engagement with urban violence in an age of market liberalisation, accelerated economic growth and planned expansion. By exploring how individuals encounter forms of urban violence as an everyday occurrence, the article argues that in these instances violence becomes the primary determining agent in the city’s urban landscape.

Item Girls and Objects of Dreams: Why Indian Censors Agree to Bold Scenes in Bollywood Films

The article presents the social background, which helped Bollywood film industry to develop the so-called “item numbers”, replace them by “dream sequences”, and come back to the “item number” formula again. The songs performed by the film vamp or the character, who takes no part in the story, the musical interludes, which replaced the first way to show on the screen all elements which are theoretically banned, and the guest appearances of film stars on the screen are a very clever ways to fight all the prohibitions imposed by Indian censors. Censors found that film censorship was necessary, because the film as a medium is much more popular than literature or theater, and therefore has an impact on all people. Indeed, the viewers perceive the screen story as the world around them, so it becomes easy for them to accept the screen reality and move it to everyday life. That’s why the movie, despite the fact that even the very process of its creation is much more conventional than, for example, the theater performance, seems to be much more “real” to the audience than any story shown on the stage. Therefore, despite the fact that one of the most dangerous elements on which Indian censorship seems to be extremely sensitive is eroticism, this is also the most desired part of cinema. Moreover, filmmakers, who are tightly constrained, need at the same time to provide pleasure to the audience to get the invested money back, so they invented various tricks by which they manage to bypass censorship. The most widely used ways to trick the censors are movie songs, so often underestimated, especially in the West, which however are not, as some would like to see them, only an unnecessary addition. Bollywood films are often called musicals, but the examples show that all the songs, not only item numbers and dream sequences , play quite a different role in Indian movies than in the classic Hollywood musicals. There is a very deep logic lying behind film production, and popular Indian cinema uses its songs to show everything that is impossible to show in the story. Filmmakers know very well that songs are the element of fantasy, which when used in a story about everyday life, can show things that are impossible in natural experience.

Embodiment and Stardom in Shahrukh Khan’s Fan

Embodiment and Stardom in Shahrukh Khan’s Fan Neepa Majumdar (bio) Fan belongs in the familiar genre of films about obsessive fans, ranging from the naïve to the deranged, but it ends up defamiliarizing both the genre of such films and the star Shahrukh Khan, first by having the star play both fan and star, and second by both extending and playing against the actor’s current star persona as developed over the past two decades in a number of media sites. Dispersed across media and live platforms, contemporary arenas for star and fan interaction, in the case of Shahrukh Khan, range from twitter to sightings “in the flesh” in front of his house, which the film also incorporates. Although at one level the film might be considered a narcissistic take on his own stardom by a transnational media icon who cannot bring himself to share the screen with another actor playing the fan, the choice of performing the fan here upends this genre while also playing into Indian cinema’s longstanding fascination with double roles. While the dual and multiple role film has been a staple of Indian popular cinema since the 1920s, and doubling has been a significant element in Shahrukh Khan’s own filmography, in Fan the double role, and thus its sameness/difference dynamic, in itself constitutes an essential element in the film’s argument about the relationship of stars and fans in the context of the contemporary intensification of long-standing paradoxes of intimacy/distance, presence/absence, and access/inaccessibility that have always characterized the star-fan relationship. In playing a star who has significant differences from Shahrukh Khan, the film can arguably be understood as a triple-role film, including first, Gaurav Chandna, the fan; second, Aryan Khanna, the fictional star (who is given the real star’s son’s name and is thus his creative child); and third, footage of Shahrukh Khan himself in various film roles and interviews. [End Page 144] In Fan, doubling does not function as in pre-Bollywood films, to showcase the star’s acting range in negative roles while safeguarding his stable star persona,1 but rather as a gateway to a proliferation, not just a doubling, of the star body, while detaching it almost completely from Shahrukh Khan’s current star persona and returning it to the persona of his earliest film roles. Here, the double role serves to work out the central idea in the film of the mutual constitution of star and fan, which is articulated several times in the words and actions of the obsessed fan, Gaurav Chandna, who quotes, or rather, re-performs Aryan Khanna saying, “Whatever I have done today is because of my fans. Without my fans I am nothing.” Re-stated as a threat, this sentiment is what the fan and the film then proceed to act out. But the threat of fan practices that go beyond the acceptable is also the subject of the film in other ways, having more to do with control over the star’s image across an ever-proliferating mediascape. My argument here concerns three closely interrelated dynamics that apply to both Fan and to contemporary modes of star- and fandom, especially in India. These are not really oppositions but work together as a range. The first dynamic is the relation between “fake” and “real” star/fan, with a greater interest in the fake or the copy or the duplicate2 in its many manifestations, both material and conceptual, and at many levels, including lines of dialogue. The many kinds of fake come together in the Madame Tussauds scene in which the diegetically fake Aryan Khanna manhandles the materially fake wax version of Shahrukh Khan standing in for Aryan Khanna, while berating his wax version about his fakeness in a rant that is clearly directed at the diegetic star’s fake persona. This scene materially and performatively draws attention to the copy, the fake, and the double in ways that stress the impossibility of seeking the real here. In a context like this, there is seemingly a distinction to be made between the real and the fake, with the wax statue, for example, clearly...

Bollywood in Portugal: watching and dancing practices in the construction of alternative cultural identities

The impact of Bollywood cinema among Portuguese viewers is an unknown reality in the surrounding society. Usually associated to the communities of Indian origin, the consumption of this kind of cinema also occurs among people from various sectors of the Portuguese population that although not related to each other, have in common the habit of watching Indian films in private, away from the suspicious and stereotyped looks from their relatives and friends. In the meantime, Bollywood dance, the performance inspired by the Hindi cinema choreographies, is growing. The increase of its practitioners reveals an interest in cultural references associated with India and its popular culture, functioning Bollywood dance as an alternative dance practice, generating wellbeing. This paper focuses on the anthropological analysis of both popular Indian cinema audiences and the increasing practice of Bollywood dance in Portugal, exploring the processes of demand for wellbeing based on cultural references from Indian popular culture. Although with different features, these two ethnographic examples represent creative and alternative cultural processes, through which new identities arise, framed in old orientalist ideas.

A national cinema’s transnational aspirations? Considerations on “Bollywood”

Popular Indian cinema theorized as a national cinema has recently undergone a ‘transnational turn’ within global cinema studies. Judging by the slew of books on ‘Bollywood’ with ‘travel’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’, and ‘border crossing’ in their titles, it would appear that the national is no longer a relevant rubric for Indian popular cinema. Despite the push to disavow the national in favor of transnational cinema studies, acknowledging other nodes connecting the expansive proliferation of films worldwide after digitization, the national cinema framework remains truculently relevant. A transnational approach might speak to a salutary universal cultural humanism in films, but it risks flattening cinematic storytelling, distinctive esthetics, and the particularity of cultural tropes integral to cinema historiography. Challenges to ‘national’ Indian cinema from regional, interregional, and regional–transnational connections strain the national rubric, but they underscore as much as they undercut the persistence of the Janus-faced concept of the nation in cinema studies.

The Cinema of India

With what outlook should one construct, analyze or dissect film theory? Should one view cinema as a medium of mass communication? Propaganda? Entertainment? Art? Or should cinema be considered a concoction of them all? In trying to formulate a film theory, dealing with all these elementary characteristics of cinema poses a serious problem. Gaston Roberge notes that – A theory of movies would tell us what a movie is, what it is made for, how it is created in images and sounds, and for whom it is made1. The questions respectively deal with the content of a movie, the validity of the content in terms of the prevailing socio-political circumstances, the form of the movie and the target audience of the movie. Now, obviously, it is required for Indian cinema to be able to provide at least a level of generalization in answering the aforementioned questions to be considered to have a theory of its own. The purpose of this article would be to investigate whether or not such a generalization (subsequently, a film theory) is possible for Indian cinema, and then to delve further to find out how much of that theory is rooted in our original outlook toward audio-visual art. Now obviously the span of one article does not allow analysis of every type of cinema produced in as cinema-crazy a country as ours, where almost every state has its own regional cinema, independent cinema, art-house cinema and recently, underground cinema. For the purpose of the present article, therefore, we would restrict ourselves to the popular Indian cinema, namely Bollywood productions that some critics coin as commercial or entertainment cinema

International terrorism? Indian popular cinema and the politics of terror

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by the decisive entry into our media landscape of the so-called global war on terror, with countless films and TV series from all over the world addressing the issue of international terrorism. Even Indian popular cinema, which has been addressing the issue of domestic terrorism since the late 1980s with films such as Roja (Ratnam, 1992), Drohkaal (Nihalani, 1994), Maachis (Gulzar, 1996), has, since the new millennium, begun to tackle the topic of international terrorism. In this article, I will analyse the shift in the construction of the terrorist discourse in Indian popular cinema from a domestic to an international perspective in order to highlight the close proximity between the two, as in fact, the “global war on terror” narrative seems to offer Indian filmmakers the possibility to simultaneously address international and domestic terrorism. In particular, I will refer to Karan Johar’s film My Name Is Khan as a text which, while discussing the consequences of the American war on terror on its minorities, problematises the official discourse on terrorism and its neo-Orientalist character. It also draws a parallel between the situation of minorities in the United States and India. In so doing, the film triggers a reflection on the state of the Indian nation and questions the state of the secularist values of newly independent India after decades of communal violence.

The visual representation of queer Bollywood: Mistaken identities and misreadings in Dostana

Abstract Tarun Mansukhani’s Dostana/Friendship (2008) is the first commercial popular feature film from India to exclusively engage in a queer dialogue using the device of ‘mistaken identity’ and ‘misreading’ (Ghosh 2007). This film provides a rich site for studying the traffic between discourses of sexuality, Indian-ness, diaspora and performativity. This article will address the queer representation of these fictional characters and queer framing, analysing the concepts of ‘dosti’ (friendship) and ‘yaarana’ (friendship) and the trope of the homo-social triangle in Hindi cinema. Indian popular cinema unlike European cinema has received quite scant attention within arts criticism and this article attempts to look at both the aesthetic underpinnings of a popular Indian cinema such as Dostana which is also ushering in a new queer cinematic aesthetic within the global cinema discourse. This article was presented at the Global Queer Cinema Network at the University of Sussex and has benefited from the advice and feedback of B. Ruby Rich, Deborah Shaw, John David Rhodes, Nguyen Hoang, Samar Habib, Cuneyt Cakirlar, Juan Suarez and the organizers Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover. Finally it has also benefited from intense discussions and debates with fellow Bollywood writer, Steven Baker.