Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire PDF
Preview Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire
Bolllft1Jood elnema 9780415930147 Bollywood Cinema Size: 229 x 152mm Spine size: 20 mm Color pages: Binding: Hardback e Bolll(J t'ood inema TEMPLES OF DESIRE VIJAY MISHRA ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON Published in 2002 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OXI4 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright © 2002 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including any photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood cinema: temples of desire / Vijay Mishra. p. cm. ISBN 0-4159-3014-6 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-4159-3015-4 (pbk.) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motion pictures-India.!. Title. PN1993.5.lB M46 2001 791.43'0954-dc21 2001019672 For my daughter, Paras That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more And all its dizzy raptures. Wordsworth It is hard to forget Those once forgotten days, Days not meant to return Why does the heart recall them? If days were doves, I would have caged them, Caressed and cradled them, Fed them on pearls of love, Clasped them to my breast. Shailendra For a thousand years unseen The narcissus bemoans its fate; Rarely is one born With passion eternal, pain unending. Hazrat Jaipuri (attr.) Contents Preface ix A Note on Transliteration xxiv Chapte7 One INVENTING BOMBAY CINEMA Chapte7 ClNO MElODRAMATIC STAGING 35 Chapte7 Clhw THE TEXTS OF "MOTHER INDIA" 61 Chapte7 ;JOU7 AUTEURSHIP AND THE LURE OF ROMANCE 89 Chapte7 ;Jive THE ACTOR AS PARALLEl TEXT: AMITABH BACH CHAN 125 Chapte7 Six SEGMENTING/ANALYZING TWO FOUNDATIONAL TEXTS 157 C hapte7 Seven AFTER AYODHYA: THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF FUNDAMENTALISM 203 Chapte7 2i'jht BOMBAY CINEMA AND DIASPORIC DESIRE 235 Filmography 271 Bibliography 277 Index 287 Vll I began writing this preface in the library of the National Film Archive of India. The library is in fact no more than a reading room, solidly built with a central pillar. Around the long reading tables a few students of Indian cinema pore over old newspapers and examine photographs of films. The central cat alogue of print material is perhaps more useful as a sign of the amount of material that can no longer be retrieved. Although current issues of Indian periodicals are readily available, back issues of journals, books, and many key films are difficult to trace even when they do exist in the stacks. Despite these shortcomings, it is the only reading room in the world that can take you back to old Indian film periodicals and fanzines. Enthusiastic librarians bring copies of magazines from the stacks if they can locate them. Without air-condition ing, the midday heat, even in the month of December, can become unbear able. Books as well as humans begin to discolor, and many of the old magazines have deteriorated beyond repair. AB I brood over this preface I recall something an Indologist (possibly Heinrich Zimmer) once wrote. During a research trip to India he observed that very often we begin to understand our selves only after we have examined another culture in some detail. I think he elaborated this pithy observation through a parable about an old man who went afar looking for gold only to discover, upon his return, that the gold lay hidden under the floor of his own kitchen. The narrative of search and dis covery hit me with uncanny force in this library as I rummaged for informa tion on Bombay Cinema. Unlike Zimmer, I came to India not as a total outsider. I grew up in the colonies, but belong, racially and as Hindu, to India. I am a descendant of illiterate Indian indentured laborers who left the plains IX x PREFACE of North India in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations of Fiji. Although they constituted a microcosm of India in terms of linguistic, religious, and caste divisions, they were nevertheless basi cally peasant in origin and working class in their social attitudes. In Fiji this fragment society constructed a largely mythical-some would say illusory India which had little basis in fact. My own India had grown through the myths of these indentured laborers, and like all mythical relationships, mine too had an implicit capacity to distort and magnifY. Yet these myths or, more accurately, ideologies, since they were imaginary systems of belief, framed our ambivalent relationship to Mother India. From around 1930 onward, how ever, these myths of the mind began to be mediated through their projection onto the visual. In an uncanny fashion, cinema reinforced the Fiji Indian myths of an ancient land still basking in its epic glory. At the same time spec tatorial fascination with the newfound power of the visual, what Fredric Jameson has called the essentially pornographic fascination that the mind has with cinema, triggered a desire for India in ways that radically transformed what until then had existed only as the fantastic cliches of our forefathers. I came to India to do archival research and to write about Bombay Cinema as a scholarly object of knowledge. Trained as a literary critic at an ancient English university, I felt that only scholarly detachment could lead to a book that would have any respectability. But as I began to write my notes in a friend's flat in Colaba, Bombay, I suddenly realized how correct the Indologist and Fredric Jameson in fact were. I had come to India in search of the pot of gold only to find that that pot had been buried deep in my uncon scious. When I saw the old films again in the Pune Film Archive, I realized that the joy of cinema was essentially sensual, stored up in the "bodily synapses" and that what I was analyzing was not so much the films themselves as repeating the original moment, the earlier gaze, of the subject, myself, view ing films. The film history I had come to construct in Pune was already there in the muscles and sinews of my body. In the end whatever I wrote will have to be framed in the experience of diaspora. Imagine my surprise when among the dun-colored and often decaying film journals in the archives I chanced upon a very early essay titled "Indian Films in Fiji Islands" published in the Indian Cinema Annual of1 933. The essay was written by a certain S. Pratap of Suva, Fiji. I had suddenly found a way in which I could write a narrative about myself in this preface. Like Marlow when he encountered Towser or Towson's book on seamanship (a battered copy lovingly restitched by a Russian captain), I was fascinated by this chance discovery and, more impor tant, by the diaspora's intervention into the discourse of film criticism.
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