Expanding the Archive:

Reiterations of Film(i) History in Contemporary

Media, Art and Cinema

Dissertation submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for award of the degree of

MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY

Amrita Chakravarty

CINEMA STUDIES
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND AESTHETICS
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY
NEW DELHI – 110067
INDIA
2019
 DECLARATION

titled "Expanding the Archive: Reiterationsof Film(i)

I declarethat this dissertation

by me at the Schoolof
History in ContemporaryMedia, Art and Cinema" submitted

Arts arrdAesthetics, Nehru Universityfor the awardof the degreeof Master

Jawaharlal

of Philosophyin CinemaStudies,is an original'"vorkandhasnot beensubrnitted

by me

so far, in partor full. tbr any otherdegreeor diplomaof this or any otheruniversityor

institution.

A U"Jr"<l.^mS
Amrita Chakravarty
lz. o+. 2411
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i

List of Illustrations v

Introduction 1

Chapter One
Cinema’s Participatory Turn 28

Chapter Two
The “Art” of Archiving 94

Chapter Three
Cinema on Cinema 153

Conclusion 244

Bibliography 248
 i

Acknowledgments

The genesis of this project lies in possibly the only mildly rebellious thing I have done, which
is to militate against the Bengali Bhadralok aversion to the so-called gaiyya Hindi cinema.
Films were to me what I imagine books are to a lot of other people, a special province of the
imagination. I have grown up doing several of the things I go on to describe in this thesis,
mouthing dialogues, copying dance steps, yearning for the glamorous and largely inaccessible
style of favourite actresses. It is this lived experience that has driven my investment in research.

But this alone rarely pushes one to think more critically, and for this I am indebted to the
Cinema Studies Faculty at SAA. What distinguishes the faculty uniformly is their utter lack of
condescension, treating students as colleagues and fellows on the path to research. I am
indebted to Veena Hariharan for her patience in dealing with first year MA students, fresh out
of college with the characteristically jaded attitude of the very young. It is in those early classes
with Veena that some of my firmest convictions in what I thought I knew of cinema were
shaken. Shikha Jhingan has taught what stands out even now for me as an especially unique
course in my time at the department, the Sound Studies paper on which she is the reigning
expert. Her enthusiasm for her subject is infectious; one can hear the familiar refrain at every
conference and talk – but what about sound? Ira Bhaskar has steered us through turbulent times
both within campus and without, and I remember being reduced to tears regularly in the Trauma
Studies course which she taught with a sense of responsibility transcending academics. I was
fortunate to have her teach us again in the MPhil course and was struck by her interest in
keeping abreast of contemporary developments in media, for which she relies on an active
interchange between herself and her students. Kaushik Bhaumik, it might be said, truly
specialises in unsettling certain certainties, and he can be found at all hours in the vicinity of
the department, counselling students on questions on an escalating scale of the arcane. Kaushik
has also been instrumental to my research, offering extended interviews and working through
some of the more complicated questions I have attempted to unravel in the dissertation. I was
especially delighted to have accompanied Ira, Kaushik and Ranjani on the departmental field
trip with the batch below, where I discovered to my delight their vast repository of knowledge
on the always entertaining subject of celebrity scandal.
 ii

Which leaves Ranjani, for whom a few lines would not suffice to describe the influence she
has had on my work and even long-term interests in the years she has taught me. Anyone who
has been taught by Ranjani can attest to her extraordinary investment in everything she does,
including painstakingly trawling through the reams of absolute tripe she is regularly presented
with, on which she nonetheless attempts a critical look. It is this characteristic of Ranjani’s
perhaps which distinguishes her so greatly, the ability to retain an openness towards everything
without becoming cynical, that enables her to have a unique, and uniquely simple perspective
on almost everything. A lot of my interest in this project has derived directly from her Media
and Aesthetics classes, a philosophy and theory-heavy course which managed to keep a diverse
batch of sixteen riveted from beginning to end. Some of the ideas we discussed in those classes,
including the contentious idea of the obsolescence of cinema has formed the ground of my
current work. It would also have perhaps been impossible to pursue the topic I did had it not
been for her almighty efforts in expediting all manner of research, including the crucial field
interviews I undertook. It became clear from the wide group of people I encountered, just how
highly she is regarded by so many. Not only professionally, but people remember her also for
her humour and warmth, as with one interviewee who said Ranjani is not to be trusted on
anything she says about a Shah Rukh Khan film, as she is a fan! I am especially grateful to her
for having seen me through this year, very often under trying circumstances herself. She has
also introduced me to a circle of students of whom I can hardly believe I am a part. This is the
dissertation seminar course with Ishani, Priyadarshini, Pallavi, Pawan, Gabriela, Shaunak,
Neiko, Vibhushan, Sebastian, Anisha, Aman, and Ipsita. I am indebted to the group for acting
as a regular sounding board, chiming in with genuinely helpful comments and suggestions on
how to fine-tune one’s ideas. Their collective knowledge is staggering, and is in no small part
due to Ranjani’s own determination in rallying the group together, ensuring we meet regularly
and read widely. Without these significant anchors, the year would have been a solitary one
indeed.

In this regard I must also mention my fellow batch mates Sudipto Basu and Soumik Hazra. We
often joke that our batch is smaller than the number of people it ordinarily takes to constitute
even a tutorial session. In other words, we have spent a considerable amount of time in each
other’s company, time that for me has been fundamental in opening up my horizons of thinking.
They have both – Sudipto with his famously amiable manner, and Soumik with his more
reticent but nonetheless kind disposition – made even a class of three feel far more full. I would
also like to thank Pujita Guha without whom – in all seriousness – submitting this thesis would
 iii

have been impossible. Pujita, already known to me as an almost legendary intellect in the
department, has shown herself to be an even more wonderful human being.

I would be remiss to not mention the professors I have had during my time in the department,
predating the two years of the MPhil. This includes the Theatre and Performance Studies
faculty, Bishnupriya Dutt, Ameet Parmeswaran and Rustom Bharucha, all of whom offered
crucial training in my first years at the department as an MA student. I would also like to thank
the Visual Studies faculty, Shukla Sawant, Parul Dave-Mukherjee, Kavita Singh, Naman Ahuja
and Suryanandini Narai by whom I have been taught personally, and who often made a
compelling case for the other discipline. The greatest thing about the department is this unique
inter-discplinary environment which makes for far more rounded and considered research than
if we were isolated in departmental straitjackets. I would also like to offer my deep gratitude
to the technical staff at the school, Savita and Vinayak, the famously boisterous fixtures of
classes that run on projectors and computers that are blackboxes to us mere mortals. I would
also like to offer thanks to the administrative staff at SAA including Mr. Deewan Ram, Harsh
Khudaniya, Alauddin ji and Mahesh Sir, who make a veritable bureaucratic hell a little bit
lighter. I also offer thanks to our library staff, used to students running amok in the little
department library that is a haven.

I would also like to thank Anurag Kashyap, Anurag Basu, Sriram Raghavan, Pooja Ladha Surti,
Sharat Katariya, Manu Anand, Himanshu Sharma, Akshay Roy and Nandini Ramnath for
taking the time to meet with me in Mumbai. They were all exceptionally patient with my
bumbling questions, giving me enough time to find my ground and press further. I am also
grateful to Geeta Kapur, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Rohan Shivkumar and Vivan Sundaram for
their critical insight, as well as their graciousness in agreeing to interviews even at the last
minute. There comments have helped me to orient my research beyond just the questions they
were asked. I would especially like to thank Gayatri Sinha at Critical Collective, who I have
also had the opportunity to work with. Critical Collective continues to stand out as one of the
few places it is possible to do research beyond the confines of academia, and my time there has
informed the work on my thesis. I would also like to thank the staff at the National Film Archive
at Pune, setting up special screenings, allowing us unprecedented access to archival material,
and generally helping to navigate the sprawling collections at the institution. I also found the
director Prakash Magdum’s exchange with us students quite useful for some of my particular
research questions.
 iv

I finally turn to the people whom it seems almost ridiculous to thank. My friends Disha, Popi,
Rhea, Shreemayee and Oieshi from school, who were instrumental in surrounding me with an
“ecology” of the cinema, their own fandoms feeding into mine. My friends Diya, Suhasini,
Rachel and Lhanzey without whom living in Delhi would be a daunting proposition. My
roommate, and elder sister surrogate Priyanka or PK, who likes to boast she has seen me
through college, an MA, and now an MPhil. My actual real sister, Doel, who has become so
much more – a guardian, a companion and a friend – as we navigate the still slightly
melancholic condition of living away from home. The vast support system I return to in
Calcutta including Purnima Didi, Sita Didi, Kajol Didi, Shondha Didi, and Bappa Dada whose
unconditional love I feel like I have done nothing to deserve. To my Pishi and cousin Aditi,
our long-distance family. And finally, to my parents and grandmother, and to the ghosts of
grandparents past: your determination that I should do whatever it takes to be happy, makes it
possible to make it through life and everyday.
 v

List of Illustrations

Fig. 0.1. Dedication, Hiren Nag’s Film Hi Film (1983)

Fig. 0.2. Gyan Chand is interviewed by the documentary crew

Fig. 0.3. The documentary crew are recruited as actors for Gyan Chand’s Film Hi
Film

Fig. 0.4. Poster, Film Hi Film

Fig. 0.5. Poster, Celluloid Man (2014)

Fig. 1.1. Bollywood Dialogues for real life

Fig. 1.2. “12 quick videos to show how Dubsmash has taken over India”

Fig. 1.3. [Screenshot] Dubsmash, “Tujhe, apna banane ki kasam, khayee hai”, pathos
and humour

Fig. 1.4. Analogue Aesthetic: TikTok Logo

Fig. 1.5. The Shoe Challenge

Fig.1.6. Bollywood Tie-ups: #ZeroChallenge; #SlowMotionChallenge

Fig.1.7. Halloween, Indian Style: #karmaisawitch

Fig.1.8. “This is what India was like in 2009”

Fig.1.9. A Landscape of Childhood

Fig. 1.10. The 90s Kid: Embodied Uses of Media

Fig. 1.11. The SRK special: Then and Now

Fig. 1.12. Pixellated: Fandom/Stardom in the Digital

Fig. 1.13. Bauua’s morning selfie; with Babita Kumari i-Phone cover

Fig. 1.14. An imposter with famous dimples

Fig. 2.1. Celluloid, in defense: Tacita Dean, Film, 2011

Fig. 2.2. Poster, Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood

Fig. 2.3. From kabaadi to auction house: Osian’s The Greatest Show on Earth,
auction, 2014
 vi

Fig. 2.4. Street Art: Photography by Husain. Chennai, 1980s

Fig. 2.5. City for Sale, Gulammohammed Sheikh, 1981-1984

Fig. 2.6. Bhupen Khakhar collaboration with Vaman Rao Khaire, Century City, 2001

Fig. 2.7. Pandal, exhibition view, Century City, 2001

Fig. 2.8. Behind the Scenes: Masterji series, Dayanita Singh

Fig. 2.9. Masterji, exhibition view

Fig. 2.10. Phantom Lady or Kismet: The Artist as Fiction

Fig. 2.11. (Cyber) Café Society Shilpa Gupta, sentiment.express, installation view,
2001.

Fig. 2.12. End of an Era? The art of film hoarding at the millennium

Fig. 2. 13. “Pyaar Hua Iqrar Hua”: Cinema as Painting

Fig. 2. 14. Back to the Frame: indiancine.ma

Fig. 2.15. Archive Affect: Rangbhoomi, 2013

Fig. 2.16. Project Cinema City. Calendars Project

Fig. 2.17. Project Cinema City. Pipeline Network

Fig. 2.18. Project Cinema City. Table of Miscellany

Fig. 2.19. Project Cinema City. Chor Bazaar

Fig. 2.20. Project Cinema City. 14 Stations, Atul Dodiya

Fig. 2.21. Film history at the Gulshan Mahal: National Museum of Indian Cinema

Fig. 2.22. Dhadaam Dhadaam: Anushka Sharma in Bombay Velvet (2015), and
Costumes at the 3-day symposium organised by the ACTADCD (2019)

Fig. 3.1. Om Shanti Om (2007): The Billboard and the Changing Face of Stardom

Fig. 3.2. Saawariya (2007): Tbt, RK

Fig. 3.3. Saawariya: Painterly Aesthetics

Fig. 3.4. Barfi!: Murphy Radio

Fig. 3.5. Barfi!: Digital Death Masque

 vii

Fig. 3.6. Barfi!: Chhau Dancers

Fig. 3.7. Jagga Jasoos: Opening Shot

Fig. 3.8. Jagga Jasoos: Train breaks the idyll

Fig. 3.8. Jagga Jasoos: Purulia Arms Drop

Fig. 3.9. Jagga Jasoos: Traces of Netaji

Fig. 3.10. Rangoon: Paean to Julia/Nadia

Fig. 3.11. Rangoon: Film Premiere

Fig. 3.12. Rangoon: Art Deco

Fig. 3.13. Rangoon: Quit India

Fig. 3.14 Rangoon: INA anthem

Fig. 3.15 Bombay Velvet, Poster: Precious Evidence, the Film Negative

Fig. 3.16. Bombay Velvet: The club façade resembling Eros Cinema

Fig. 3.17. Bombay Velvet: Opulent interiors, phallic chandeliers

Fig. 3.18 Bombay Velvet: Opium Den

Fig. 3.19. Bombay Velvet: At the Races

Fig. 3.20. Bombay Velvet: Cricket Club of India

Fig. 3.21. Bombay Velvet: Tommy Gun

Fig. 3.22. Andhadhun: Dedication

Fig. 3.23. Andhadhun: Anil Dhawan/Pramod Sina’s house

Fig. 3.24. Andhadhun: Surfing ghost

Fig. 3.25. Andhadhun: End Credits Sequence

Fig. 3.26. Dum Laga Ke Haisha: Opening Sequence, cassette shop

Fig. 3.27. Dum Laga Ke Haisha: Unspooled cassette reel

Fig. 3.28. Dum Laga Ke Haisha: A new CD shop

Fig. 3.29. Dum Laga Ke Haisha: That 90’s show

 viii

Fig. 3.30. Meri Pyari Bindu: The writer of pulp novels

Fig. 3.31. Meri Pyari Bindu: The attic of memory

Fig. 3.32. Meri Pyari Bindu: Mixtape

Fig. 3.33. Meri Pyari Bindu: “Yeh Jawaani Teri”

Fig. 3. 34. Meri Pyari Bindu: CD shop

Fig. 3.35. Meri Pyari Bindu: Polaroid Memories

Fig. 3.36. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil: “Tere Mere Hoton Pe” on the Saavn music app

Fig. 3.37. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil: Yash Chopra landscapes

 1

Introduction

This project proceeds from the preliminary observation that the digital turn has
spawned a corresponding archival turn. In a paradoxical situation, new media
technologies which threaten the cinema as we know it, at the same time make its past
recoverable, visible and therefore a constitutive part of our present. Such visibility, as
Laura Mulvey observes, is intrinsically tied to cinema’s survival at the close of a
century-long cinematic regime. I propose that a postcinematic archive of cinema in
India provides both the occasion and the means for an expanded thinking of both
terms – archive and cinema.

As the cinema leaves the theatre, its archive too spills beyond the confines of the
monumental structures charged with housing it, becoming writ large across an
expanded media landscape. I explore the mobilisations of film history across a range
of cultural productions including new digital media, contemporary visual arts, and
popular cinema. Acts of auto-archiving drawing on memory, experience, nostalgia
and cinephilia, they become alternative sources to the designated institutions for the
preservation of film history. These are archives of the cinematic denoting a history of
the cinema that goes beyond the screen to a wide ranging filmi culture identified with
posters, billboards, fashion, pinups, songs, dialogues etc. An ecological conception of
cinema thus replaces a more narrowly technological identification of cinema with
celluloid as well as challenging its enclosure in the architectural space of the theatre.
Cinema’s past circulates across these sites as material harnessed to new performances,
thus dismantling the convention of the stable archival document and reconfiguring our
notion of what constitutes archival practice. Or rather, they instate archiving precisely
as practice, an active and open-ended process that is concerned with transmitting film
history rather than storing it. And finally, such expanded archives reimagine the
archival enterprise as a collective one, dependent on the participation of multiple
concerns that diverge from the official investments in film history. Film as heritage
gives way to film as personal souvenir, as a cultural and aesthetic resource, and as an
index of hidden histories.
 2

I debate all these issues across three chapters. In Chapter one, I look at the manner in
which cinema’s past, or rather a cinematic past, finds a performative articulation in
digital lip-sync applications, and a nostalgic articulation in the media listicle. I also
look at the relation of these new media forms to an older formation of the cinema
channeled through a discussion of stardom. In Chapter two, I read various
contemporary art practices that are drawing on the archive of cinema as a source of
alternative histories, while also – through a somewhat circuitous route – producing an
alternative archive of the cinema. In Chapter three, I look at the manner in which
recent examples of mainstream cinema seem to have internalised this explosion of
cinema’s past in other spaces. I take up two sets of films, the first of which reflects
back an image of cinema as an archive, while the second engages an archive of
cinephilia that is made visible by the digital.

This project thus hopes to creatively re-imagine cinema’s archive at a time when
cinema’s ontology is dependent on the opening out of different film histories. In this,
it takes its cue from a particular figure of the archive for whom cinema’s past is
always projected out towards it future.

Figures of the Archive, Real and Imaginary

“50,000 hazaar rupay! Ek interview ke liye? –

“Agar aap bura na mano toh main ek baat poochhoon? –

“Poochhon –

“Aap in 50,000 rupiya ka kya karoge? –

“Film Banaye ge aur kya karenge?...”

“50,000 rupees! For just one interview? –

“Would you mind if I asked a question? –

“Ask Away –

“What will you do with so much money, Sir? –

 3

“I’ll make a film! What else?...”

[Translation mine]

Producer Gyan Chand, once-renowned, has fallen on hard times. Jailed for five years
for the non-payment of debts, he works as a lowly gate-keeper upon his release.
However, he continues to nurture ambitions of making a feature film. He is visited by
a French documentary crew on the recommendation of a young man who refers to
him as the “jeeti-jaagti history” (the history made flesh-and-blood) of the Indian
cinema, a redoubtable resource on the subject. Gyanchand’s memory, the youth avers,
is like the pages of a history on the cinema, and his life story cleaves to the plot of a
typical filmi melodrama. The aging and disillusioned Gyan Chand is coaxed into
recounting his memories of the industry, dating back to his first experience on a film
set, at the shooting of a Raj Kapoor film. His memory takes the form of film reels
from two unreleased films starring Kapoor. The first, the song sequence “Hans Kar
Hansa, Masti Mein Ga, Kal Hoga Kya Bhool Ja Bhool Ja” from Behrupiya (dir.
Chandulal Shah, 1964), sees the actor in the get-up of a clown, a look that would
subsequently become iconic with the release of Mera Naam Joker (dir. Raj Kapoor,
1970). This is followed by clips from Reporter (dir. Mani Bhai Vyas, 1960), including
a surreal sequence involving a talking dog. He ends his reminiscences with his own
trajectory in the industry, having tasted success and failure in equal measure, and
expresses a desire to one day make a film again. To his surprise, he is paid for his
time and his remembrances, money which he immediately resolves to channel into
financing his dream project. From here, we follow Gyan Chand’s quixotic but
ultimately successful attempt to make a film sans stars on a meagre budget, and to get
a wide theatrical release for it. Over here then, cinema’s present is quite literally
constituted through cinema’s past.

This is the core theme of Hiren Nag’s little-known Film Hi Film (1983), which in
many ways emblematises the film industry’s own approach to its history, marked by
nostalgia and homage rather than the preservationist drive associated with the
cinephile archivist. Gyan Chand, while full of fondness for the industry’s (perceived)
glory days, is pre-occupied with making a new film. Generally not a backward-
looking sort, Gyan Chand is delighted to find that his film memories can be made into
capital to make yet more films! In his discussion of Nag’s film, Sudhir Mahadevan,
 4

diagnoses this as the tendency in India to put cinema’s archive to use in endless new
contexts and iterations.1 This is, according to Mahadevan, a mode of popular
historiography that works through an open-ended archive in which the past is
constantly modulated by the present.2 Nag’s fictional producer seems to be modelled
quite faithfully on his real-life counterpart who, film preservationists will attest, is
famously complacent on the matter of film preservation.3 Personnel at the National
Film Archive of India (NFAI) at Pune reported wariness on the part of producers to
submit old negatives and materials for archiving despite such services being rendered
free of charge. And this is regarded as one of the primary impediments to building up
the NFAI’s collection. Producers’ negligence is thus chalked up as one of the primary
reasons for the woeful state of film preservation in the country. Film Hi Film,
however, seems to suggest that the producer’s blasé attitude towards film preservation
stems not from a lack of regard for cinema’s past, but rather from an investment in its
continued production. Here, the melodramatic mode, with its stock of characters,
situations, song sequences and emotions reconfigured from film to film, functions
itself as a repository of a long history of the popular cinema in India. Gyan Chand
himself, as a filmi character, becomes a living embodiment, the jeeta-jagta of the film
history that resides outside of celluloid. If ontological accounts of cinema insist on the
specificity of celluloid, Film Hi Film depicts embodied memories as interchangeable
with the film strip, implying that the object of film history can be located in “bodies”
outside of that of film.

In this regard, the character of Gyan Chand is in some ways similar to the real-life
figure of P. K. Nair, founder-director of the NFAI, whose contribution to the
establishment of film preservation has been mythologised in a documentary feature,
Celluloid Man (dir. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, 2012). Like Film Hi Film, Celluloid
Man interweaves the history of the Indian cinema with the life’s mission of a single
individual, his body, like celluloid, itself becoming a repository of that history. The

1
Sudhir Mahadevan, “The Abundant Ephemeral: The Protocols of Popular Film Historiography in
India,” in A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India, (New York: State
University of New York Press, 2011), 161-180.
2
Ibid, 162.
3
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder of the non-government film archive the Film Heritage
Foundation, lamented in an interview that “It’s ironic how producers would take those film cans to
temples for puja before the release, but do so little to save it later.” Shail Desai, “Where old movies go
after ‘The End’,” Blink, February 22, 2019, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/where-
old-movies-go-after/article26338900.ece.
 5

film is stitched together from Nair’s own reminiscences as well as interviews with
prominent film personnel, many of whom are former Film and Television Institute of
India (FTII) students, an institution closely tied to the NFAI. These are interspersed
with footage from films which have been preserved in the archive with Nair’s efforts.
Thus, both Film Hi Film and Celluloid Man function to rehabilitate old film
fragments that would otherwise languish without care. The difference, however, is in
the nature of the archival home thus gained. Nair’s drive, as he himself puts it, is that
of the film collector’s rather than the filmmaker. “The unfortunate part is that not
many people are involved in this activity, unlike filmmaking where there are many,
many people,” he avers, echoing the view that is aired several times during
Dungarpur’s film, that there is a crucial lack of awareness of film preservation in the
country. Nair then, marks a difference from the likes of Gyan Chand, whose
historicist drive is subordinated to his ambitions to insert himself into the continuum
of history. But as Mahadevan observes, Film Hi Film, works in a salvage mode
qualitatively different from that of the institutional archive. Here, the film itself acts
as an archival home, and is moreover, the “rightful context” of the orphaned footage,
denied a release the first time round.4 If Celluloid Man, echoing the conviction of film
archivists everywhere, asserts that celluloid is the material par excellence for the
storage of film history, Film Hi Film would offer instead, that it is only in film – as
more than merely celluloid – that archival fragments can truly be restored to life.
Here, film is understood to encompass more than the footage contained on film reels,
to include a whole formation of the “cinema”, standing in for the relation between a
film text and the world it is embedded in. This refers, in other words, to the manner in
which films take – rather than merely take up – place across on-screen and off-screen
worlds.5 There is thus a sense in which films cannot be understood outside of this

4
Mahadevan, 175.
5
Anna McCarthy in a discussion of the simultaneously material and immaterial dimensions of
television (at once a receptacle and a thing in itself), explores the constitutive dialectic of a medium
that is a part of immaterial networks but also exercises an imagination tied to its physicality. She notes,
“the philosophical engagement with television’s materiality as modern technics must articulate its
concern with questions of being and perception with the modern preoccupation with the everyday in all
of its seeming banality and unreadability.” [Anna McCarthy, “From Screen to Site: Television’s
Material Culture , and its Place,” in October, Vol. 98 (Autumn 2001, pp. 93-111, 97.] I both draw from
McCarthy in her emphasis on the tacit imaginaries encoded in the mute physicality of media, but at the
same time I argue that the materiality of cinema itself is networked across posters, billboards, fashions,
music, etc, rather than contained in the celluloid medium. The moment of film, in other words,
straddles an active exchange between the film text and a world in which cinema’s presence is
ubiquitous in forms other than film.
 6

cinematic context, and so it is, that Gyan Chand – and Hiren Nag himself – are
interested in remaking film history as a film.

Film Hi Film’s historiographical project further breaks with that of the NFAI in its
very conception of the importance of film history. For the NFAI, as with all state-
sponsored drives to champion the cause of cinema, film preservation is tied up with
the imperative to conserve the cultural heritage of the country. Cinema, in this regard,
is recognised as both a national treasure, as well as for its ability to serve as a
historical document more generally. In contrast to this more instrumental approach, in
Film Hi Film, the look back towards cinema’s past is refracted entirely through the
lens of a love for cinema. Cinema is valuable for its own enchantment, and its ability
to weave itself, inexorably, into people’s lives as it does with Gyan Chand – “jeene ki
ek ada hai, humko to ek nasha hai, bolo to woh kya hai, feeling ye feeling! feeling ye
feeling!” What Film Hi Film does is to foreground an archive of cinema as affect,
“film” as “feeling,” which exceeds the life of individual films. The film not only
facilitates the incorporation of orphaned film reels into a promised narrative home, it
also manages to narrativise another aspect of the life of cinema in India, namely its
ability to generate a filmi ethos and affect. If Gyan Chand emerges as an oral historian
of the industry, his life-long enchantment with the world of movies (an enchantment
which often sabotages his more practical filmmaker’s instincts) finds resonance in a
larger film public outside the industry, who like him, participate in what is a veritable
cinema galaxy6 affecting wide swathes of public and private life. In this respect, Film
hi Film’s popular historiography, its archival gesture through cinephilia, is able to
produce a record of film history that cannot be produced in the institutional archive.
This is the manner in which individual films always partake of and mobilise a larger
fascination of the cinema as an ultimately unknown quantity.

6
I follow the use of the term both in the sense originally deployed by Marshall Mcluhan, and
subsequently by Francesco Casetti. McLuhan used the phrase the “Gutenberg galaxy” to describe the
way in which media shape the world in their image, the title referring to the epoch-making introduction
of the printing press [Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962]. Casetti takes McLuhan’s idea as a starting point to
explore the expansion of cinema in the contemporary. He explains his preference for McLuhan’s term,
because of the way “it synthesizes perfectly the image of an experience no longer localizable in a
single point, ready to assume different forms, at the crossroads with other kinds of experience, and yet
still characterised by its own identity” [Francesco Casetti, Introduction to The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven
Key words for the Cinema to Come, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 16.]
 7

Like the fictional documentary crew then, I too turn to Gyanchand as the model of an
alternative historiography in India, which is in turn predicated on a more expansive
notion of the archive. For some time now, it has been widely acknowledged among
scholars of Indian cinema that the paucity of the historical record does not in fact
constitute an insurmountable obstacle to academic inquiry.7 This reflects an
understanding of the fact that the past registers itself in forms and genres that might
not necessarily conform to established (read European) conventions of preservation
and historiography.8 What counts as a source of film history has been creatively
reimagined to include materials other than the original celluloid print, as well as
extending the search for sources beyond the “official holdings of the brick-and-mortar
State archive.”9 This in itself, then, is hardly a new endeavour. What is of significance
is the implications of such alternate archival practices on our understanding of what
cinema has been, and more importantly, what it has meant to us. A characteristically
Indian mode of film historiography, which always already takes into account the
obsolescence of celluloid, assumes a new importance in a world historical frame in
the midst of a fraught transition to the digital.

Expanding the Archive

Increasingly, definitions of the archive have to contend with the interactivity of digital
systems and the imperative for information to not only be stored but to communicate.

7
There is a burgeoning field of archival studies in India where the government’s poor track record in
acting as a responsible custodian of film heritage has launched a quest for alternative archival sources
of film history. For the above refer to Kaushik Bhaumik, “Cinematograph to cinema: Bombay 1896–
1928,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2(1)(2011): 41–67; Ravi Vasudevan, “In the Centrifuge
of History,” Cinema Journal 50, No. 1 (Fall 2010): 135-140; Stephen P. Hughes, “The lost decade of
film history in India,” Journal of the Moving Image 9 (2010): 72–93; Sudhir Mahadevan, “Traveling
showmen, makeshift cinemas: The Bioscopewallah and early cinema history in India,” BioScope:
South Asian Screen Studies, 1(1) (2010): 27–47; Gayatri Chatterjee, “Writing History for Cinama:
Archives, Archaeologyical Sites and Homes,” Journal of the Moving Image 9 (2010): 47-60; Anupama
Kapse, “Producing film heritage,” South Asian Popular Culture, 13(1) (2015): 89–93; Debashree
Mukherjee, “Notes on a scandal: Writing women’s film history against an absent archive,” BioScope:
South Asian Screen Studies, 4(1) , (2013): 9–30; Kuhu Tanvir, “Pirate histories: Rethinking the Indian
film archive,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 4(2) (2014):115–136.
8
India’s alternative traditions of history writing is the subject of historian Romila Thapar’s The Past
Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India. Thapar counters the allegation that India, and
other ancient societies lacking a historical corpus in the vein of ancient histories in the west, also
correspondingly lack a sense of history. Romila Thapar, The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of
Early North India, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2013).
9
Ramesh Kumar, “Alas, Nitrate didn’t Wait, but does it Really Matter? Fiery Losses, Bureaucratic
Cover-ups, and the Writing of Indian Film Histories from the Relics of Cinema at the National Film
Archive of India,” BioScope 7, Number 1 (2016): 108.
 8

Wolfgang Ernst, as perhaps the signal figure in contemporary debates on archival

theory, describes the change thus: “While the traditional archival order – spatial order
and classification – will in many ways necessarily persist, the new archive is radically
temporalised, ephemeral and multimodal, corresponding with a dynamic user culture
that is less concerned with records for eternity than with order in fluctuation.”10
Similarly, in her work on the transformation of the archive under an informatic
regime, Orit Halpern regards this as the transition from empirical modes of
descriptions towards a statistical paradigm of processing the past with a view to the
future.11 Halpern explains the drive of cybernetic theory informing contemporary
structures of control as the management of future outcomes through the relay of
information. In other words, information is of value only insofar as it helps to
determine a spectrum of possibility, thereby refocusing our attention away from the
meaning of past actions towards what they could tell us about the future. What
Halpern describes is in effect an entirely new order where older questions of
“documentation, inscription, and perception” wither away. The (impossible) desire to
produce a total record of an external reality, i.e., indexicality, gives way to a “self-
referential and probabilistic form of thought.” Which is to say, that history becomes
an instrumental rather than epistemic exercise, invested in virtualities rather than
certainties; the potential of the future is projected into the past which is now open-
ended rather than closed. Such a cybernetic understanding, also inflecting Gilles
Deleuze’s reading of the cinema as an interface, refigures the archival process as one
of further production rather than description.12 But perhaps most importantly, thinking
the archive through the lens of cybernetics repudiates, once and for all, the idea of
archival practice as an objective endeavour. Comparing the processing of data in a
cybernetic structure to physical processes such as vision, Halpern describes a situation
in which all that is stored is not necessarily all that is finally communicated, just as
the eye corrects for “noise” so that what we finally see is only a part of the
information that is perceived. The archive thus built in the image of cybernetics might
be understood as a system for transmission rather than storage.

10
Wolfgang Ernst, “Aura and Temporality: The Insistence of the Archive,” Key-note speech on
occasion of the workshop The Anarchival Impulse in the Uses of the Image in Contemporary Art,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, 24 October 2012,
http://www.macba.cat/uploads/20131220/QP_29_Ernst_F.pdf.
11
Orit Halpern, “Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Temporality, Storage and Interactivity in
Cybernetics,” Configurations 13, No. 2 (Spring 2005), 283-319.
12
Halpern, 302.
 9

Mary Ann Doane dates the tendency to minimise contingency or noise even further
back in time to the emergence of statistics as an epistemological framework in the
nineteenth century, amid a general rationalisation of society in the throes of the
industrial revolution.13 It is against this backdrop, Doane contends, that cinema
emerges as the primary representational means to express the tension between the
systematisation of time and the ephemeral moment that resists capture. Cinema’s
apparent ability to represent the contingent folded into the general archival desire of
the nineteenth century to regain lost time. But in doing so cinema refigures the notion
of the record itself as that which passes, staging each time an experience of loss.
Doane states, “Yet this archival artifact becomes strangely immaterial; existing
nowhere but in its screening for a spectator in the present, it becomes the experience
of presence (this is the sense in which film is usually associated with the present tense
rather than the past). What is archived then is the experience of presence.”14 In a
similar vein, Paula Amad notes in her book-length account of the magisterial archival
exercise of Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, that film’s “ability to find and
uncover the past has always been supplemented by its confirmation of the past as lost
and unrecoverable.”15 Addressing the manner in which the Kahn archive deploys the
moving image as an archival form, Amad like Doane, draws an analogy between the
archival impulse of the nineteenth century and the new apparatus for storing time. The
moving image was privileged as an archival record precisely because it could register
the fleeting, the ephemeral and the unremarkable; in short the everyday that otherwise
fell through the cracks of history. Film could capture noise, making it a counter-
archive to the positivist archive’s structures of “order, exhaustiveness and objective
neutrality.”16 Trond Lundemo, also analysing the Kahn archive, regards the operation
of the technology itself as demonstrating a sense of time past, the essential
ephemerality of history.17 The very fact of archiving, in some sense, encodes an
understanding that what is being archived shall soon be past, and further, that loss is

13
Mary Anne Doane, “The Representability of Time,” in The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency and the Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard
University Press, 2002, 1-33.
14
Ibid, 23.
15
Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2.
16
Amad, 4.
17
Trond Lundemo, “ “The Archives of the Planet” and Montage,” in Between Stillness and Motion:
Film Photography, Algorithms, ed. Eivind Rossaak, (Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 227-223.
 10

being precipitated by the very same acceleration that also propels the recording – it is
the technology of the camera which tautologically produces a sense of the world
without the camera. He notes further, “the historical articulation of the past depends
not on the single image, however, but on virtual and future connections: these flashes
occur in ‘inter-mediary’ places.” In other words, history arises out of the operations of
montage, as in Godard’s filmic exegesis on the historicity of cinema. In all these
formulations, what emerges is a conception of historical practice through the archive
as a staging or reconstruction in the present, predicated on the knowledge of the
ineluctable loss of the past.

Even as the digital has forced the rest of the world to reckon with loss – the archive as
performance and pattern rather than inscription – we have in the case of Indian
cinema, an archive which has always been reconciled to such loss, and is
consequently made up of a number of cultural practices and rituals through which the
memory of cinema is prolonged by other means. One such manifestation of
alternative archival practices is what Kuhu Tanvir has designated cinema’s “pirate
archive” consisting of articles such as dialogue and song lyric booklets, mix tapes and
other merchandise made on the cheap even before digital piracy became feasible with
the coming of video technologies. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has more recently theorised
cinema’s informal or bazaar archive which has always subsisted alongside the formal
State archive.18 Such an archive is itself ephemeral, consisting of gestures, citations,
speech acts and aural memories that encode historical information automatically.

Mahadevan regards this as an archive of cinephilia understood as the common

repository of cultural references derived from the “density of cinema’s presence in
everyday life.”19 Archiving can thus be understood as an automatic quotidian function
of film cultures rather than only a bureaucratic enterprise linked to film preservation.
Elsewhere Doane also notes the increased theoretical valence of cinephilia as the
cinema becomes threatened by new electronic and digital media.20 Considering
cinephilia, however, takes us beyond the narrow lens of cinema, commonly identified
with celluloid, to consider it instead from the point of view of its reception and uses.

18
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Personal Interview, June 18, 2019.
19
Mahadaven, 4.
20
Doane, “The Instant and the Archive,” in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 228-229.
 11

Crucially, Mahadevan’s conception of cinephilia departs from most conventional

accounts where it is seen as a preoccupation with the technicalities of film language,
authorial style, and the consecration of classics.21 Cinephilia thus comes to stand for
that which exceeds the boundaries of the film text and comes to signify, in a more
general sense, a particular filmi style. This is a style, moreover, which by a circuitous
path, finds its way back into films themselves, as they acknowledge, at the level of
narrative, the world outside in which they operate; the realm of the extracinematic.
Such a spillage of the cinema is also at the heart of Rajadhyaksha’s notion of the
“cinema-effect.”22 The cinema effect refers to properties of the cinema in excess of
celluloid that can be expressed through other forms, as in fashion, architecture, music,
etc. Rajadhyaksha’s theorisation of Bollywood sees it precisely as such a post-
celluloid formation where a notion of the cinematic is deployed in a series of
spectacular productions linked to emerging consumerist lifestyles, as in the elaborate
display of actor Dimple Kapadia’s home interior at the department store Selfridge’s in
London, or the postmodern stylings of Mumbai-based architect Hafeez Contractor.23

21
Even the more recent writings on cinephilia as those of Thomas Elsaesser and Girish Shambu who
update the concept in light of the intervention of digital technologies, still delineate it as a form of
specialised activity on the part of a dedicated fandom. Girish Shambhu, “For a New Cinephilia,” Film
Quarterly 72 No. 3, (Spring 2019): 32-34; Thomas Elsaesser, “Cinephilia and the Uses of
Disenchantment,” in Cinephilia: movies, love and memory, eds. Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener,
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 27-45.
22
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency,
Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010.
23
Rajadhyaksha’s designation of the term is qualified by the historical context of liberalisation, thus
dating Bollywood to the years of the larger financialisation of the Indian economy. Rajadhyaksha
makes a clear division between the Bombay film industry and the globalised form of Bollywood which
is no longer centrally concerned with the enterprise of filmmaking. For Rajadhyaksha, the constituents
of Bollywood are not the films produced by the contemporary Bombay industry, which is kept out of
the transnational flows of Bollywood style. Ravi Vasudevan similarly invokes the “expanded
commodity functions” of the Indian cinema following liberalisation. Vasudevan puts the matter clearly
as the transformation of the function of film, from being charged with producing a national aesthetic to
producing a national brand, valuated in an international marketplace of cultural commdodities.
Vasudevan’s delineation of the term however largely devolves on the films themselves, as he dates the
increased currency of the term to the success of the first major diaspora-themed film, Dilwale Dulhania
Le Jayenge in 1995 (dir. Aditya Chopra). He highlights criticism of the term as well, coming from the
unexpected sources of actor Shah Rukh Khan and director Subhash Ghai, seemingly the most
representative examples of the new industrial formation. Vasudevan thus qualifies two sense of the
term, the first referring to a “Bollywoodian” strategy of marketing the products of Indian films
overseas and in conjunction with a new consumer economy, and a second sense of the term, that refers
to its functions in mediated global modernity at home, in India. M. Madhava Prasad reviewing the
Bollywood phenomenon at the millennium, similarly regards it as part of a historic transition in
Indian/Hindi cinema, encoding a shift from Urdu to English as the lingua franca of the filmic universe,
the prominence of an NRI class holding a mirror to contemporary middle class identity, and a general
postcolonial preoccupation with what Appadurai elsewhere refers to as an endless game of catch-up
with the modernised west. Prasad is wary of the term precisely because of the way it tends to obscure
the historicity of the shift it signifies, incorporating the Indian cinema that came before into its
appearance of a timeless, essentially Indian cultural monolith. But he nonetheless grants the usefulness
 12

The formulaic nature of the popular film has ensured that individual films always
partake of a standardised set of conventions, including plot, characters, song and
dance that constitute what is regarded as the masala style. Arjun Appadurai ascribes
the pleasures of Hindi cinema to an ability to strategically calibrate repetition
alongside difference – retaining the stability of the structure but being simultaneously
capable of articulating the new. Such a repetitive structure of the Hindi film entails
what Appadurai describes as the eternal return of the past. Besides this, the industry
has also found ways to memorialise its own past in a series of self-reflexive narratives
dating back to the time of the early cinema when Cinema Girl (dir. B. P. Mishra
1930), presented “a cinematic study of the mechanics and inner workings of the film
industry.”24 The tradition of the meta-industrial narrative would be carried forward
through the subsequent history of Bombay cinema including Kaagaz ke Phool (dir.
Guru Dutt, 1959), Bhumika (dir. Shyam Benegal, 1977), Chala Murari Hero Banne
(dir. G. Asrani, 1977), Hero Hiralal (dir. Ketan Mehta, 1989), Rangeela (dir.
Ramgopal Verma, 1995), Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (dir. Chandan
Arora, 2003), Om Shanti Om (dir. Farah Khan, 2007), Khoya Khoya Chand (dir.
Sudhir Mishra, 2007), and Luck By Chance (dir. Zoya Akhtar, 2009). A different set
of films turned the spotlight on the spectator of cinema and the fascination of stars,
including Guddi (dir. Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1971), Cinema Cinema (dir. Krishna

of the term as the symptom of such a formal transformation, understanding form not only as a
dimension of textuality, but also in a larger sense as the set of relations between the elements internal
to the text as well as those which constitute its habitat: its audiences, its economic structure, its
ideological matrix etc.” In the introduction to a volume of essays on the subject, editors Raminder Kaur
and Ajay J. Sinha, refer to the traditionally hybrid form of the commercial Bombay film industry,,with
its locally hegemonic influence, but largely fragmentary drive as it expands out into into the world,
interfacing with diasporic and other communities. Aswin Punathambekar’s more recent tome on the
subject looks more closely at Bollywood as a mulitmedial formation drawing together film with new
communications technologies beginning with satellite television and advertising in the nineties, and
more recently including the digital resources of the internet. Punathembekar’s text professes to look
beyond the “film text and the cinema hall.” This finally is the sense in which all conceptualisations of
Bollywood are united, in thinking film as a larger cultural enterprise crisscrossed by several different
flows of media, capital, and production. See; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodisation’ of the
Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,” in Preben Karsholm (ed.), City Flicks:
Cinema, Urban Worlds and Modernities in India and Beyond. International Development Studies,
Roskilde University Occasional Paper # 22, 2002; M. Madhava Prasad, M. Madhava Prasad, “This
thing called Bollywood,” in Seminar #525 “Unsettling Cinema” (May 2003), Raminder Kaur and Ajay
J. Sinha (eds.), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through a Transnational Lens, New Delhi,
Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 2005; Ravi Vasudevan, “The Meanings of Bollywood,” in
the Journal of the Moving Image, 2008. Aswin Punathambekar, From Bombay to Bollywood: The
Making of a Global Media Industry, New York and London: New York University Press, 2013.
24
This is the description of the film accompanying its display as part of the repertoire of thirties film
productions at the National Museum of Indian cinema in Mumbai.
 13

Shah, 1979), Billu (dir. Priyadarshan, 2009), and most recently Fan (dir. Maneesh
Sharma, 2016). A third sub-genre within this larger corpus of films consist of
narratives that critically dissect clichés and tropes related to the form of the popular
Hindi film including Oh Darling! Yeh Hai India! (dir. Ketan Mehta, 1995), and I Hate
Luv Storys (dir. Puneet Malhotra, 2010). Bhaskar Sarkar reads the more recent
examples of self-mythologising as instances of Bollywood’s overtures both on and
offscreen to define itself vis-à-vis both Hollywood and an indigenous tradition of
filmmaking which has long devolved on “stylistic tendencies such as epic dispersion,
cyclicality, artifice and irony.”25 The digital provides the latest horizon for such self-
reflexion, proceeding through both critical retrospectives as well as nostalgic
invocations of cinema’s place in the world. In any case, films themselves have
animated and embedded film history in narrative, exemplified by the opening
example of Film Hi Film.

Such a ubiquitous presence and invocation of the cinema’s past in the cultural forms
and strategies mentioned above assume a new dimension as digital technologies of
storage and recall spark an archival impulse. Catherine Russell in a recent venture,
has coined the phrase archiveology to refer to the myriad ways in which fragments of
film history are incorporated into contemporary audiovisual assemblages.26
Archiveology takes a historical view of the contemporary when digital media have
simultaneously sparked a nostalgia for film as well as making it possible to access and
remix its archives. Russell’s formulation gestures to the manner in which film history
is increasingly taken up as a thematic as well as material in contemporary cultural
productions, yielding archiveology-as-practice as opposed to the archive-as-storage.
While Russell’s examples pertain mainly to avant-garde and experimental film, there
is a whole host of other genres and forms which similarly treat film’s archive as the
point of departure for new articulations. The archive has also framed the historical
endeavours flagged by the separate, though related fields of retro and nostalgia studies
and media archaeology. While the first examines the cultural renaissance of past
styles and fashions, the latter studies the material remains of old technologies
sedimented across the ages of media. Characterising the approach of all three

25
Bhaskar Sarkar, “Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht after Ohm Shanti Om,” in Figurations in Indian
Film, ed. Meheli Sen and Anustup Basu, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 205.
26
Catherine Russell. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2018).
 14

including Russell, is the apprehension of a vogue for the past defining a “period” style
of the contemporary. As the digital puts to rest the teleological, utopian ambitions of
the twentieth century, what Mark Fisher following Franco Berardi refers to as “the
slow cancellation of the future,” the only way forward it would seem is, ironically, to
go back to a time when such dreams of progress were possible.27

The critical importance of Russell’s formulation, however, stems from its

demonstration of the way in which the digital allows a democratic reconfiguration
from the recipient to the user of film history, mirroring Henry Jenkin’s more general
observation of the web 2.0 as creating participatory structures of media production.
Even before Russell, Jaime Baron describing the blurring of the categories of the
archival document and what is referred to as found footage, suggests that the quality
of being “archival” or “found” is not an objective property of the film object itself,
but a function of the spectator’s experience. In other words, it is the reception of a
film, producing a particular “effect” or eliciting a certain “consciousness” in the
viewer that determines its order of pastness.28 Such pastness is moreover dependent
on the viewer’s apprehension of a “temporal disparity”, a sense of the image
belonging to a different context than the present; the requisite distance from which
historical retrospection can commence. She also speaks of new digital histories,
making more than merely instrumental use of digital databases to actually incorporate
database structures in staging the reception of history.29 This involves presenting
material along with a set of navigational tools that personalise reception. Such a
presentation of non-narrativised materials, leaving it up to the user to chart her own
path renders each such user a historian as against the earlier reader of history.
Breaking with the tradition of presenting grand narratives, this is an archaeological
conception of history that recognises a multiplicity of narratives and the
corresponding impossibility of instating any single one of them. The digital, in effect,
dismantles the centralisation of narrative, for so long a prerogative of monumental
History.

27
Mark Fisher, “The Slow Cancellation of the Future,” in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression,
Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2014), 2-29.
28
Jaime Baron, “The Archive Effect: Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception,” Projections 6,
Issue 2 (2012):104.
29
Jaime Baron, “The Digital Archive Effect: Historiographies and histories for the digital era,” in The
Archive Effect: Found footage and the audiovisual experience of history, (London and New York:
Routledge, 2014), 138-174.
 15

Elsewhere Tanvir describes a similar opening up of cinema’s archive in India

facilitated through digital technologies, that enable a host of different participants to
enter the archival enterprise for so long dominated by the state. Tanvir notes, that
since the 1980s, technologies like the low-res VCD and DVD, and subsequently p2p
services like Torrents have made the decentralised reproduction of the film object
possible on a mass scale. Alongside the film object however, the pirate archive also
contains cultural productions that variously incorporate and make reference to film
material. Tanvir emphasises the significant intervention of the pirate archive in the
very conception of archival practice: “The authorial, productive capacity of the
user(s) in these cases is in visible contrast to the users of the official archive, where
the user is actually not a user at all, and is instead just a receiver who requests specific
films and is allowed access in a highly circumscribed and controlled manner.
Tampering with the film, or even touching it for that matter, is not a possibility. The
pirate archive on the other hand freely borrows material from various sources—be it
television, sites that provide films to download, YouTube, Flickr, and several
others—allowing users to become producers in several capacities, that is, either a host
on a torrent site, a curator of video collages, and so on.”30 It enables, in other words,
various operations on archival material including playful montage and compilation,
that in turn allow more elusive facets of film history to emerge, as for example an
index of cinephilia.

Such uses of cinema’s past have also become increasingly common in contemporary
art practice, even as cinema itself has found a home in the museum and gallery. Since
the 1990s, a process of museumisation of the cinema has proceeded through
retrospective glances back at film history in artist’s film, as in the gallery
commissioned work of Douglas Gordon, Christophe Girardet and Matthias Muller,
Monica Bonvicini among others, as well as the staging of cinema’s technological
obsolescence in installations such as that of Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Atom
Egoyan, Steve McQueen and others. Such a trend of cinema in the gallery coincides
with the eruption of the death of cinema debates. In other words, cinema’s entrance
into the gallery is predicated on its death, reflecting an arrogance as Thomas Elsaesser
notes, on the part of an art establishment that now considers itself the gatekeeper of a

30
Kuhu Tanvir, “Pirate Histories” (2014): 128.
 16

certain legacy of the cinema.31 Erika Balsom and Matilde Nardelli regard the
tendency with more optimism, even as they agree that questions of the ontology of
cinema after film are increasingly being settled away from the proverbial black box of
the theatre and in the white cube of the gallery. What seemingly characterises
cinema’s latest move into the domain of art is a defensive appreciation of both the
cinematic apparatus and spectacle32, what Catherine Russell identifies as the
“phantasmagoria” of narrative cinema, elicited by cinema’s newly endangered status.
The spectre of cinema’s obsolescence seems to have cast a tinted glow over a cinema
century, translating into, to quote Elsaesser, “liberal and celebratory rather than
critical use of Hollywood films” in art. This is in part due to the circumstances in
which the millennial cinematisation of the gallery has taken place, including the
dirges offered to a cinema past on the occasion of its centenary in 1995, which as
Elsaesser observes, “became the ideal occasion to praise the cinema in order to bury
it.”33 The other factor conditioning the artistic return to cinema’s past is, following
Elsaesser, the appropriations made possible by the availability and accessibility of
cinema’s large back catalogue in DVD form and on the internet. Here Elsaesser seems
to echo Laura Mulvey’s notion of the pensive spectator, enabled by the new
affordances of DVD technology, to pause, stop and rewind film. The cinephiliac
affordances of new technology to at once own the cinematic object, as well as
manipulating or delaying the cinema experience is reflected in the artists’ repetition
and freezing of cinema. Russell expands on Elsaesser’s identification of this
cinephiliac tendency in the uses of film in contemporary art as “a critical form of
nostalgia.”34 As digital technologies make cinema’s past into objects that can be
owned, isolated and recontextualised, in other words, into so much kitsch, they
facilitate a form of, to quote Russell, “unconscious remembrance, souvenirs of

31
The grouse of critics like Elsaesser lies primarily in the way that the gallery presumes to re-auratize
an object whose effect had been precisely to de-auratize art at the turn of the last century. In other
words, what is at stake is precisely the democratic nature of cinema as mass culture. The gallery’s own
position as a beneficiary of neoliberal capital flows reflected in, as David Fairfax notes, its billionaire
patrons, blockbuster shows and superstar artists, not to mention its role in facilitating art tourism as an
exercise in city-branding and the projection of soft power, make it as suspect as the cinema itself as a
site of ideological interpellation.
32
Matilde Nardelli, “Moving Pictures: Cinema and its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art,” in the
journal of visual culture, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2009), pp. 243-264. 245.
33
Thomas Elsaesser, “The Loop of Belatedness: Cinema After Film in the Contemporary Art Gallery,”
Senses of Cinema, Issue 86, March 2018,
http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/cinema-and-the-museum/cinema-contemporary-art-gallery/.
34
Russell, 148.
 17

memories we did not know we had.”35 The archiving of cinema in art, itself
predicated on the archival affordances of digital technologies, generate an entire
archaeological landscape of such film fragments that provide insight into other times
and places. Such a drive is further realised in the assembling of a mise-en-scène of
cinema’s material paraphernalia as in Dean’s FILM, where celluloid figures in all its
retrofuturist glory as the embodied memory of a cultural practice. Obsolescence, or to
put it as Elsaesser does, the “surviving witness of past newness,” becomes the means
through which cinema’s undead status is made productive and instructive.

However, the corresponding movement in India of the engagement of cinema in

works of contemporary art, even as it might be read against the discursive framework
outlined above in the context of the productions of Anglo-American art, nonetheless
challenges such an emphasis on obsolescence. This is in view, first, of the historical
relationship of cinema and art in India and the fundamental imbrication of histories of
modernism and the cinema therein. The respective figures at the head of both, M.F.
Husain and Dadasaheb Phalke are famously positioned between worlds, the former
having begun his career as a painter of film hoardings, and the latter having
apprenticed in the printing press of Raja Ravi Varma before going on to assume his
place as the apocryphal “Father of Indian cinema.” The impetus for both film
production and artistic modernism in India can be located in the matrix of a colonial
commodity culture and urban modernity that made such intermedial crossings as
evinced throughout the subsequent history of both, not only possible but inevitable.
Further, Geeta Kapur notes, the very institutional-infrastructural support
characterising the project of artistic modernism as an elite enterprise in the west is
lacking in colonial and postcolonial contexts, a precarity that brings it in line with the
similarly informal and non-institutionalised/industrialised base of the film industry.36
This is in contrast to the polarisation of cinema (as mass culture) and artistic
modernism as subsisting in Euro-American discourse, the reconciliation only
occurring with cinema’s assumption of historical status at the end of the twentieth
century. Thus, if the examples given above of the artistic engagements of cinema
since 1990 happen in the shadow of cinema’s demise, the parallel move in India is

35
Ibid, 152.
36
Geeta Kapur, “Visual culture in the Indian metropolis: critical intervention through art,” Lecture,
Columbia University, New York, 2001,
https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/fedora_extracted/20807.pdf.
 18

marked by the accession of both cinema and art to the logic of the market post-
liberalisation. Articulations of cinema in the gallery at the turn of the millennium
participate in what Rajadhyaksha regards as the consolidation of the culture industry
designated Bollywood. In other words, the establishments of art are enlisted in the
retroactive generation of a canon for the patently new globalised formation of the
industry, thereby marking a birth rather than death. Noting the profusion of
exhibitions on the relationship between cinema and art, one contemporary
commentator observed that the common thread in them all was the positing of cinema
as “the changing library of our emotions, desires, impulses and compulsions.”37 The
more recent commemorations of cinema attending the celebrations this time of the
Indian cinema centenary, similarly coincided with the development of a neoliberal
nostalgia industry responsible for the circulation of national heritage as souvenirs and
collectibles.38 If the cinema historically colluded with the state to narrate the nation,
cinema’s archive as envisioned in the centenary celebrations reconstituted the same
process as an exercise in advertising and merchandising.39 Once again, it is not so
much the passage of a once great tradition that is lamented, but the production of a
history geared towards a projection of soft power. The Indian cinema centenary is
thus noticeably devoid of the melancholic meditation on the state-of-the-medium that
marked the museumisation of cinema on the Lumière anniversary.

The space of contemporary Indian art, as with the study of Indian archival practices
more generally, becomes a useful site to critically think through the debate on
cinema’s obsolescence. Such an intervention is crucial precisely for the way in which
it qualifies the debate with an account of the cinema outside the geographical and
epistemological coordinates of the West, in cultures where digital acceleration has not
been the norm. This is an account of cinema and its archive from a place, where as
Mahadevan notes, “no technology dies a predictable death.”40 It is also a place where
cinema leads many lives outside of the theatre; a formation more appropriately
designated as the “cinematic” diffused across a spectrum of infrastructural, cultural
and intermedial practices. This is what Ravi Vasudevan has elsewhere referred to as
37
Madhu Jain, “Reinterpreting cinematic memory,” The Hindu, April 14, 2002,
https://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2002/04/14/stories/2002041400470200.htm.
38
Neepa Majumdar, “The nostalgia industry and Indian film studies,” South Asian Popular Culture 13,
No. (2015), 85-88.
39
Ibid, 87.
40
Mahadevan, I.
 19

the centrifugal field of film history in India predicated on an understanding of the film
object as fundamentally dispersed.41 The archive of the cinematic is accordingly
found in as many places as the cinema travels. As the digital is forcing a rethinking of
the archive the world over, the case of Indian film history might provide a template to
think through such an expansion.

In my work, I hope to demonstrate the manner in which an archive of cinema that

expands in multiple directions, might produce new meanings of the cinema, thereby
challenging notions of cinema’s obsolescence.

Frameworks: The Obsolescence of Cinema, the After-life of the Cinematic

As stated in the abstract, this project begins from an expansive definition of cinema
that regards it as an an ecology of everyday life. This is different from definitions of
cinema that centrally figure its indexical quality, as the privileged relationship
between the medium of celluloid and the profilmic world.42 Rather, this is a
conception of cinema’s presence, both material and symbolic, in the lives of its
public. In this I follow Brian Larkin’s infrastructural reading of cinema as constituting
“unique aural and perceptual environments, everyday urban arenas through which
people move, work, and become bored, violent, amorous or contemplative.”43
Considering cinema as infrastructure rather than as technology has a number of
benefits not least of which is a shift in focus from the purely material base of film.
Approaching cinema through the lens of infrastructure thus enables us to engage with
it as more than merely celluloid. Thinking infrastructurally unfolds more than a single
sense of media, opening up technopolitical, economic, social and aesthetic registers. It
allows us to think, for example, of the symbolic aspects of technology which are often
calculated to produce imaginaries rather than functional effects, as Larkin notes citing
art historian Vladimir Todorov, of the symbolic productions of the Soviet factory

41
Ravi Vasudevan, “In the Centrifuge of History,” in Cinema Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Fall 2010), pp.
135-140. 136
42
Neils Niessen, “Lives of Cinema: Against its ‘Death’,” in Film in the Post-Media Age, ed. Agnes
Petho, (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 161.
43
Brian Larkin, “Introduction” to Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in
Nigeria, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008) 1-15.
 20

which far outweighed its actual ability to produce commodities.44 Larkin describes the
manner in which infrastructures are at the heart of the project of modernity, rendering
the “collective fantasy of society” in phenomenal form. In this sense, cinema has
always been intrinsically tied to the history of the twentieth century as the very
medium through which the century was perceived. It also foregrounded modernity as
a regime in which political, economic and social forces are all critically routed
through the realm of the senses – the human body as the biopolitical unit of
production.45 For Larkin, the critical utility of the concept is due to the way in which
it posits the object of research as fundamentally unstable. Even as he denies that
infrastructures are necessarily invisible, Larkin asserts that they are nonetheless
protean formations, constantly threatening to spill beyond their designated
coordinates. Such a mercurial quality also characterises the cinematic, as opposed to
the cinema, resisting capture as any single, concrete thing.

The notion of the cinematic assumes a new significance at a time when a certain
‘classical’ formation of the cinema is being dismantled, releasing as some have
argued, the essence of the cinema that is not necessarily tied to the same –
Rajadhyaksha for example, refers to cinema being in some senses “trapped in
celluloid” being finally liberated by the digital.46 The background to this project,
however, is the litany of voices weighing in on the academic debate on the death of
cinema, arguing variously for and against it. In a way, the death of cinema debates
bear a direct relation to archival efforts to preserve film, with film preservationist
Paolo Cherchi Usai foremost among the voices at the turn of the millennium,
pronouncing cinema’s death at the hands of the digital. The film archivist’s vocational
concern to ensure the preservation of nitrate film as a storage form par excellence
effected, as Ramesh Kumar notes, a certain hermeneutic confusion between carrier
and content.47 Efforts to contain the death of celluloid became refigured as efforts to

44
Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” The Annual Review of Anthropology 42
(2013): 335.
45
Larkin draws here on Jonathan Beller who argues that cinema prefigures modes of production under
digital regimes of communication, harvesting labour minutely through the infrastructure of the mobile
phone. It is the cinema which first inducts the body into a control structure operating both from a
distance, but also more viscerally at the very level of the senses to produce desire as the motor of an
economy of consumption.
46
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Personal Interview, June 18, 2019.
47
Ramesh Kumar, “Alas Nitrate,” (2016), 104-5.
 21

save the cinema itself. It is thus precisely an archival view of the cinema that has
provoked such heated debate on cinema’s ontology.

Usai’s polemical charge has, however, been succeeded by a number of useful

conversations on the condition of cinema in a post-cinematic age. Julia Leyda and
Shane Denson in an anthology of essays on post-cinema acknowledge the passing of
the “broadly cinematic regime of the twentieth century.”48 But at the same time they
regard the current media-landscape as one of flux, an ongoing “historical transition”
than a clean break. This is a situation in other words, not of the prevalence of a digital
monomedium, but of the coexistence of old and new media on terms that are still
undergoing definition. Elsewhere, William Uricchio refers to this as a case of
displacement rather than replacement of old media, diagnosing the present as a time
“when we are experiencing crucial displacements in our cultural lives that are
rendering long-established practices obsolete. But they continue to exist – as
displaced practices, institutions, and even reflexes.”49 The category of post-cinema is
thus useful precisely because it simultaneously addresses a death – that of classical
cinema – while accommodating a dialogue between the past and present. Leyda and
Denson qualify the “post-” in post-cinema as a term that encodes both “the closure of
a certain past as much as a radical opening of futurity.”50 Post-cinema is thus invested
in the ways in which cinema will transition – rather than death, post-cinema is
reconciled to a past that never quite goes away. Cinema’s obsolescence in fact might
even serve as the launch pad for new uses and iterations. Babette B. Tischleder and
Sarah Wasserman regard obsolescence as an occasion for redefinition and
recontextualisation.51 Even more striking, Tischleder and Wasserman suggest that it is
the digital itself that is most prone to obsolescence; they give the example of the
iPhone 5, the latest model of Apple’s marquee smartphone which they predict would
be rendered old by the time of the book’s publication (and it was!). Against such bi-

48
Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, “Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction,” in Post-Cinema:
Theorizing 21st-Century Film, eds. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016),
2.
49
William Urichhio, “Replacement, Displacement and Obsolescence,” in Cultures of Obsolescence:
History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, eds. Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, (US:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 101.
50
Denson and Leyda, op.cit., 7.
51
Babette Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, “Introduction,” to Cultures of Obsolescence: History,
Materiality and the Digital Age, eds. Babette Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016), 3.
 22

annual cycles of obsolescence, old media like the cinema might even gain a new aura
of unchanging stolidity.

One of the major impetus to pursue this project in fact has been to test what is largely
an academic hypothesis against the ways in which the digital transition is made sense
of outside of the insular world of film studies.52 I have found during the course of
fieldwork, that while the idea of the death of cinema is a largely obscurantist one, the
transformation in film cultures is more readily comprehensible. In this, I have found
theorisations of nostalgia and retro cultures particularly productive, as they create a
dialogue between technological changes in the present and people’s relation to their
media environment. Cinema and other analogue media become auratic because of
their juxtaposition with new media, satisfying a yearning for indexicality that is
characteristically of this moment of high definition digital image.53 Simon Reynolds
and Andrew Higgins have separately addressed the transformation of nostalgia itself,
from a feeling of wistfulness for the past to becoming a playful and ironic
engagement with an archive of ephemera and recorded materials made readily
accessible in the present.54 The contemporary is thus regarded by ordinary users and
practitioners as a moment of the opening up of the past. And finally, the lens of
nostalgia enables us to take into account those aspects of the cinematic experience
that are ill-served by an exclusive focus on the cinema object. This is a certain lived
experience of the cinema, associated with memories of growing up, of love, of aging,
acting as a different sort of temporal marker. Nostalgia thus enables us to understand
the complicated relationships cinema enters into with the world outside.

The Methodological Architecture

I marshal the forgoing arguments, with the overarching themes of i) cinema as an

ecology or infrastructure, ii) cinema’s obsolescence, and, iii) cinema’s ongoing

52
Referring to the theoretical quarrel within the field of film studies, Niels Niessen states that it is “an
idea that is almost impossible to explain to people not familiar with the field.” Niels Niesse, “Lives of
Cinema.”
53
Laura Marks elsewhere refers to this as analogue nostalgia. Laura U Marks, Touch Sensuous Theory
and Multisensory Media, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
54 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Pasts, (New York, Faber and
Faber, 2011); Andrew Higson, “Nostalgia is not what it used to be: heritage films, nostalgia websites
and contemporary consumers,” Consumption Markets & Culture 17, Issue 2: Nostalgia in the Twenty-
First Century (2014): 120-142.
 23

transition into the postcinematic, as the framework for my own inquiry. As stated in
the abstract, this project has tracked the itineraries of the cinematic across three very
different sites: in social media forms like the Dubsmash/TikTok video; in the domain
of contemporary art including exhibitions, documentaries and digital archives; and
finally, in films themselves as they meditate on cinema’s archival circulation. The
diversity of the sites examined has yielded a correspondingly diverse approach,
modulated according to the specific demands of the different fields. In a sense, the
entire thrust of the dissertation is methodological as I look at how different practices
might be read as constituting acts of archiving even though they do not, at first glance,
present themselves as such.

In my first chapter, I have looked at the quintessentially digital genre of the short
form video, Dubsmashes and TikTok, named for the companies that have at different
times made such services available. These produce a particular quandary for thinking
through issues like the archival document, trace and memory as they seem designed to
precisely resist such an archiving disposition. How do we understand such essentially
ephemeral media as nonetheless partaking in the dissemination of the popular
memory of the cinema? I follow the expanded notion of the archive outlined above to
explore the manner in which the repertoire of performative acts facilitated on such
platforms partake of a popular archive of film memories, actions and gestures. I have
also looked at listicles on websites such as BuzzFeed, ScoopWhoop and iDiva.

For my second chapter, where I look at a set of exhibitions, documentaries and digital
databases, I have combined interviews conducted with curators along with catalogues
and essays related to the same. Interestingly, the exhibition itself as an ephemeral
form is granted an afterlife through the traces that are left on the internet. The
cinematic is incorporated first as installation, and then as photograph and text in a
continuing series of displacements. The virtual mediates the encounter such that what
one sees can no longer be regarded as simply leftover documentation, but as a new
form of experiencing the material altogether. My own method could be construed as a
form of digital archival practice, as I attempted to reconstruct a history of cinema and
its intersections with art on the basis of reviews, interviews and work summaries that
are all that are left of the original events. This was supplemented by accounts shared
by curators, providing both critical insights as well as anecdotal information. But even
 24

here, the process of recounting the exhibition was a form of memory work, with the
curators recalling, re-assessing and re-membering an event that was in some ways
remote even to them.

In the final chapter, where I look at sets of films, I have drawn on interviews with
directors, cinematographers, writers and film journalists to gain a sense of the
industry’s own perception, if any, of a “crisis” of the cinema and its future in a
changing media landscape. I visited Mumbai in the early half of 2019, at a time when
streaming services and creation of online content has emerged as a significant player.
Many of the film personnel interviewed evinced excitement about this new space, as
well as the possibilities of the digital for enhancing what they believed was their main
vocation of being able to tell stories. It is during these discussions with a number of
writers, cinematographers, an directors that it became truly clear to me that the
question of cinema’s death is the preoccupation of a world that is removed from the
day to day life of cinema. It is towards a reconciliation of this world and our own as
theorists that I finally undertake an examination of cinema’s contemporary horizons.
 25

Fig. 0.1. Dedication, Hiren Nag’s Film Hi Film (1983).

 26

Fig. 0.2. Gyan Chand is interviewed by a French documentary crew.

Fig. 0.3. The documentary crew are recruited as actors for Gyan Chand’s Film Hi
Source: National Film Archive of India (NFAI)
 27

Fig. 0.4. Poster, Film Hi

Film (1983).
Source : National Film
Archive of India (NFAI)

FIGURES OF THE ARCHIVE

Fig. 0.5. Poster, Celluloid

Man (2014).
 28

CHAPTER 1: Cinema’s Particpatory Turn

One of the rallying cries of the web 2.0 “revolution” has been the opportunity for
grassroots production exemplified in such digital-era neologisms as “influencer,”
“youtuber,” or the technical media studies term, the “prosumer.” Jenkins and co.
spoke early of the revolutionary potential of an incipient participatory culture poised
to affect not only content creation and distribution but also the possibilities for civic
organisation and political change.1 However, the experiences of the last few years,
especially the growth of digital monopolies, has muted such initial enthusiasm,
framing contemporary digital use through an apocalyptic lens. But such sweeping
assessments, whether the early unguarded optimisim, or the subsequent, equally

1
Jenkins et al. identify participation as the primary cultural logic governing the mass adoption of new
media technologies. Such technologies they argue have made it possible for “average consumers to
archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content in new and powerful ways”. The notion of
participatory culture essentially devolved on the perception of a radical democratisation of the means
of cultural production made possible by the affordances of digital technologies. From the hierarchical
structures of an age of broadcast media in which an elite few acted as gatekeepers of culture,
participatory culture envisions a situation where anyone can produce and circulate content, and that
such equality of production necessarily fosters horizontal solidarities and understanding across
differences. Jenkins had first used the term in his early work on fandom, describing the fan’s mode of
operation as participation as opposed to spectatorship. The idea has been more recently articulated in
the theorisation of “spreadable media.” This is the contention that contemporary models of culture have
shifted from distribution to circulation, with sharing emerging as the principle force driving the cultural
economy. Spreadable media depend on the participatory activites of audiences who disseminate
cultural artefacts widely, among multiple terminal points. Common to both the notion of participation
and sharing is that practices associated with active audiences and engaged fan communities have now
become more widespread among a virtual community at large, that uses digital tools and platform in
the course of everyday activities. At the heart of both is a belief in grassroots creativity fostered by the
digital, and the corresponding transformation of cultural texts from closed and centrally distributed, to
materials that can be reconfigured variously and transformed in the very process of sharing. However,
criticisms of participatory culture highlight its almost naïve view of the democratic potential of
technologies without acknowledging the control logics built into the algorithmic basis of digital
platforms. As several have pointed out, free will and independent action under the digital often tend to
conceal the a priori decisions made for consumers while ostensibly presenting them with unlimited
choice. If Jenkins et al. posit information-based uses of the internet as against entertainment and
communication-oriented activities, new formulations of a global post-Fordist order argue that even
leisure now is captured by production cycles. For more on participatory culture and mass adoption of
technologies refer to Henry Jenkins, Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton and Alice J.
Robison, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009); on the early nomenclatures of fandom Henry Jenkins,
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, (New York and London: Routledge
Taylor and Francis, 1992); on spreadable media, Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green,
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, (New York: New York
University Press, 2013). On the critique of participatory culture refer to Alexander Galloway, The
Interface Effect, (Cambridge, UK and Malden Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2012) and Steven Shaviro,
“Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Insufficiency in Times of Real Subsumption,” e-flux Journal
#46, (June 2013), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8969650.pdf.
 29

uncritical pessimism fails to engage digital culture on its own terms. It is therefore,
not so much with a view to perceiving the advantages/disadvantages of new media
technologies, but rather their affordances and logics that I proceed to chart the
particular intersection of contemporary film culture with social media.

The chapter looks respectively at 1) dubsmash or lip-sync videos, and 2) listicles on

Buzzfeed and ScoopWhoop. While it is difficult to categorise such online content
which is characterised precisely by its spill over into a variety of different sites and
uses, I have chosen the above as instances of a larger phenomenon I am interested in
examining, namely the ways in which cinema and its associated popular culture feed
into cultural productions on the web. At first glance, such an online film culture
seems like a simple migration or transcription of an analog film culture. Particularly
in India, such social media applications realise a uniquely diffuse cinephilia, that
differs both from a discursive model as well as that associated with fandom, both of
which ultimately devolve on a sustained engagement with film texts. In other words,
it is not merely the engagement with cinematic texts, but its spill into other realms of
social life, as fashions, music, dance and signage that is addressed by this more
expansive notion of cinephilia. This is the sense in which Bollywood is understood to
constitute a dominant cultural style.2 A number of scholars have moreover observed
that web paraphernalia or “paratexts” such as posters, trailers, tribute videos and
online discussions have increasingly come to constitute the primary encounter with
cinematic material, displacing the primacy of the original film text.3 In other words, it
is a case of the extracinematic overtaking the cinema altogether. This is partly the
crux of my own argument, as I show how these film-related or quasi-cinematic forms
of digital cultural production foreground not cinema as such, but a larger film culture.
The social media forms I address index the presence of cinema outside of the theatre
(the extra-cinematic) as well as the persistence of cinema after film (the post-
cinematic). But above all they index the place of cinema in the everyday, representing
the ways in which it is variously taken up, or the ways in which it very often acts as
backdrop or white noise against which life unfolds. Or as Sudhir Mahadevan

2
It is in this sense that I shall use the term for the remainder of the chapter.
3
Monika Mehta, “Fan and its Paratexts,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 58, Numbers
1 & 2 (Spring and Fall 2017): 128-143; Kathleen Amy Williams, “Fake and fan film trailers as
incarnations of audience anticipation and desire,” Praxis, March 15, 2012,
https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/360/284.
 30

elsewhere puts it, “an imaginary of cinema in and as everyday life.”4 What new media
allows then is a veritable archive of cinema through cinephilia.

Mahadevan has made the case for considering self-conscious evocations of a

cinematic vernacular as sources of film history. He takes the example of the song,
Dhan Te Nan! from Vishal Bharadwaj’s 2009 film Kaminey as evoking the memory
of the onomatopoeiac sounds used in Hindi cinema action sequences. Moreover, the
audience’s recognition of the historical reference is predicated not on (conventional)
cinephiliac proficiency but rather an immersion in an everyday in which cinema is
writ large. Mahadevan also addresses the difficulty in traditionally archiving what are
inherently ephemeral expressions. He says in response to Kajri Jain’s argument:

“Jain’s formulation provokes a question: is the vernacular capable of

possessing a history? Or is its historical value restricted to the effect of a
deliberate discourse that frames it as belonging to a past? Can the vernacular-
qua-imaginary be archived? Or is it too ephemeral, too steeped into everyday
life to be formally and institutionally archivable? While the recycling of film
history in contemporary culture suggests that there is no stable archive of the
past, I also suggest that we take the ephemerality of this vernacular as itself
the richest source for film history.

We must therefore distinguish between ephemerality and contingency, the

latter indicating the cinema’s vulnerability as medium to the ravages of time.
The problems of preservation of ‘film’ for posterity in India are rendered
moot by an imaginary that sees recall rather than archiving as paramount for
the preservation of the ‘cinema.’”5

Extrapolating from Mahadevan, the memory of film is understood to be kept alive,

not by storage, but its repeated invocation in new productions. In other words,
memory is embedded in a performance of the past. This is somewhat similar to
Jenkins, Green and Ford’s dictum for digital media, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead,”
crediting the repurposing, reuse and remixing actions of audiences and users with the
success of media products. While the latter study, situated within the larger matrix of
writings on participatory culture, is more about the dynamic of top-down vis-à-vis
grassroots production, its implications can be extended to our own discussion of film
history/memory, determining its visibility and persistence through topical stagings.

4
Sudhir Mahadevan, “Introduction,” in A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of Indian Cinema,
(New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), 11.
5
Ibid.
 31

Responding to Mahadevan, I tentatively offer that new media technologies have made
it possible to archive such an elusive imaginary. This is because the archival
strategies/structure of new media similarly depend on a logic of circulation and
proliferation rather than containment. This is a logic of archiving as recall. Wolfgang
Ernst, in his discussion of the dynamic archive, explains that a storage mania – a
peculiarly occidental obsession – has given way to processual data flows in the digital
database, which, to quote Laermans and Gielen, “privileges the active user above the
stable source, the need for present information or information that is also (re-)usable
within the present above a more or less accurate representation of the past within that
very same present.”67 In other words, performativity is the guiding principle of this
new user-oriented archive-as-database.

Storage does not go away however, as even Ernst acknowledges, and the common
narrative of social media is precisely its imperative to “document everything.” Wendy
Chun avers that the archival promise of digital media is undermined by its emphasis
on storage, which is not the same as memory.8 Chun’s argument is predicated on
storage as a passive action as opposed to the active endeavour represented by memory
work. Chun’s argument thus runs directly counter to Ernst’s who, as noted above,
reads the digitial archive as dynamic rather than static. Chun’s apprehension of the
new digital memory-as-storage essentially makes the case that the mode of operation
of machinic memory – the storage of enduring ephemerals – poses an existential
threat to human memory, which, to avoid entropy, is structured on forgetting. Emma
Velez, in her study of Snapchat, explains how the app attempts to recreate the
ephemerality of everyday encounters and conversations, eschewing the archival
impulse evident in other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.9 If the
latter are premised on organising user data chronologically with past activity
organised and searchable by timelines, a “snap” is meant to disappear lingering for

6
Rudi Laermans and Pascal Gielen, “The archive of the digital an-archive,” Image and Narrative:
Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, Issue 17 (April 2007),
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/digital_archive/laermans_gielen.htm.
7
Geert Lovink, “Interview with Wolfgang Ernst,” Net Time, February 26 2003,
https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0302/msg00132.html.
8
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory," Critical Inquiry 35,
no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 148-171.
9
E Velez, “Intimate publics and ephemerality, Snapchat: A case study,” Second Shift, 2014, accessed
December 8th, 2018, http://www.secondshiftblog.com/2014/09/intimate-publics-and-ephemerality-
snapchat-a-case-study/.
 32

the fleeting moments that it takes for the recipient to register the image. But Snapchat
too allows users to save screenshots of snaps contradicting the very premise of an
ephemeral mode of digital communication.

Thus, drawing on, but also departing from the latter, I would make the case that the
social media forms I describe, combine archival and memorial logics. As opposed to
necessarily enduring the ephemeral, these platforms encourage us to commit to the
record only that which is worthy of memory (consider the heavy emphasis on curating
one’s social media profile to always appear in a preferred light). In this way, they
attempt to simulate the ways in which human memory, with its performative, volatile,
and selective function, actually works.10 Recall the sense of the word archive, familiar
both from the nineteenth century bureaucratic enterprise as well as the archive
function on Gmail (essentially a delete command), which equates archiving with
storing out of sight, or forgetting. Orit Halpern addresses this drive of recording to
forget as (following Derrida) the need to automate remembering in order to live in the
“real time” of the present.11 Such a desire is of the order of interactivity and its vision
of immediate, transparent communication. However, unlike Derrida, Halpern holds
out hope for the interface precisely because it cannot yet achieve simple transcription.
Replacing the archive with the interface thus refigures its work as the production of
the new.

In the light of these debates, I argue that the uses of cinematic material towards the
production of new texts and objects as in the lip-sync video or the nostalgia listicle
constitute modes of archiving the cinema. This is predicated on an expanded notion of
both terms outlined above – the archive, as an active production or performance, and
cinema, understood as a roving cultural style. Dubsmash/TikTok and nostalgia
listicles draw on a popular repertoire of filmi gestures, expressions and emotions, and
in turn, produce an archive of the filmi. Incorporating a certain Bollywood style into
new performances, they demonstrate the extent to which the cinema has always
constituted a mode of cultural practice in India. And finally, even as they variously
10
Elsewhere Orit Halpern suggests that cybernetic models of the archive, concerned more with the
transmission of information, function like perceptual apparatus such as the human eye which
automatically effects focus, keeping insignificant detail in the background. Orit Halpern, “Dreams of
Our Perceptual Present: Temporality, Storage and Interactivity in Cybernetics,” Configurations, Issue
13 (2005): 285-321.
11
Ibid, 318-319.
 33

refer to the cinema, digital media highlight their own, increasingly major role in
mediating the cinematic.

Lip-sync Fandom: Dubsmash/TikTok and Cinema’s Gestural After-life

Dubsmash and Musical.ly (now TikTok) represent the way that not only information
but platforms themselves are subject to the vicissitudes of digital flows and trends as
well as copyright.12 At the time of writing, Dubsmash has lost the currency it once
enjoyed, and most of the videos from the app that I study are taken from the period
2015-2016, when its popularity seems to have peaked in India. Musical.ly, a
successor to Snapchat, has similarly merged with the app TikTok after its takeover by
the Chinese tech conglomerate ByteDance. Nonetheless, the lip-dub video as a
ubiquitous social media object seems to have persisted. These apps essentially cater to
the making of short videos, usually between 15 and 60 seconds, featuring a short
performance, either a dance or a skit, set to a pre-recorded audio byte. Both
Dubsmash and Musical.ly have offered an array of quotes, songs, and sound effects
from movie soundtracks and other popular videos, while the latter also features a
range of AR filters and video editing tools, so that one can add time-lapse, slow
motion, boomerang, split screens and similar effects to the video in post production.
In September 2018, TechCrunch reported TikTok as the most downloaded app in the
United States overtaking YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram, while it ranked 4th
overall on the App Store’s top charts.13 Dubsmash had previously traced a similar
trajectory being downloaded 10 million times by January 2015 after its launch in
October, 2014.14 Facebook has recently launched its own short video platform Lasso
targeting the market monopoly commanded by TikTok.

The lipsync video as a social media genre could be linked more broadly to the
popularisation of the “video selfie” with its antecedents in the late short video hosting

12
Lip-sync video has always been placed ambiguously in relation to copyright, because of its use of
mostly unlicensed musical and audio snippets. One way of getting around this has been for users to
create their own audio dub, as with the original sound tag on TikTok which indicates users recorded the
audio themselves. In several cases, the recorded audio is of copyrighted material but represents the
user’s own discretion rather than the app’s.
13
Casey Newton, “Why Vine Died: Closing the Loop,” The Verge, October 28, 2016,
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown.
14
Ravin Sampat, “Lip-syncing goes viral: the rise of Dubsmash,” BBC Trending, January 27, 2015,
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-31010873.
 34

service Vine, acquired and later shut down by Twitter. Vine, capping video length at 6
seconds and playing them on loop, is credited with initiating a whole new genre of
short video which one article described as essentially merging “a GIF with audio,”
prompting unprecedented creativity and experimentation.15 The service spawned a
whole generation of Vine stars, whose videos consisted of anything from short
physical comedy skits and variety sketches (Amanda Cerny, Logan Paul), song covers
(Shawn Mendes) and dance routines (Harlem Shake) to magic tricks (Zach King),
approximating somewhat, the late nineteenth century field of short, mass
entertainments that fed into early cinema. This association was seemingly recognised
by Ian Padgham, a member of Twitter’s marketing team charged with explaining the
use of the company’s newly acquired service through sample videos, who fashioned a
short video from 300 photographic prints in a tribute to Eadweard Muybridge, an
early pioneer of chronophotography. And much like early cinema, the short-lived age
of Vine is today regarded with reverence and affection as representative of a period of
unadulterated social media whimsy. Since its closure in 2016, an archive of the app
was launched, allowing the service to continue a “nostalgic afterlife” on the web.16

Vine also originated the genre of cringe comedy, a specifically social media brand of
ironic humour, where laughter is elicited from embarrassing content. Cringe comedy,
associated also with the proliferation of “mockumentary” sitcoms in the 2000s (The
Office, UK, 2001; The Office, USA, 2005; Curb You’re your Enthusiasm, 2005;
Modern Family, 2009) with their shaky handheld documentary aesthetic, could be
considered symptomatic of the pervasive voyeurism of our times, the camera
intruding into workaday situations, rendering the everyday spectacular. The popular
perception of TikTok too seems to associate it with cringe as evinced by the many
YouTube compilations of TikTok videos as well as commentators who frequently

15
Ibid.
16
Luke Winkie, “'Our generation's inside joke': the bizarre, nostalgic afterlife of Vine,” The Guardian,
August 23, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/23/our-generations-inside-joke-
the-bizarre-nostalgic-afterlife-of-vine.
 35

invoke the category in their assessments of the app.17 Hardik Rajgor discussing
TikTok in India places it along a continuum of viral phenonema that include the
YouTube stardom of amateur Pakistani pop-singer Taher Shah and the self-styled
Dhinchak Pooja.18

The earlier uses of Dubsmash also attested to the operation of such ironic humour,
with users enacting short scenes and dialogues with equal parts earnestness and self-
referential humour. In these videos, shot without the fanfare of the original
productions, users frequently mined the discrepancy between the grandiose aural
track, often featuring bombastic dialogue and melodramatic scores, and the
ordinariness of the visual track. The home figured most often, with dubsmashes made
in the bedroom, the kitchen, the living area, or perhaps the street just outside the
house. In the case of celebrity dubsmashes, videos were shot in trailers, green rooms
and hotels, possibly between takes with the actors out of costume. While most notices
of the Dubsmash app advertised the opportunity to recreate one’s favourite songs and
iconic scenes, a survey of the videos themselves suggested that users were actually
aware that their amateur productions could never approximate the lavish excess and
scale of their cinematic models. In the move from the big to the small screen,
therefore, melodrama and action often translated into parody.

At the same time, the performance of famous lines and choreography also gestured to
their valence outside the texts from which they originated. Film quotes and songs are
folded into everyday activities and situations like washing, exercising, driving and at
get-togethers, reunions and even during class. The re-enactment of dialogue and song
itself has an older history in Indian film culture, with such snippets entering a filmi

17
For more follow, Hardik Rajgor, “Tiktok: One Person’s Cringe is Another Person’s Cool,” Arre,
October 19, 2018, https://www.arre.co.in/pop-culture/tiktok-musically-india-social-media-content-
video-app/; Taylor Lorenz, “TikTok Is Cringey and That's Fine: A social platform can’t scale without attracting
normal users,” The Atlantic, October 25, 2018,
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/what-tiktok-is-cringey-and-thats-
fine/573871/; Julia Alexander, “In defense of TikTok, the joyful, slightly cringe-inducing spiritual
successor to Vine,” The Verge, November 5, 2018,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/5/18009260/tiktok-musically-youtube-challenge-vine.
18
Samiksha Pattanaik, “Dhinchak Pooja’s ‘Selfie maine leli aaj’: Why are cringeworthy videos so
popular?” in The Hindustan Times, June 11, 2017. https://www.hindustantimes.com/music/dhinchak-
pooja-s-selfie-maine-leli-aaj-why-are-cringeworthy-videos-so-popular/story-
h1SFv6ZctKu08gzXpOfzeK.html
 36

patois as with the example Mahadevan gives us of “Dhan Te Nan” or with other
memorable lines as “Mogambo Khush Hua!” “Mere Paas Ma Hai,” or “Ja Simran! Jee
Le Apni Zindagi!” Elsewhere, Bambaiyya, a dialect of Hindi spoken in Bombay, is
considered to have particular cinematic resonances, forming part of the imagination of
the tapori or street tough.19 The writing of dialogue in Hindi cinema is usually a
specialised activity, separated from the function of scriptwriting and screenplay,
framing it as a separate endeavour with a correspondingly different set of concerns.20
Dialogue played the crucial function of rooting characters in a particular cultural
context, which over time solidified into linguistic convention, as with the garbled
Hindi of the Anglo-Indian or the exaggerated styles deployed by the comic sidekick.21
The blockbuster success of the 1975 multi-starrer Sholay (dir. Ramesh Sippy) really
foregrounded the iconicity of dialogue, with such Salim-Javed penned lines as “kitney
aadmi the?” and “Basanti in kutton ke saamne mat naachna!” acceding to the status of
cultural idioms.

This then is a popular lexicon of film references and jokes which are deployed in
everyday humour, their usage in banal situations further underscoring the fantastical
imagination of the filmic universes they are drawn from. This is what Barbara Klinger
has elsewhere deemed as cinema’s ability to generate long-term popularity through
supplying a steady stream of popular catch-phrases.22 In the context of Hollywood,
Klinger has discussed how cinema’s quotability, or its ability to become memorable,
was expedited by a “replay culture” that enabled media to proliferate across platforms

19
Ranjani Mazumdar, “Figure of the 'Tapori': Language, Gesture and Cinematic City,” Economic and
Political Weekly 36, No. 52 (Dec. 29, 2001 - Jan. 4, 2002): 4872-4880; Nandini Ramnath, “Classic
Bollywood dialogue: When in Mumbai, speaks like the locals do,” Scroll.in, May 17, 2015,
https://scroll.in/article/727835/classic-bollywood-dialogue-when-in-mumbai-speaks-like-the-locals-do.
20
Tejaswini Ganti describes the beginnings of writing in the early sound era in the 1930s, when the
story (referred to as the scenario) and script were conceived originally in English, with a separate
dialogue writer translating or providing dialogue in Hindustani. The separation thus had its origins in
the historically multi-lingual character of the industry, with Urdu emerging as a favoured screen
language because of its connotations of an elite literary style. Tejaswini Ganti, ““No One Thinks in
Hindi Here” Language Hierarchies in Bollywood,” in Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local
Labor, ed. Micheal Curtin and Kevin Sanson, (Oakland, California: University of California Press,
2016), 118-131.
21
Mustansir Dalvi, “Tribute: How Kader Khan changed the way Hindi film dialogue was written,”
Scroll.in, January 1, 2019, https://scroll.in/reel/907787/tribute-how-kader-khan-changed-the-way-
hindi-film-dialogue-was-written.
22
Barbara Klinger, “Say It Again, Sam: Movie Quotation, Performance and Masculinity,”
Participations 5, Issue 2, (November 2008),
https://www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%202/5_02_klinger.htm.
 37

in the period of deregulation under the Reagan presidency. She further explains how
such instances of quotations, rather than being confined to organised industry and
fandom attention, constitute “ordinary dimensions of viewing and fandom.” She
writes:

“…the viewer’s immersion in dialogue vividly demonstrates how, through

repetition, films are personalized, brought so close that they provide a means
of self and social identification, including gender identification. The kind of
familiarity bred by repeated contact with a title enables it to become a part of
a viewer’s identity, a unit within a repertoire of elements that he or she may
draw upon in diverse circumstances to momentarily or in a more sustained
fashion occupy different subjectivities. In this light, quotation can be seen as
part of what Erving Goffman has referred to in other contexts as the
theatricality of everyday life — the infusion of daily existence with
performances that constitute individual and social identities.The applicability
of the term performance not only to official forums such as the stage or
screen but to everyday activities enables a view of even small-scale
responses such as movie quotation as ‘technologies of the self’ — devices
that express and embody identity in specific situations and social contexts.”23

The primary identity that such dialoguebaazi24 has traditionally been considered to
reinforce in an Indian film context, is that of the nautanki or dramebaaz. These are
idiomatic South Asian renditions of the notion of the “drama queen” that locate it
within the film-verses of mainstream Hindi cinema. The term nautanki earlier
acknowledged the vestiges of the older rural mass entertainments of North India that
manifested in the modern institution of cinema, and now in the digital age, evoke a
culture of cinema-going associated with the single screen. The Buzzfeed notice of the
app announced it to prospective users as a platform “to live out your Bollywood
dream,” especially addressing those individuals used to getting called “dramebaaz”,
“filmy”, and “nautanki”.25 The nautanki as a typical South Asian film subject has been

23
Ibid.
24
As the grandiloquent language associated with mainstream Hindi cinema is popularly referred, also
sometimes referred to as taali-maar or applause worthy and seeti-bajao or whistle-worthy lines. Trisha
Gupta writing in the Caravan magazine, describes it as “a language of theatricality, rhetorical flourish,
bombast and melodrama: in short, it suggests the kind of speech that would only appear in an old-style
Hindi film, not in real life”. The phrase also doubles as the designator of the practice of spouting such
dialogue. Such popular phrases in a vernacular film parlance demonstrate the manner in which film
reception in India is always already implicated in aspects of film production. It also frames film
reception as corporeal and participatory, involving the viewer’s physical immersion in the spectacle of
the film. Trisha Gupta, “Death by Dialogue,” Caravan, May 11, 2011,
https://caravanmagazine.in/reviews-and-essays/death-dialogue.
25
Karima Khan, “Live Out Your Bollywood Dream With This Hilarious New App,” Buzzfeed, April
27, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/karimasanela/dubollywood-smash.
 38

the protagonist of several films, indexing the reach of the popular cinema in the life of
the masses. The film Om Shanti Om! (dir. Farah Khan, 2007), which Ranjani
Mazumdar has elsewhere analysed for its invocations of retro at a time of digital
transition, depicts characters who are both melodramatic stock types as well the type
of film fan outlined above, immersed in a popular culture of the cinema. Om Shanti
Om! demonstrates the manner in which mimetic fan behaviour intrudes into spaces of
the everyday embodying a cinematic desire that spills beyond the time and space of
viewing. Lip-syncing applications like Dubsmash as the notice above suggests,
precisely acknowledge such a cinematic surfeit in the everyday, providing a space to
channel a performative cinephilia.

Dubsmash stars, German sibling-duo Khatera Bilsky and Breshna Khan similarly
described the app as providing “Bollywood-crazy people the means to dub our
favourite scenes.”26 Born in Afghanistan and raised in Germany, the sisters had
acquired viral fame in the wake of their Bollywood tribute videos, sampling dialogues
from movies and shows like Andaz Apna Apna, Hera Pheri, Ek Aur Ek
Gyarah and Comedy Nights with Kapil.27 In a video interview, Khatera Bilsky (going
by Grzmotbilska) explained that while the videos were initially made out of boredom,
they also sprang from important childhood memories.28 For the sisters then,
Bollywood, as “an important part of India,”29 figured in the larger memory of the
experience of growing up in a particular place, the popular Hindi cinema doubling up
as an affective archive of the country/region. Equally significant is their invocation of
“boredom” as a factor in prompting them to make the dubs, indicating the manner in
which Dubsmash extends a historical filmi culture where cinema is dispersed across
an economy of distractions. At its heart is an equivocal formation of the cinematic,
which has the character of being simultaneously quotidian and spectacular,
mechanical and playful.

26
Audra Schroeder, “Life in a time of Dubsmash wars and lip-sync battles,” The Daily Dot, October
26, 2015, https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/dubsmash-lip-sync-battle-celebrity-promo/.
27
“Dubsmash madness: These two German girls have gone viral and here’s why,” The Indian Express,
July 21, 2015, https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/dubsmash-madness-the-two-german-girls-
have-gone-viral-and-heres-why/.
28
Schroeder, Op. cit.
29
Ibid.
 39

Dubsmash further came at a time when, as mentioned above, the culture of cinema-
going with which the nautanki/dramebaaz are associated was itself in crisis. The rise
of the multiplex since 1997 has steadily driven the single-screen hall out of business.
According to to the Ficci-KPMG Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2017, by
the end of 2016, there were around 6,000 single screens and around 2,500 multiplex
screens in India.30 The end of the era of the single screen, then, also meant the passage
of the raucous, “rowdy” sociality characterising its distinct viewing culture with its
“house fulls” and “first day, first shows”.31 The multiplex as a more up-market
exhibition venue has also spawned what a number of commentators regard as a new
brand of bourgeois realism in the Hindi cinema. The masala film which formed the
staple of the single screen and appealed to a heterogeneous audience is increasingly
giving way to niche films for the segmented multiplex audience.32 In other words, the
iconic one-liners and catchphrases that are a part of the new dialogue-baazi mediated
by lip-sync applications are often relics associated with a certain historical formation
of the Hindi cinema. As such, user’s deployment of such dialogue expresses a
nostalgic identification with a golden age of Hindi cinema. Equally, the uses of
historic dialogue by a younger demographic demonstrates the possibilities of the cult
value of cinema history, becoming a source of subcultural affiliation, an attachment to
the Hindi mainstream cinema as kitsch. Dialogue could thus become the hyperlink of
a new online community coalesced around their interactions with cinema archived
online; a new “active audience” for the age of post-cinema.

Stock choreography and hook dance steps similarly form part of a generalised canon
of “bollywood dance”, characteristic moves alliteratively expressed as jhatkas, matkas
and thumkas. Iconic routines such as Hrithik Roshan’s famous break-dance moves
from the song “Ek Pal Ka Jeena” from Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai (dir. Rakesh Roshan,
2000), Shah Rukh Khan and Malaika Arora’s elaborate dance-sequence atop a train in
“Chhaiya Chhaiya” from Dil Se (dir. Mani Ratnam 1998), or Katrina Kaif’s lavni-

30
Lata Jha, “The multiplex revolution and beyond,” Livemint, July 6, 2017,
https://www.livemint.com/Consumer/VbhDs0dHTLmOdID8J1u6ZM/The-multiplex-revolution-and-
beyond.html.
31
Lakshmi Srinivas, Housefull: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience, (Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press, 2016); Amit S. Rai, “First Day First Show: Bollywood Cinemagoing and
the New Sensorium,”in Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage, (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2010), 23-54.
32
Adrian Athique, “From cinema hall to multiplex: A public history,” South Asian Popular Culture 9,
No. 2 (July 2011): 147-160.
 40

inspired performance in “Chikni Chameli” from Agneepath (dir. Karan Malhotra,

2012) have assumed an iconicity surpassing the memory of the films they were a part
of. “Hit” choreography is moreover emulated in diverse contexts, from performances
in official functions to sangeet ceremonies at Hindu weddings and at festivals and
talent contests of all kinds. A further repertoire of gestures and mannerisms are
associated with specific stars. As mentioned in my opening example, the
quintessential image of superstar Shah Rukh Khan pictures the actor in the heydey of
his career as a romantic hero, his arms outstretched in an expansive invitation to the
heroine to embrace his ardour. The actor is also identified by the idiosyncratic line
delivery of his early films where he often played unstable, psychopathic characters,
most notably Darr (dir. Yash Chopra, 1993) for which he developed a menacing
stutter. Salman Khan in keeping with his image as a “macho” actor often appears
shirtless, muscles flexed in elaborate expositions of his gym body. Amitabh
Bachchan, with his deep baritone and distinguished Hindi diction is considered
something of an Indian Morgan Freeman, based on comparisons with the Hollywood
actor who commands a similar sonic stardom. Actresses Kareena Kapoor and Sonam
Kapoor are known for their characteristic hauteur both on and off screen, their diva-
images solidified through iconic roles in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (dir. Karan
Johar, 2001) and Aisha (dir. Rajshree Ojha, 2010) respectively, and jointly, in Veere
di Wedding (dir. Shashanka Ghosh, 2018). But even as these performance styles are
informally patented to particular star personae, they are nonetheless omnivorously
invoked in a general exposition of the bollywood style.

It could be argued that all the detachable objects listed above – dialogue, song-and-
dance, and acting style – that are taken to constitute the popular cinema’s economy of
attractions, are indicative of, following Agamben, this cinema’s essentially gestural
nature. Giorgio Agamben identifies gesture and not the image as the “element of
cinema.”33 Images, Agamben avers, simultaneously reify gesture, at the same time
that they are able to retain the dynamis or movement from which indivdual stills are
extracted. In the latter sense, images as fragments continue to refer to the whole of
which they are a part. In this way, the gesture as a third type of action is that which
neither acts nor produces, but rather supports and endures. In other words, it is a

33
Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means Without an End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesare Casarino, (Mineapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 55.
 41

figure of signification which refers back to itself; merely steps which do not amount
to the act of walking, or a communicability without communication.

“The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a

means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of
human beings and thus opens an ethical dimension for them.”34

This then for Agamben was the special province of cinema, as a medium that could
sublimate into visibility what could not be expressed in language, namely the very
being-in-language or mediality of human beings. To put it another way, what the
cinema could make visible, remarkably, was the fact of its own mediation; of the way
in which intervened between its audience and the world. But the early cinema, as Pasi
Valiaho notes, did not just capture or record movement, it equally produced it through
its automation of the body.35 The early cinema was therefore interested in an
exhibition of its own technological effects, an exposition of cinema as such which
Tom Gunning refers to elsewhere as the cinema of attractions. According to Laura
Mulvey, however, in the case of Hollywood and European cinema such a direct
address – cinema’s uncanny exposition of the body in the machine – is over time,
naturalised and tamed into narrative.36 But it might be argued that Bollywood cinema,
premised as it is on attractions, retained this essentially gestural mode, the individual
expressions listed above all referring back to this monolith of the popular cinema.
Thus, what the “Shah Rukh pose”, or the famous “mere paas ma hai” line signify are
not individual films or fandoms, but a language of the cinema in India. Further,
following Valiaho’s argument that the cinema does not merely represent bodies, but
folds them into its technological dispositif, one can argue that the performances
described above indicate a filmi body that the popular cinema modulates at the same
time that it visibilises it. This is a being-in-Bollywood as it were, that collapses the
inside and outside of cinematic experience. Or, to somewhat rework Rajadhyaksha’s

34
Ibid, 58.
35
Pasi Valiaho , “Modulation: On Cinematic Gestures,” in Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture,
Thought and Cinema circa 1900, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 30-32.
36
Laura Mulvey, “Cinematic gesture: The ghost in the machine,” Journal for Cultural Research 19,
No. 1 (2015): 6-14.
 42

concept, it represents a “Bollywoodization” of the body embedded in the sensorium of

the popular cinema.37

It is possible to read lip sync apps like Dubsmash then as an extension of this gestural
aspect of the popular cinema. Each dubsmash video utilising the styles and signatures
of the cinema in the realm of the extra-cinematic is an exhibition of this being-in-
Bollywood; a final collapse of the world depicted on the screen and that outside it.
The digital fragment here, “supports and endures” a certain formation of Bollywood
as a meaning making apparatus. To bear this out, one has only to sample the hashtags
that accompany such videos invoking #bollywoodlife, #bollywoodthings, and
#bollywoodlove which indicate the manner in which Bollywood properly constitutes
a milieu rather than a canon of popular cinema. Dubsmash’s performative mode
squares perfectly with a notion of Bollywood that regards it as a mode of expressivity
rather than a corpus of film titles. #Bollywoodlife as the very “stuff of life.”38

In this light, Dubsmash can be understood in terms of the possibilities of what Laura
Mulvey regards as a “delayed cinema” enabled by digital technologies. According to
Mulvey, options for slowing down, pausing, and isolating clips from the larger
narrative makes it possible to extract meanings from “delayed cinema”,, which are
nonetheless already there.39 She explains by way of a discussion of Douglas Sirk’s
cinema, where style serves to imbues certain objects and sequences with cinematic
significance. While such moments are already indicated in the narrative, the
distancing effect triggered by the digital fragmentation of cinema, allows the self-
conscious recognition of such moments. This is a recognition in other words of the
operation of cinema itself, the sudden apprehension of the specifically cinematic
value of objects in the narrative. This appearance of the cinematic, an awareness of

37
Rajadhyaksha’s formulation refers to a culture industry consisting of fashion, interior design,
architecture and bhangra rap that refer to a broad kitsch style associated with the Indian cinema. I use
his term to refer to the way in which such a film style precedes the millennial boom of the post-
celluloid industry, even in the period that Rajadhyaksha designates as the pre-Bollywood Hindi
cinema. The implication is that cinema, through its gestural mode that travels beyond the screen
through impersonations and mimicry, produces an audience habituated to its stylistic flourishes. In
other words, the cinema no longer produces a world external to it, but one that is made in its image,
and whose visible signs are certain gestures, expressions, fashions. In short, a cinematic way of being.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency,
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009).
38
Valiaho, Op. cit., 18.
39
Mulvey, Op. cit.., 6.
 43

the mediation of cinema is facilitated crucially by digital re-play and remix. To quote
from Mulvey,

“In All that Heaven Allows, Sirk adds semiotic value to an object, not a
single point of punctuation but with its special significance accumulating,
dispersed across the story’s time. By means of these rhetorical devices the
audience cannot but see the added value and, as these visual tropes draw
attention to themselves, they often provoke laughter at the very moment in
which they ‘work’ emotionally. This reaction marks the gap between the
unselfconscious ‘I see’ and the self-consciousness of ‘I see!’ The audience
reacts as it might to gags and jokes, for which decoding is not only essential
to the very process of understanding but also involves a moment of
detachment, a moment, that is, of self-conscious deciphering.”40

The digital delayed cinema is thus seen to double the operation of gesture in
melodrama. But it does so while also inflecting it with a layer of irony. A similar
logic underlies the performances on Dubsmash, where the gesture is often one of
homage, acknowledging the salience of punchlines and narrative clinchers, while the
re-enactment itself is shot through with the light-heartedness of play. In a viral
dubsmash by the user @jeet_barai, the song “Tumhe Apna Banaane ki Kasam Khaayi
Hai” (“I have sworn to make you mine”) from the film Sadak (1991) is set to a
choreography that interprets the lyrics of the song quite literally. The video features
the user and a friend dressed in formal jackets and sporting sunglasses, holding a
banana each. As the strains of the chorus play out, the friends make matching
movements, both taking a hand to their throats in a popular gesture that indicates the
taking of a vow. They then proceed to eat the banana held in the other hand, in a
bodily transliteration of the idiomatic expression in Hindi, “kasam khana” or “making
a promise” which translated literally would be to “eat a promise”. The Hindi word for
“making”, “banana”, is also phonetically close to the word “banana”. The boys retain
a deadpan expression throughout, such that their sombre demeanour clashes all the
more with the incongruous prop. Here the rhetorical intent of the original, the
punctuation of the narrative with a song that clearly frames the central couple’s
declaration of love, is disrupted through the prank which however works with the
earnestness of the song’s lyrics. The humour is generated precisely because of the
way in which the gravity of the song’s original context is dissipated by its

40
Laura Mulvey, “Delaying Cinema,” in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image,
(London: Reaction Books, 2006), 149.
 44

transposition into a more banal situation, as well as by the literal interpretation of the
lyrical cliché. But even as there is laughter at the overwrought nature of the original,
there is simultaneously a recognition of the fact that a certain intensity can only be
marshalled at the scale of the cinema. Thus, what is specifically cinematic about the
cinema, its ability to frame something as cinema, can paradoxically come into view,
only with this digital framing of cinema.41 The iconicity of cinema is constituted post-
facto through its digital afterlife.

Mulvey’s formulation of the delayed cinema sees it as the realisation of that which
has always been immanent in the cinema, i.e., the mediation of cinema itself. But such
a theorisation on the other hand, risks overlooking the mediation of the digital. Here,
the very nostalgic mode of several of the amateur productions on Dubsmash should
alert us to a break. Agamben had observed with regard to the early silent cinema that
it scrambled to salvage the gestures that society had lost, while at the same time,
recording that loss.42 The moving image, as a realm of pure movement, broke for the
first time, the unity of gesture and meaning, which Valiaho regards as a larger break
between action and cognition, or the soul and the body.43 Cinema consequently
registered the realm of the uncanny or the unconscious, of bodies that could move of
their own volition, automatically. It is this convulsive, nervous, mechanical body that
was the subject of an, often morbid, fascination in the early cinema. In other words,
there is nostalgia for the body in its “naturalness” which the cinema strived to capture,
while actually recording instead, its disappearance. A similar phenomenon could now
be said to take place with the digital remapping of cinema. This is a cinema which
comes into view archivally, accessible only from the vantage point of the digital.
Increasingly, what is foregrounded is the digital itself, in a period of its technological
fascination similar to the phase of the early cinema. In this regard, it is TikTok, even

41
Sudhir Mahadevan makes a similar argument elsewhere about the nostalgia for “slow-moving
societies” in the 19th century, elicted by the greater speed and mobility afforded by the bicycle, the
half-tone and the hand-camera. He observes that a sleepy old world could only be recognised by its
difference from the new world where “the thrill and speed of perception, of mobility and multiplication
of instantaneous images, of their rapid dispersal in print in vast scales, had all become the new normal”
(Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine, 111).
42
Agamben, Op. cit., 53.
43
Pasi Valiaho, “Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body,” in Cinema and
Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, ed. AsbjØrn GrØnstad and Henrik Gustafsson,
(New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014), 110-111.
 45

more than Dubsmash, which emblematises, to borrow Valiaho’s concept, the

modulation of the mediatic body in the contemporary.

The newest entrant into the world of short-form user-generated video, TikTok
distiguishes itself, as one article observes, by totalising the features of a host of other
social media applications, including the Instagram story, Snapchat, Musical.ly and
Vine.44 It encapsulates in effect, the history of social networking thus far. As the
culmination point of all that came before it, TikTok is a meta social media format that
heralds the complete virtualisation of life. Where all these earlier applications affected
to approximate modes of offline life – Snapchat claimed to have modelled itself on
the ephemerality of person-to-person communication; Instagram rebooted
photography for an age of “visual communication”; Vine generated a web standard
for the variety sketch – TikTok purports to harness the collective communicative
potential of the social web. As such, it surpasses even Dubsmash, with its modest
karaoke-homage format, to index a new mode of cultural participation and production
through networked platforms.

The app’s mission statement, to “capture and present the world’s creativity,
knowledge and moments that matter, directly from the mobile phone,”45 places
TikTok within a continuum of what Steven Shaviro designates as post-cinematic
media. According to Shaviro, such media coalesce digital editing tools with the
informational economy of late capitalism to produce “radically new ways of
manufacturing and articulating lived experience.”46 Digital post-media of the twenty
first century displace cinema from its century-long dominance as the aesthetic
apparatus of the “Machine Age.” If cinema expressed the experience of the
industrialisation of life, the body synced with the rhythms of Fordist factory
production, interactive and participatory new media signal a post-Fordist economic
order in which production is imbricated in ever more rapid flows of information and

44
Luke O’Neil, “TikTok: the Chinese lip-syncing app taking over America,” The Guardian,
November 21, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/21/tiktok-lip-synching-app-
jimmy-fallon.
45
Kevin Roose, “TikTok, a Chinese video app, brings fun back to social media,” New York Times,
December 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/technology/tiktok-a-chinese-video-app-
brings-fun-back-to-social-media.html.
46
Steven Shaviro, “Introduction,” in Post-Cinematic Affect, (Winchester, UK, Washington, USA: O-
Books, 2010), 2.
 46

affect.47 This is a model of “just-in-time” production structured on flexibility and

mobility such that work is increasingly reimagined as an open-ended creative process.
This is in turn dependent both on the production of data and information about
markets on the one hand, and the creation and manipulation of affects in the service
economy, twin aspects defining what Michael Hardt designates as immaterial
labour.48 The smart phone is in this regard both the purveyor and observer of the
immaterial labour that is increasingly central to the production process. It both brings
into view, through ubiquitous facilities for media capture, the body that is made to
perform such labour, as well as implicating such a body in the forms of productive
play that characterise, following Julian Dibbell, ludocapitalism.49

TikTok it could be said, crystallizes precisely this digital body-in-play situated at the
intersection of new media technologies and neoliberal finance capital. The app is
frequently hailed for allowing users to to be silly, creative, even cringey, and to just
have “fun!” in an era in which other social media have increasingly begun, as one
commentator puts it, to feel like the unpaid labour they are. While this is often
attributed to the absence of advertising on the platform – anticipating a future when
such brand intrusion might compromise the sheer joy and simplicity of the app – what
most of the tech literature on TikTok seems to miss is that the mode of “having fun”
on the app is no longer distinguishable from the commoditised leisure activities of the
reigning influencer economy. Self-expression – through dance, comedy, singing and
acting as the app encourages – has been rendered a capital enterprise under conditions
of what, following Shaviro, can be termed “intrinsic exploitation.”50 This is a

47
Michael Hardt, “Affective Labour,” boundary 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1999): 89-100.
48
Ibid, 94-97.
49
While Julian Dibell uses this in a slightly different context, the term is nonetheless appropriate to
describe the thoroughgoing virtualisation of the global economy. Dibell’s case study is of Chinese gold
farms (a figure that Alexander Galloway later takes up), referring to the industrial organisation of low-
paid wage labour whose primary job is to accrue virtual trophies and currencies on video games that
are then sold in exchange for real currency. The Chinese gold farmer, as Shaviro remarks in a gloss on
Dibell, is the ne plus ultra of the contemporary collapse of the formerly separate categories of work
and play. Dibell’s theorisation of ludocapitalism extends his earlier work on LambdaMOO, a
pioneering multi-player system, and the case of what Dibell termed a “cyberrape” that occurred on the
platform. Shaviro notes that where in the earlier work, Dibell was at pains to demonstrate the
concreteness of the virtual world, by the time of his work on the gold farms, no such clarification
between the real and virtual world was necessary. Julian Dibell, Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day
Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, (New York: Basic Books, 2006);
Julian Dibell, “Play, Productivity, and Computing at Their Limits,” Artifact 2, Issue 3 (2008): 1 – 6;
Steven Shaviro, “Money for Nothing: Virtual Worlds and Virtual Economies,” Shaviro, January 10,
2007, http://shaviro.com/Othertexts/MMOs.pdf.
50
Steven Shaviro, “Accelerationist Aesthetics”.
 47

condition, in other words, when all aspects of life have been colonised by capital,
which “incorporates labour and subjectivity within its own purposes.” Shaviro’s
argument addresses the fate of aesthetics in a time of late capital or economic
acceleration, when the financialisation of everything has undermined Freud’s
conception of beauty as a “disinterested” vocation. The very definition of an aesthetic
judgement as one which cannot be converted into any form of knowledge or
“information” is brought into question. This is nowhere more evident than in the
organisation of the influencer economy, by which advertising has penetrated even the
apparently non-commercial expressions on social media as YouTube stars and
Instagram celebrities become highly paid marketers. Much activity on social media is
now understood to contribute to a user’s brand, which essentially translates into her
visibility and prominence. The user’s talent – singing, dancing, comedy and
improvisational skits, personal style – is usually only a means, the “content’” required
to build a profile, which when sufficiently enlarged, can become monetisable. In other
words, a person’s worth is measured in advertising terms, but determined through the
apparently inconsequential activities that represent modes of passing or even “killing”
time online.

The company motto, “Make every second count!” is revealing in this regard, with its
resonances with the older aphorism, Time is money!, as well as the implicit invitation
to prospective influencers to get creative. Video length is capped at 15 seconds and a
full-screen display blots out the phone clock to make TikTok an immersive
experience, arresting your time and attention. The ingenuity of TikTok, like
Instagram51, is to mine the discrepancy between the capacity for binge watching
versus the increasing shift towards short-form content in an era of information
overload. Its interface folds micro video into a scrolling format that compels people
into spending ever more time on the app, even as the videos themselves, as the NYT
reviewer puts it, feel like individual “dopamine jolts.”52 According to one survey
measuring stickiness (i.e., the ability of a platform to persuade visitors to stay on it),
TikTok has a high rating of 57% on the DAU/MAU ratio, with users spending

51
It is often called “Instagram, only with videos.”
52
Roose, “TikTok, a Chinese video app”.
 48

approximately 52 minutes on the app everyday.53 Akash Senapaty, who cites the
report in his assessment of the app, observes, “That is A LOT of 15-second videos.”54
Thus, the experience of temporality on TikTok, calculated to dovetail with the
exigencies of the attention economy, mirrors the corresponding expansion and
contraction of time that marks the contemporary.

If TikTok expresses a new relationship with time, it equally articulates a new

orientation of the body in digital space, evoking the avatar-like existence of smart-
phone users, constantly navigating the relationship between the physical and virtual
self. Organised around challenges and memes, TikTok structures the creation of
content around complicated special effects – infinite loops, split-screens and dizzying
mise-en-abyme, time-lapse, glitch and rapid transitions. The Shoe Change challenge,
for example, saw users employing rapid cutting techniques to exhibit a series of
costume changes (or alternatively, changes in hair or eye colour) synchronised with
the beat of the song “Run Free” by SoundCloud artiste Deep Chills.55 The Shoe
Challenge not only perfectly encapsulates the standard TikTok video (a catchy audio
track, usually a generic EDM or trap “hook,” is set to an elaborate sequence, that
enables the display of fashions, material wealth, and suggestive choreography), it also
demonstrates the way in which TikTok is able to capture, to borrow from Shaviro,
“what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century.”56 If Dubsmash facilitated a
relatively simple voice-body assemblage, TikTok generates a new digital body
crossed by the technosocial apparatus of finance capital. This is a body capable of
being moved, spliced and otherwise manipulated by the ahuman, impersonal forces of
the post-Fordist production regime. It is a body moreover that is itself inhuman.
Where cinema had earlier envisioned the body sutured to the machine, postcinematic
media like TikTok invoke the digital personae that are increasingly elected to be our

53
Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2018,” Kleiner Perkins, May 30, 2018,
https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/internet-trends-report-2018/.
54
Akash Senapaty, “Anatomy of Tik Tok: The viral video app from Bytedance,” factordaily, August
9, 2018, https://factordaily.com/anatomy-of-tik-tok-the-viral-video-app-from-bytedance/.
55
Other viral challenges include the #pillowchallenge (falling into a pillow in an infinite loop), the
#karmaisabitch challenge (where users lip-sync a dialogue from the popular TV show Riverdale before
a slowmotion reveal of themselves made up glamourously), the #copycat challenge (where the user
occupying a large central frame, makes various gestures which are copied by miniature dopplegangers
gathered in smaller windows that surround the main frame).
56
Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect, 2.
 49

proxies. Shaviro regards such media as performing a function fulfiled by cinema in an

earlier economic epoch:

“Just as film habituated the “masses” of Benjamin’s time to the shocks of

heavy industry and dense, large-scale urbanization, so post-cinematic media
may well habituate Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” to the intensities arising
from the precarization of work and living conditions, and the unleashing of
immense, freefloating and impersonal financial flows.”57

But if cinema, as an embodied form, could reconcile the experience of modernity with
the human, postcinematic media foreground the alienation of the human itself, which
is now properly relegated to the iconic. The lurching, juddering body in the Shoe
Challenge, subject to the impossible space-time compressions of virtual space
demonstrates the limit case of human experience. It gestures to a life, to vitality that
can no longer be apprehended at the level of the human. TikTok as postcinematic
audiovisual media, expresses what electronic music first captured in the nineties –
human extinction structured as an experience of jouissance.58 59
Not for nothing then
does artist Joshua Citarella describing the use of TikTok among its key demographic
– the generation dubbed “Gen Z” – link it to a generalised nihilism characteristic of
the era: “The younger generation now mimes the zombie forms of gaming avatars in
order to laugh at a world in which they themselves have no autonomy and are
controlled by outside forces.”60

Periods of technological uncanny are, however, mitigated by the reassuring presence

and appearance of older media, or as Bolter and Grusin put it, by the remediation of
old media. The logo for TikTok for example, a double image of a musical note set
against a black background, deliberately recalls analogue technology. The
superimposition of colours calculated to give it the appearance of vibrating in place,
also evokes the glitch aesthetics of retro VHS tapes. In its suite of special effects are
included filters simulating grainy film cameras and video recorders, and the flickering
digital image constantly threatens to disintegrate as if interrupted by electronic noise.

57
Ibid, 138.
58
Alex Williams, “Escape Velocities,” e-flux Journal #46, (June 2013), http://worker01.e-
flux.com/pdf/article_8969785.pdf
59
Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect, (2010), 39-40.
60
Joshua Citarella, “Welcome to TikTok, the Wildly Popular Video App Where Gen Z Makes the
Rules,” artsy.net, December 3, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-tiktok-wildly-
popular-video-app-gen-rules.
 50

On TikTok, it would seem, cinema is quite literally realised as an “effect.” Such retro
aesthetics fit into a larger trend of what Laura Marks describes as “analog nostalgia”
for those media whose relatively simple perceptual apparatus corresponds closely
with the human body.61 Laura Marks further observes that analog nostalgia is a
condition paradoxically prevalent among a generation that has grown up with digital
video.62 It would thus seem to be the anachronistic desire of a generation that is
already posthuman. Retro as a modality of the contemporary, gestures less towards
any specific history than a general archive of the human. And cinema figures in this
archive as one of the last and perhaps most monumental expressions of what it means
to be human. It is thus that one must understand invocations of cinema – as retro style
– in digital media, as expressions of a very contemporary condition.

A platform like TikTok discloses the manner in which cinema is recontextualised for
the digital age. Following Marshall Mcluhan, who had stated that “the content of any
medium is always another medium” cinema continues to provide materials for the
production of culture online. Tie-ups with film production houses63 64
as part of
digital marketing initiatives, represent the way in which TikTok is increasingly
imbricated in processes of paratextual production.65 The recent #Zerochallenge
launched by Red Chillies Entertainment in collaboration with the app, demonstrates
how TikTok is enlisted – alongside more conventional publicity channels – in the
drive to create buzz around new releases. The partnership, intended to promote the
latest Shah Rukh Khan star vehicle, delivered songs and sound bytes from the film
and its trailer onto the app, along with personalised messages from the film’s
protagonists. An associated competition encouraged fans to record their own videos
incorporating the film’s dialogues to win a chance to meet Khan. Subsequently, the
Salman Khan-starrer Bharat (dir. Ali Abbas Zafar, 2019) produced by T-Series had a

61
Photochemical film and analog video as indexical media are considered to preserve the connection to
organic life that digital media lack. Specifically, it is a desire for messy, mortal physicality in a time of
digital seamlessness. Laura U. Marks, Touch Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, (Minneapolis,
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 148.
62
Ibid, 153.
63
“Shemaroo partners TikTok, Vigo Video to promote Bollywood merchandise brand Yedaz,”
Television Post, August 16, 2018, https://www.televisionpost.com/shemaroo-partners-tiktok-vigo-
video-to-promote-bollywood-merchandise-brand-yedaz/.
64
“TikTok, Red Chillies Entertainment Introduces #Zerochallenge,” Mid-day, December 20, 2018,
https://www.mid-day.com/articles/tiktok-red-chillies-entertainment-introduces-
zerochallenge/20123152
65
Mehta, “Fan and its Paratexts.”
 51

similar tie-up. The #slowmotionchallenge named for the film’s lead single, “Slow
Motion”, asked fans to upload videos of themselves using the slo-mo filter, with five
lucky fans finally being selected to meet the eponymous “Bharat”, i.e., Salman Khan.
While the instructions did not set any parameters, leaving it to fans to choreograph
skits as they liked, a standard template soon evolved. This involved a couple standing
by a swimming pool, gazing into each other’s eyes, and at the cue provide by the
song’s refrain – aaja doob jaoon teri aankhon ke ocean mein, slow motion mein – are
shown to jump into the pool together, their fall dramatically prolonged through the
use of slow motion effects. The emergence of such a pattern is characteristic to
TikTok’s meme format operating on the proliferation of copies without an original.
The mimetic drive is further evident in videos where users have modelled themselves
on the film’s leads. The videos are distinctly gendered, with male users preferring the
“Slow Motion” song and female users favouring the Katrina Kaif-centric number,
“Aithey Aa”, indicating the separate cults of the male action star, and the female item
girl respectively. Salman Khan, in particular seems particularly prone to
impersonation, with multiple doppelgängers on the platform. While the phenomenon
of the star lookalike or “duplicate” has a longer history in Indian cinema, TikTok adds
a new dimension to the phenomenon.66 If the duplicate, with his mannerisms and
appearance closely modelled on the star, referred to the latter’s aura, the new TikTok
impersonators embody a certain aspirational style. The Salman Khan lookalikes
proliferating on the platform form a piece with a larger cult of body-building and
fitness, and the exhibition of – to use journalist Snigdha Poonam’s term, “swagger” –
that is independent of the muscular Bollywood star. Similarly, female users styling
themselves after Katrina Kaif’s old-fashioned sari-look and performing the hook-step
from “Aithay Aa”, an exaggerated hip-twist, feed into a larger pattern of women on
the app showcasing talent like singing, dancing and acting, frequently in overtly
sexualised performances.67 Khan and Kaif, then, serve not so much as cinematic role

66
See Tanul Thakur, “The Mirror Cracked,” Close Up, October 8, 2013,
https://tanulthakur.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/the-mirror-cracked/.
67
Investigative journalist Snigdha Poonam conducted a survey into the app following two cases of
“TikTok murders” in the national capital. The first case, the daylight shooting of twenty-seven year old
Mohit Mor (with 500,000 followers and 5.9 million “hearts” on TikTok) saw a morbid twist to the
app’s promise to make “ordinary users into stars”, with the hired killers’ parting shot at Mor, “Let us
make you a TikTok star,” before emptying several rounds of bullets into him. The app played a more
direct role in the killing of 19-year old Salman Zakir, after a stunt being recorded for a TikTok video
went awry. Poonam analysed user behaviour on the app, observing the difference between male and
female users referred to above. Snigdha Poonam, “ Connecting the TikTok dots in 2 murders that
 52

models but as handy references for users’ own self-oriented exposition of talent and
bluster.

Nonetheless, the TikTok platform is sought to be enfolded into the larger media swirl
orchestrated around the release of films. For TikTok too, licensing contracts help to
alleviate the taint of illegality that has always plagued user platforms like YouTube
and also ultimately doomed Dubsmash. But the decision of big production houses to
“collaborate” with TikTok seems to mask a larger anxiety about the increasing
prominence of digital spaces as the primary site of encounter with media content. In
other words, what are meant to be satellite productions referring back to a central
organising film text, are converted in the iterative world of social media into
independent cultural artefacts. In an inversion of roles, it is cinema that attempts to
feed off the TikTok phenomenon. TikTok realises an aspect of the cinematic
experience that has always been immanent, namely the circulation of filmic fragments
in the sphere identified as the extracinematic. But in doing so, it reveals cinema as one
element in a larger, heterogeneous media landscape. This is exemplified in the
TikTok explore page that lists the hashtags trending in a particular region,
encapsulating the zeitgeist at any given moment. Here, film dialogues and songs
along with ad jingles, TV shows and independent music, are all incorporated into
TikTok’s challenge and meme format. The TikTok explore page thus reflects the
manner in which film culture is adapted into the mode of networked life.

Even as cinema competes with a host of media forms to capture the precious attention
of consumers, cinema’s past is opened up to appropriation by the digital prosumer.
But unlike Dubsmash, where the object of the amateur productions was often a
nostalgic attachment to a certain formation of the popular cinema, on TikTok, the
affiliation is firmly to the new media object generated by the platform. Where
Dubsmash operated in the mode of homage, the logic of TikTok is that of the remix
where the emphasis is on the creation of something new. The TikTok video, like the
trick films of early cinema, is meant to be an exposition of the unique effects of the

shook Delhi,” Hindustan Times, June 14, 2019, https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-

news/connecting-the-tiktok-dots-in-2-murders-that-shook-the-capital/story-
To3U7uWARTHNzSuUqjSzmK.html.
 53

new medium. Cinema is revisited, but from the perspective afforded by the new
medium.

Take the example of Instagram user Krazy_Kaushal, who with a relatively modest
following, nonetheless made it to a list compiled on The Indian Express website,
“These quirky and weird TikTok videos by desi users will leave you in splits.”68 The
video (since removed) presented its own take on the famous exorcism scene from the
film Bhool Bhulaiyaa (dir. Priyadarshan, 2009), where the character played by Vidya
Balan exhibits psychological symptoms resembling spirit possession. The TikTok
video condensed the film’s grand exorcism sequence, staged through a song “Mere
Dholna”, into a byte-sized video with a split-screen replacing the short-reverse-shot
structure of the original. The video takes a few strains of the song, the musical
interlude consisting of a freestyling alap in a male vocal, the rhythms of which
alternately animate either side of the split screen. In the left frame, a group of boys
mime along to the musical piece, and appear to be providing encouragement to a girl
in the frame to the right. With dishevelled hair and makeup, vermillion smeared
across her forehead, the girl is evidently modelled on the film’s main antagonist
Manjulika, while the group of men who attempt to tame her, recall the screen coterie
headed by Akshay Kumar. Neither the article, nor the many hashtags listed alongside
the video mentioned Halloween, a largely Anlgo-American tradition now being
circulated internationally through the effusion of the Internet. The Halloween fad was
flagged, among other things, by the numerous pictures posted to social media of
popular TikTok users (formerly known as “musers” after the app’s earlier incarnation
as Musical.ly) made up as skeletons in imitation of a popular make-up look for the
festival. Kaushal’s video offering, on the 31st of October, was probably in response to
the #karmaisawitch hashtag, trending internationally on the day of Halloween. The
video posted by the Indian user, made a nod to the simultaneously national and
international trend, but did so by making sense of it with an Indian association and
reference. The injunction to respond to an unfamiliar festival, with a theme/genre
lacking a mainstream history in the subcontinent, was complied via digging through
the catalogue of popular Hindi cinema for the relatively few showings of horror.

68
“These quirky and funny tik-tok vidoes will leave you in splits,” Indian Express, November 3, 2018,
https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/viral-videos-trending/these-quirky-and-funny-tik-tok-videos-
will-leave-you-in-splits-5427314/.
 54

Balan’s Manjulika, one of the few memorable horror characters of the past decade
thus made her re-appearance.

Film history is thus deployed in topical ways. In this example, as in several others,
Bollywood emerges as a resource and a style, called upon to figure “Indianness” in a
transnational media form. In another video also included in The Indian Express list,
user awez_darbar did a comic version of the song “Bole Chudiyaan” from Kabhi
Khushi Kabhie Gham, riffing on the lyric, tere bin jiyo naiyo lag da main te margaiya
(“Without you, my heart is not in it, I may as well die”) to reveal the clincher – his
girlfriend is already dead! The Indian Express compilation captioned the video,
“When Halloween meets Bollywood! It’s a deadly combo indeed!” This final example
is perhaps most indicative of the transformations that social media like TikTok have
precipitated in the Indian mediascape. For Rajadhyaksha, the millennial formation of
Bollywood – of which Karan Johar’s films were exemplary – represented a post-
celluloid industry which nonetheless drew from an aura of the cinematic. Bollywood
was the privileged (pop) cultural form elected to mediate India’s entrée into an elite
club of global superpowers. By the close of the second decade of the millennium,
with the economic promise of liberalisation lying in shambles, Bollywood, with its
hypernational cultural stylings, is relegated to a quaint historical genre to be invoked
with fondness and humour. It is digital media now that represent the latest phase of
globalisation, throwing up Bollywood alongside Halloween, Shah Rukh Khan
alongside DJ Snake.

“Remember When?”: Nostalgia, Virality, and Digital Media

As can be seen from the forgoing section, the primary mode of cultural production on
the internet increasingly veers towards short-form content, vignettes and fragments
designed to negotiate the exigencies of the attention economy. Figuring prominently
in the internet’s repertoire of truncated media forms is the listicle, a portmanteau term
that refers to an article presented in the form of a list. The format, a mainstay of
popular media outlets like Buzzfeed, often presents materials cobbled together from
different sources – Youtube videos, memes, GIFS, stills – in free-style compilations
loosely organised along a thematic thread. While it has antecedents in literary forms
predating the internet, the listicle nevertheless signals a narrative form that condenses
 55

the database logic of computational culture. This is the appearance of the world on the
internet as, to quote one author, “as just one damn thing after another.”69 According to
Lev Manovich, databases are necessarily open-ended and asignifying, resisting the
drive towards order found in narrative.70 As such, narrative is refigured as an interface
negotiating a particular experience of what are multimedia material.71 But such a
database structure replaces the linear cause-and-effect logic of narrative, and therefore
also of history, in favour of what Manovich regards as a principle of spatial montage
enabled by digital compositing. Spatial montage, as opposed to the temporal montage
of cinema, allows the bringing together of everything at once. To quote at some
length from Manovich:

“In spatial montage, nothing is potentially forgotten, nothing is erased. Just

as we use computers to accumulate endless texts, messages, notes and data,
and just as a person, going through life, accumulates more and more
memories, with the past slowly acquiring more weight than the future, spatial
montage can accumulate events and images as it progresses through its
narrative. In contrast to cinema’s screen, which primarily functioned as a
record of perception, here computer screen functions as a record of
memory.”72

For Manovich then, such a spatial imagination is intrinsically at odds with a linear
historical imagination. The database characterised by simultaneity is therefore held to
be antihistorical. Or it could be, that what the database heralds is an archival as
opposed to historical imagination. Or history itself is re-imagined in the image of the
archive, as “just one damn thing after another.” Such a conception of history
moreover, brings it closer to the order of memory, as the uncharted space, rather than
place of the past.73 The listicle as one of the cultural forms supported by the database
structure of new media, could thus be seen as having a privileged relationship with
memory. Indeed, memory could now be nothing more than a name for the
classificatory principle guiding the mode of recall and re-use of the past in digital
media.
69
Steven Poole, “Top nine things you need to know about ‘listicles’,” The Guardian, November 12,
2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/12/listicles-articles-written-lists-steven-poole.
70
Lev Manovich, “Database,” in The Language of New Media, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
2002), 199.
71
Ibid, 200.
72
Lev Manovich, “New Language of Cinema,” in The Language of New Media, (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), 272.
73
Carolyn Steedman, “The space of memory: in an archive,” The History of the Human Sciences 11,
No. 4 (1998): 65-84.
 56

It is against this, that I take up the study of particular instances of the listicle that
presents the history of a decade, or the experience of growing up in a particular time
and place as a compilation of archived pop cultural moments. Such listicles recount
public histories as the collective memory of a generation, folding the big events of
history into personal biography. Importantly, they reflect an imagination of time as a
passage through pop. These could be linked to the larger profusion of nostalgia-tinged
pieces, traceable to Buzzfeed’s popular lists of “things that will make you feel old,”
that index time through mapping the distance from iconic moments of the recent past.
An example of such a list, Matt Stopera’s “40 Things That Will Make You Feel Old”
checks off the ages of John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe if they had been alive at
the time of writing (92 and 86 respectively), observes that singer Kurt Cobain and
rapper Aaliya have been dead for the last 17 years and last 10 years respectively,
notes that it has been 10 years since the discontinuation of the carbonated sugar-drink
Surge and that the chihuahua appearing in the first advertisement for the Taco Bell
franchise has been dead for two years.74 Such a list, clearly addressed to a
“millennial” readership signals age not only through the invocation of years but also
through a collection of references that stand in as the signs of an era.75 Here, time is
not only spatialised but materialised into the artefacts of commodity culture. The list
also flags the extent to which the history of the late twentieth century is mapped onto
a history of mediatisation, describing the process whereby media came to not only
convey, but actually co-produce the events of the century.76 Another such list, “31
Pictures Will Give You Nostalgic Flashbacks to Better Times”, old toys and
boardgames, the outdated technologies of VHS tapes, iPods and DVDs, magazines,
comics and books mingle with the memory of everyday routines crossed by media
flows, film-viewing, telemarketing, advertisements and TV schedules.77 The
compilation evokes an archive of things at the same time that it recalls intangible

74
Matt Stopera, “40 Things That Will Make You Feel Old,” Buzzfeed, May 12, 2011,
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/40-things-that-will-make-you-feel-old.
75
The generation dubbed “millennial” in the American press, refers to individuals born between the
early-eighties to roughly the mid-nineties, who also qualify for the moniker of the “90s kid”
76
Andrew Hoskins, “The Mediatisation of Memory,” in Save As… Digital Memories, ed. Joanne
Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading, (Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 31.
77
Brian Galindo and Matt Stopera, “31 Pictures Will Give You Nostalgic Flashbacks To Better
Times,” BuzzFeed, October 13, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/take-me-back-now-
please.
 57

aspects of lived experience as habit, fantasy, and loyalty. The entry on the now-
defunct music downloading network LimeWire, for instance, not only mentions the
regular, pointedly “illegal” download of music through the programme, but also that
users made such downloads back home, after school, that the audio clips thus
acquired were often spurious files, and that a low-quality radio rip disappointed hopes
of a sing-along. Similarly, an entry on the popular bowl cut hairstyle associated it
with the rivalry between fandoms of the two most popular boy bands of the decade,
the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. This kind of a configuration of the archival
material and contextual information evokes a milieu, that just a listing of the objects
themselves could not have conjured. Nostalgia here is both the archival logic
summoned to organise the detritus of our lately-lived pasts endlessly accessible
online, as well as being of archival value itself, encoding in it information impossible
to index otherwise.

Nostalgia seems to define also the retrogazing dispensation of social media more
generally, increasingly designed to encourage what Ryan Lizzardi describes as “now-
stalgia,” asking users to “define their lives, even their ‘now,’ through the lens of
longing.”78 Moreover, such nostalgic encouragement is built into the very structure of
social networking platforms as with Facebook’s Timeline and “On This Day”
features, #tbt or “Throwback Thursday” (alternatively “Flashback Friday”) posts, or
the Instagram and Snapchat filters that affect vintage photographic or video effects.79
Most recently, the #10yearchallenge meme involved users juxtaposing current
photographs alongside documented versions of themselves ten years ago, sparking
“the first viral trend of 2019.”80 The challenge, and also criticism of it – the
contention that it is really a ploy to train Facebook’s facial recognition algorithms –
indicates the manner in which nostalgia has emerged as the reigning principle guiding
the navigation, organisation and capitalisation of the ever increasing amounts of data
online.

78
Ryan Lizzardi, “The Now-stalgia of Social Media,” in Nostalgic Generations and Media: Perception
of Time and Available Meaning, (Lanhan, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books, 2017), 122.
79
Ibid.
80
Rebecca Jennings, “Why you’re seeing the ten-year challenge everywhere,” Vox, January 16, 2019,
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/16/18185256/10-year-challenge-facebook-meme.
 58

For my purposes, I am interested in the proliferation of such listicles in Indian

webspace on websites like BuzzFeed India, ScoopWhoop, and iDiva, and the
particular mobilisations of film history therein. Clearly riffing off the international
template for such listicles, the Indian iteration of the nostalgia listicle adjusts for
culture-specific references, while still clearly catering to millennial audiences.
Bollywood looms large in the recounting of such generational memories, and it is the
specific form that such recollection assumes that is of particular significance. On
Buzzfeed India, 2019 was kickstarted with a flashback to 2009; the list “This is What
India Was Like in 2009” catalogued 22, largely unrelated happenings, that together
summarised the year that recently turned a decade old.81 Among other things, we are
informed that the “Delhi High Court declared Section 377 unconstitutional and
legalised consensual sex between persons of the same sex,” that “Manmohan Singh
was re-elected as prime minister for the second time in the 2009 elections,” and that
“Satyam Computers' founder, B. Ramalinga Raju confessed that he tampered with the
company's accounts resulting in a ₹7,000 crore fraud.” Such minutes of the state of
the union, circa 2009, are however tempered with the more frivolous information that
singer Kylie Minogue appeared on the soundtrack of the Hindi film Blue (dir.
Anthony D’Souza, 2009), actress Twinkle Khanna unbuttoned husband Akshay
Kumar’s jeans during a Levi’s fashion show leading to their subsquent arrest for the
stunt, and that debutantes Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor broke up a year into
their much publicised relationship. The list also includes a cursory round-up of the
year’s best and worst films as well as noting the highest box office-grosser for the
year, 3 Idiots (dir. Raju Hirani, 2009). The list’s logic of commemoration is at first
elusive, appearing as a mere arbitrary collection of facts that approach but do not
quite exhaust the picture of the year. On examining closer however, it becomes
apparent that the recapitulation of the past is calculated to correlate with the present.
Thus, the 2010 Delhi High Court ruling is seen to presage the Supreme Court
judgement on section 377, drawing a clear line from that moment to the present
decriminalisation of homosexuality, even as the memory of an adverse judgement
given by the apex Court in 2013 is sought to be suppressed. Similarly, the memory of
the break-up of the young actors Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor, accompanied

81
Sonia Mariam Thomas, “This is What India Was Like in 2009,” Buzzfeed, January 8, 2019,
https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/this-is-what-india-was-like-in-2009.
 59

with the caption “we thought the world would never see real love again,” is
underwritten by the present knowledge that the respective parties have happily moved
on. The review of 2009 as executed by the listicle is symptomatic of the memory-
practices of digital media outlets that instate a constitutive dialectic of past and
present informing our digital contemporary. Or to put it another way, under
conditions of instant digital recall and retrieval, an ever-present past is moulded to
topical ends. And so, the very compilation of a list on 2009 is elicited by and
participates in the viral circulation of the trending #10yearchallenge, just as the
individual entries correspond to discrete viral phenomena. The challenge, applied to
actors, athletes, iPhones, Facebook privacy concerns, and global warming, is now
applied to time itself.

As if to confirm the trend, ScoopWhoop, an Indian variant of the BuzzFeed media

model, published its own version of the 2009 listicle.82 The slightly expanded list – 25
to BuzzFeed’s 22 items – contained significant overlaps with the list published by
BuzzFeed India a week earlier. Significantly, a larger proportion of items referred to
milestones in Indian defence (the launch of the first nuclear submarine, the INS
Arihant; the testing of the nuclear-capable missile Dhanush), space research (the
launch of RISAT-2 reconnaissance satellite; the discovery of water on the moon by
the Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe), and, cricket victories (20 years of Sachin
Tendulkar’s international cricket career; India achieving World no. 1 status in Test
cricket). As compared to the BuzzFeed list, the ScoopWhoop piece more prominently
projected the history of 2009 as the triumphal narrative of a year in the life of the
nation. The bringing together of public and pop histories, more clearly manifest in the
ScoopWhoop than the BuzzFeed listicle, attests to what Anupama Kapse regards as
the “commemorative practices that are embedded in a neo-liberal recirculation of
commodities, histories and narratives.”83 Kapse, writing in the context of the
centenary celebrations of the Indian cinema, avers that on such loaded occasions of
remembrance, cinema does not simply stand for popular memory, but is specifically
called upon to act as such. She says:

82
Ankit Subarno, “This Is What India Was Talking About 10 Years Ago,” Scoopwhoop, January 15,
2019, https://www.scoopwhoop.com/this-is-what-india-was-talking-about-10-years-ago/.
83
Anupama Kapse, “Afterthoughts on the Indian cinema centenary,” South Asian Popular Culture 13,
No. 1 (2015): 61-64.
 60

“Global capitalism narrows borders to such an extent that ‘the nation has to
function in an even more mythologized way’ – where a whole range of
‘commemorative souvenirs can stage… a relationship with cinema
understood as collective heritage.’ By that token, the more the nation
advances, the greater its nostalgia and longing for the past.”84

In other words, cinema is sought to be located in an archive of Indianness. In the

same volume, Neepa Majumdar writing on the nostalgia industry built around the
centenary, observes that “the nation has become, in part, a collection of materials,
objects, and styles that can circulate globally and generate ‘likes’ and ‘hits’.”85
Following Kapse and Majumdar, we can observe a similar logic at work in both
ScoopWhoop and BuzzFeed listicles. In their incorporation of major and minor
moments in narrating the nation, the listicles represent a model of history that
disavows the traditional division between official and anecdotal history. In a time of
global communications structured on the virality of “likes” and “hits”, such a model
embraces rather than rejects the affective power of oral narratives that have the ability
to foster affiliations. In a sense, such a conception of history has something in
common with what Paula Amad, referring to the work of Arthur Elton, describes as
cinema’s own historical imagination as serving “a new type of history in an
audiovisual mode, not by neutrally offering facts and figures, but by delivering a
deliberate, unabashedly biased ‘point of view.’”86 It would seem that the cinema’s
particular ability to filter objective representation through an impressionistic lens
finds parallels with the listicle’s own curious alchemy of fact into fancy.

An even more intimate view of history is provided by articles that look back fondly at
the years of childhood and adolescence – “60 Things That Defined Your Childhood in
India” (BuzzFeed, 2014), “32 Things Every Indian Born In The ‘90s Misses Dearly”
(BuzzFeed, 2015), “18 Pictures People Who Have Never Gone To College in India
Will Never Understand” (BuzzFeed, 2016), “18 Things That Every ‘90s Kid Would
Miss About Their Childhood” (ScoopWhoop, 2015), “48 Signs You Are A True Blue
90s Indian Kid” (2013), “These Simple Posters of Our Best Childhood Memories Will
Make You Want To Go Back In Time” (ScoopWhoop, 2015), “This Is What Bringing

84
Ibid.
85
Neepa Majumdar, “The nostalgia industry and Indian film studies,” South Asian Popular Culture 13,
No. 1 (2015): 85-88.
86
Paula Amad, “Film as the “Skin of History”: Andre Bazin and the Specter of the Archive and Death
in Nicole Verdres’s Paris 1900 (1947),” Representations 130, No. 1 (Spring 2015): 89.
 61

In The New Year As A 90s Kid Looked Like” (Idiva, 2018). In these, a vast
collection of miscellany – chewing gum, malted beverage brands, cricket and WWE
trading cards, cassettes, stationery, school uniforms, toys and tazos, library books – is
set out in a veritable mise-en-scène of childhood. The listicles are predicated on an
understanding of material culture that regards it as a repository of lived experience.87
Objects assume a fetish-like aspect through the accrual of biographical value.
Formative life stages are thus encapsulated as a series of rituals and practices
embedded in a sensorium of the everyday.

Cinema frequently appears in these lists’ synaesthetic evocation of the smells, sights
and sounds of childhood, its own history intertwined with the history of everyday
lives. Phil Wickham has elsewhere described cinema’s unique imbrication with the
everyday, as both concrete reality (“the Saturday night show at the end of the working
week, or the leisure option before a meal out”), as well as fantasy (“screen dreams”).
As he considers the practice of collecting film memorabilia, Wickham offers a
conception of film history as the study of ephemera which provide an insight into
“cinema’s role in everyday life and its place within individual lives.”88 Ephemera thus
constitute an alternative archive of cinema’s past outside of the film text – of cinema
effects that open onto cinema affect. What unfolds in these listicles is precisely an
archive of cinema’s everyday-ness, pictured through stacks of cassettes, used ticket
stubs, old posters and publicity stills, fashion trends and kitsch. These are appended
with descriptions, reminiscences and comments that index individual’s engagement
with cinema as a cultural force. In the majority of these listicles, rather than individual
films, what is flagged time and again is a formation of the popular cinema as a source
of cultural references, as a focal point of sociality and as a temporal marker.

The listicle thus serves up two different archival articulations of the cinema. In the
first place, it presents cinema as a counter-archive of official history. As with the
decade of the eighties in America, where the final years of the Cold War and the
victory of American hegemony triggered a colourful explosion of Americana centred
on consumer lifestyles, the nineties is associated with a similar release of libidinal

87
Phil Wickham, “Scrapbooks, soap dishes and screen dreams: ephemera, everyday life, and cinema
history,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 8, No. 3 (2010): 317.
88
Ibid.
 62

pleasures in India attendant on the opening of the economy and an end to Nehruvian
austerity. Cinema is recounted as part of the media landscape that marked the period
of liberalisation, associated among other things, with a video boom and the coming of
cable and satellite television, and, towards the end of the decade, the arrival of the
internet. The “90s kid” listicle, instating cinema in a spectrum of commodities that
became freely available to generations growing up amid economic and political
change, places it in general archive of liberalisation. But such listicles also constitute
a counter-archive of the cinema itself, indicating the changes the industry was
undergoing at the fin-de-siècle. In these years, as Ranjani Mazumdar has elsewhere
discussed, the film industry graduated to becoming a conglomeration of media
franchises dispersed across diverse sites including television, the live stage event, and
the Internet.89 Several listicles reflect this dispersion of the cinema as it came to be
mediated by electronic and digital formats, and circulated in an arena that included
advertising, fashion, and music television. The listicle “21 Iconic Moments Only
Indians Who Watched TV in the Early 2000s Will Recognise,” enumerates such
instances as the first season of the quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati hosted by
Amitabh Bachchan; the 2004 Pepsi ad starring the trio of Shah Rukh, Saif Ali Khan
and Preity Zinta, fresh off their appearance in the film Kal Ho Na Ho (dir. Nikhil
Advani, 2003); and the actors Ayushmann Khurana and Rannvijay Singh as hosts on
the MTV reality show Roadies before their big screen breaks.90 Another such listicle
recalls iconic moments such as actor Vivek Oberoi’s now-infamous press conference,
calling out superstar Salman Khan for his abusive behaviour towards his ex-girlfriend
Aishwarya Rai; Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey made to do the “Lungi Dance” at the
IIFA awards; the comedy “roast” of prominent Bollywood celebrities by the sketch
group AIB; and the very public media fall out between actors Kangana Ranaut and
Hritihik Roshan after a rumoured love affair gone sour.91 Through all of these, an
extracinematic life of film emerges as it travels through different media channels and
becomes memorialised through these other forms, as scandal, rumour and gossip. The

89
Ranjani Mazumdar, “Film Stardom after Liveness,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural
Studies 26, No. 6 (December 2012): 833-844.
90
Sahil Rizwan, “21 Iconic Moments Only Indians Who Watched TV In The Early 2000s Will
Recognise,” Buzzfeed, March 22, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/sahilrizwan/oye-bubbly-oye-oye-
bubbly?bfsource=relatedauto.
91
Sahil Rizwan, “19 Absurd Pop Culture Events That I Still Can't Believe Actually Happened,”
Buzzfeed, August 2, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/sahilrizwan/19-absurd-pop-culture-events-that-i-
still-cant-believe?bfsource=relatedauto.
 63

listicle itself emerges as one more site of the production of the star text, precisely
because of the way it dredges up the past. This follows Mazumdar’s assertion that
cinema frequently relies on these extrafilmic channels of publicity, having evolved
from magazines and promotional images into the diverse media channels of the
twenty-first century, that provide a scaffolding to the star text. Mazumdar further
argues, that it was through such diversified media productions that the risk of
filmmaking became alleviated, guaranteeing profits for a large chain of players
including media management companies, the star, and the broadcast rights holder.92
While the idea of Bollywood as a post-celluloid formation of the Hindi film industry
remains a largely academic construct, such listicles provide a popular source of the
same history.

The aging of the media event analogises our own mortality, as we read dated news
items with all the shock of the new. The listicle’s unique memorial exercise, its
determination to restore the insignificant, the routine and the habitual, is symptomatic
of a desire to defy the ineluctable march of time. But in its unfolding of nostalgia, the
listicle highlights its own role in preserving memory. With such periodic reminders of
our own failure to remember, the digital instates itself as the exteriorised repository of
our collective past.

As digital media become central to the proliferation of the moving image, cinema
becomes one among an expanded landscape of images. I have shown how cinema
navigates the transition to the new digital regime, a transition I have argued, evinces
as many continuities as disruptions. Having moved through a discussion of new
media, I would now like to move to a discussion of cinema’s own internalisation of
the digital.

Back to Zero!: Srk, Fandom, and a New Digital Cinema

“Kya baat hai! Phir Phir? –

“Phir Kya? Phir Wahi! –

92
Ranjani Mazumdar, Op. cit., 839.
 64

“Kya? Sex?! –

“Abbe na! – Gaana! Guddu, 5,000 per head ke hisaab se, dhai lakh ke saajinde, der
lakh ke unke kapre; Imperial Hotel ke manager ke moonh mein 50,000 hazaar ki
khons; 80 hazaar ke chhote gande bacche, rang pani gulal ka kharcha 20 hazaar; aur
khudka der lakh rupein ka suit alag. Bhai saab na, na karte hue bhi 6 lakh rupein
laga diyein the maine Ashok ke, gaana gaane mein. Par maata rani ke kripa se, ladki
ne baune ko dekhna shuru kar diya tha…”

“Wow! And then what happened? –

“And then what? It happened! –

“What? Sex?! –

“Oh no! – A song! Guddu, calculating for 5,000 per head, about two and half lakhs
for the musicians, a lakh and half for their clothes; a bribe of rupees 50,000 for the
manager of the Imperial Hotel; rupees 80,000 for those disgusting children; about
20,000 spent on water and colours. Even without wanting to, I ended up blowing
more than 6 lakhs of Ashok’s wealth – all to sing a song. But by god’s grace, the
dwarf had finally caught the lady’s attention…”

[Translation mine.]

In the lead-up to the song “Mere Naam Tu,” arranged and picturised in the grand
tradition of lush, orchestral romantic ballads of the Hindi cinema, the film’s lead
character Bauua Singh (played by Shah Rukh Khan) relates in clinical detail, the
financial and logistical planning that went into the making of the musical number.
Recapitulating to his friend the progress of his courtship, Bauua with his cold
calculations sounds almost like a film producer estimating the costs of the spectacle.
The visual trickery and flourishes that customarily mask the production of fantasy in
such sequences are laid bare – a standing fan is conjured to keep the heroine in wind-
swept glory, an actual orchestra plays the musical accompaniment to the hero’s song,
and the hero himself ensures that despite all the visual detail jostling for attention, he
remains firmly at the centre of the frame. There is even a subtle send-up of the very
convention of song-and-dance in this cinema, regarded as elaborately staged
attractions that facilitate “coitus interruptus”93 – a song instead of sex! Bauua’s

93
Lalitha Gopalan (2002), terms the characteristic withdrawal of the camera in scenes that would
otherwise naturally culminate in lovemaking, cutting away instead to suggestive imagery as that of
waterfalls, thunder or flowers, as coitus interruptus. These conventional shots constitute according to
her a mode of self-censorship on the part of the Hindi film industry itself. The song sequence,
 65

double aspect as producer/hero of the show seems to further inscribe Khan’s own dual
role as both producer and lead actor of the film, anchoring the fictional diegesis in the
context of the film’s own production. When Bauua switches gear from the
Machievellian architect of the song spectacle to its lead performer, the transition is
signalled by Khan’s strutting entry, dimpled smile in place, arms outstretched in a
gesture that through accumulated appearances, has helped to cement his reputation as
the last word in filmi romance. “Mere Naam Tu” then is not just another Bollywood
romantic standard, it is a song about love songs.

This sequence is one of many self-reflexive gestures in a film that can arguably be
read as an exegesis on cinema. It follows the quest of a dwarf or bauna for greatness
that takes him, literally, from “Meerut to Mars”. Told all his life to settle, Bauua
struggles to dream big, his star-gazing honed by his immersion in the fantasy worlds
of popular cinema. This is signaled right from the opening scene, a dream sequence in
which Shah Rukh Khan seems to appear as himself rather than the dwarf we have
come to expect from the film’s promotional imagery. Bauua’s daily conflicts with his
father are transformed here into a face-off between rapacious villains and a
swashbuckling hero a la film westerns, with the north Indian cityscape of Meerut
reimagined as the cinematic world of the American Frontier. The dream is abruptly
cut short taking us into Bauua’s reality, a Meerut significantly more grimy and
squalid than the one of his dreams, and himself considerably smaller than the modest
but expansive frame of the superstar Khan. Bauua’s struggle against his lot in life is
translated at the level of narrative and form as that between documentary realism and
illusion/fantasy, echoing the foundational opposition enshrined in film discourse
between the cinema of the Lumières on the one hand, and Méliès on the other.
Bauua’s predicament – his earthly circumscription as against his cosmic ambitions –
in a sense opens onto a structuring dissonance of the cinematic experience,
circumscribed within the everyday and yet imbued with the transcendent possibilities
of machinic agency. Even as he crystallises the most marginalised, radically outsider
elements of society, Bauua stands in more generally for a whole cinema public that

sublimating as it does the prohibited expression of love into the discreet pleasures of costumes, exotic
locations, grand settings, and stylised choreography, represents yet another production expedient that
encodes the particular pleasures of the Hindi cinema. Lalitha Gopalan, “Introduction: ‘Hum Aapke Hai
Kaun?’ Cinephilia and Indian Films,” in Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary
Indian Cinema, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1-24.
 66

negotiates such transactions between reality and fantasy. In this regard Zero is the
latest in a line of films which have as their protagonists the people who watch movies.
But at the same time that it shines a light on an older film subject, Zero really
addresses the emergence of an entirely new animal.94

This is the digital consumer of cinema whose own life is as much a part of the
spectacle as the screen fantasies that constitute his dream-worlds. Bauua, for example,
takes as many selfies of himself and worships his own image almost as much as he
does his favoured heroine, the item-girl Babita Kumari. His one skill, a seemingly
supernatural power to make stars fall at the command “5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0,” is not, as one
reviewer notes, unlike the swiping gesture one makes across the touch screen of a
mobile phone.95 And in “Mere Naam Tu,” the fan Bauua is able to orchestrate his own
fantasy taking a cue from ready cinematic models so that it appears remarkably like
Khan, already displaced onto a virtual body, ventriloquizing himself. This sequence,
and indeed the film as a whole, stages the possibilities of the digital, as a force that
can project the transcendental qualities of cinema into the everyday. It can
simultaneously shrink the larger-than-life image of Khan, even as it invests a bauna
with Khan’s star calibre. It further indicates the manner in which, increasingly, a
dispersal of the means of production and a proliferation of screens undermine
traditional media hierarchies. As with Khan’s previous release, the meta-thriller, Fan,
the figure of the double or the replicant looms large, as an altered figuration of the
star. But if the earlier film had staged the anxiety of replacement and erasure, Zero
embraces the dissemination of star power into satellite sites of production and
performance.

As such, “Mere Naam Tu” presents a microcosm of what is today vaunted as the new
participatory culture, where everyone is an empowered user as well as producer of
content. Bauua simultaneously displays a producer’s canny understanding of the
mechanics and pragmatics of spectacle, while also channeling – in the long tradition
of the film fan – an idea of romance derived and informed by the cinema. Zero
understands that Khan will have to be miniaturised for an age in which increasingly,

94
The “Zero” of the title then in some sense alluding to an evolutionary ground zero.
95
Baradwaj Rangan, “Zero Review: This Very Literal Flight of Fancy Is the Year’s Most Audacious
Love Story,” Film Companion, December 23, 2018, https://www.filmcompanion.in/zero-review-
baradwaj-rangan-this-very-literal-flight-of-fancy-is-the-years-most-audacious-love-story/.
 67

images are received and circulated on the phone. It also realises that the out-size
figure of Khan will give way to many up-start Bauuas, even as Khan himself remains
as the cipher of a particular filmi style. Arms thrown open in the familiar gesture of
invitation, Khan’s citation here refers not only to his own filmography, but to an
entire history of mainstream cinema whose energies he has come to embody. Zero
with its “aging superstar”96 and its fundamentally “old-school” romance is then
centrally concerned with the ways in which the past can be accommodated in the
future.

In Maneesh Sharma’s Fan (2016) Shah Rukh Khan plays the double role of a fictional
superstar Aryan Khanna (modelled closely on himself), and his fan, Gaurav Chandna,
to stage a meta-commentary on the shifting nature of celebrity in the contemporary.
The film, remarkable in its deployment of star discourse and the body of the star
himself in a special effects-mediated role, has invited extensive critical attention,
including a dedicated dossier of essays in a 2017 volume of the journal Framework.
The various contributors all signpost the way in which the film addresses the
intersection between local and folk practices of fandom and the affordances and
capabilities of a global digital network.97 The essays also touch on the significant
anxiety generated by the disruption of the star text by its digital proliferations,
digitally empowered fans and doppelgängers now threatening to exceed the
designated boundaries regulating the traditional relationship between fan and star.
Fan is seen as film that seeks to address this newly contentious equation as well as the
response of the industry to contain the threat to the hierarchal formation of media by
incorporating the informal products of fan creativity, and attempting to police what
constitutes appropriate modes of fan behaviour and adoration. That the digital is
viewed as a dangerously disruptive force is evident elsewhere in Khan’s much
publicised 2017 Ted talk, in which his own trajectory is likened to the evolution of
“humanity”, which really refers here to the post-Independence experience of
successive stages of industrial and postindustrial modernity. In a significant passage,

96
Khan refers to himself as such in a widely publicised TED talk about the future of humanity
allegorised through the figure of the star past his prime. Shahrukh Khan, “Thoughts on humanity, fame
and love,” TED, May 11, 2017,
https://www.ted.com/talks/shah_rukh_khan_thoughts_on_humanity_fame_and_love?language=en.
97
Even apart from this, Khan has attracted significant academic attention including a conference on the
star held in Vienna, which resulted in the publication of a volume edited by Rajinder Dudrah, Elke
Mader and Bernhard Fuchs, SRK and global Bollywood, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015.
 68

Khan describes his move to the city of Bombay and the concurrent explosion of both
his stardom and the neoliberal economy. He goes on to express the soaring highs in
both, bringing the narrative up to the momentous expansion of digital
communications. Khan avers:

“Then in my late twenties, I shifted to the sprawling metropolis of Mumbai,

and my framework, like the newly industrialized, aspirational humanity,
began to alter. In the urban rush for a new, more embellished survival, things
started to look a little different… Ideas were flowing with more freedom and
speed. And I experienced the miracle of human innovation and cooperation,
and my own creativity, when supported by the resourcefulness of this
collective endeavour, catapulted me into superstardom. I started to feel that I
had arrived, and generally, by the time I was 40, I was really, really flying…
and humanity was soaring with me…And then you all know what happened.
The internet happened. I was in my late forties, and I started tweeting like a
canary in a birdcage and assuming that, you know, people who peered into
my world would admire it for the miracle I believed it to be. But something
else awaited me and humanity. We had expected an expansion of ideas and
dreams with the enhanced connectivity of the world. We had not bargained
for the village-like enclosure of thought, of judgement, of definition that
flowed from the same space that freedom and revolution was taking place
in… In this world slowly, reality became virtual and virtual became real…”98

Khan’s TED talk then forms a piece with Fan’s narrative of the “aging star” identified
with a particular regime of mechanical production. Khan maps relations of affection
between the different sites of stardom, cinema and the national body politic. Their
intertwined fates stand at the cusp in the face of the transformations wrought by the
digital. Most readings of Fan therefore stress the figuration of the titular fan as
encoding an ambivalence about the expansive and flexible qualities of the digital that
produce an entitled, technologically proficient and savvy consumer of media. This is
both an intensification as well as reversal of the traditional codes of spectatorship
governing the interchange between star and fan. On the one hand, the film emphasises
the desire for closeness characterising the star-fan relationship, modelled on an
intense form of worship that asserts the co-constitution of deity and devotee – “Kyun
ki main jo bhi hoon, jahan bhi hoon, jis mukaam pe bhi hoon, apne fans ki wajah se
hoon” (I am what I am because of my fans). Such desire is both expedited as well as
exacerbated by the immediacy and mimetic capabilities of digital technology which
enable fans to have ever-more embodied forms of contact with the star even as the

98
Shah Rukh Khan, “Thoughts on humanity, fame and love.”
 69

star himself remains inaccessible. Neepa Majumdar and Anupama Kapse both
theorise the threat of doubling as issuing from the manner in which the digital copy,
in its approximation and dispersal of the image of the star, teases a scenario in which
its compensatory function might give way to complete displacement.99 Monika Mehta
makes a similar argument about fan-authored paratextual materials that compete with
the proprietary claims of the production company, Yash Raj Films, to dictate the
discourse around the film; a threat which is neutralised by the co-optation of such
materials under the sign of YRF.100 The writers also take note of the postcinematic
world in which Fan takes place, where the film theatre is not the engendering site of
fan discourse and activity. I would take their arguments further, to suggest that the
film’s paranoid vision registers an even more acute threat than the supersession of a
centralised cinematic apparatus by satellite channels of production. The threat is now
of the very erasure of the cinematic even as sign, as digital media generates a new
brand of celebrity.

As noted in the discussion of video-dubbing applications, platforms such as TikTok

and Dubsmash mobilise the cinematic as stuff to fashion new cultural products with.
Moreover, these apps like Vine before them, have spawned stars who flaunt their
allegiance to the platform, rather than pre-existing icons from an earlier media
regime. The “copy star”, as Majumdar refers to the lookalikes piggybacking on the
fame of the “original” star, gives way to the TikTok celebrity influencer, whose
indiscriminate use of dialogues, gestures and style no longer refer to any specific form
of fandom.101 The link to the star threatens to be broken not only physically but also
symbolically. In such a scenario, the character of the dedicated fan as even a crazed-
manic lover can be strangely reassuring rather than threatening. Mehta, in her reading
of the film’s solitary song (which does not even appear in the film), the “Jabra Fan
Athem”, notes the manner in which the its picturisation reflects the shifting nature of
film culture, with the visual track reflecting the physical locations – the
neighbourhood street, the bazaar, the barbershop, the highway – on which the star is
constructed as (para)text, while the lyrics of the song enumerate the virtual sites of
99
Neepa Majumdar, “Embodiment and Stardom in Shahrukh Khan’s Fan,” Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media 58, Numbers 1 & 2 (Spring & Fall 2017): 144-160; Anupama Kapse, “Double
Trouble: SRK, Fandom and Special Effects,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 58,
Numbers 1 & 2 (Spring & Fall 2017): 187-208.
100
Monika Mehta, “Fan and its Paratexts,” 128-143.
101
Neepa Majumdar, Op. cit., 144-160.
 70

star discourse including Facebook, Twitter, and Google.102 Mehta’s reading even as it
acknowledges the break between older and newer media regimes, nonetheless posits a
continuity. What it doesn’t register is that Gaurav as the representation of a fervid,
devotional fandom, is himself somewhat of a relic. Gaurav is constantly chided by his
crush, Neha, to forgo his obsession with Aryan, as a basically idle preoccupation. She
herself aspires to obtain an MBA in the US, and we meet her first as she visits
Gaurav’s cyber café to get necessary printouts for her visa application. Neha’s upward
mobility contrasts with Gaurav’s relative complacence in terms of career and
vocation, devoting himself to being a full-time fan instead. Gaurav’s fandom itself is
positioned between older modes of folk-culture103 – the fair in which he participates
in the Super Sitara talent contest, the ceremonial viewing of the star on his birthday –
alongside the modern appurtenances of fan culture embedded in selfies, digital
screensavers, live television coverage and social media updates. Significantly,
Gaurav’s use of technology is confined to its role in abetting first his fandom and then
his vendetta against the star. Unlike Neha, who uses the cyber café to print visa
applications, Gaurav uses the computer to print countless posters of Aryan Khanna.
Thus, breaking with readings that identify him with the playful, dynamic, creative and
flexible qualities of the digital, I would argue that he actually raises the spectre of an
older mode of subjectivity that cannot adequately adjust itself to a regime of digital
cool – Gaurav’s character to use a millennial colloquialism literally “has no chill”.104
The film suggests, that not only the star, but his fan too is maladjusted in an age of
digital individualism. Gaurav’s passion for Aryan is framed as unproductive, “extra”,
as opposed to Neha’s pragmatic pursuit of a career and a life. His beating of a
younger rival to Aryan, Sid Kapoor, early in the film, indicates the excessive and
destructive potential of blind devotion, as a moment in which, following Mehta, the
desire for darsan gives way to nazar or harmful looking.105 Aryan denounces
Gaurav’s actions as unbecoming of a fan, and later in the film implores with him to
give up his “madness” and lead a normal life. Gaurav’s love manages to alienate not
only his parents, sundry neighbours, and potential lovers, but finally also Aryan

102
Mehta, Op. cit., 139.
103
Kapse cites Henry Jenkins’ observation elsewhere, of the application of the practices of folk culture
to mass culture in fandoms, to delineate the dominant mode of activity of the fan of Bombay cinema.
Kapse, Op. cit., 187-208.
104
I defer to the meaning of the phrase in the Urban Dictionary posted by the user CSaw16, referring
to a person or people who “have effectively lost their ability to act in a rational manner.”
105
Mehta, Op. cit., 137.
 71

himself. His isolation complete, Gaurav takes the fatal step of jumping to his death.
Gaurav’s final words to Aryan, reassert his unwavering devotion, delivering his
signature refrain – rehne de, tu nahi samjhega. Ultimately, even the star is unable to
comprehend the depth of the fan’s attachment, and has to as a consequence relinquish
– depicted here quite literally as Gaurav’s fingers slip out of Aryan’s grip, and he
plummets to his death – the dangerous, defiant but unconditional love of the superfan.

Gaurav’s relentlessness, his obstinate desire for recognition and affection is framed as
a problem for the star. In the film’s climactic sequence, Aryan acknowledges his
inability to meet the many demands on his time and attention, admitting that he is
spread too thin. This gestures to the conflictual nature of stardom mapped on to a
contemporary network of media, where the star becomes simultaneously more
omnipresent and more intangible. This creates, as Majumdar notes, a desire for star
presence that he is ill-equipped to satisfy. Gaurav’s fan entitlement reflects such a
desire for presence, or as Majumdar puts it, the desire for liveness and proximity.106
Gaurav’s excessive ardour, however, as both Mehta and Majumdar observe, is also in
the mould of a culturally specific mode of spectatorship drawing on subcontinental
mystic traditions that emphasise the imbrication of the mortal lover and the
supernatural beloved. The desire for oneness with the star may have descended from
this much older lineage informing the repertoire and mode of fan practice in India.
The devotional organisation of Indian cinema is now seen to spill into digital space.107
However, as the film suggests, devotional desire for star presence assumes
unmanageable proportions under the digital, and is in contention with the qualities of
playfulness, adaptability and insouciance required to navigate information networks.
While Gaurav displays these characteristics, it is only in the second half where his
love for Aryan takes a destructive turn, and is even then, driven by a glut of sentiment
that ill-serves the directive to maintain the ironic distance or “cool” that Alan Liu
elsewhere designates the essential “ethos of information.”108

106
Neepa Majumdar, Op. cit., 156.
107
Neepa Majumdar cites Elke Mader who reads SRK’s legions of Twitter fans against the lens of
darsan (Majumdar, Op. cit., 156).
108
Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004).
 72

In a different context, Pansy Duncan discusses the “duty of hilarity” incumbent on

workers in late capitalist economies, required to cultivate openness and flexibility to
better cater to the demands of just-in-time production.109 Looking at examples of
cringe comedy on TV, she concludes that the figure of the amusing mechanical
worker inherited from a long tradition of comedy dating back to Charlie Chaplin and
Buster Keaton, becomes rebranded as the awkward and out-of-step protagonists of
shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. These characters are “cringe-
worthy” because they are unable to execute the altered principles of work-as-play
governing postindustrial societies. Where the mechanical had embodied a perhaps too
faithful adherence to Fordist prescriptions of labour, the awkward figure of cringe-
comedy conversely manifests a misguided affiliation to obsolete work practices and
ethos. His failure to keep up with the times thus registers as awkward, or
embarrassing. Duncan quotes Ricky Gervais, who plays the lead character in The
Office, who explains that his alter-ego’s “only crime is he’s not as cool as he thinks he
is.” These characters’ old-school rigidity is thus in direct contravention of coolness as
a labour injunction, rendering them quaint objects of comedy rebooted for a late-
capitalist age. Similarly, Gaurav’s inability to modulate his fan labour in keeping with
the star’s priorities renders him a threat to the star. His criminal assault on Sid
Kapoor, mirroring Aryan’s own previous altercation with the actor, is the first of
many actions that endanger the star’s already precarious reputation. In the encounter
between the aging superstar and the upstart actor, the loyal fan becomes an added
complication. Here not only the star, but his longtime fan is also depicted as a misfit
in a changing world. Kapse describes Gaurav’s two-pronged personality as consisting
on the one hand, of the performative skill of the “feminized rasika,” while his social
media expertise aligns him with the figure of the hacker.110 I would further qualify
this chronologically, both within the narrative of the film, where the rasika of the
film’s beginning gives way in the second half to the technologically savvy anti-fan, as
well as in terms of the different models of fandom addressed, with the first referring
to an older “folk-cultural” mode and the second referring to the altered conditions of
fandom under the digital. There is a sense in which the two models are considered to
be incompatible, finally entailing a transformation of fandom into its antithesis – the

109
Pansy Duncan, “Joke work: comic labour and the aesthetics of the awkward,” Comedy Studies 8,
Number 1 (2017): 36-56.
110
Kapse, Op. cit., 196.
 73

fan as nemesis. The film shows Gaurav’s double failure as a fan who is unable to
successfully defend the star against the incoming forces of the future – his strategy of
attacking Aryan’s competitor threatens to backfire on Aryan himself – as well as a fan
intoxicated by his own power who finally turns on the star. In both cases, Gaurav fails
to become the cool fan, loving too much in the first instance and hating too much in
the second, and consequently transgressing the binding imperative of detachment.
Gaurav, as an extension of Aryan, reflects the latter’s own failure to assimilate into
the new order.

Yet, even as Gaurav is condemned as a deliquent, the film ultimately mourns his
passing. He appears at the very end, his ghostly face appearing in a large crowd of
well-wishers assembled outside Aryan’s (and Shah Rukh Khan’s actual) residence,
his still beaming face pointed directly at the star’s. He breaks his gaze to take a look
at the fan hordes gathered around before returning his eyes again to Aryan, tilting his
head slightly as if to warn him to take better care of them than he did of Gaurav. It is
Gaurav, then, rather than Aryan who emerges as the patron saint of the fans, his spirit
persisting beyond the grave to compel Aryan to honour the pact between star and fan.
A final montage of fan-selfies taken by Gaurav seems to wash away his sins
documented earlier in the film, reinstating him as a well-meaning if naïve figure.
There is a nostalgia for the Gaurav of the film’s beginning, as a fan forged in the
image of his cinematic model – “Junior Aryan.” His memory is meant to serve as an
admonishment to Aryan and his hubris in failing to cherish a fan like Gaurav. Fan’s
project, thus, entails more than the schooling of unruly or primitive fans. Rather, it is
a belated acknowledgement of a certain type of fan at the very moment when his
tribe, like the star’s, is diminishing. For Majumdar, the film works to emphasise the
singularity of the star vis-à-vis pretenders to his title.111 I would contend that there is
equally an emphasis on the singularity of the favoured fan – the kind that participates
in local talent competitions, the kind that cuts cakes on the star’s birthday, the kind
that makes pilgrimage to the star’s home, and the kind that is even willing to kill for
the star. The fan is a mediator of sorts between the virtual realm of cinema and the
terrain of everyday life. If the digital virtualises the star, compromising his presence,
it also abstracts the fan, thereby undercutting the means by which cinema extends its

111
Neepa Majumdar, Op. cit., 157.
 74

domain over the everyday. As the fan becomes a digital user and consumer of media,
the activities depicted in Gaurav’s final snapshots appear as the antiquated rituals of a
bygone era.

Moreover, it is social media platforms that increasingly structure our relation to the
physical spaces vacated by the cinema, with streets, objects and faces being appraised
for use in TikTok videos, Instagram stories and Twitter and Facebook posts. As the
signage of cinema is displaced by that of other media, the film celebrity is no longer
the exclusive embodiment of the commodity form.112 For social media and its
attendant practices of self-branding, as Khamis et. al observe, represent the
commodification of subjectivity itself as central to the immaterial labour practices of
post-Fordist economies.113 In other words, the parlaying of an online self functions
akin to the marketing of branded products. In an era of personalised and targeted
production, the imperative to cultivate a brand is no longer the prerogative of
celebrity but extends to all individuals in a competitive labour market aspiring to
stand out. As self-mediation assumes new proportions online, the seemingly
insignificant and banal become new sites of capital generation. Elsewhere, Alison
Hearn describes this as the situation in which “capital’s productivity penetrates ever
more deeply into all, including the most intimate, aspects of our lives.”114 If earlier
models of celebrity marketed a life tantalisingly beyond our reach, the new social
media influencer is distinguished paradoxically by being one of us.115 Where the
deferential model of celebrity described vis-à-vis subcontinental stardom devolved on
the notion of presence, new practices of microcelebrity entail intimacy, authenticity
and relatability. Ordinariness, in other words, accumulates capital value. It is against
this that one can read Shah Rukh Khan’s return to his middle class origins in Fan, as
the youth hailing from the city’s Punjabi settler colonies. The character of Gaurav, as

112
This departs from Majumdar’s reading of the star in Fan, drawing on Barry King’s formulation that
“celebrity is the latest phase of the penetration of capitalist social relations of production into the realm
of personal identity that accomplishes the human rendition of the money form” (Neepa Majumdar, Op.
cit., 154-55).
113
Susie Khamis, Lawrence Ang and Raymond Welling, “Self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’ and the rise
of Social Media Influencers,” Celebrity Studies 8, Issue 2 (2017): 191-208.
114
Alison Hearn quoted. in Khamis et al., ibid, 11.
115
Naomi Fry explains the dynamics of microcelebrity and the capitalisation of ordinariness with
respect to the recent case of the feud between famous YouTube beauty vloggers, James Charles and
Tati Westbrook. Naomi Fry, “James Charles and the Odd Fascination of the YouTube Beauty Wars,”
The New Yorker, May 15, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-odd-fascination-
of-the-youtube-beauty-wars.
 75

several observers note, signalled the return of those aspects of Khan’s personality and
biography that have become submerged within his primary persona of the
cosmopolitan global star. Essaying the role of an unhinged lover, Gaurav recalls the
series of psychotic, villainous characters Khan played before becoming identified
with the romantic, sensitive leading man of films like DDLJ (dir. Aditya Chopra,
1995) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (dir. Karan Johar, 1998). He is the proverbial ghost of
the past, a spectral presence conjured by the affordances of digital recall, that threaten
the star’s carefully constructed persona. But as Gaurav forces a collision with the
disavowed self, Aryan resolves to respond in kind, by removing the “face of the star”
to reveal his “real face” – his Delhi-wala chehra. The only way to tackle the threat
posed by Gaurav it would seem, is to peel back the careful restraint of the star and go
back to his rough and ready roots. Khan’s Delhi-face reflects his most authentic self,
which must now become mobilised under the altered circumstances in which fame
and sympathy are parcelled online. If Gaurav is a gesture towards Khan’s newly
empowered fan legions, Aryan chalks out Khan’s own strategy as an imperilled
screen star grappling with the challenges of social media-powered celebrity.

Such a return to the roots and enthusiastic embrace of the ordinary is carried even
further in Anand L Rai’s Zero. This film, perhaps even more than Fan, contends with
the question of Shah Rukh Khan’s place in a changed media order. The film is a
unique experiment in reconciling the apparently divergent world of the “small town
film” marking a cycle of recent Bollywood productions, and Khan’s star-image
associated with the millennial explosion of Bollywood glamour in a transnational
frame. Rai and frequent collaborator, the scriptwriter Himanshu Sharma, are
prominently associated with the small town wave in Bollywood, through such films
like Tanu Weds Manu (2011), its sequel Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015), and
Raanjhanaa (2013). These films could be said to mark Bollywood’s very own
demotic turn116, with the visibility of middle class characters and regional milieus
breaking with the jet setting lifestyles of the phenomenally wealthy depicted in
Bollywood films of the early 2000s. These earlier films, catering to NRI audiences as
well as a burgeoning urban middle class, emblematised the aspirations attending the

116
I follow the sense of the term as originally expounded by Graeme Turner describing the increased
visibility of the “ordinary person” in cultural productions, dating from the expansion of celebrity
culture across media in western societies since the 1980s. Graeme Turner, Ordinary People and the
Media: The Demotic Turn, (London and New Delhi: SAGE, 2010).
 76

liberalisation of the economy, and Khan, who appeared in a number of these “NRI
films” and whose own biography charted a fairy tale rags-to-riches narrative, became
the flag-bearer of promised global mobility. However, the global downturn since 2008
and the growth of a pan-Indian middle class in the same period has prompted the
industry to look to the country’s interiors. Akshaya Kumar reads the ongoing trend
towards setting films in generic rural and small town settings as indexing patterns of
internal migration accompanying the IT boom and the expansion of the service sector.
He theorises “small town nostalgia” as reacting to the globalisation of Indian cities,
which simultaneously induces aggressive nativist sentiment as well producing a class
of wealthy, Hindi speaking migrants aspiring to the status of global citizens.117 Just as
the NRI film before it then, the small town film can also be seen as responding to a
particular epoch of globalisation. Where the earlier category of film had attempted to
map cultural Indianness against the onslaught of economic liberalisation, the new
supposedly more realistic brand of Hindi cinema, in its emphasis on the vernacular,
equally addresses the question of roots. It is precisely in terms of a rootedness that
Sharma (who wrote the script for Zero) describes the brand of cinema cultivated by
Rai and himself. He says:

“The whole association of us and him (Khan) was kind of based on this idea,
that we were coming from a place of making small town films, where the
small town is the milieu… be it Benares, or Kanpur, or Lucknow… we were
operating in these very rooted cultures and cities, and people especially.
When we went to Shah Rukh, he knew where we were coming from, that we
are known for making films that brought the small town into the mainstream
cinema. He was aware of that, and thus it was a sort of collaboration where
he wanted to lend himself to this. That, ‘okay, I will go to Meerut, a guy
from Meerut!’… And that was the first time he was doing something like
this. He has done films where he’s coming from humble families, like Kabhi
Haan Kabhi Naa and all that, but it was never the small town, it was never
about the milieu, it was never about the culture, about what caste, what
creed, what land you’re coming from. This film kind of pushed him into
that.”118

Elsewhere, Rai is quoted as saying:

117
Akshaya Kumar,“Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural economy of north-Indian small-town
nostalgia in the Indian multiplex,” South Asian Popular Culture 11, No. 1 (2013): 62-63.
118
Himanshu Sharma, Personal Interview, February 26, 2019.
 77

“Khan saab is still very Delhi. I always tell him that no matter how much you
show Mannat [his bungalow in Bandra], at heart you are middle class. His
roots are intact.”119

In a sense, Zero reverses the identification of Khan as sundry Raj and Rahuls in films
of the nineties, heroes encoding a normative upper caste, upper class Hindu ethos, but
consciously bereft of any markers of regional and sectarian identity. Instead, Zero like
Fan, requires Khan to tap into his “archived self,”120 his regional identity conjured to
satisfy the desire for ‘authenticity’ sparked by the experience of millennial urbanity; a
journey in other words from “Indianness” to “Delhiness”. The small town film and its
gesture towards “real characters” can however also be understood in the light of the
demotic shift precipitated by social media and the greater access to streaming content.
Sharma describes the manner in which the very nature of stardom has changed at a
time when social media “has turned everyone into a star.” He opines that the
magnitude of stardom that accrued to yesteryear superstars like Rajesh Khanna – with
legendary stories of the actor’s car’s windshield being obscured by lipstick marks left
by adoring female fans – is firmly a thing of the past.121 Such a thing, would never
happen with a contemporary star like Ranveer Singh, because the new-age film
viewer is “too cool for this shit.” This is a viewer who is moreover very sure of what
he wants from a film and is quick to make known his opinion on different media.
Sharma also acknowledges the impact of exposure to premium international content
on digital platforms which generates pressure to replicate similar standards in regional
productions. These forces, along with the ascendancy of a moneyed middle class
which wants to see itself represented onscreen, has produced a drive towards realism
in themes and form against which we can understand the nature of Khan’s concession
in playing the role of a vertically challenged middle class character, who speaks in

119
Udita Jhunjhunwala, “‘I needed somebody humongous’: Aanand L Rai on shrinking Shah Rukh
Khan for ‘Zero’,” Scroll.in, December 2, 2018, https://scroll.in/reel/904179/i-needed-somebody-
humongous-aanand-l-rai-on-shrinking-shah-rukh-khan-for-zero.
120
Kumar refers to screenwriters and filmmakers hailing from small towns recruited to infuse much
needed new blood into the industry, and to resolve the creative deadlock of contemporary Hindi
cinema. These writers are called on to channel their “archived selves” as a source of performative
identity (Kumar, Op. cit., 64).
121
Sharma related an interesting anecdote about an encounter during the outdoor shoot for the film
Tashan (2008) on which he served as an assistant director. He recalls a man asking him, in all
earnestness, whether the actor Abhishek Bachchan really existed. This was the incredulity among a
certain kind of film-goer for whom cinema genuinely appeared as belonging to another world. This is
the attitude, Sharma reflects, prevalent among a large section of the country’s non-metropolitan
population, for whom – given the low screen-to-population ratio in India – experiencing the cinema
was a rare occurrence before the advent of the mobile phone.
 78

coarse dialect rather than chaste Urdu or fluent English, and whose provincialism
presents a stark contrast with the cosmopolitan image identified for so long with
Khan. It is an acknowledgement of the paradoxical desire, as Khan himself notes, to
see Shah Rukh Khan, but not as Shah Rukh Khan.122

Accordingly, Khan’s character in Zero reconfigures the mobile character of his star-
persona – depicted in the NRI films as being able to travel effortlessly between
worlds and cultures – in a new context, where the unapologetically rustic Bauua is
able to partake of global travel and a consumerist lifestyle as easily as his urbane
predecessor. This continues the dynamic that Kapse elsewhere reads in Fan where she
says, “the imaginative aspects of special effects work to emphasise the double’s
futurity – as a Junior SRK, he culls elements from the past to craft a persona that
looks ahead by taking advantage of what once was, no longer is, but could be
resurrected in future.”123 However, the criticism that almost immediately greeted Zero
since the release of its trailer, demonstrates the limits of accommodating Khan into
the new realist dispensation, embodying as he does the last incarnation of an older
mode of stardom, and synonymous with the sumptuous fantasies of mainstream
cinema. The objection was to Khan, of average height, playing a vertically challenged
character, instead of hiring a person actually affected with the condition to essay the
role. The dilemma, Khan observes, is to embody an ordinariness that has become
radically alienated from his public identity. In such a situation, Khan says, “if you
want me to play normal, I can’t look like myself anymore.”124 Thus the charge that he
is stuck in repetitive roles of the larger-than-life romantic hero, which he is now
deemed too old to play, cannot be adequately addressed given the circumscription of
his own stardom. Khan’s legendary mobility, his ability to mould himself to any
circumstance, seems to have finally hit a barrier against the dictates of a new
representational realism in Indian cinema. What is perhaps even more baffling, is this
insistence on naturalism at precisely the moment in which digital technologies and
VFX make it possible to “de-age” actors, as well as facilitate the wildest of fantasies.

122
Anushree Majumdar, “In my stardom, I think I lost my ordinariness: Shah Rukh Khan,” The Indian
Express, December 23, 2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/in-my-stardom-i-
think-i-lost-my-ordinariness-shah-rukh-khan-5504473/.
123
Kapse, Op. cit., 182.
124
Ibid.
 79

Zero then, perhaps less obviously than Fan, is a disquisition on Khan’s stardom at a
crucial juncture in the evolution of media technologies. Like in Fan, the weight of
Khan’s formidable filmography hangs over proceedings in Zero. Baradwaj Rangan, in
his review, catalogues all the references made in the film to Khan’s earlier outings as
well as to the career profiles of its two leading ladies, Anushka Sharma and Katrina
Kaif, and its director, Rai. He refers specially to a scene in which Bauua pulls out his
favourite party trick – the aforementioned ability to literally make stars fall at his
command – to impress a gathering of female stars at an industry soiree. Rangan avers:

“…but look carefully and you’ll see it’s not a lazy Om Shanti Om-like
homage to stars on earth. From Sridevi (Army) to Alia Bhatt (Dear Zindagi),
they’ve all been Shah Rukh Khan’s co-stars. They gather around Bauua to
see him perform his trick. He tries and tries. The stars above don’t budge. Is
it the 38-year-old Bauua (who keeps emphasising his dimples and stretching
out his arms in love) who’s suddenly lost his power? Or are we seeing the
fifty-something Shah Rukh Khan, now in a well-acknowledged career crisis,
unable to recreate the magic he once did, with the likes of Deepika Padukone
and Juhi Chawla?”125

Rangan’s cinephiliac reading of the film sees it as a palimpsest of cinematic traces

mobilised in a stock-taking of Khan’s career. Again, Bauua, like Aryan, is a cynical
Scrooge-like character who must atone for his waywardness towards an ardent lover
who turns vengeful on being scorned. In both Fan and Zero, Khan harnesses digital
technology to make himself over in the image of his other, the star in the image of the
fan. In both, the effect of the transformation is uncanny, highlighting the violence that
must be done to the star body – from shrinking Gaurav’s frame to literally bringing
Bauua down a few notches – in order to fit Khan within the space of the digital. Even
the title Zero carries some resonance of the cyclical quality of time, and Khan’s own
career come full circle, back to playing the anti-heroic, everyman characters of his
early career before his accession to superstardom.126 In both films, then, there is the
sense of a reckoning of Khan’s past and present that opens on to larger questions
about the state of contemporary Hindi cinema.

125
Rangan, “Zero Review”.
126
Khan constantly refers in interviews to being written off early in his career even by collaborators
who believed he did not have the looks to make it as a star. He he continues to emphasise his success,
despite being “completely average”. Shahrukh Khan, “Thoughts on Humanity, Fame and Love.”
 80

Fan’s dystopic vision however is replaced by Zero’s more optimistic perspective.

Even as it ostensibly pays obeisance to the desire for “realness”, Zero as Sharma
admits, is a fundamentally “old-school” film drawing on cinema’s originary promise
to elevate the mundane, and provide the happy ending and escape in fiction that are so
elusive in real life. The psychotic Gaurav gives way to the more affable, but no less
tenacious Bauua, whose love for his screen-idol Babita Kumari persuades him to
abandon his bride at the altar in futile pursuit of her. Unlike Gaurav, Bauua collapses
both an older mode of devotional fandom along with the realistic, and even
narcissistic bent of the new age fan, without the two personalities coming into
conflict. In an early scene, we see Bauua take a selfie of himself first thing in the
morning. The face of Babita peers out from the phone’s back cover, so that Bauua and
Babita appear as two sides of the same coin as it were. Later, Bauua gathers a large,
rowdy crowd of male fans to watch her latest release at a single-screen theatre with
characteristic Art Deco interiors. At the hall, the camera cuts between Babita’s item
number on the giant screen and the audience in the stalls many of whom, Bauua
included, are seen dancing along with her. The sequence thus splits the focus between
the spectacle of the item girl and the audience’s own performance, which Lakshmi
Srinivas in her ethnographic study, deems part of the participatory aesthetic of film
reception in India.127 This is derived, as Srinivas contends, from the matrix of folk
traditions that have shaped film culture.128 While the “active audience” is as old as the
cinema in India, its depiction and acknowledgement in film remain infrequent. What
we have in Zero then is the cinema looking at its own reception at a time when film
culture is being overhauled by participatory media.129 We can see at work in this
sequence something that Dan Golding elsewhere describes in relation to the reception
of virtual reality technology enacted in the particular genre of the YouTube reaction
video, as the body communicating what the image cannot.130 This is the affective
impact of the technology which must be staged as its own spectacle. The focus on the
active audience in Zero accomplishes something similar with respect to cinema’s own
effects that take place as much outside the text as within it. Moreover, at a time when

127
Srinivas, Housefull: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience.
128
Ibid, 61.
129
Srinivas in fact makes a clear comparison between traditional modes of audience involvement and
the fan collaborations and engagement spawned by social media. (Srinivas, Ibid, 62).
130
Dan Golding, “Far from paradise: The body, the apparatus and the image of contemporary virtual
reality,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 25, No. 2
(2017): 345.
 81

the digital is reformulating traditional practices of fandom, the reference to an older

film public emphasises the materiality of the theatre, its vicinity and the body of the
fan implicated within this matrix. This is in keeping with the film’s larger spotlight on
the conventional practices and sites of fandom, including meet-and-greets at malls,
and reality-TV contests. Like Gaurav in Fan, Bauua too finally wins a chance to meet
his idol through a decidedly quaint dance-off, where the “fan” Bauua beats the
superstar Salman Khan playing himself in a cameo. When he finally meets Babita,
Bauua wisely refrains from making an extravagant display of his adoration. Unlike
Gaurav’s misreading of Aryan, Bauua knows that in order to capture her attention he
must be of use to Babita rather than merely worship her. He also knows not to
embarrass her, only doing so at the moment he wants to be set free. Bauua has no
illusions about his favourite star, but that does not prevent him from loving and
protecting her. Zero is an assertion then of cinema’s continuing fascination, as well as
a measure of what it can yet do, in a time when the average screen, like Khan’s
character, has shrunk to pocket-size.

In promotions of the film, both Rai and Khan reiterated the message of the film as a
demonstration of the extraordinary lengths even an ordinary man will go to for the
sake of love. The adage “love you to the moon and back” is re-interpreted here as the
journey from “Meerut to Mars”, which harks back also to cinema’s own early history
and the fantasies of transcendent mobility expressed in the imagination of space
travel, as in the Méliès short, Le Voyage Dans la Lun (“A Trip to the Moon”, 1902).
At the film’s end, Bauua, is selected to make the first manned spaceflight to Mars. He
is chosen over several other volunteers and even, significantly, over a chimp
originally intended to make the journey sedated for its length. Bauua beats out the
competition because, during a long and arduous training period, he emerges as the
most resilient. The final rocket launch is filmed on a monumental scale, a
vertiginously high angle shot capturing its take off, while back on earth, screens large
and small reflect Bauua/Khan’s dimpled smile. Referring to this scene, the film’s
DOP Manu Anand (who also shot Fan) reflects, “You will not feel the seats vibrating
to the sound of a rocket on a mobile phone.”131 Even earlier in the film, in an
extraordinary sequence, the spurned lover Aafia played by Anushka Sharma,

131
Manu Anand and Sharat Katariya, Personal Interview, February 21, 2019.
 82

confronts Khan in a zero-gravity facility. The fluid camera tracks slowly across as
objects, fluids and the two bodies become suspended as if in a trance. In a succession
of shots, they are shown turning slowly in space, framed against a blinding sun, that
engulfs their interlinked bodies in an otherworldly halo. A similar sense of infinity is
manifest when Bauua first tries to impress Aafia, doing a goofy dance routine to a
Shashi Kapoor song in the cavernous banquet hall of the Imperial Hotel in Delhi.
Their spectacular confrontation later is prefigured here already, when still earthbound,
the two orbit slowly across the room on Aafia’s wheelchair, their faces bathed in the
glow of the afternoon sun. The “Mere Naam Tu” sequence is also shot on a broad
canvas, the camera moving in sweeping tracking shots across a lobby where Bauua,
backed by a full-piece orchestra serenades Aafia. The song is executed in extravagant
style with the richly appointed halls of the colonial hotel flooded with colour and
water sprays. In all these scenes, there is a sense of scale, of melodramatic excess
expedited through the aid of digital technology that nonetheless registers as
essentially “cinematic”. It is perhaps to this which Anand refers in his invocation of
the immersive experience of the film in the theatre. Although he goes on to observe
that the film can, and is, watched across a range of platforms, while still being
recognisable (Rodowick), as cinema. What we have is thus a digital magnification of
an expansive cinematic style which is, remarkably, able to travel beyond the confines
of the cinema.

Anand explains that the film’s grand visual style was designed in keeping with the
fantastical and fable-like quality of the film’s central romance. And indeed, in the
scenes described above, a connection seems to be made between the intensity and
magnitude of a grand passion and the cosmic sublime. But they can equally be read as
the exposition of a technological sublime at a time when VFX has quite literally
opened up a world of possibilities. As with Fan, Zero was marketed heavily as a
special effects vehicle, a spectacular showcase for the capabilities of the Khan-owned
Red Chillies VFX, and a reflection of the star’s own long-standing interest and
investment in the cutting-edge in technology. Where in Fan, as a film in the genre of
an action-thriller, VFX was deployed in the service of a heightened naturalism132, in
Zero the special effects are used to foreground a magical world that extends from the

132
Kapse, Op. cit., 197.
 83

stars on earth – the glamorous heroines of the film industry – to those in the sky. Zero,
in many ways, gestures to early cinema as a part of a landscape of fairground
attractions where, as Tom Gunning has famously argued, the technology itself – the
Cinématographe, the Bioscope, the Vitascope – was an object of curiosity, and films
emphasised rather than concealed visual trickery. Bauua, as a “freak” and a trickster,
crystallised through the laborious use of special effects, becomes the signal figure of a
new digital cinema of attractions.133 In a different context, Dorris Gassert reads
cinema’s digital transition as an intensification of its essentially illusionistic nature, as
the foremost “art of prestidigitation”.134 She argues that instead of proclaiming the
death of cinema with the digital, it might be more pertinent to ask “what the art of
cinema gives life to in the digital age.”135 Drawing on Peter Weibel, according to
whom it is “only thanks to the post-media computer, the universal machine, that we
can realise the abundance of possibilities which resides in the specificity of media,”
Gassert contends that the digital in effect allows cinema to become more itself.136 It
distils what is essentially cinematic about the cinema. For Gassert, this singular
“cinematic” quality is the ability to create illusion. But I would argue through my
reading of Zero, that the question of the cinematic is fundamentally a question of
scale. There is a sense in which cinema, by bringing life into radical visibility,
bestows magnitude. It is an alchemical process by which the “ordinary becomes
extraordinary.” That the film intends to play with such scale is evident from Rai’s
assertion that he needed someone “humongous” to play Bauua, and that led inevitably
to Khan.137 For Khan, in his own assessment, exemplifies the manner in which the
cinema can transform the ordinary, taking a man of average looks and height and
anointing him the “king of romance”.138 Khan, then is a quintessentially cinematic
star, and his casting as Bauua looks to the restructuring of the scale of the cinema he
embodies in the era of the digital. Even as he is dwarfed, the new digital avatar of the

133
The character of Babita, the film star, also invents an origin story about herself in which she claims
to be the daughter of circus workers.
134
Doris Gassert, “PrestiDigitation: Some Reflections of Cinema in the Digital Age,” in Film in the
Post-Media Age, ed. Agnes Petho, (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2012), 207-226.
135
Ibid 220.
136
Ibid, 218.
137
Quoted. in Jhunjhunwala, “’I needed somebody humongous’”.
138
“Shah Rukh Khan: With Zero, I hope people understand how amazingly special it is to be ordinary,”
The Indian Express, December 19. 2018.
https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/zero-shah-rukh-khan-ordinary-uniqueness-
5497552/.
 84

screen star is able to ascend to new heights, symbolically and literally. If traditional
readings of cinema associate it with celluloid as an indexical trace, the link to the
flesh and blood, known world, Zero’s exhibition of the possibilities of a digital
cinema suggests instead that cinema has always been about transcending the world. In
its defiance of space-time conventions, and its flirtation with a world of fancy,
cinema, even before the advent of the digital, was already in the realm of the virtual.
Through Bauua, who is chosen above all others for a momentous journey into the
unknown, Zero flags the enduring resilience of cinema.

In the film’s epilogue, Aafia’s voiceover describes how the spacecraft carrying Bauua
got lost on the return flight, only surfacing over fifteen years later. In a tongue-in-
cheek parting shot, Bauua’s voice taking over from Aafia’s, claims triumphantly that
in the intervening passage of years, even as the world has grown older, the dimples on
his face are as youthful as ever. Both Fan and Zero open with their protagonists being
warned that times are changing. In both cases, the remark seems to be directed at
Khan himself, implying he’s a has-been. Khan’s response in both instances forks the
double path of simultaneously establishing his appeal as the relatable common man,
while at the same time asserting his superior ability and resources as a star. In Fan,
the presumptuous Gaurav is finally beaten by Aryan, the boy from Delhi who turns
out to be an action-hero in real as well as reel-life. In Zero, Bauua experiences every
fan’s dream when at the film’s end, his idol boasts to a friend about once having
kissed him. But continuous references to Khan’s famous dimples remind us that it is
not the fan, but the extra-textual star we have been watching all along. The films
reflect Khan’s desire to demonstrate the endurance of his stardom, suggesting it is
enhanced rather than disrupted by the digital. In both films, even as there is the
intimation of change, there is also the sense of a story unfolding rather than ending.
And if the star is, “15 saal jawaan,” then so is the century-old cinema. Or to put it in
the words of another memorable Khan-character, “Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost!”
 85

Fig. 1.1. Bollywood Dialogues for

real life.
Source:
https://www.scoopwhoop.com/dial
ogues-in-real-life-situations/
 86

Fig. 1.2. “12 quick videos to show how Dubsmash has taken over India.”
Source: https://scroll.in/article/725431/12-quick-videos-to-show-how-dubsmash-has-
taken-over-india

Fig. 1.3. [Screenshot] Dubsmash, “Tujhe, apna banane ki kasam, khayee hai”, pathos
and humour
Source:
https://www.instagram.com/p/2f3hHzK26P/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign
=embed_video_watch_again
 87

Fig. 1.4. Analogue Aesthetic: TikTok Logo.

Fig. 1.5. The Shoe Challenge

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPFydFzVK4Q
 88

Fig.1.6. Bollywood Tie-ups: #ZeroChallenge; #SlowMotionChallenge

Fig.1.7. Halloween, Indian Style: #karmaisawitch

 89

Fig.1.8. “This is what India was like in 2009.”

Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/this-is-what-india-was-like-in-2009
 90

Fig.1.9. A Landscape of Childhood

Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/this-is-what-india-was-like-in-2009
 91

Fig. 1.10. The 90s Kid: Embodied Uses of Media

Source: https://www.scoopwhoop.com/90s-kids-memes-for-nostalgia/
 92

Fig. 1.11. The SRK special: Then and Now.

Fig. 1.12. Pixellated: Fandom/Stardom in the Digital

 93

Fig. 1.13. Bauua’s morning selfie; with Babita Kumari i-Phone cover

Fig. 1.14. An imposter with famous dimples.

 94

Chapter 2: The Art of Archiving

In this chapter, I shift my focus to the world of contemporary art as part of the larger
exploration of the different sites of the (post)cinematic. Film and film history have
emerged prominently in art practice since the 1990s, a trend that is borne out across the
world. While this is often considered as part of a global mourning for celluloid replaced
by incoming digital technologies, I argue instead through a reading of the cinema’s
gallery turn in India, that it is not the obsolescence of film but the archive of cinema
that drives such an exercise. This is meant in two ways. In the first place, I argue that
contemporary artists turn to the alternative archive of cinema to excavate different
histories. Cinema, here, crucially refers to much more than celluloid, encompassing a
way of being in the world. And secondly, I argue that artistic projects are also invested
in producing an alternative archive of cinema, imaginatively expanding the State
project of film preservation. In doing so, they recast the archival endeavour in the image
of artistic practice, concerned as much with creation and exhibition as storage. As with
the intervention of new communication technologies seen in the last chapter, the artistic
engagement of cinema’s past is similarly geared towards making the archive perform.

I channel these insights through a survey of major exhibitions and alternative archival
projects. I look at two different moments in the history of the intersection of cinema
and art. The first is coterminous with the transformations in the film industry as well as
the art world since the 1990s, both linked to the moment of globalisation. A meditation
on the changed project of modernity at the millennium focuses historical attention on
both the city and the cinema. The second moment attends the centenary of the cinema
in India in 2013, which generates great interest in its past. The centenary
commemorations are marked by diverse participation in thinking cinema’s legacy and
its future. As in the rest of the world, cinema in India seems to have found a new haven
in the gallery. But this, as I shall argue, is consequent not so much on its obsolescence
as its expansive presence, both historically as well as in the contemporary.
 95

Countering Cinema’s Obsolescence: Indian Cinema in Art

In 2011, a year after the discontinuation of the production of 16mm film, British artist
Tacita Dean premiered a new installation at the famous Turbine Hall of the Tate
Modern in London. Titled FILM, the work – an 11-minute silent film shot on 35mm in
a Cinemascope format turned ninety degrees – was widely held to be a rallying cry in
defense of celluloid against its extinction in an age of digital reproduction. It reflected
the artist’s longstanding conviction in film as a medium in its own right, as central to
the filmmaker as paint is to a painter.1 More crucially, in Dean’s conception, cinema is
identified with this material base as well as with the specific conditions of viewing – a
darkened room, a projection screen, seating – that have come to associated with it.2
Accompanied by a catalogue recording statements in support of film by a range of
filmmakers, artists and musicians, including the poignant offering from Steven
Spielberg, that he would “remain loyal to this analogue art form until the last lab
closes,” the exhibition struck a decidedly elegiac note.

Dean’s work has in some senses become the defining image of cinema’s entry into the
gallery in the first decades of this century, even as it is exemplary of a larger tendency
in recent contemporary art, of works that engage cinema’s history.3 While this is hardly

1
Dean qt. in Nicholas Cullinan, “Summary: Tacita Dean, Film, 2011,” tate.org, November 2011,
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-film-t14273.
2
Francesco Casetti, “Relocation,” in The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come
(New York, Columbia University Press, 2015), 17.
3
This is not however the first foray of the moving image into gallery space. Critical treatments of film
date back atleast to the 1960s when the efforts of the expanded cinema would refocus attention away
from the film image to the circumstances or “situation” of film exhibition and spectatorship. The aim of
the expanded cinema, as Andrew Uroskie observes, was not so much to consecrate a canon of cinema
but rather, to explore, by a brechtian distanciation of cinema from its natural home, what cinema really
entailed. Similarly, in the 1970s, concurrent with the consolidation of apparatus theory in the academy,
attacks on the illusionism of classical narrative cinema took the form of an exposition of cinema’s
material base. In these years, a minimalist structuralist-materialist practice as in the works of Paul Sharits,
Tony Conrad and Michael Snow sought to return cinema to its pure state, rejecting the meaning-making
drive of narrative to emphasise surface. Vera Dika, however, identifies a parallel stream of artists in the
same period who, breaking with the prevailing dispensation of abstraction, returned to representation
through an engagement with the photo-realist qualities and narrative elements of cinema. These artists,
whom Dika dubs the “pictures generation” tracked the cinematic influence of a particular practice of
filmmaking associated with mainstream rather than avant-garde film, flagged by the use of the term
“pictures”. Their primary strategies of critique, appropriation, recontextualization and re-enactment of
culturally coded representational forms provide a direct antecedent to the practices of artists in the 1990s
for whom increasingly, it is the archive of Hollywood as opposed avant-garde film which provides a
point of reference (Elsaesser, 2018). Matilde Nardelli, “Moving Pictures: Cinema and its Obsolescence
in Contemporary Art,” Journal of Visual Culture 8(3):244; Vera Dika, “(Moving) Images: Introduction,”
in The (Moving) Pictures Generation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 9-10; Thomas Elsaesser,
 96

the first instance of cinema’s presence in the art world, there is a sense that cinema can
formally enter the gallery now because it is presumed to be dead in its classical sense.4
Babette Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman in their theory of obsolescence observe the
manner in which it frees up formerly utilitarian objects for artistic uses.5 A similar logic
seems to be guiding artworks that variously meditate on the contemporary condition of
cinema. Indeed, the Tate note on FILM draws an analogy between the gallery itself, as
the reincarnation of an out-of-commission power station, “an obsolete structure that
found a new lease of life as a museum,” and the fate of celluloid film “as it migrates
from the cinema to find its last refuge within the gallery’s walls.”6 Dean’s FILM is thus
intended to be a manifesto, railing against the dying of the light as it were.

But for all its polemical charge, FILM is effectively reconciled to cinema’s
obsolescence, reminiscent of what Christopher Pinney has referred to in a different
context as the “salvage paradigm” of colonial photography.7 This is the manner in
which an anthropological gaze framed the subjects of the colonial ethnographer’s
camera, anxious to induct the primitive threatened with “imminent extinction” to the
documentary record.8 The colonial analogy finds resonance in the critical opinion on
cinema’s initiation into the gallery at the fin-de-siècle, as in Daniel Fairfax who
provides the following searing analysis:

“Rather than an act of liberation, is it not an occupation, a power-play by one

institution, one dispositif, against another, less reputable, less endowed with
cultural capital? As cinema hit a period of vulnerability, buffeted by the rise
of new visual media, convulsed by the changes wrought by the conversion to
digital production and exhibition, plunged into necrological introspection by
its own centenary and mired in a sentiment of formal exhaustion with the
passing of its high-modernist period (and the perishing of many of the

“The Loop of Belatedness: Cinema After Film in the Contemporary Art Gallery,” Senses of Cinema,
Issue 86, March 2018,
http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/cinema-and-the-museum/cinema-contemporary-art-gallery/.
4
Cinema in the “classical sense” would refer to the institutional-infrastructural framework organised
around celluloid. Or as David Rodowick puts it, “The projection of photographically recorded filmstrip
in a theatrical setting” (Rodowick, 2007: 206).
5
Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, “Introduction,” in Cultures of Obsolescence: History,
Materiality, and the Digital Age, edited by Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman, (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3.
6
Nicholas Cullinan, “Summary: Tacita Dean, Film, 2011,” on tate.org.uk, November 2011,
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-film-t14273.
7
Christoper Pinney,“ ‘Stern Fidelity’ and ‘Penetrating Certainty’,” in Camera Indica: The Social Life
of Indian Photographs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 37-38.
8
Ibid.
 97

filmmakers who embodied it), did the museum not intuit an opportunity to
expand the orbit of its influence? Were its curatorial paeans to the cinema’s
past not, in actual fact, an effort to consign the seventh art to a state of
historical obsolescence, so that it could be safely plundered, much as ancient
artefacts from distant lands were purloined by European museums in the 19th
century? Is the now ubiquitous presence of the film projector in the gallery
space not a sign – cause and effect – of its disappearance from contemporary
popular culture?”9

Seen in this light, Dean’s programmatic defence of celluloid might be seen to actually
kill cinema before its time. Francesco Casetti, referring to Dean’s work, notes that it
devolves on a certain technological determinism of the filmic apparatus at a time in
which the multiplication of screens has actually generated a heightened presence of the
cinema.10 This may not be cinema as it has been traditionally defined, but despite its
transposition into other formats and contexts, it retains its ability to generate an
experience which is quintessentially cinematic. Citing autobiographical references to
cinema in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Epstein, and Michel de Certeau, Casetti
draws attention to the way in which cinema has always been “contagious, reproducing
itself even far from the darkened theatre.”11 For Casetti then, what is fundamental to
cinema is a certain shaping of experience, delineating a specifically cinematic way of
perceiving the world. It is precisely such a notion of cinema as experience that informs
artistic uses of cinema in India. If Dean’s mourning for celluloid is the ne plus ultra of
cinema’s entry into the gallery at the millennium, the corresponding move in India has
been marked, as curator Gayatri Sinha puts it, “by puns, jokes, swapping of identity,
satire, representation, admiration, many many acts of mimicry.”12 Such diverse
articulations reflect a cinema that is not one, or, following Casetti, an “idea of cinema”
that is plural.13 This stems in part from the experience of cinema in India, which extends
even Casetti’s repertoire of the sites of cinema’s reception, spread across an array of
cultural practices, visual and aural economies. This is a dispersal not only of the moving
image, but of cinema as a style and texture of the everyday; in other words, a filmi ethos.
It is the status of the cinema in India, as an aesthetic and cultural resource, that has
traditionally prompted artistic engagements seeking to cut to the heart of everyday life.

9
Daniel Fairfax, “Cinema and the Museum: Introduction,” in Senses of Cinema, Issue 86 (March
2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/cinema-and-the-museum/introduction-8/.
10
Casetti, The Lumiere Galaxy, 18-19.
11
Ibid, 26.
12
Gayatri Sinha, Personal Interview, March 27, 2019.
13
Casetti, op. cit., 34.
 98

As Divia Patel and Rachel Dwyer note, in a riposte to Ray’s charge that “a truly Indian
film should… look for its material in the most basic aspects of Indian life, where habit
and speech, dress and manners, background and foreground, blend into a harmonious
whole,” that the Hindi cinema precisely constitutes this harmonious whole.14 In other
words, there is no outside of the (popular) cinema in India, as life is deeply embedded
within its folds. Cinema is thus part of an archive of the everyday.15

But if artists have drawn on this archive of cinema as experience, there has equally been
an attempt to document neglected film histories through art. In India, cinema’s
relationship to the gallery seems to have always been founded on a constitutive lack of
archival efforts towards the preservation of film. In 1963, even before the setting up of
the National Film Archive of India, documentary filmmaker B. D. Garga made a film
from photographs and film excerpts that traced the evolution of the cinema in India.
The film Glimpses of Indian Cinema commemorating the cinema’s Golden Jubilee –
marked from the release of Phalke’s 1913 feature Raja Harishchandra – went on to
tour the country alongside an exhibition of a 100 photographs first mounted at the
Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay. Garga notes in the essay on his collection of film
artefacts, that “in the absence of a film archive and an almost total absence of awareness
of film preservation among our producers,” his efforts to document Indian film history
were a “foolhardy undertaking.” And yet, Garga’s commitment to the project was
spurred by the fact that although much was lost, something of value continued to persist.
Garga wrote:

“I soon found that while the trailblazing pioneers like Dada Sahib Phalke, J.
F. Madan and Himanshu Rai had long gone, there were still many filmmakers
alive whose enterprise and energy had contributed to make India a leading
producer of entertainment films in the world. Many were veterans of silent
cinema who had seen cinema evolve from a simple curiosity to a dynamic art

14
Divia Patel and Rachel Dwyer, “Introduction,” to Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film,
eds. Divial Patel and Rachel Dwyer (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 7-8.
15
Paula Amad regards cinema’s unique ability to register the inconsequential and mundane aspects of
life as central to its role as a counter-archive to monumental histories. But the notion of the counter-
archive hinges, in some sense, on the idea of cinema’s optical unconscious, its mechanical ability to
record the unseen life of things. In the case of Indian cinema cited above, however, the reference is not
necessarily only to film as a recording apparatus but as material culture and ecology. This is an everyday
cast in cinematic terms so that history cannot be understood outside of it. To put it another way, cinema
constitutes a sort of hypervisible ground of life. For a discussion of the counter-archival possibilities of
cinema, see Paula Amad, Counter-archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la
Planete, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
 99

form. As they narrated to me what it was like to make films then, the saga of
Indian cinema began to unfold. This was oral history, told by men who made
it.”16

While Garga subsequently went on to help found the NFAI as well as curating the first
major retrospective of Indian cinema at the Palais de Chaillot, Cinemathèque Francaise
in 1968, his fledgling efforts to assemble the missing archive of Indian silent cinema
demonstrated how film archiving in India has had frequently to proceed by other means,
through the collection of ephemera – stills, photographs, film fragments – but more
importantly, through the recording of screen memories.

The engagement with cinema since the 1980s seems also to have emerged out of the
collections of print memorabilia – lithographs, photographs, religious posters and
calendar prints – that sparked an interest in the popular. The visual studies turn was led
by a slew of American academics working in the field in the 1980s, Christopher Pinney,
Philip Lutgendorf, Diana Eck, Sandria Freitag, Judith Mara Gutman, who drew from
the cultural studies’ investment in, to quote Freitag “the participation of nonelite groups
in the developments, events and political narrative that previously have constituted
‘history.’”17 It also sprang from the recognition as Christopher Pinney put it, that such
history was not merely represented but constituted by a visual regime of the popular.18
The popular here also represented the space vacated by a minority high culture which
in effect retreated from the public sphere.19 The fate of the single screen cinema hall –
one of the foremost sites of the consolidation of a public culture – became symptomatic
as the rise of the middle class from the late eighties along with the spread of the
domestic technology of video compromised the public character of the popular
cinema.20 The segregation of cinema audiences corresponded to the alienation of the
popular – consider the revulsion which the decade of the eighties in cinema is still
regarded with. At the same time, the introduction of mass technologies of
communication in this period enabled the formation of a new religious public,

16
B. D. Garga, “The Garga Collection,” in Tara Lal and Mortimer Chatterjee (curated), Indian Film
Memorabilia: Catalogue, (New Delhi: Pragati, 2002).
17
Sandria B. Freitag, “Introduction,” in Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance and
Environment, 1800-1980 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989) 1-20.
18
Qt. by Ramaswamy.
19
Freitag, pp. xii.
20
Madhusree Dutta, “Popular cinema and public culture in Bombay,” Seminar #657 “Celebrating City
Spaces” (May, 2014), http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html.
 100

predicated on, as Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley note, “spatial and social mobility
of symbols” as well as the “disembedding” of religious tradition from social space.21
All of these developments formed a continuum with the rise of majoritarian politics
culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the subsequent retaliatory
Bombay riots and blasts in 1992-93. The interest in popular culture as majority culture
then assumed an additional importance in the aftermath of the riots, as an investigation
into the roots of majoritarian violence.22 This was a recognition most crucially, of the
deep political implication of everyday activities. It was this return to the everyday, of
the environmental conception of culture as indistinguishable from aspects of lived
experience that set the agenda for future inquiries, both academic and as we shall see,
artistic, into the legacies and meanings of the popular.

Both a project like Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Tasveer Ghar digital initiative and Neville
Tuli’s Osian come out of this investment in popular history. At Osian, ambitions
towards developing an infrastructure to support the arts amidst a “crisis of patronage”,
including a planned educational facility at the erstwhile Minerva Theatre stemmed from
a holistic understanding of Indian culture and history which encompassed the cinema.23
Film history in such a conception opened onto a national epistemology linking together
seemingly disparate art forms including photography, fashion, literature, theatre, dance
and music.24 But the safeguarding of such national culture and knowledge as
represented in the creative arts required the same to be rendered economically viable
under conditions of the market. Tuli’s ingenuity was to cast his agenda for the arts in
terms of the developmentalist project of the nation-state. It is against what is essentially
a cultural revivalist project that a recuperation of cinema proceeded through its hawking
as heritage. Respect for film history, and by extension, for the cinema itself as an
integral part of national history, was sought through recasting cheap film ephemera as

21
Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley, “Introduction,” to Media and the Transformation of Religion
in South Asia, eds. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2000), 4.
22
There is a direct connection between the expanded communications landscape from the end of the
1980s and the rise of Hindutva politics as several commentators have pointed out. See for example,
Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Christiane Brosius, “Hindutva Intervisuality: Videos
and the politics of representation,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 36, Issue 1-2 (2002): 264-295.
23
Kaushik Bhaumik, Personal Interview, March 2, 2019.
24
Neville Tuli, “Dissolving the I: individual to institution to infrastructure,” in Seminar #578 “A
Shifting Canvas” (October 2007).
 101

the auratic objects of a shared national past. A move not so much as from “black-box
to white-cube” as from the “kabaadi to auction house”.

Osian’s project of building a national arts heritage segued perfectly in the early 2000s
with Bollywood’s own quest to enshrine a historical line of descent. Ashish
Rajadhyaksha notes the explosion of a Bollywood retro at this time at events such as
the ‘Bollywood at Selfridge’s’ season in 2002, as well as the slew of attractions and
activities planned in keeping with an “Indian Summer”. Rajadhyaksha regards all of
these as indicating Bollywood’s true character as a culture industry, where the film
object itself ceases to be central. Bollywood recasts the Indian popular cinema as style,
as visual iconography, as mode. It is thus ironically with Bollywood, attending the long-
coveted granting of industrial status, that the film industry moves firmly into the realm
of the postcinematic. Or rather, an economy of cinema disengaged from celluloid. It is
no coincidence then that the landmark V&A exhibition Cinema India: The Art of
Bollywood (2002), recapitulated the history of the industry as a tour through film
publicity and advertising. The moment of globalisation provokes another kind of
meditation on cinema’s recent past in the Century City exhibition at the Tate Modern,
where Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha curated the section on
“Bombay/Mumbai, 1992-2001”. Here again, the transformation of the metropolis is
mapped through a transformation of the film industry it hosts, the movement from the
1970s “subaltern” cinema to the 1990s “new ‘Bollywood’” reflecting Bombay’s
transition from an industrial and manufacturing centre into a post-industrial financial
capital. If the Tate and V&A shows marked the inauguration of an industrial epoch, a
unique art, research and documentary project, Cinema City (2008-2014), capped the
Bollywood/Globalization moment. Cinema City as core team member Kaushik
Bhaumik puts it, “is an archive, a document after the fact, of certain kinds of traces of
the excitement of old Bombay.”25 The show is symbolically perched between
significant dates – the year of the onset of a global recession in 2008, which also saw
terrorist attacks on iconic locations in Bombay, and the Indian cinema centenary in
2013. The latter has spawned renewed historiographical efforts that proceed alongside
the state-sanctioned programme of the preservation of film and film history, including
the web database Indiancine.ma housing film clips, stills, documents and other

25
Kaushik Bhaumik, Personal Interview, March 2, 2019.
 102

resources for the study of Indian cinema. Cinema-themed exhibitions as well as

exhibitions on the moving image have proliferated in the years since.26 In view of these,
it would appear that questions of cinema’s past and its projected digital future are
increasingly being posed in the sphere of the contemporary arts by artist-cinephiles.

Pre-histories/Historical Itineraries

It must be noted to begin with, that the interrogation of the cinematic exemplified by
the work of the Lettrists in 1950s Paris, and American artists like Claes Oldenburg and
Nam June Paik in the mid-1960s in New York, do not find relevant historical parallels
in India.27 The latter represent a mid-century expanded cinema movement drawing on
post-minimalist practices of institutional critique, that critically deconstructed cinema
in the gallery. The expanded cinema focused attention on cinema’s site specificity, the
particular modality of the black box, by placing it in the alien environment of the white
cube.28 The expanded cinema movement was perhaps the first to recognise cinema’s
incommensurability with its technological base, encompassing also a host of
institutional and cultural logics. But the movement mainly addressed itself to avant-
garde gesture towards creating a pure cinema, liberated from the institutional capture
of the film industry. Such intermedial experiments of the relocation of cinema are
confined to one-off ventures like Akbar Padamsee’s unique inter-disciplinary Vision
Exchange Workshop (VIEW, 1969-1972), which brought together painters,
photographers, sculptors, printmakers, a cinematographer, an animator and a
psychoanalyst.29 More recently, Rajadhyaksha has staged a dialogue between parallel
filmmaker Mani Kaul and video artist Ranbir Kaleka.30

26
These include Filmi Jagat (2014) at the Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi, Horses in the Air (2017) at the
Vadehra Gallery, Delhi, Tah-Satah: A Very Deep Surface (2017) at the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur,
Delirium//Equilibrium (2018) at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi.
27
For a historical survey of the expanded cinema movement in America and France, see Andrew Uroskie,
Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Post-War Art, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2014.
28
Ibid.
29
Murtaza Vali, Text for Ashim Ahluwalia’s Events in Cloud Chamber, at Jhaveri Contemporary, 26
Nov – 24 Dec, 2016.
30
Tah-Satah: A Very Deep Surface, Mani Kaul and Ranbir Singh Kaleka: Between Film and Video.
January 20 – March 4, 2017, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur.
 103

Perhaps the reason that such an expanded cinema movement never took off, was
because of the different media regimes characterising the developed and under-
developed worlds respectively. The expanded cinema, as Andrew Uroskie notes,
developed against the disruptions in moving image culture in 1960s America marked
by the ascendancy of broadcast television and the corresponding decline in popularity
of the cinema. He refers to this as “a dramatic conjunction of birth and obsolescence.”31
At the same time, cinema reappeared on television even as film theatres crumbled. It is
in such a context – of the death of (a) cinema but also the birth of its archive – that the
expanded cinema turned its attention to cinematic essence as a matter of situation rather
than medium. But in India, where cinema dominated moving image culture till at least
the eighties, when television became more widely available and video technology made
its first appearance, no such reflection on cinema’s “place” occurred.

In India, an “environmental” interrogation of the cinema has instead devolved on its

status as visual culture. The interest is not so much in intermedial incursions but rather
in a shared history of urban modernity that informs the lineages of cinema, print culture,
photography and art. Husain perhaps represents the earliest example of such an interest
in the vibrant visual culture of film, having himself worked as a painter of film
hoardings for Prabhat Studios and New Theatres in the thirties. Interestingly, in an
exposition of modern Indian painting curated by Howard Hodgkin as part of the
Festival of India in London, 1982, Husain was exhibited not as the “modern master” he
is frequently identified as being, but as a photographer. Hodgkin, apparently reluctant
to include Husain at all, found his photographs of the street hoardings of Chennai more
compelling than his painting.32 The show Six Indian Painters at the Tate Gallery, apart
from Husain, included Bhupen Khakhar and K. G. Subrahmanyam alongside the older
modernist trio of Rabindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, and Amrita Sher-Gil. The newer
generation consisting of Husain, Khakhar and Subrahmanyam betrayed a distinctive
move towards the popular away from the modernist canon the exhibition purported to
document. The curatorial choice of Hodgkin, an English painter in an otherwise

31
Uroskie, 12.
32
Jhaveri, Shanay and Howard Hodgkin, “My Memories of an Indian Master,” in Tate Etc., Issue 37
(Summer 2016). https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-37-summer-2016/my-memories-indian-master
 104

classical mode, reflects the interest of Indian art in an international frame as devolving
on its popular tendencies.33

The interrogation of cinema has thus always proceeded under a larger examination of
the public sphere. As Divia Patel notes, “the dynamic nature of the film industry and
the imagery it produces has influenced a range of fine artists,” referring to the works of
Husain, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, and Doug Aitken
included in the V&A exhibition curated by her. In the work of all these artists, cinema
is engaged with as a popular idiom and a cultural force that informs the everyday.
Indeed, the V&A show considered the legacy of the Indian cinema as an iconic form,
disseminated through the techniques and practices of advertising. In Sheikh’s City for
Sale (1984), for example, the cinema hall is placed at the centre of a quotidian scene,
but also in the midst of a catastrophic historical moment. As communal riots unfold,
Sheikh’s painting Patel contends, presents a searing critique of a public in thrall to the
fantasy world of cinema even as the city all around them burns. The film at the centre
of the painting is Silsila (dir. Yash Chopra, 1981), which famously dramatised the real-
life love affair between Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha. The scene shown is the famous
confrontation of Bachchan’s wife Jaya Bhaduri – playing a fictionalised version of
herself onscreen – with her husband and mistress. The artist here, according to Patel,
draws a parallel between the commercial profiteering off private lives and the political
profiteering off communal violence. Critic Gayatri Sinha too, referring to the painting,
reads a simultaneity in the mass participation in riots and the mass participation in the
everyday entertainment of the cinema, both converging as they do on the street.34 But
Sheikh’s critique of what he considers the cheapening of Indian culture must
nonetheless proceed through the signage of the cinema he denounces, signaling the
extent to which cinema is writ large across public life. Sheikh’s juxtaposition of
political commentary with an examination of popular culture moreover foreshadows
the ineluctable connection between the two from the decade of the 1980s onward, when
the rise of religious fundamentalism became expedited through new communications
media.

33
Geeta Kapur draws a parallel between this exhibition and Century City two decades later, which
similarly opens out the modernist canon into modernity through reflections on the popular.
34
Sinha, 2019.
 105

Rajadhyaksha also identifies a group of artists, modernist in location, who have

likewise “used” the cinema.35 Sheikh is once again named in this group, while special
attention is given to the kitsch productions of Bhupen Khakhar, regarded as a pioneer
of pop art in India. Rajadhyaksha regards their work as part of an investigation of the
cinema-effect, referring to a symbolic production in excess of realism in celluloid. This
is a form of narrative deploying a self-conscious realism or hyper-realism in which the
presentation of an objective truth is punctured by the acknowledgement of artifice by a
culturally initiated audience. This is the manner, in other words, by which narrative
addresses the spectator as both inside and outside the text.

Kapur notes that Khakhar’s incorporation of popular art, including calendars, “god-
posters,” and graffiti, provided a template for later artists engaging the category of the
local as a binary of the global.36 For Kapur, Khakhar’s postmodern miscegenation of
high and low art represented a specifically postcolonial variant of the mid-century
deconstruction of modernism, in which the avant-garde and kitsch are not posed as
separate values. Kapur writes about the role of the Baroda school of artists (associated
with the Faculty of Fine Arts at the historic M. S. University), and Khakhar in particular,
in determining a new cosmopolitanism in Indian art from the 1960s onwards:
“A few of these changes are directly connected with Khakhar, as for example,
the dramatic makeover of the more conventional forms of modernist painting
into an eclectic language incorporating the urban popular in its emerging
vocabulary… The context was defined to include modern and contemporary
world art but also the range of Indian art: folk and tribal to urban art in both
its popular and elite aspects. This contextualising made the ground easy for
the turn of events in favour of the popular that Khakhar initiated. The glittering
plethora of calendars, film posters, ‘god pictures’ and popular shrines, indeed
the whole nineteenth century tradition of a hybrid culture and its pictorial
forms, began to spark the imagination of Baroda artists around 1963. Khakhar,
Jyoti Bhatt, Vivan Sundaram and on his return from the Royal College in 1966,
Gulammohammed Sheikh, turned the gaze upon alternative sources,
alternative to proper art history, and to the ruling aesthetic of international
modernism. Local picture-making practices and the excesses of kitsch that
distinguishes visual culture of urban India, caught the artists’ fancy, and there
was a happy and long-due surrender to the pictorial seductions of India’s
common culture.”37

35
Rajadhyaksha, 111.
36
Kapur, Geeta, “Bhupen Khakhar,” in Bhupen Khakhar, in retrospective exh. cat., Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2002.
37
Ibid.
 106

The narrative turn of the Baroda artists was thus a concerted move against the abstract
modernist gestures of an earlier generation of Indian artists and towards an art grounded
in a sense of place and people – hence the name of their “exhibition-as-manifesto”, A
Place for People (1981).38 This entailed the embrace not only of the subaltern subject,
but also the subaltern media of cinema, photography, lithographs, that as Ranjit
Hoskote observes, are “sign-systems more widely understood in society than formally
defined in art.”39 Artists Pushpamala N. and Atul Dodiya, known for the prolific and
insistent cinematic references in their artworks, both cite Khakhar as well as the whole
narrative painting tradition in the 1970s as a foundational influence in their practice.4041
The citation of cinema in contemporary Indian art thus proceeds under the larger uses
of the popular inaugurated in the Third World postmodern practice of Khakhar and the
eighties generation.

The eighties also witnessed the emergence of the first critical writing on Indian cinema
as distinguished from an existing tradition of film criticism. The independent Journal
of Arts and Ideas played a role in crystallising some of this early writing. The journal,
a post-Emergency artist’s initiative, was originally conceptualised in 1979 at the annual
residency run by artist Vivan Sundaram at the Kasauli Art Centre (1976-1995);
transforming from its initial role as a cultural mouthpiece of the Left into an
independent project to query histories of modernism unallied to national teleologies.42
A seminar on cinema was held in Kasauli in June, 1983, which led to the publication
of a devoted issue of the journal on cinema edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. The
seminar and subsequent volume emphasised the need to expand the reading of cinema
in dialogue with a “multiplicity of art traditions” including literature, theatre, painting
and music. At the same time, the inclusion of film in the journal’s agenda was an
attempt to broaden its own scope, which by general editor G. P. Deshpande’s own
admission, tended towards the esoteric. Thinking on cinema opened onto the larger

38
Hoskote, Ranjit, “Indian Art: Influences and Impulses in the 1980s and 1990s,” in Gayatri Sinha (ed.),
Indian Art: An Overview, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2003. pp. 201.
39
Ibid.
40
Dodiya Atul, “A Delicate Unmasking,” in Indian Quarterly. http://indianquarterly.com/a-delicate-
unmasking/
41
N., Pushpamala, “The Phantom Lady strikes! Adventures of the artist as a masked subaltern heroine
in Bombay,” in Thesis Eleven, Vol. 113, No. 1 (2012), 157-180. 158.
42
Jiwani, Subuhi, “Cultures of Critical Writing on Film,” on Sahapedia.org, June 2017,
https://www.sahapedia.org/cultures-of-critical-writing-film-0
 107

quest of exploring alternative histories of modernity in response to the embattled

political situation of the 1980s-1990s, with the rise of populist forces and nascent
financialisation in the Rajiv Gandhi years. Cinema thus becomes the site of examination
of the specifically Indian career of modernity, routed through Swadeshi indigenism and
subsequently state-sanctioned realism. As a quintessentially modern medium tied to a
nationalist project of achieving modernity, the cinema becomes an alternative source
of the history of the nation-state at a moment when the state itself appears to be
dismantling under the pressure of the global economy. Moreover, an interesting
dialogue is set up across disciplines so that film theory interfaces with art history,
performance studies, cultural studies and gender studies. In the theoretical spectrum
opened up, Phalke and Raja Ravi Varma can be considered as part of an interlinked
tradition of modernism in the arts. There is thus a sense going forward, that the history
of either cinema or art in India cannot be considered independently of each other; the
archive of one necessarily yields an alternative history of the other.

In the decade of the 1990s, a number of developments can be identified as culminating

in the efflorescence of cinema-centric exhibitions coterminous with the consecration of
Bollywood. In 1994, the 14th Giornate del Cinema Muto, or the Pordenone Silent Film
Festival, had India as a showcase. Rajadhyaksha notes, that “most historians were
surprised to see what the NFAI had come up with,” in a presentation of twenty-five
silent films, of which only eight were Phalke features.43 Rajadhyaksha conveys the
magnitude of the discovery, especially of the two films by Baburao Painter who, tucked
away in the archive, was a figure essentially lost to public memory. The Giornate, along
with the cinema centenary celebrated a year later, was to renew focus on India’s silent
and early film history that had languished in view of the belated endeavours towards its
preservation, and whose stars, including the iconic stunt-actress, the Fearless Nadia,
had passed into oblivion even before their actual deaths.44 The 14th Giornate was the

43
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Film Fragment: Survivals in Indian Silent Film,” in Post: Notes on Modern
and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, February 7, 2017.
https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/921-the-film-fragment-survivals-in-indian-silent-film
44
Nadia, however, enjoyed a renaissance of sorts in the nineties, after the release of the documentary
Fearless: The Hunterwali Story directed by her nephew Riyad Vinci Wadia in 1993. Nadia was among
a host of older stars to be felicitated during the centenary celebrations including Lalita Pawar, Jairaj,
Pramila, and Master Bhagwan. Nadia passed away in 1996 inviting fresh assessments of her significance
in the history of the industry, while her nephew continued to preside over auctions and exhibitions of
film ephemera and other effects from the Wadia archive. The scholar Rosie Thomas examines Nadia’s
new-found popularity in the nineties as compared to her relative obscurity in the intervening years since
 108

first ever complete retrospective of Indian silent film, followed by the publication of
Suresh Chabria’s (then director of the NFAI) monograph Light of Asia, as a significant
companion to the study of the subject. Neepa Majumdar, however, records Chabria’s
reluctance to release video box-sets of the films as providing a “dangerous level of
access to unknown members of the public,” who in any case were largely indifferent to
film history.45 Rajadhyaksha too contrasts the subsequent availability of the films on
digital platforms with provisions for repeat viewings and annotation, and the revelation
in the mid-90s of watching the films under the aegis of the NFAI. Despite Chabria’s
misgivings, the centenary celebrations of 1995-96 actually marked the first public,
rather than merely industrial commemorations of the legacy of Indian cinema. The
dates mark a double anniversary – the centennial celebration of, respectively, the first
public screening of the Lumière shorts at the Grand Café in Paris, on December 28,
1895, and, the first exhibition of the Cinématographe at the Watson’s Hotel in Bombay,
on July 7, 1896. Tejaswini Ganti has written of the different investments in the symbolic
dates, as well as the contestations over the ownership of the cultural heritage
represented by the cinema between the Indian state on the one hand, and the regional
Maharashtra government on the other.46 Ganti’s account indicates the manner in which
the cinema and its history would become a bone of contention in the context of
contemporary politics, at the very moment in which the industry was set to take off as
part of the larger economic liberalisation of the city.

The city of Bombay itself as the venue of the first film screenings in the country,
became a special protagonist in the historical reflection produced by the centenary. A
number of art exhibitions held during the centenary year accordingly focused on the

her heyday in the 1930s-40s. In that time, the actress in early film socials, the aristocratic Devika Rani,
was vaunted as the “first lady” of Indian cinema. Thomas notes the different models of femininity
represented by the two, with Devika Rani providing the template of the heroine of the nationalist
melodrama, the long-suffering stri-dharma ideal of Indian womanhood, while Nadia stood for the more
masculine virangana, the swashbuckling heroine of the stunt-action film. Thomas attributes the revival
of the Nadia cult in the nineties as responding to the “cultural flows of a postcolonial late capitalist
world.” The rejection of Devika Rani on the other hand represented the failure of the project of a
Nehruvian national-modern, whose efforts to chart an alternative path into industrial modernity devolved
on an Orientalist conception of rustic purity. For a fuller discussion on Nadia, see Rosie Thomas, “Not
Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts,” in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (ed.),
Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through a Transnational Lens, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks,
London: Sage Publications, 2005.
45
Majumdar, 86.
46
Tejaswini Ganti, “Centenary Commemorations or Centenary Contestations? – Celebrating a 100
years of Cinema in Bombay,” in Visual Anthropology, Vol. 11 (1998), pp. 399-419.
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relationship between the city and cinema, including Bombay – An Artist’s Impression
at the Jehangir Gallery, 1995, and Cinemascape at the Lakeeren Gallery, 1996. In a
review of the former, Lekha Rattanani writing for India Today observed that the two
recurring motifs in the city’s depiction across the works of the seventy-four artists
participating in the show were the recent communal riots and popular film imagery.47
Vivan Sundaram’s sculptural installation Gun Carnage for example, was based on the
iconic news photo of a Muslim victim of the carnage that rocked the city between 1992
and 1993, while in Dodiya’s Sunday Morning at Marine Drive, a famous city view is
reimagined as graffiti on a public wall, replete with a poster of superstar Amitabh
Bachchan such as one would find at streetside barber’s stalls. Both works reflect
Bombay as a city mediated through images, while their subjects indicate the twin events
– the riots and Bollywood – that would define the city’s millennial moment. In the
Cinemascape exhibition, artists were presented with the brief to produce images that
drew on cinema’s status as “a 20th century memory theatre… of ceaselessly mobile
images, plastic and vivid, unstable yet insistent, residing in collapsed time and
dislocated locations.”48 49
The exhibition marks possibly one of the first occasions on
which the relationship between cinema and visual art is directly taken up. But here once
again, the exhibition, rather than taking on an intermedial investigation of the
intersecting modalities of cinema and art, primarily engaged cinema as a repository of
tropes, images, gestures and themes. For example, artist Tushar Joag’s six-part mixed
media installation Ingredients of Fantasy referenced Bollywood clichés including the
rain-drenched, sari-clad woman, the hero with hairy chest, and the archetypal mother.
The cinema here is a generator of fetish objects, from the voluptuous beauty of the
actress to the rugged masculinity of the film hero, as ciphers of consumer capitalism.50

47
Lekha Rattanani, “Artists salute Bombay with exhibition of their impressions,” in India Today, July
31, 1995. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/story/19950731-artists-salute-bombay-
with-exhibition-of-their-impressions-807588-1995-07-31
48
Quoted in Meenakshi Shedde, “Two arts beat together,” The Times of India, September 8, 1996.
49
The exhibition participated in a global wave of the interrogation of cinema’s legacy on the occasion
of its centenary. In London, a similar show was commissioned at the Hayward Gallery; Spellbound: Art
and Film curated by Ian Christie invited ten artists including Damien Hirst, Steve McQueen, Douglas
Gordon and filmmakers Peter Greenaway and Terry Gilliam to reflect on the cinema century. A travelling
exhibition, Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945 examined the intertwined post-War trajectories of
film and the visual arts (premiered Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).
50
Geeta Kapur notes the fetishistic aspects of installation art emerging from the nineties. There is a
dialogue she contends, between older regimes of fetishism in traditionally ritualistic societies and the
commodity reification of contemporary capitalism. The historical avant-garde’s fascination for the
primitive fetish and taboo object is sublimated in the work of contemporary artists in Asia into a counter-
narrative of everyday ritual militating against the binary set up between tradition and modernity in
 110

It is moreover invoked, as in Dodiya’s painting in Bombay, as a part of the lived

everyday.

Dodiya’s nineties work in particular, as Hoskote notes, addresses the dilemmas of being
a painter in an age of the ascendancy of installation art.51 Dodiya’s contribution to
Cinemascape consisted of a characteristic self-portrait, depicting the artist in his studio,
staring at his reflection in a mirror through the lens of a camera. The painting, a tribute
to the famously “painterly” film director Andrei Tarkovsky, was named “Matreshka”
for the traditional Russian dolls of decreasing size, placed one inside the other,
reflecting the mise-en-abyme structure of the painting. Meenakshi Shedde singles out
the painting in her review of the exhibition, noting that “Certainly the use of mirrors in
painting inviting the gaze to travel back and forth, goes back centuries, but the addition
of the camera, linking the painting to cinema, leads the gaze further.”52 In this painting
and elsewhere, Dodiya’s work is representative of the expansion or “revitalisation” of
the classic painted frame in the nineties, in dialogue with the contemporary media of
cinema, television, video, and the internet.53 The nineties are in fact associated with a
crisis of painting in the midst of the wide-ranging currency of installation art as part of
a new internationalism in Indian art.54 The turn to installation, while in keeping with a
global move towards interactivity and a digital gesamkunstwerk, represented an
unprecedented compact between art and technology in India. As noted before, the
career of the moving image in modern Indian art had been limited to the stray
experimental gestures of an initiative like VIEW, and conspicuously lacking a tradition
of video art as exemplified elsewhere by a figure like Nam June Paik. The emergence
of installation art thus marks the freedom of a new generation of medium-agnostic
artists deploying multiple modes of image-making including film, video and the
internet to create artworks deliberately playful and ironic in tone.55 Installation art also
bore an indelible association with the political violence of the decade, the first pieces
arising primarily in response to the atrocities set off by the Babri Masjid demolition.

globalising cultures. Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice
in India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000.
51
Hoskote, 207.
52
Shedde, 1996.
53
Hoskote, 205.
54
Roobina Karode, “Installation Art in the 1990s,” in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Indian Art: An Overview,
New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2003. pp. 216-17.
55
Ibid.
 111

Artists Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Rummana Hussain, Navjot Altaf, Sheba
Chhachhi all make the transition to a multi-media practice which, like theatre and
cinema, entail the perceptual mobilisation of a mise-en-scene rather than the creation
of objects.56 At a time when the pictorial frame seemed inadequate to the task, the
phenomenological thrust of installation was felt to be more suitable for addressing the
violent political. It thus bears mentioning that in the Indian context, it is a crisis of
painting rather than cinema that facilitates the passage of the latter into gallery space.
It is the historical possibilities of painting rather than the cinema which are considered
to be exhausted at the dawn of a new millennium. Cinema at this time enters the gallery
not so much as a historical object, but is rather entrusted with the distinguished mandate
of overturning the strictures of high modernism.

At the same time, Ranjani Mazumdar draws attention to the distinctly anti-Benjaminian
tendency in the emergence of the hand-painted film poster as a collector’s artefact. A
formerly banal feature of public spaces, the displacement of the hand-painted poster by
the new forms of film publicity, especially the digitized billboard, has refigured it as an
object of nostalgia.57 A venture like Tuli’s Osian thus enters into this transformation of
film culture, or the transition from the Hindi cinema into the new media assemblage of
Bollywood. Osian, as Mazumdar points out, not only re-invests the film poster with the
aura of art but also, significantly, an aura of history.58 Value accrued precisely from the
(new) historic significance of the filmic material. In fact, Osian’s primary claim was to
the creation of an infrastructure for the arts that would support research, archiving and
exhibition, by generating revenue from within.59 Osian’s landmark auction, A
Historical Mela: The ABC of India: The Art, Book & Cinema peddled film memorabilia
– posters, photographs, song booklets, lobby and show cards – as fine art. A Deewar
poster is thus accorded the same status as a Gaitonde watercolour as the exhibition
catalogue proudly declaimed, allowing for previously invisible associations and
connections to emerge.60 The artefacts moreover belong to the period between the

56
Kapur, 2019.
57
Ranjani Mazumdar, “THE BOMBAY FILM POSTER: The Journey from the Street to the Museum,”
in Film International (2003:4), 13-18. 17.
58
Ibid, 18.
59
This was, as Bhaumik (associated with Osian’s Cinefan festival, 2007-9) notes, a rather medieval
conception of the film database as the knowledge foundation for a university of the arts,
60
Neville Tuli, A Historical Mela: The ABC of India: The Art, Book & Cinema, exh. cat., OSIAN’s &
Mapin, 2002.
 112

1930s and ‘70s, crucially leaving out the decade of the’80s, rejected presumably for not
having aged suitably to be of value, but also perhaps because of its association with a
debased rather than ‘classical past’ of the cinema that is emphatically rejected in the
turn to the more polished product of Bollywood. Mazumdar’s account of Osian thus
locates it in the nostalgia industry triggered by the explosion of Bollywood. Osian then,
is a signal example of the ways in which the field of art and heritage was being
remapped consequent on the withdrawal of national protectionism in the arts – film and
art history are both opened up to the forces of the global market.

However, the idea of linking up the products of a national arts heritage with the
structures of modern industry including exhibitions and sales networks, has older
antecedents going back to the time of Gandhi and even further, to the early movements
for Swadeshi or economic self-sufficiency in the early twentieth century.61 The
capitalisation of artisanal labour as a matter of national culture at an earlier moment of
international colonial trade resonates with Osian’s latter-day mode of marketing
traditional crafts in the context of a global art market and auction network. The art of
the hand-painted poster as an endangered tradition is taken up elsewhere in the
exhibition, Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood, held at the V&A, itself an institution
associated with the exposition of industrial arts and crafts in the tradition of the great
nineteenth century World’s Fairs. It was held in conjunction with the eight-month long
festival of South Asian cinema, ImagineAsia, organised by the British Film Institute,
tapping into the recent UK box-office success of Asian-inflected films.62 Key
Bollywood figures including Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and
director Shekhar Kapur attended various events associated with the Festival, while an
important volume on producer-director Yash Chopra by academic Rachel Dwyer
received a grand release. Attending the festival, Chopra is quoted as saying, “This new
and rapidly intensifying interest in Indian cinema is very exciting for us here. It
promises to open doors in the international film market to Indian film-makers and that’s

61
Abigail McGowan relates colonial and nationalist efforts to forge a crafts ideology incorporating
cultural, political and economic dimensions (McGowan, 2009). Elsewhere, Ashish Rajadhyaksha
recounts the story of Gandhi’s attendance of the Haripura Congress after he had already resigned from
the Congress party. His attendance was apparently solely in support of the posters made by Nandalal
Bose for the annual conference as an example of indigenous arts and crafts (Rajadhyaksha, 2015).
62
Gunvanthi Balaram, “Bollywood goes off to London to participate in ImagineAsia,” in The Times of
India, April 26, 2002.
 113

something all of us – young and old – are looking forward to.”63 The V&A’s historical
exposition of the visual culture of Hindi film is firmly tied to the so-called Indian
Summer’s marketing of cultural products, indicated in its anachronistic tagline “The
Art of Bollywood” to refer to an older mode of film culture that is actually made extinct
by the new industrial formation. If the V&A show unfolds under the sign of the global
film industry, other exhibitions take a more critical look at the period of transition.

Century City at the Tate Modern, even before Cinema India, takes Bollywood as a
motif, a visible sign of Bombay’s changing fortunes at the turn of the century. Looking
back on a decade of financialisation and the rise of Hindu nationalist and Marathi
nativist movements, the focus on the city is refracted through the lens of the popular, a
direct look having become too painful in the immediate aftermath of trauma. Curator
Geeta Kapur recalls the searing criticism of the exhibition by The Guardian’s art critic,
Adrien Searle, who apparently remarked, “What would you expect from Bombay but
Bollywood and corpes!”64 Searle’s contempt is nonetheless revealing of the extent to
which the imagination of Bombay (and India) had become cast in cinematic terms. An
excavation of the city would then necessarily have to proceed through an excavation of
the cinema. And in a sense, Bollywood and the Bombay riots were precisely the
culmination of a century of urban modernity in India, that informed the Tate’s larger
investment in tracking the characteristically twentieth century triad of the modern,
modernism and the metropolis as it unfolded in locations around the globe.65 Elsewhere
Hindi cinema’s digital turn sparks a reflection on the interlinked careers of art and
cinema in Cinema Still, at the Indian Habitat Centre in Delhi. Here too, Bollywood
becomes the occasion for an engagement with Indian cinema in an expansive frame. In
what follows, I look at these exhibitions’ excavation of different histories and
projections into the future at a moment of flux.

63
Chopra qt. in Balaram.
64
The same critic would ironically go on to laud Dean’s FILM as “a rejoinder to the digital noise of the
modern world… It is cool and passionate, lovely and weirdly old-fashioned.” The divergent reception of
the different cultural takes on the cinematic exposes a fundamental inability on the part of the Anglo-
American art establishment to consider the cinema in anything but high modernist terms. Such an
imagination cannot square with cinema as a popular form. Adriene Searle, “Tacita Dean: Film – review,”
in The Guardian, October 10, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/oct/10/tacita-
dean-film-review
65
Iwona Blazwick qt. in Janet A. Kaplan, “Century City: Conversations with the Curators,” in Art
Journal, Vol. 60, No. 3, 48-65, pp. 49.
 114

Film, History and the City: Take 1

Century City: Art and Culture in the Metropolis (February 1 – April 29, 2001), marked
the inaugural exhibition of the newly opened Tate Modern in London. The exhibition
with its emphasis on cities, had separately curated sections on nine prominent twentieth
century metropolises including Bombay/Mumbai, Lagos, London, Moscow, New
York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Vienna. “Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001” curated
by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, focused on the ongoing transformation of
the city into a centre of global finance capital, amid processes of political and social
restructuring of its formerly cosmopolitan fabric. The curatorial selection was in a sense
determined by Kapur’s longstanding intellectual project to delineate alternative
traditions of the modern and an account of a historical avant-garde informed by art
history and practice outside of western contexts.66 The decision to take up the decade
of the nineties likewise continued the concerns of the artists’ and civil action initiatives
launched in the wake of majoritarian violence, including the aforementioned Journal
of Arts and Ideas as well as the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust or SAHMAT. The
choice of a globalising Bombay also seemed particularly apposite to the site of the
exhibition, the Tate Modern itself being a belated bid towards an institution of modern
art in London lagging behind similar establishments in Paris (the Centre Pompidou)
and New York (the MoMA), as well as a symptom of the city’s own transition from an
industrial past into a postindustrial future – from a coal power station into a gallery of
contemporary art.

In any case, the selection of Bombay/Mumbai in the decade of the nineties made the
inclusion of the cinematic an a priori in the overall exhibition concept.67 For these were
also the years, as Rajadhyaksha has elsewhere argued, in which the film industry’s
nexus with forms of indigenous finance capital including in the highly speculative
realm of real estate, came under increasing scrutiny in the wake of the Bombay riots (in
which such elusive sources of funding became associated with terrorist activities)
initiating its move towards corporatisation.68 But rather than marking a rupture,

66
Geeta Kapur, “Visual Culture in the Indian Metropolis: critical interventions through art,” Columbia
University, New York, Lecture, 2001.
67
Geeta Kapur, Personal Interview, June 19, 2019.
68
Rajadhyaksha, 2006; 2014.
 115

Bollywood with its new system of venture capital actually marks the continuation of a
system of spreading risk through the diversification of investment into newer revenue
sources including music and satellite rights, stage shows and star endorsements and
appearances, such that the film product is not the primary site of profits. Rajadhyaksha
moreover dates such practices to the period after the Second World War in the 1940s,
from when various “ancillary territories” emerged as sources of the industry’s financial
inflow, as in the formation of the Gramophone Company of India in 1946.69 The
immediate antecedent to Bollywood’s own evolving “financier mode” was represented
by the increased visibility of figures like Bharat Shah in the nineties, whose arrest
Rajadhyaksha regards as instrumental in exposing the industry’s implication in the
city’s larger speculative economy. The Bombay riots of 1992-93 and the Bharat Shah
arrest in 2001, bookend moments in which the industry’s implication in the city’s larger
financial structures are suddenly and excruciatingly laid bare, and the films themselves,
as Rajadhyaksha argues, present an archive where such a shadowy economic and
historical dynamic is visible. Bollywood also becomes one of the primary employers of
the daily wage labour that replaced the city’s former working classes, thereby
participating directly in the service economy and the corresponding precarity faced by
labour. And finally, the glossy Bollywood aesthetic became the means by which the
new order of capitalism came to be signified on the city’s surfaces, with
“Bollywoodization” standing in for an “aesthetic infrastructure.”70 It is thus that cinema
came to be regarded as a key to the historical moment the exhibition undertook to
examine.

A major set-piece of “Bombay/Mumbai”, located in the museum’s famous Turbine hall

beyond the overhanging bridge, was a temporary structure or pandal commissioned
specially from the elite architectural firm of Sen Kapadia. The structure made from
cloth and bamboo scaffolding, drew on local techniques prevalent across the country in
the service of making temporary venues to host public functions of all kinds, and also
invoked a tradition of pandal cinema or tent cinema as both the earliest as well as an
alternative mode of film exhibition in urban and semi-urban areas in the country. The

69
Rajadhyaksha, “The Guilty Secret: The Latter Career of Bollywood’s Illegitimacy,” presented at the
ARI Cultural Studies Cluster, Singapore, 2014. Singapore, Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series
No. 230. pp. 6.
70
Bhaumik, 2019.
 116

siting of moving image works in such a structure made it, in Kapur’s words, “almost
half-circus, half-cinema.”71 The pandal moreover displayed a hoarding for the
Bollywood film Fiza (dir. Khalid Mohammed, 2000) about the communal
conflagration in nineties Bombay told through the story of a sister’s search for her
brother. Made by the traditional hoarding painters, Balkrishna Arts, the hand painted
banner represented a material culture of film that was fast disappearing by the early
years of the new millennium, and Kapur reports that even the commission for the
exhibition could only be made after a long search for remaining practitioners of the
formerly popular craft. Another banner adorning the bridge, presented a synoptic view
of a popular history of the Hindi cinema from Raj Kapoor and Nargis down to Shah
Rukh Khan and Kajol. The hoarding, encasing the transhistorical dramatis personae in
a landscape of kitsch, depicted the transition of film from black-and-white to colour as
well as the violent spectacle of action and consumerist display marking the staple of
the masala film from the ‘70s down to the early ‘000s. Interestingly, the poster is signed
by the poster-maker Balkrishna Vaidya, a marking of authorial presence that signals
the elevation of the poster from an object of mass culture to the rarefied realm of fine
art. Over all, the pandal-and-poster assemblage in its quasi-installatory gesture, referred
to the cinematic as part of a tradition of the pictorial popular in India of which the
cinema has historically been a part.72

Inside the pandal cinema, played five pieces – edited versions of Anand Patwardhan’s
documentaries Father, Son and Holy War and Our City; Owais and Reima Husain’s
documentaries on the making of the film Gaja Gamini (2000), Madhuri in Paris and
The Genesis of Gajagamini; and a compilation of film clips put together by
Rajadhyaksha entitled Shehar aur Sapna: Bombay Goes to the Movies. The three sets
of film clips represented different orders of the moving image, with the documentary,
the archival and the art form abutting each other.73 The edited clips of Patwardhan
signal the political uses of documentary in the nineties, crucially enabled by video as a
cheap, easy to use and process technology. In India, the entry of video technology
simultaneously facilitated the rise of the independent documentary, a form that had
been previously dominated by the state-run Films Division, and at the same time,

71
Kapur, 2019.
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid.
 117

allowed for experimental uses that engaged video as performance. This ambivalent
positioning of video as simultaneously a non-fiction medium as well as an art form is
explored elsewhere in the exhibition in the works of Nalini Malani, Rummana Hussain,
Navjot Altaf and Vivan Sundaram. Installation art using video as in Malani’s
Hamletmachine and Remembering Toba Tek Singh or Navjot Altaf’s Between Memory
and History question the uncritical embrace of video technology as a utopian freeing of
the representational field from the clutches of the state, and the corresponding
democratic distribution of the state’s authority to a populist mass.74 This is the sense in
which video, in association with the spectacle of television, had precipitated the crisis
of the nineties in the rise of a form of authoritarian politics. Rajadhyaksha’s Shehar aur
Sapna on the other hand, meditated on the way in which a specific format, the low-
resolution Video Compact Disc or VCD as “the great dumping ground for the digitised
moving image in India,” had become instrumental in purveying the life of cinema.
Further, if cinema as a medium sublimated the experience of industrial mass modernity,
the VCD according to Rajadhyaksha, crystallised the experience of privatisation. The
90-minute compilation of about 50 film clips from late-silent cinema to the nineties
Bollywood looks at the way in which the vast archive of film is reconfigured under the
sign of video; film culture in the nineties as primarily video culture. The film clips all
bear the watermarks of the video companies – Shemaroo, Ultra, Bombino, NET, Eros,
Pen – that democratise access to cinema’s past, and with added provisions to pause, fast
forward and select images at will. The video archive is also resolutely antihistorical,
the clips jumping back and forth in time between early and later eras of the Indian
cinema with scant regard for chronology. According to Rajadhyaksha, the VCD format
and the pandal in which Shehar aur Sapna exhibited, gestured to - following Ravi
Sundaram – low-res, pirate structures that “have been central to the survival of the
cinema.”75 This is the underbelly of the digital revolution, in which older and traditional
economies of image-making and circulation creatively adapt new technologies to local
conditions. Moreover, it is a digital form that is itself marked by precarity and
impending obsolescence (with the arrival of the more high-tech, encrypted format of
the Digital Video Disc or DVD). The compilation ends with clips from the Govinda-
Karishma Kapoor starrer Coolie No. 1 (1995), of the famous song “Main Toh Raste Se

74
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Video, Art, Medeamaterial,” Bombay, Max Mueller Bhavan, January 1,
1997.
75
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Personal Interview, June 18, 2019.
 118

Ja Raha Tha”. The hero and heroine make their way towards a film theatre where,
beaten by a rush of bodies that storm the hall as soon as the gates open, they are greeted
by the “housefull” sign. As Kapoor demands to be shown a “pikchar”, it is not Govinda,
but video itself that will answer.

Madhuri in Paris and The Genesis of Gaja Gamini signal the entry of Husain, former
painter of film hoardings and celebrated “artist-laureate” of the Indian state, into
Bollywood and its public sphere through the iconic figure of the dhak-dhak girl,
Madhuri Dixit. However, Kapur argues, that it is by this turn to fetishistic spectacle that
he paradoxically also re-enters modernism, given the historic avant-garde’s notorious
fascination with the forbidden erotic.76 Kapur further suggests that it is Husain’s fatal
embrace of the popular, abandoning the immunity of the esoteric and insular space of
modern art, that opens him up to attack from a public in its own field of operation,
condemned for his audacity, as an old man, and a Muslim, to countenance the ideal of
Brahmanical femininity represented by Dixit.77 But Husain’s interpretation of
Bollywood spectacle as pure fetish seems to inform Century City’s own drive to
spectacularise the Bollywood formation in the gallery, in a space alien to its ordinary
sphere of circulation. The pandal was one of many manoeuvres that sought to simulate
cinema away from cinema, a mise-en-scene designed specifically for the staging of the
cinematic in the gallery. Just outside it, Kausik Mukhopadhyay’s technicolour chairs
reconstituted from trash signaled the museum as a space of remediation.78

Beyond this simulation of the cinema as installation lay artist’s impressions of the
Indian street scene, with Khakhar’s cut-outs of Amitabh Bachchan, Rekha and Shah
Rukh Khan, Dodiya’s rolling shutters, and Sudarshan Shetty’s red fibre-glass cow. Like
Husain, Khakhar’s plyboard cut-outs, painted on one side by the Baroda-trained
hoarding artist Vamanrao Khaire, and on the other with autobiographical images of
Khakhar’s terminal illness, represented a clash of kitsch and high modernism that was
bound to accompany Bollywood’s accession to the gallery. As Rajadhyaksha put it

76
Kapur, “The Exile of Maqbool Fida Husain,” Lecture, SAHMAT, New Delhi, August 24, 2009. pp.
11.
77
Ibid.
78
The chairs were originally intended to serve as seating within the structure, but the curators did not
receive the sanction of the Tate to go through with this as the protruding bits might have hurt visitors.
Ironically, then, the chairs which were meant to return urban waste to a new context of use, were thwarted
once again in the very space that sought to reauratize them.
 119

elsewhere, “On one side we saw a popular hoarding painter who had, so to say, both
the class and cultural credentials… to ‘authentically’ represent a cultural form (in this
case a representation of cinema culture in public spaces)…On the reverse we had
Khakhar, and a more personal representation of another site of authenticity production:
a ‘high’ artist’s autobiographical concerns, grim and tragic but in this case, incapable it
appeared, of anything but the crassest spuriousness.”79 But Khakhar and Dodiya’s
similarly autobiographical portraits on shutters can also be read as gesturing to the
ineluctable presence of the popular in Indian life. The works suggest that the “high
artist” and the modest painter of film hoardings are enfolded alike by the lifeworld of
the metropolis whose most visible sign is a cinematic kitsch. They unfold a sense of the
cinema that is ecological, expanding the notion of the cinematic apparatus to encompass
the street.

Pushpamala N.’s Phantom Lady or Kismet: A Photoromance and Dayanita

Singh’s Masterji series feature the photographic still as yet another variation on the
cinematic. Pushpamala’s series of black-and-white photographs borrows an obscure
narrative format, the fotoromanzo popular in post-War Italy (from which future film
stars like Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren started their careers), to tell an
“adventure thriller” starring a masked crusader in the vein of the Fearless Nadia, Zorro
and Phantom.80 It treats various popular genres, the detective novel, film noir, and
comic strips as archives of the modern metropolis, thereby treating the history of
Bombay as a history of and in images. M. Madhava Prasad, writing about the series
along with Pushpamala’s other photo-works regards them as excavating a disavowed
Indian modernity.81 If cinema has been the means through which such modernity was
experienced and registered, as in the signal figure of the stunt heroine, the photograph
serves an archival function, presenting records of that cinema in fragments. And
significantly, in doing so it refigures the archive itself as a mode of reenactment and
performance. In the context of the exhibition’s larger quest for alternative genealogies
to contemporary battles around identity, Pushpamala’s work posits obscure histories of
cinema and other popular culture as productive sites of looking. Pushpamala’s act of

79
Rajadhyaksha, 2009, pp. 127-129.
80
Pushpamala, 2012, pp. 169.
81
Prasad, Madhava M., “The last remake of Indian modernity?: on Pushpamala,” exh. cat., Bose Pacia,
January 1, 2004.
 120

shuffling the categories of documentary and performance is carried further in Dayanita

Singh’s Masterji photographs of the famous Bollywood choreographer Saroj Khan.
Described in the catalogue as the “ungainly queen of Bombay film’s song and dance,”
Singh’s photographs of Khan seem to mediate between the fantasy of the beautiful
screen heroes and heroines and the underlying infrastructural base that works to
produce the illusion. Singh’s gesture is ostensibly towards deconstruction, unveiling
the industrial apparatus that laboriously manufactures the spectacle we consume.
Interestingly, the still is transformed from its function as a publicity vehicle into a
document of the film’s “reality”. But perhaps something more is being said of the
relationship between media so that the series might instead be read as a photographic
view of film. If cinema is associated with the monumental, the photograph is able to
slip unobtrusively into proceedings, a “fly-on-the-wall” that, receding into the
background, is able to offer a different perspective than the iconic framing of cinema.82
At the same time, it is a comment on how cinema itself traverses iconic and mundane
registers through its navigation across different media and contexts, as for example the
way in which print material is recycled into forms of secondary use so that containers
for fast food often bear the images of stars. The photographs take their cue from such
everyday deconstructions of the Bollywood aura, mining the cinema’s interstitial
placement between the ordinary and extraordinary as a space from which different
narratives and histories can emerge.

Singh and Pushpamala’s photographs provide a glimpse into a contemporary

phenomenon that Ranjani Mazumdar has theorised as the collapsing of the formerly
separate figures of the vamp and the heroine in Hindi cinema. Mazumdar’s argument
traces the way in which female flânerie becomes central to a new regime of
consumption in the nineties crystallising around dance, fashion and travel – the vamp
as a figure of alienated western modernity and base consumerism is incorporated into
the heroine at the moment of globalization.83 In Phantom Lady Pushpamala plays a
double role, the eponymous masked Phantom Lady, as well as her lost twin sister, the
gangster’s moll kitted out in fancy evening dress and gloves. Masterji documents the
figure at the head of this transformation in Bollywood, as Khan is credited with crafting

82
In her review of the series shown later as part of Cinema Still, Madhu Jain designates Singh’s fly-on-
the-wall approach as the means by which sexual fantasy in unveiled.
83
Mazumdar, Ranjani, “Desiring Women,” in Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, 91.
 121

the new “sexy” routines performed by the nineties heroine. In both Phantom Lady and
Masterji, images of homosociality dangerously skirt the borders of a transgressive
sexuality, thereby gesturing towards a buried archive of queerness. Photographs thus
emerge as a means of squeezing the latent historical content in cinema through
displacement; an archival take on the cinema as it were.

Shilpa Gupta’s sentiment-express signaled a decisive shift towards new media art,
which returns the foundations of not only Indian but also world art to a literal and
figurative ground zero. The significance of Gupta’s work registers itself in a world
historical frame, becoming the first piece of net art to be mounted at the Tate – Kapur
recalls the logistical difficulties in mounting the piece, and the final triumphant note
struck by the Tate director Lars Nittve on its successful installation. Gupta’s work,
exploring the future of labour and materiality in a world of the online delivery of goods
and services forms a postscript to the exhibition’s look back at the tactile and artisanal
qualities of twentieth century visual culture. It is sited within a makeshift booth lined
all over with purple satin cloth, evoking the cyber cafes mushrooming across India in
the early twenty-first century. sentiment-express anticipates a transition from the
floating signifiers captured by the street into the “purple pleasures” unleashed by the
digital.84

Cinema Still works firmly under the shadow of the digital and the wide-ranging changes
in visual culture it ushers in. “With the digital you realise certain kinds of image-making
are going to change forever,” curator Gayatri Sinha avers, which prompts a look back
at earlier passages between media.85 At the heart of the exhibition is a foundational
fluidity of the image in a historical frame extending back to the time of Baburao Painter,
a figure rediscovered in the nineties as the pioneer of a mixed-media practice that had
become de rigueur in that decade. A line is traced between Painter, the modernist
Husain and the contemporary artist Dodiya all representing the intimate and early
relation between the industrial forms of photography and cinema, and modernist
painting as it developed against successive phases – a dying courtly tradition, a growing

84
Amit S. Rai regards the digital formation of Bollywood as extending the essentially non-narrative
pleasures of Hindi film. What new media enable is the freeing up of the image to the pure play of vectors,
fleeting, ephemeral pleasures and energies unfixed from a narrative home (Rai, 2008).
85
Sinha, 2019.
 122

movement for Swadeshi or independence, a post-independence quest for the artistic

modern, and continuing into the new internationalism of the present. Shukla Sawant in
a monograph on Painter, details his practice of painting from photographs and the
manner in which this intersected with his other vocation of making films.86 Sawant
relates Painter’s modus operandi of manually enlarging photograph’s to the larger-than-
life scale of cinema in his painted reproductions. She also draws attention to the shifting
sites of reception of his painting-photo hybrids traversing the dark room, the studio, the
public exhibition and the illustrated periodical. Highlighting the essential instability of
both medium and exhibition-reception, Sawant indicates the manner in which the
modalities of painting and photography affect each other, with the indexical claim of
the photograph compromised by the performative charge of painted embellishments
and enhancements, and conversely, the contamination of the courtly painting by its
association with the photograph as a vaguely disreputable form linked to the world of
the female model and an incipient regime of surveillance.87 Sawant’s study unearths
buried linkages between film and painting that were crystallised not only in the figure
of the artist but also his muse, the actress-model similarly straddling the professional
worlds of cinema and painting. These dynamics, as Sinha notes, continue into the career
of a figure like Husain who likewise explores the relationship between the artist and
the female muse in his experimental film Gaja Gamini (2000), starring reigning
Bollywood queen Madhuri Dixit. In the film, there is an opening of time such that
Kamadev, Leonardo Da Vinci, Raja Ravi Varma and Shah Rukh Khan all chase the
same woman who not only reincarnates herself over the centuries but also across media.
Sinha notes the reappearance of Painter’s iconic painted images of womanhood – in all
likelihood based on photographic models – in Husain’s film. The film even otherwise
flits ceaselessly between the registers of painting and cinema, as for example, in the
sensational sequence in which Dixit, wandering through the hallowed space of the
Louvre a la Godard’s Bande a Part, appears before the Mona Lisa, “looking for all the
world like a ghostly double of La Giaconda.”88 The digital transition it would seem,
causes paintings to move and cinema to still, giving the exhibition its name.

86
Shukla Sawant, “The Trace Beneath: The Photographic Residue in the Early Twentieth-century
Paintings of the Bombay School,” in BioScope, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2017), pp. 1-29.
87
Sawant, 25.
88
Geeta Kapur, “The Exile of Maqbool Fida Husain,” Lecture, SAHMAT, New Delhi, August 24, 2009.
 123

Keeping in mind these historic intermedial encounters, Cinema Still featured seven cut-
out portraits of Tamil cinema superstar Rajnikanth by an artist of film hoardings,
Aramugam. The latter hailed from a family of traditional painters who were themselves
caught up in the digital turn transforming the art of poster-making. Preminda Jacob in
her study of film advertisements in Tamil Nadu, notes the wholesale displacement of
hand-painted cut-outs, that had “in the past produced an almost continuous public
spectacle,” by the vinyl billboards, digitally generated, in the new millennium.89
Moreover, the cut-out display, as a form associated with a cult of hybrid film and
political celebrity in Tamil Nadu, was banned in 2000 in the wake of the discovery of
widespread corruption under the Jayalalitha-led administration.90 The resultant changes
in visual culture implied more than a merely mediatic transition, with an accompanying
switch-over from an artisanal mode of production into mechanised mass reproduction.91
It also signified a change in the mode of the image, from being enclosed in the iconic
matrix regulating public life and ritual to becoming an aesthetic marker of urban
modernity. Sinha expressed an interest in this concrete manifestation of the so-called
digital revolution, mounting an investigation into the changed circumstances of image
production - whether the same families continued to operate in the field; whether the
practice of embellishing images with “dollars” and glitter remained; the change, if any,
in the iconographic structure of the image associated with political and religious
functions. The interest in the film hoarding also stemmed from an apprehension of the
manner in which, in the words of Sinha, the cinema “possesses the street.”92 For Sinha,
the digital, rather than detracting, actually adds a further dimension to cinema’s
colonisation of extracinematic space; the image, formerly static, is now endowed with
a new mobility. The digital it would seem, intensifies what has been the remarkable
ubiquity of printed pictures in India through the twentieth century.93 Elsewhere in the
exhibition, artist-activist Sheba Chhachhi’s installation Warrior/Saint, testified to such
an expanding mediascape, drawing on material from fan sites, screensavers, posters,
hoardings and television in a work meditating on the militant masculinity of

89
Preminda Jacob, “The Future of Chennai’s Visual Culture,” in Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture
of Cinema and Politics in South India, Lexington Books, 2008. 258.
90
Jacob, 268.
91
Ibid.
92
Sinha.
93
Stephen Inglis, “‘The Norman Rockwell of South India’: Multiformity and Repute in the Work of a
20th Century Artist,” in Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Culture, August 15,
2011. http://www.tasveergharindia.net/essay/norman-rockwell-south-india.html
 124

Bollywood. Sinha also reports Aramugam’s adoption of digital practices, thereby

repeating the historical pattern of the adaptation and hybridisation of new technologies
which never completely displace older modes of image-making.

Cinema’s new-found digital mobility is also considered to be a continuation of its

ability to move between contexts. Sinha notes,
“The cinematic image goes through different kinds of iterations which make
it in any case iconic, say the poster, say the lobby card, certainly the large
hoarding. And then when you pluck it out of that iconicity and put it into a
painting, and this is its fourth or fifth iteration, but then it’s a different kind of
embedding and that gives it a different kind of valence. Because its
transnational references by this time, that say someone like an Atul Dodiya
will offer, has become much more complicated. He also uses other kinds of
tropes, like the suicides of the girls in a family, Gandhi and his various
marches. When you put them on the same plane, then Bollywood ceases to be
a discreet entertainment medium; it becomes a part of another kind of a visual
field and it allows for other kinds of readings.”94

Significant in this statement is the idea that cinema’s iconicity is not tied to a single
form but emerges through its travels across media of different scale and context. In a
sense, this is already a hypertextual form linking up with different spaces and cultural
references. Further, such an itinerant character of the cinema ensures that it is always
part of a wider spectrum of visual culture, and hence, intimately linked with social,
historical and political forces. The different works in Cinema Still can all be read as
attempts to enframe – in non-cinematic media like video and painting – the vagrant
cinematic. Arpana Caur’s Pyaar Hua Iqraar Hua transfers the iconic image of Raj
Kapoor and Nargis in the eponymous song, from celluloid to oil on canvas. Much as
the song continues to circulate independently of the film (Shri 420), Caur’s painting
demonstrates the detachability of the film still as well. She gestures to the way in which
the image of the actors (and purported real-life lovers) huddled under an umbrella,
gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, has endured in cultural memory through
numerous extratextual manifestations, including, among other things, in a government-
sponsored ad-campaign to promote a contraceptive.95 The transposition of the film still
into painting, however, is not a smooth process and the image undergoes a
transformation in the passage. The black-and-white of the filmic original is retained,

94
Sinha, 2019.
95
Ziya Us Salam (qt. in), The Greatest Show on Earth, auction cat., Osian’s – Connoisseurs of Arts,
Pvt. Ltd., August 2014, pp. 62.
 125

but at the same time, bright blue droplets of water appear to leak through the painted
surface, as if the stormy scene depicted in the film’s fictional universe had come alive.
The figures and landscape, while recognisable, are oddly distorted, sagging as though
under the weight of the damp canvas. The painted image in other words, betokens a
sensuousness that the photograph does not. Caur’s work can be seen as a throwback to
a Painter-style reworking of photographs into grandiose painted confections that are
more appropriate to the scale and imagination of film.

Elsewhere artist Shibu Natesan, also part of the exhibition, mentions using the
photograph as an “unemotional” documentary base in order to create paintings “to push
the limits of the real to achieve effects that a photograph will never be able to
reproduce.”96 The “cinema still” thus, mediates between the fantasy worlds of painting
and cinema. At the same time, the work is not so much cinema-as-painting but a,
following Rajadhyaksha, painted variant of celluloid. Speaking in a different context,
Rajadhyaksha contemplates the act of “perpetuating” rather than “restoring” celluloid,
which inevitably entails translating into a different medium and context.97 Such an act
of transfer is moreover, bound to be a transmogrification rather than simple
transcription, and so, represents a new object as such. Rajadhyaksha, speaking with
reference to the digital restoration of Mani Kaul’s films, mentions the bluish hues
produced in the digital image as a result of the telecine transfer.98 The blue droplets of
rain in Caur’s painted still similarly draw attention to medium, reminding us that what
we are viewing is no longer cinema.

There runs throughout Cinema Still, a sense of the the self-contained image giving way
to the open-ended frame that lends itself to any number of associations and connections.
Cinema’s transition to the digital will then take a path it has, in a way, always already
taken through routes of affect, intensity and memory that distinguish cinema as opposed
to film.

96
Somak Ghoshal, “Shibu Natesan: Stranger than reality,” in Livemint, March 16, 2013.
https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/HY993Ssg5hD9ihf5AewNTM/Shibu-Natesan--Stranger-than-
reality.html
97
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, “Teaching Film Theory 2,” in the Journal of the Moving Image, No. 11
(December 2012).
98
Ibid, 46-47.
 126

Film, History and the City Take 2

The 14th Giornate in 1994 had been the first encounter with silent cinema for many.
Pushpamala N. writes about having never actually watched a Fearless Nadia film at the
time of making Phantom Lady or Kismet in 1996-98.99 She based her photo-
performance on a brochure for a festival of Nadia films organised by the actress’s
nephews Riyad Vinci Wadia and Shiamak Davar in the early nineties. And more
importantly, she based her fictional persona on the popular legend and iconography of
Nadia which had circulated long after the films themselves. In 2013, when Indian
cinema celebrated the centennial anniversary of the release of Phalke’s Raja
Harishchandra, the film could be viewed on YouTube while the internet was awash
with stories on India’s “first stunt queen”.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the circulation of not only the still but
also the moving image has been accelerated by the speed and spread of digital
technologies and networks. Even more than television and video which marked the
nineties expansion of visual culture, video hosting sites like YouTube as well as
piratical media like Torrents mark a new democratisation of the field, providing not
only cheaper means of production but also alternative means of circulation. Ubiquitous
computing produces a new ubiquitous cinema. It is the digital that really opens up a
previously hierarchical media structure, allowing on the one hand, the emergence of
independent documentary and film, as well as the generation of content by ordinary
users. While the dispersal and uses of digital media vary greatly, reflecting continuing
differences of class, gender, and location, it nonetheless approaches a situation that
gives pause to Mahadevan’s dictum, cited earlier, that “no technology dies a predictable
death in India.” For, as Rajadhyaksha has long argued, celluloid and its attendant
system of subjectivity linked to the centralised nation-state, is indeed displaced by a
decentralised digital subjecthood – a move in Foucauldian terms from a disciplinary to
a control structure. It is in this context that there is a belated apprehension of a “cinema
century”, marked in the developed world by the Lumière anniversary and the earlier
dispersion of digital culture. The 2013 anniversary is felt more keenly, not only because
it is the “Indian” cinema centenary, but because there is the apprehension of film as

99
Pushpamala, 2012, pp. 157.
 127

history, a certain perceived obsolescence of celluloid that renews attention to the

government’s responsibilities towards the preservation of India’s film heritage and the
long-proposed plan to open a National Museum of Indian cinema. In contrast to the
criticism of the industry in the press in 1995-96 for failing to commemorate the
centenary with appropriate pomp, the discourse set off by the centenary of Indian
cinema and continuing into the present focuses on the state’s responsibility towards
celluloid. 2013, then, symbolically releases the contemporary industry – which as
Rajadhyaksha argues is anyway a post-celluloid formation – from the past of Indian
cinema, while simultaneously reasserting the imbrication of the state with that history
and the consequent duty to preserve it.

Even here, the state’s perceived failures have drawn several other, private interests into
the field. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur launched the not-for-profit Film Heritage
Foundation (FHF) in 2014, in deference to the archival spirit of P.K. Nair, the venerable
founder-director of the NFAI. Singh highlighted the losses sustained to India’s film
heritage, given the late founding of the NFAI.100 He estimated that by 1950, almost 70-
80% of India’s early and silent film had been lost, including the sensational loss of the
first Indian talkie Alam Ara. Most of all, Dungarpur rued the lack of a sense of
preservation in India, which he put down crucially to cinema’s status as mass culture
rather than an art form. Even as the FHF inherits the archival vision of the NFAI, it is
sustained largely by funds from corporates, including entertainment company Viacom
18 which has been the primary sponsor since 2015.101 This amounts in a sense to the
replacement of state proprietorship with corporate ownership, retaining the “fortress”
model of the archive as a fortified physical structure haunted by the spectre of “fire
flooding and data loss”.102 Indeed, as a privately-run archive, one requires permission
from the foundation to access films, enabling a private organisation to claim – in the
name of the public – a custodianship of national culture and heritage that constitutes a

100
Kanika Sharma, “We lack a sense of preservation: Shivendra Singh Dungarpur,” on Mid-day.com,
November 23, 2014. https://www.mid-day.com/articles/we-lack-a-sense-of-preservation-shivendra-
singh-dungarpur/15779160
101
Desai, Shail, “Where old movies go after ‘The End’,” in The Hindu Business Line, February 22, 2019.
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/where-old-movies-go-after/article26338900.ece
102
Theses 2, “Ten Theses on the Archive,” pad.ma, Beirut, April 2010.
 128

form of mnemonic power.103 104

An essentially medieval pedagogical model is
reincarnated for successive phases of capital, embodied first in the nation-state and now
in a market-driven populist democracy. But as with the National Archive before it, the
FHF is as dependent on the “bazaar archive”, or the informal collections constituted by
cinephiles and independent enthusiasts, and artefacts circulating in flea markets and
waste networks. Dungarpur mentions chancing upon the original camera negative of
Guru Dutt’s Bharosa (1963) at a kabadiwala in Goregaon, and the even rarer discovery
of reels of the first Konkani film, Mogacho Aunndo (1950) dating from Portuguese-
occupied Goa, delivered to the foundation in decrepit state, covered in newspaper.105

In contrast to the FHF’s emphasis on the preservation of celluloid and original film
material106, scholars of Indian film, faced with the perennial issue of the loss of their
primary object of study as well as bureaucratic hurdles blocking access, have come up
with inventive, imaginative ways of skirting the problem. Ramesh Kumar, citing the
call-to-arms issued by Stephen Putnam Hughes (2010) and Kuhu Tanvir (2014),
challenges the idea of the original film text and the archival document as the only
authoritative source of film history. He draws attention to the development of a tradition
of scholarship that (largely) does not hold too much store by film’s carrier, its
technological base.107 Rajadhyaksha, too, contends that the archive of Indian cinema
has always posed a problem resolved through alternative means like remakes, citations
and other forms of cultural and folk memory, that “take into consideration the fact that
the Indian cinema is not going to survive in any kind of established archival form.”108
He also refers to the operations of dedicated filmographers of Indian cinema, including
the likes of Virchand Dharamsey, whom he describes as having created a database of
cinema from secondary sources, and with the firm conviction that the films would never
be seen. Rajadhyaksha was himself closely involved in the setting up of indiancine.ma,
an annotated digital archive of Indian cinema, on the occasion of the centenary. The

103
Theses 1, “Ten These on the Archive.”
104
Anupama Kapse also notes that, despite not having any explicit neoliberal agenda, the beneficiaries
of private initiatives like the FHF are invariably also implicated in contemporary distributions of cultural
and economic capital (Kapse, 2015).
105
Qt. in Desai, 2019.
106
From the Film Heritage Foundation website, https://filmheritagefoundation.co.in/about-us/beliefs/
107
Ramesh, Kumar “Alas Nitrate Didn’t Wait, but does it really matter? Fiery Losses, Bureaucratic
Cover-ups and the Writing of Indian Film Histories from the Relics of Cinema at the National Film
Archive of India,” in BioScope, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2016), 96-115. pp. 107.
108
Rajadhyaksha, 2019.
 129

site follows a similar initiative dedicated to video material, the Public Access Digital
Media Archive or pad.ma formed by the Mumbai-based CAMP collective in 2010. But
it goes back even further to the seminal Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema Referring to
this early project, Rajadhyaksha reflects that the Encyclopedia was positioned between
the video epoch and the arrival of the internet, affecting the tome in various ways.109
The Encyclopedia is in a very a real sense enabled by the archive of cinema opened up
by VHS, while its hypertextual form with keywords emblazoned in bold text (described
at the time as “leaving trails”) anticipated a digital future of the text. The vision of the
Encyclopedia, to contain every Indian film made ever, is finally made possible with the
evolution of digital resources, so that now indiancine.ma, with approximately 7000
films, already has more titles than the NFAI, whose collection numbers between 4000-
6000.

The website, however, is not merely representative of a simple shift from celluloid
preservation to digital collections, or of a participatory as opposed to a centralised state
archive. More crucially, it points to the way in which film will transition onto digital
platforms as an altogether different object. Rajadhyaksha, following Laura Mulvey,
highlights the quality of attention that digital platforms facilitate, of a fundamentally
different magnitude from the celluloid era.110 On the website, films are broken into
frames that appear below the video player, so that we have films pixelated to form one
long thumbnail of the film called a “timeline”. Sebastian Lutgert who, along with Jan
Kerber, has worked on developing the back-end of both pad.ma and indiancine.ma,
describes this as a form of spatialising video to make it easier to navigate. Unlike a
traditional archive, which closes in on itself, the design of the website imagines the
archival object strictly in relation to users who chalk different pathways through the
same film, animating the possibility of different, personalised versions. The image of
the timeline – an inscrutable mass standing in for pure duration – further suggests the
disconnect from a film’s content, only activated through the act of viewing, and its
mechanical base – celluloid or digital – inaccessible to human perception. It is also
possible to enter a set of keywords – rain for example, or beach – which yield clips and
images drawn from different films, making it possible to explore a film by other means.

109
Ibid.
110
Rajadhyaksha, “Presentation 5: Teaching Film Theory 2,” in The Journal of the Moving Image, No.
11 (December 2012), 42.
 130

Elsewhere there are edits that compile clips from several different films clubbed under
a single motif. For example, an edit entitled “1957: transportation” is an almost two-
hour long succession of clips of transport including buses, trains, cars, planes, and boats
seen in 241 different films from the year 1957. “Telephone” is another idiosyncratic
compilation of sequences featuring telephones from 114 films. These ostensibly
whimsical compilations, undermining the very idea of a final edit, might actually force
us to question what a film is, suggesting that the “original” text is only a variation on
footage that remains open to interpretation. The digitalisation of cinema entails
breaking up the unity of the original film to open up its constituent parts, which might
enter into other combinations and contexts. Such a dismantling of film, however,
proceeds from the manner in which films are always remembered in terms of particular
images, or generalities of emotion and affect – the real grist of a film that is never
delimited by narrative. Cinema’s digital archive draws attention to this characteristic
cinematic tendency to overspill the boundaries of narrative, reflected in the way cinema
is memorialised. The memory of cinema, in a tautological sense, becomes
fundamentally central to what we understand cinema as being. Even more radically, it
suggests that the past we get is the past we search for, instating the archival film clip
as always shaped by our concerns in the present. As Rajadhyaksha asserts, what we
have is emphatically not the original film object – which is always evanescent and for
reasons that are not necessarily technological – but its memory haunting digital space.
In other words, films can never actually be stored, only re-membered.

In the NFDC documentary Tracing Phalke (2013), Kamal Swaroop is similarly

preoccupied with the digital archiving of film history. The documentary aims to
reconstruct the life and times of Dadasaheb Phalke, whose story has assumed the shape
of a legend. At the very beginning, the opening titles broach the question, “how could
the pixels of a digital image help us to recall the early history of Indian cinema?” Like
Rajadhyaksha, Swaroop is simultaneously animated by the new affordances of the
digital, and at the same time, wary that what is captured is not the past itself, but a
ghostly imprint of the dead. Almost two centuries after the first invention of
photography, digital projects rehearse early debates about the technologically-induced
ability to store time, and reverse death.
 131

Phalke is an abiding subject for Swaroop, whose earliest engagement with this tutelary
deity of the Indian cinema dates back to 1990, when he produced a timeline of Phalke’s
life correlated with events in history.111 Similarly, in Tracing Phalke, Swaroop maps
Phalke’s life against the cities he lived and worked in, on the way documenting the
various art schools, commercial printing establishments, and film studios he was
associated with. The search for Phalke leads out of the archive into sundry studios,
narrow streets, and decrepit houses, depending on the testimony of diverse sources,
including a mendicant whose account of the expulsion of Brahma from the Hindu
pantheon is incorporated into Phalke’s own mythos. The act of tracing Phalke also
throws up remnants of other histories and personalities, for example, the actress Sardari
Bai of the Marathi cinema, who is tracked down from old black-and-white photographs
and found to be alive, though in straitened circumstances, residing in an old locality of
the city of Kolhapur. The team is led to her by locals and neighbours who speak of an
old lady who used to be an actress, the city thus emerging as a site where film history
– even in the absence of more visible traces of its presence – circulates as memory,
rumour and legend. On being interviewed, Sardari Bai recalls the experience of working
as an actress in the early years of the cinema when it was still considered a disreputable
profession, Kolhapur also being the first place where women were cast in films. At the
end of the interview, the team is not so sure whether the old lady who claims to be the
same as the young actress in the archival still is really Sardari Bai. But “fact” here gives
way to the importance of memory; what is significant is that Sardari Bai continues to
live on, even if apocryphally, in the local imagination. Along with Sardari Bai, the story
of Phalke links up with Baburao Painter and V Shantaram of Maharashtra Film Co. and
Prabhat Pictures respectively, studios whose activities cannot be seen apart from the
history of Kolhapur as an erstwhile princely State. Cinema is part of the story of
modernisation in these former regional urban centres. Here, the names of Painter and
Shantaram are not necessarily in the order of specialist film historical knowledge, but
part of the lore of the city itself.

The history of Indian cinema is further related to the global modernity of film, with P.
K. Nair explaining the novelty of the experience of the Lumières’ Cinématographe to

111
Ramnath, Nandini, “Kamal Swaroop,” in Livemint, May 6, 2013.
https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/zG3qwNagMvpkl9vy5GiywI/Kamal-Swaroop.html
 132

the first audiences of moving pictures. Nair is elsewhere credited by Dungarpur, as

being responsible for restoring Phalke to the public memory of film in the country. But
in Tracing Phalke, he appears as one of many sources who unfold different versions of
the birth of cinema in India, located in the intersecting histories of the twentieth century.
Swaroop, who refers to Phalke as a “process rather than a project”, suggests that given
Phalke cannot be found only in the cinema, having worked a plethora of jobs and
imbibed a host of influences, the history of the cinema in India must accordingly be
tracked or “traced” through the multi-sited career of its founder as a photographer,
magician, draughtsmen, lithographer, filmmaker and theatre director. Taking its cue
from the mazelike character of Phalke’s life, the film takes a stream-of-consciousness
approach jumping between locations and interspersed with archival footage and
photographs, including pages of the Tracing Phalke coffee-table book where historical
footnotes, newspaper cutouts, diary entries, sketches, and paintings crowd together in
thick palimpsests. These are overlaid with a telegraphic commentary narrating crucial
events in Phalke’s biography, but also mixing at times with stories concocted by
participants of workshops conducted by Swaroop, asked to imaginatively retrace
Phalke’s experiences and journeys. The documentary thus deliberately blurs the
registers of, on the one hand, a clinical forensic re-enactment, and a fictional
storytelling exercise on the other. The constant slippage between fact and fancy is
perhaps also considered appropriate to narrating the life of the founder of Indian
cinema, who collapsed in himself the lineages of both Lumière and Méliès. In one
place, a project coordinator can be heard saying,
“So you can even choose to do that when you’re taking your story. Like you’ll
see elements and you’ll see things. And it’s also true observation no? It’s a
mixed thing! These are elements that give us some feeling, flowers and bees
and clouds. So to build on the feelings they give and find an expression.”

Students of the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology assisting in the
documentary are thus recruited in a phenomenological investigation, steeped in the
materials and places of the past that Phalke had himself traversed. There is a sense that
the past can never be known, only relived and reimagined. In any case what is
important, the film seems to suggest, is our memories and feelings, which create a
tangible sense of the past. Such a sense of the past, is moreover privileged equally with
the objective, material remnants of the past, whose historical significance is only
activated through such creative engagement.
 133

A similar strategy is followed in a second documentary, Rangbhoomi (2013), which

focuses on an interregnum in Phalke’s film career, during which he relocated to Kashi
(Benares) to write the eponymous play. In Rangbhoomi, we have an undoing of
cinema’s teleology, following Phalke’s turn to the stage after a stint in the cinema. For
Phalke, the turn to theatre also realised a lifelong fascination with myth and magic
which cinema, given its circumscription of a profilmic world, could not fully sustain.
Here, as in Tracing Phalke, the documentary takes the form of a historical
reconstruction, cast here almost as a pilgrimage into the past. A young student remarks
at the beginning, “This journey is what Phalke’s family must also have taken when they
went to Benares. We were trying to imagine how they would react in this very space
that we are sitting in this train.” It unfolds at times, almost like a who-dunnit, with an
interviewee at one point even referring to finding “clues” as to Phalke’s historical
whereabouts. In Rangbhoomi even more than Tracing Phalke, the search for the
common subject is like looking for a ghost, given that Phalke’s renunciation of the film
world at the height of his success marked a death of sorts; in fact, newspapers did indeed
report Phalke as dead at this time. The job is thus a difficult one of tracking a history
twice buried – exposing the more exalted, but still obscure filmi Phalke, and then
excavating his other, lesser-known (re)incarnation as a man of the stage.

In the course of their search, the crew is led to spaces as diverse as an old newspaper
office, where a cantankerous clerk looks upon “researchers” with contempt and
suspicion, to a hermitage where a screening of Phalke’s Kaliya Mardan is held for octo-
and nonagenarians, almost as old as the cinema themselves. In a remarkable sequence,
a female member of the crew painstakingly pours over water-stained newspaper
records, exclaiming in delight when she chances across a rare notice announcing the
performance of a new play by the Kirloskar Natak Mandali, a travelling theatre
company closely associated with Phalke. As she flips through the yellowing pages, the
damp having formed tiny rivulets across the surface of the paper and large craters
formed by silverfish, the records seem to return to the earth. The symbols are obscured
by the sheer materiality of the paper. What we have here, is quite distinctly, a
 134

dramatisation of the archive affect. 112 Finally, it is evident in both Tracing Phalke and
Rangbhoomi that the intention is to produce an expressive portrait of Phalke rather than
a mere document. There is a sense that this history won’t survive unless it can generate
affect – behold the researcher’s unalloyed glee – in those who are meant to receive it.
History then can only be perpetuated through artworks that draw new audiences, and
that can not only communicate, but as one interviewee advises, emote across
generations.

Elsewhere Swaroop’s scrapbook-like approach to history finds a parallel in the

historical scrapbook collating material from pre-Independence cinema of the 1930s-
40s, attributed to a certain Mangaldas V. Lohana, based on a stamp on the cover of the
volume. The scrapbook was discovered by Rahaab Allana, curator at the Alkazi
archive, at a flea market in Mumbai. The book went on to be the centre-piece of the
exhibition, Filmi Jagat, held in Delhi in 2014 to mark a hundred years of the cinema.
In his review of the volume, Uday Bhatia describes Lohana as a “spirit guide”, shining
a light on lost histories of the cinema.113 And indeed, it is precisely a certain cinephiliac
spirit that came to be acknowledged on the occasion of cinema’s centenary when, as
Bhatia observes, there ensued “a good deal of hand-wringing when everyone realised
that they had little to show from the first couple of decades (of the cinema).” The freshly
perceived paucity of the official archive prompted an inventory of the formerly informal
means of archiving cinema’s history manifest through the activities of enthusiasts and
amateurs, and indeed by a whole cinema public that denotes an embodied memory of
the cinema through everyday citation and reference. At the moment of the centenary,
the cinephile comes to be recognised as having historically substituted for the film
archivist in India. Such a recognition of the cinephile-as-archivist moreover casts an
entirely different light on the nature of archiving itself, replacing the pedagogic with

112
There is a long tradition of literature extolling the experience of the historian in the archive in romantic
terms. Carolyn Steedman cites the description of “Archival Romance” found in Douglas Johnson’s
review of historian Richard Cobb’s A Second Identity. She quotes, “Johnson noted Cobb comparing ‘the
historian arriving in the small French provincial town, looking around the cafés before proceeding to the
archives, to Maigret putting his nose to the wind and getting the feel of the place.’ Johnson continues: ‘It
is deeply moving to find him [Cobb] quoting Lefebvre’s feeling that the supreme satisfaction was that
of untying the string on the bundles of archives in the attic of a village mairie.’” Carolyn Steedman, “The
space of memory: in an archive,” in the History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1998), pp. 65-
83. 70.
113
Uday Bhatia, “Filmi Jagat repurposes the scrapbook as art project,” in The Sunday Guardian, October
11, 2014. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/bookbeat/filmi-jagat-repurposes-the-scrapbook-as-art-
project
 135

the “libidinal”, and film with film memorabilia. Debashree Mukherjee designating the
collector of film materials a “kinetomaniac”, writes of the ways in which a passion for
the movies produces a keen desire to prolong what is an essentially evanescent
experience.114 The kinetomaniac does this through “Booklets that precede the release,
ticket stubs, postcards of film stars, posters stolen from a theatre lobby, reviews cut out
of newspapers and pasted in scrapbooks, a faithfully maintained list of films that year,
diary entries that casually associate the memory of a film with the presence of a
lover.”115 These materials are moreover stored in a form that seeks to animate rather
than embalm them in a different medium – Mukherjee speaks of the “peculiarly
cinematic form” of Lohana’s creation with its deliberate play of gazes and montage
aesthetics brought to bear on still photographs.116 In other words, the act of archiving
is refigured as one of creative translation between media; an art of archiving as it were.
The incorporation of Lohana’s Filmi Jagat into an exhibition thus bears testament to
the multiplicity of creative acts spawned by the cinema that circulate beyond the world
of film. But also of the way such acts build over the world in the image of film, the
eponymous “filmi jagat”.

But of all the archival endeavours launched by the centenary, the exceptional case
remains the monumental Project Cinema City (2008-2012), unfolding across
documentaries, artworks, installations and exhibitions, and involving the collaboration
of over a hundred artists, filmmakers, architects, designers, academics and writers. It
also produced three publications, Cinema City Lived: Book of Spatial and Textual
Cartography (Made for the 60th Berlin Film Festival), dates.sites: Project Cinema City,
Bombay/Mumbai (Tulika 2012) and the eponymous Project Cinema City (Tulika
Books, 2013). The genesis of the project lay in an initiative by Majlis, a Mumbai-based
organisation for women’s rights and legal aid, which included a cultural documentation
wing headed by Madhusree Dutta. Dutta, primarily responsible for conceiving the
project, belongs to an activist documentary tradition that had developed against the
political events of the nineties, communalisation and liberalisation, centering on the
city of Bombay. Dutta’s famous documentary I Live in Behrampada (1993), shot after

114
Debashree Mukherjee, “‘Filmi Jagat: Folding a World into Itself,” in Filmi Jagat: A Scrapbook: A
Shared Universe of Indian Cinema, Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2014, pp. 35-63. 46.
115
Ibid.
116
Ibid, 35.
 136

the first phase of the Bombay riots in 1992-93, produced an important document of a
volatile moment in the life of the city, in a time before cellphones had made it possible
to bear witness instantaneously.117 The documentary 7 Islands and a Metro (2006)
formed a sequel of sorts to this first film, and it is from this that Project Cinema City
evolved as, at first, an “attempt to create an archive at the boundaries of disciplines”,
of the relationship between the city and cinema.

In association with the design cell at KRVIA (Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of
Architecture), Cinema City started as an empirical, data-collection project to eventually
transform into an artistic and pedagogic strategy to project the database out into the
world. The head of the KRVIA Design Cell Rohan Shivkumar, who was also a part of
the core team, recalls that the first project undertaken by students at the architecture
school was to create an archive of images, “cinematic, photographic, poetic,” of the
city’s neighbourhoods.118 This archive was made available to everyone working on
Cinema City including artists who processed the contents of this image bank into their
own work. The archive of images initiated thus gained new accretions and articulations.
In a sense, Cinema City tracks the transformation of the documentary impulse to gather
and provide evidence, into the artistic drive to perform critical operations on the
material thus collected, a form of mourning work as it were. As the catalogue states, art
becomes the means by which research becomes refracted on to a public domain.119 Both
Cinema City and pad.ma, which Dutta was again instrumental in founding, originated
in acts of documenting political trauma – the Bombay riots and blasts, a history of
insurgency and state atrocity in Kashmir – and the need to provide public access to the
archives generated through such documentation.120 After her initial association with
pad.ma, Dutta felt the urgency to develop the idea of mere access into a larger
intervention into the public – to make the archive perform as it were – resulting in the
multi-disciplinary Project Cinema City.

117
Damini Kulkarni, “‘Nothing is too sacred to be touched’: Madhusree Dutta on the evolving world of
her documentaries,” on Scroll.in, January 30, 2018. https://scroll.in/reel/866847/nothing-is-too-sacred-
to-be-touched-madhusree-dutta-on-the-evolving-world-of-her-documentaries
118
Rohan Shivkumar, Personal Interview, July 6, 2019.
119
Research, Art and Collaborative Projects: Project Cinema City Exhibition, exh. cat., 168.
120
Bhaskar Sarkar and Nicole Wolf, “Documentary Acts: An Interview with Madhushree Dutta,” in
BioScope, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2012), 21-34. pp.
 137

“We get Rs 2000 a day to hide our faces and Rs 1000 to expose them,” – this quote
from stunt double Reshma Pathan forms a motif in the exhibition, whose main agenda,
according to Kaushik Bhaumik, was to make the hidden visible.121 An infrastructural
imagination, Project Cinema City worked simultaneously to produce an archive of
Bollywoodization – as a short-hand for the larger economic and cultural
transformations of the city – while also consciously attempting to subvert the spectacle
of glamour produced by Bollywood. Like in Century City before it, Cinema City’s
desire to create an archive of the contemporary was driven by the apprehension of
globalisation as following in the wake of a great genocide.122 The riots were connected
directly to the opening up of land for redevelopment that was to drive the growth of the
city in the subsequent decade. Real estate was thus the key logic underpinning the city’s
new economy of which the film industry too was an integral part. Bollywood was the
means by which the reconstruction of the city proceeded in the aftermath of violence,
both in an aesthetic sense – the glittering “Bollywoodized” facades of malls, highrises
and the visual landscape dominated by new media – as well as more concretely, as a
major client in the new service industries. Both Century City and Cinema City then,
were concerned with the passing of old Bombay, its working classes and its pre-
Bollywood film culture premised on celluloid. But Cinema City engages with the theme
of disappearance in unexpected ways. At its heart is a governing dialectic between
precarity and circulation; the destruction of celluloid, for example, through sheer use.
It is because of the popularity and excessive love of the cinema in India that it is
paradoxically doomed to destruction.123 Consequently, Cinema City is not concerned
as much with the death of celluloid – pre-ordained even before the coming of the digital
by the very nature of cinema in India – but with the energies and forces that sustain the
great edifice of cinema, and by extension, the city. It is interested, as Bhaumik puts it,
in the people behind the cinema.

The project was also significant for the alternative perspectives it offered on cinema.
Shivkumar speaking from an architect’s perspective, for example, regarded the cinema
itself as way of perceiving the hidden life of the city, the storehouse of its dreams.124

121
Kaushik Bhaumik, Personal Interview, March 2, 2019.
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid.
124
Shivkumar, 2019.
 138

According to him, both cinema and architecture devolve on the virtuality of the image,
as a form in which collective desire congeals. The notion of the cinematic city seeks to
tap into an archive of the city that exists only in this virtual realm, but is nonetheless
concrete, informing the political and cultural contestations over space and identity.
Arjun Appadurai has referred to this elsewhere as the “cinematic soteriology” of
Bollywood.125 Appadurai shows how the figure of shelter in a city where the homeless
poor disproportionately outnumber its vaunted millionaires, takes on a particular
imaginative force as it comes to be figured in the idea of the home and hearth in Bombay
cinema. This business of dreaming as it were, is the common vocation not only of the
cinema but also of urban planners, real estate agents and politicians. It is this spectral
nexus that Cinema City attempted to unfold.

The first major production of the project was the publication dates.sites: Project
Cinema City executed by artist Shilpa Gupta. As in Swaroop’s similar gesture with
Phalke, it mapped a timeline of Bombay in the twentieth century against its premier
public institution, the cinema. The city’s modernity is correlated with cinema and its
archive of images, rumour, anecdotes, studio records, exhibition histories – urban
history as a history of the popular. The book also contains 56 images of calendars
worked on separately by close to 50 artists including graphic designers, filmmakers and
architects, who produced creative tableaux of both found images as well as digital
images deliberately worked on to create a retro effect. More than the actual traces of
twentieth century visual culture, however, the project was concerned with the ways in
which the history of the century would be received by contemporary digital subjects.126
The juxtaposition of found images with digitally produced replicas “pretending to be
copy of something that never materially existed but recognized by the collective
consciousness as old and archival”, is calculated to disrupt any auratisation of the past.
For Bhaumik, dates.sites emphatically announces the digital orientation of Cinema City
at large. Such a timeline, a thoroughly postmodern exercise of equating the big and

125
Arjun Appadurai, “The Cinematic Soteriology of Bollywood,” in Peter Van der Veer (ed.),
Handbook of Religion and the Asian City, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015.
126
This is somewhat along the lines of Jaime Baron has elsewhere referred to as the shift in focus from
the archival document to the condition of its reception. The apprehension of pastness is now no longer a
function of the vintage of archival material but rather to its ability to generate a sense of temporal
disparity. For a fuller discussion of the changing conception of history mediated through the digital
archive, see Jaime Baron, “The Archive Effect: Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception,” in
Projections, Volume 6, Issue 2 (2012), pp. 102-120.
 139

small events of history, only takes place at the moment in which informatisation makes
all data equivalent. The entire project, even as it ostensibly makes a gesture towards a
cinematic century, is signally about the ways in which the past comes to be worked on
by the digital. Dutta in her introduction to the book even invokes the Timeline
application, ordering information chronologically on sites like Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, Vimeo and Google Maps.127 History is thus increasingly an aspect of the
management of information.

dates.sites formed the prelude to exhibitions in branches of the National Gallery of

Modern Art (NGMA) in Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore, all in 2012. Featuring
individual and collaborative artworks, the exhibitions were an experiment, as Rosie
Thomas elsewhere remarks, in “how to place raw data in the public domain, while
refusing closure and also engaging audiences in playful and interactive ways.”128
Shivkumar confirms that the drive of Cinema City was as much towards producing as
collecting, given that so many of the project participants – artists, filmmakers, architects
– were practitioners.129 He describes the evolution of one such project on the city’s
production units or “sweatshops” which produces the material of cinematic fantasy,
while themselves occupying space in the cinematic city. The project drew on the
research of the KRVIA students along with visual documentation by Avijit Mukul
Kishore and Madhusree Dutta, material which was then submitted to Kaushik
Mukhopadhyay and Mamta Murthy to be incorporated into a video installation with 13
monitors, The Western Suburb. First exhibited at the National Centre for Performing
Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai in 2009, the project underwent a new iteration with every
subsequent exhibition. Shivkumar’s description paints the process as an open-ended
collaboration, constantly evolving through points of contact between different sets of
concerns. Even the unfinished, protean nature of the artwork, shifting shape across time
and space, gestures to the essentially processual drive of the archival project.
Documentation, Cinema City suggests, never simply produces objects but also
performances.

127
Dutta, Madhusree, “Introduction,” to dates.sites: Project Cinema City, New Delhi: Tulika Books,
2012.
128
Thomas, Rosie, review of Project Cinema City by Madhusree Dutta, Kaushik Bhaumik and Rohan
Shivkumar (eds.), BioScope, Vol. 8, No.1 (2017), 171-180.
129
Shivkumar, 2019.
 140

Kaushik Mukhopadhyay’s Bioscope made in collaboration with Amruta Sakalkar

similarly presented the accumulated data of Cinema City through an interactive game.
The installation harked back to one of the earliest exhibition devices for moving
pictures, designed to be mobile above all else. The bioscope, Dutta observed in the text
accompanying the work, was never preoccupied with narrative continuity, its sole
commitment being to “images that moved.” Unlike the fixed coordinates of the
designated film theatre, the bioscope Dutta avers, represented a fundamentally
improvisatory form. Mukhopadhyay and Sakalkar’s installation correspondingly
sought to draw on the nomadic and adaptable character of the device, rather than make
a virtue of its historic material qualities. With a distinctly media archaeological bent,
Bioscope excavated the eponymous early cinematic device as a fundamentally mutable
object, a veritable pre-cursor to the unfixed, nomadism of the digital. Sample Dutta’s
text:

“In worlds that knew nothing of the wonders of empire, the bioscope charmed
its viewers with its ability to transport viewers to a random combination of
scenes that came up at each of its windows. Each window in addition had the
capacity to show a number of scenes wound around the spool holding the reel
of scenes. The permutations and combinations possible with all the scenes that
a bioscope contained were thus infinite. Now all is seen, the charm of the
unknown recedes as most of the world begins to see everything there is to see
at the click of a mouse. Cyberspace is the biggest bioscope show ever… The
images don’t change but go around in an infinite circularity that mimics the
24x7 availability of imagery today.”130

Cinema City is able to contemplate digitality – is even enabled by the digital,

managerially and logistically, in terms of the sheer mammoth scale of the research
project – without lapsing into melancholic meditations on the death of celluloid. If
Century City dwelt on the materiality of film cultures displaced by Bollywood’s new
media regime, Cinema City, conversely, examines the residual materiality of the vast
infrastructural networks, of labour, production, distribution and exhibition, that loom
beneath the ether of entertainment. One of the main goals of the project was, as
Shivkumar explains, to understand how the informal industry was re-organising itself
in response to the larger changes in the city, retreating away from the prohibitively
expensive sites of prime real estate into the city’s interstices, encapsulated in the

130
Madhusree Dutta, “Bioscope: Cinema-City-Modernity: Interactive Game,” text in Madhusree Dutta,
Kaushik Bhaumik and Rohan Shivkumar (eds.), Project Cinema City, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013.
 141

northward shift of film production. It traced a period of film production in the city when
digital technologies had begun to shrink production units, evolving new structures and
practices alongside the older networks of pre-production, post-production, distribution
and exhibition.131

In Cinema City, obsolescence is deployed as critical category to understand how waste

can be generative. Whether in the cinema whose vast ecosystem ensures the constant
circulation of materials so that nothing is ever redundant, or the city’s real estate
economy where the reclamation of marshlands – the Behrampada slum which was
literally converted from slimy wetland into viable property by its Muslim settlers –
similarly reverses the redundancy of land. Dutta relates the story of Sharmaji, 70, who
works out of a makeshift shed near the Western Express Highway in Bombay.132
Gathering discarded filmprints and celluloid waste, he ransacks the waste for useful
remnants. He could earlier extract silver from black-and-white prints, but once these
dried up, he turned to processing acetate-based colour prints to produce an ingredient
used for making bangles. Once even these acetate prints became scarce, the new
polyester prints are only good to be used as strips to make shirt collars thicker. Dutta
concludes, “Death is not final, there are always ghosts.” Cinema City is interested in
these careers of cinema’s obsolescence, as it undergoes transformations even in death.
The endurance of Sharmaji becomes metonymic of the film and the cinema that sustain
him. The question of the digital transition is then centrally one of the accommodation
of change.

The question of cinema’s accommodation in a digital world is finally the subject of

Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s attempt to exhibit the films of Mani Kaul of the parallel cinema,
alongside the video works of Ranbir Kaleka. Originally commissioned for the 4th
Guangzhou Triennial, it received a further articulation in the show Tah-Satah at the
Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur. The experimentation evident in Kaul’s cinema, with its
use of multi-media structures, seemed to lend itself quite easily to Kaleka’s own
distinctly intermedial art practice combining painting, video and still photography,
elsewhere christened “moving image works”.133 But this is not a simple accession of

131
Shivkumar, 2019.
132
Sarkar and Wolf, 30.
133
Hemant Sareen (ed.), Ranbir Kaleka: Moving Image Works, Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2018.
 142

the art cinema to the institution of art – for Rajadhyaksha, Kaul and Kaleka can be
brought together precisely because the digital frees up the moving image, trapped in
celluloid.134 This is both a practical liberation, as the digital provides both cheaper
means of filmmaking as well as alternative forms of exhibition, in effect dismantling a
certain industrial organisation of film, as well as a more fundamental freeing of the
form of the cinematic image, which has in any case, always threatened to spill out of
the screen and even the theatre. The museum thus emerges as a space not so much to
contemplate what the cinema was, but what it has in a sense been prevented from being,
providing laboratory conditions to test the unknown quantity of the cinematic as
opposed to film.

Postscript

The discussion in this chapter has tried to show how in India, a legacy of the cinema is
sought to be activated rather than embalmed in the art gallery. These artistic
engagements of cinema, even as they evince a fascination with film history and its
particular materiality, do not mourn cinema. Cinema is taken up as an untapped archive
of experience, an alternative source of understanding the historical itineraries of
modernity in India. It is also seen as an index of ongoing changes in the present. At the
same time, these are cinephiliac gestures to a life lived amid cinema. The subject is not
so much the cinema but its public, steeped in its distinctive ethos. The archive of cinema
produced in the gallery is one that, to quote Kaushik Bhaumik, “will tell us about
ourselves”; an archive of cinema’s effects as it were. And finally, cinema’s recent
accession to art points to the future of a cinema that is not one. Its gallery iteration
indicates the many paths that cinema will take, but also the many paths it has always
taken, outside the confines of screen, celluloid and theatre.

I bring this account of cinema’s museal careers to a close with a few notes from the
field. During my stay in Bombay for research, I was able to make two trips that shed
light on cinema’s particular museumisation in India. The first was to the newly-opened
National Museum of Indian Cinema, which was finally inaugurated this year after long

134
Rajadhyaksha, Personal Interview, 2019.
 143

delays.135 Housed in the old Gulshan Mahal, erstwhile residence of the first lady of
Indian cinema, Devika Rani, the museum presented a microcosm not so much of film
history, but of the culmination of the memorial efforts organised around the centenary.
A newer building, of glass and chrome adjacent to the quaint Victorian gothic
bungalow, houses equipment and collections demonstrating the capabilities and
infrastructure of the contemporary industry, including new technologies like VFX. The
second visit was to a rather unusual event, a 3-day symposium showcasing the
contributions of industry technicians, affiliated with the Association of Cine and TV
Art Directors and Costume Designers (ACTADCD). The modest catalogue for the
exhibition – a simple paper hand-out – announced the need for the technician’s body,
so far acting “only as a vehicle for vigilance, and a forum to settle cases related to
payment and wages,” to provide a space for its members to forge “creative partnerships
as a community of artists.” The symposium included a display of props, costumes, and
art and production design contributed by members of the association. These were
arranged moreover in the form of “installations”, idiosyncratic assemblages that
refigured the materials as artistic rather than cinematic fantasy.

Both the National Museum and the exhibition organised by industry personnel
demonstrate the investments in displaying film history to the public. Such gestures
towards history are moreover always conducted with a view to a contemporary,
flourishing film industry, partaking of its enduring, rather than diminished aura.

135
The museum was expected to have opened by the time of the centenary in 2013.
 144

Fig. 2.1. Celluloid, in defense: Tacita Fig. 2.2. Poster, Cinema India: The
Dean, Film, 2011. Art of Bollywood
Source:
Source:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articl
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/d
es/c/cinema-india-the-art-of-
ean-film-t14273
bollywood/

Fig. 2.3.From kabaadi to auction

house: Osian’s The Greatest Show on
Earth, auction, 2014.
Source:
https://www.osianama.com/new-
auctions
 145

Fig. 2.4. Street Art: Photography by Husain. Chennai, 1980s.

Source: https://scroll.in/magazine/887087/mf-husains-photographs-of-film-hoardings-
will-take-you-back-to-chennai-of-1980s

Fig. 2.6. Bhupen Khakhar collaboration with Vaman Rao Khaire, Century City, 2001.
https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/geeta-kapur-and-vivan-sundaram-
archive-bombaymumbai-19922001/object/amitabh-wounded-exhibition-view
 146

Fig. 2.7. Pandal, exhibition view, Century City, 2001.

Source: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/geeta-kapur-and-vivan-
sundaram-archive-bombaymumbai-19922001/object/pandal-exhibition-view

Fig. 2.8. Behind the Scenes: Masterji series, Dayanita Singh.

Source: https://www.pressreader.com/

Fig. 2.9. Masterji, exhibition view.

Source: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/geeta-kapur-and-vivan-
sundaram-archive-bombaymumbai-19922001/object/photographs-by-dayanita-singh-
exhibition-view
 147

Fig. 2.10. Phantom Lady or Kismet: The Artist as Fiction

Source: http://www.pushpamala.com/projects/phantom-lady-or-kismet-1996-1998/

Fig. 2.11. (Cyber) Café Society Shilpa Gupta, sentiment.express, installation view,
2001.
https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/geeta-kapur-and-vivan-sundaram-
archive-bombaymumbai-19922001/sort/title-asc/page/4/object/bombaymumbai-1992-
2001-preparation-43797
 148

Fig. 2.12. End of an Era? The art of film hoarding at the millennium.

Fig. 2. 13. “Pyaar Hua Iqrar Hua”: Cinema as Painting

Source: Swaraj Art Archive
 149

Fig. 2. 14. Back to the Frame: indiancine.ma

Source: https://indiancine.ma/

Fig. 2.15. Archive Affect: Rangbhoomi, 2013.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWARjKpelW4
 150

Fig. 2.16. Project Cinema City. Calendars Project.

Source: https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/Hq8EDvfYJMaHIiZNMDMuCK/Extract--
Project-Cinema-City.html

Fig. 2.17. Project Cinema City. Pipeline Network.

Source: https://caravanmagazine.in/reviews-and-essays/dream-factory

Fig. 2.18. Project Cinema City. Table of Miscellany.

Source: http://projectcinemacity.com/artwork/collaborative/
 151

Fig. 2.19. Project Cinema City. Chor Bazaar.

Source: http://projectcinemacity.com/research/neighbourhood/

Fig. 2.20. Project Cinema City. 14 Stations, Atul Dodiya.

Source: http://projectcinemacity.com/artwork/individual/
 152

Fig. 2.21. Film history at the Gulshan Mahal: National Museum of Indian Cinema.
Source: https://www.urbannewsdigest.in/2014/03/indias-gets-first-film-museum-in-
mumbai/

Fig. 2.22. Dhadaam Dhadaam: Anushka

Sharma in Bombay Velvet (2015), and
Costumes at the 3-day symposium
organised by the ACTADCD (2019).
 153

Chapter 3: Cinema on Cinema

In the previous chapters, I have indicated a renewed currency of film history, sparked
variously by the nostalgic exercise occasioned by the post-celluloid formation of
Bollywood; the centenary discourse around the importance of film preservation and
an accompanying excavation of the lost figures of early cinema; and finally, by the
ubiquity of digital technologies which make it possible to access sprawling archives
of film material spread across official, private and informal channels. Film history is
not only taken up but is reworked and reconfigured into new texts, as with the lip-
sync video, the nostalgia listicle, the art exhibition and installation, and documentary
film. In this chapter, I look at a third site of the reactivation of cinema’s past in the
productions of mainstream Bollywood. I argue that such productions are in dialogue
with the film historical discourse outlined above, as well as indexing ongoing changes
in the contemporary industry. I look at two separate sets of films. The first, including
Barfi! (dir. Anurag Basu, 2012), Jagga Jasoos (dir. Anurag Basu, 2017), Rangoon
(dir. Vishal Bharadwaj, 2017), and Bombay Velvet (dir. Anurag Kashyap, 2015),
respond to a now wide recognition of cinema and popular culture as archives of
alternative histories. Here cinema is considered to provide, following Paula Amad, a
counter-archive to grand historical narratives, being uniquely able to register the
small, hidden and tucked away details. It also indexes currents of desire, aspiration
and anxieties suppressed in officially sanctioned narratives of history. In the second
set of films, Andhadhun (dir. Sriram Raghavan, 2018), Dum Laga Ke Haisha (dir.
Sharat Katariya, 2015), and Meri Pyari Bindu (dir. Akshay Roy, 2017), I look at
operations of cinephilia and nostalgia in films that are increasingly being heralded as
the “New Bollywood.”1 If the first group of films engage cinema as counter-archive, I

1
The phrase has been used by Sangita Gopal to describe a phase of production following the changes
in the industry since the nineties accompanying economic liberalisation. This is reflected in the
glossier, more urbane products of the millennial industry as in the films of Karan Johar with their
lavish budgets and fantastic spectacle of consumption. Reading these films for what they reveal of the
family dynamics in Hindi film, she argues that the films break with an older mode of signifying the
family in conjunction with the law. The family now acts as “facilitators of desire.” The New
Bollywood thus bears a nostalgic relationship with the older film melodrama which comes to denote a
historical style. But Gopal’s use of the term projects back the term “Bollywood” itself to a period
before liberalisation. But Bollywood, as Madhava Prasad and Ashish Rajadhyaksha note, is too
intrinsically tied to the moment of globalisation, with all that came before it better designated as the
Hindi or Bombay film industry. Even as I use Gopal’s term, I refer to a phase of production in the
noughties that seem to break with melodrama altogether, including the traditional emphasis on song-
and-dance. This version of the New Bollywood, as it is being hailed in the media, renders even the
family romances refigured for the millennium by Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra quaint. This version
 154

argue that this second set responds to a counter-archive of the cinema, referring to the
memorialisation of cinema online, proceeding through the collective efforts of fans,
film enthusiasts and even those encountering old film materials for the first time.
These films respond to the place of cinema in people’s lives, its imbrication in a
memorial, autobiographical mode.

All of this plays out against a transformation and the expansion of the media
landscape in which film is no longer “a cultural dominant.”2 But despite a landscape
of change and a corresponding nostalgia for the past, there is an investment in the
resilience of cinema and its ability to adapt. This then, is not so much a melancholic
glance back, but in equal parts, a strategic and ruminative engagement with the
cinema’s past anchored in the present of the industry. I proceed to map the
contemporary against both an older conception of film form and narrative as these
have been taken up in various studies, and also against the changes I have signposted
above – the perception of cinema’s historicity, and the availability of archives of
nostalgia and cinephilia – as marking the present moment of explosion of global
media.

Crisis Historiographies

Film Hi Film, which I have discussed in the introduction of this dissertation, was
released, as Sudhir Mahadevan notes, in the decade of the eighties which witnessed
the arrival of video and satellite television. This was accompanied by a recession of
the public culture of film, as middle class audiences withdrew from the raucous single
screen theatre into the comfort of home viewing while working class audiences

of the New Bollywood derives from budget filmmaking facilitated by the digital which has in a sense
allowed independent filmmaking or what has traditionally constituted the parallel cinema to go
mainstream. For Gopal’s argument refer to, Sangita Gopal, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New
Bollywood Cinema, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. For debates on the terminology of
Bollywood refer to, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The "Bollywoodisation" of the Indian Cinema: Cultural
Nationalism in a Global Arena’, in Preben Karsholm (ed.), City Flicks: Cinema, Urban Worlds and
Modernities in India and Beyond. International Development Studies, Roskilde University Occasional
Paper # 22, 2002; M. Madhava Prasad, “This thing called Bollywood,” in Seminar #525 “Unsettling
Cinema” (May 2003). For a report on the (new) New Bollywood refer to, S.J., “Realism, Indian
cinema’s parallel success story,” in The Economist, May 29, 2017.
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/05/29/realism-indian-cinemas-parallel-success-story
2
Steven Shaviro, “Introduction,” to Post-Cinematic Affect, Winchester UK, Washington USA: O-
Books, 2010.
 155

became more financially precarious.3 The evacuation of a genteel audience was

further underwritten by the institution of a division between so-called “massy” and
“classy” film aesthetics that persists to this day. The association at this time of the
popular cinema with the rape-revenge and action potboilers that increasingly formed
the staple fare contributed to an all-round denigration of cinema as a degraded and
disgraced medium. The historical reflection of Film Hi Film is thus filtered through
and occasioned by a moment of the perceived crisis of the contemporary industry.4 In
this regard, the particular response to such a crisis as enshrined in Film Hi Film is of
interest. The turn to cinema’s past at a time of intermedia rivalry is meant to yield a
raison d’être for cinema in the age of TV and video.5 What is thus foregrounded is a
romance of the movies from early times until the present that indicates an unabated
enthusiasm for the cinema as personified by Gyan Chand. The latter’s resilience (as
compared to Nair’s mortality in Celluloid Man) invokes a cinephilia that is not
married in any intrinsic way to film, but to cinema as spectacle and imaginary. The
filmmaker’s entrepreneurial, as opposed to the archivist’s more disinterested approach
to film history ensures its viability, by opening it to endless reuse. Film’s archive is
quite literally made productive. Such reuse in altered technological and cultural
circumstances simultaneously ensures that film itself remains open to redefinition.

The example of Film Hi Film remains particularly instructive for our own times,
when the Bombay film industry seems to be in the throes of a crisis not unlike that
plaguing the industry of the eighties. A round-up of the decade given at the
commencement of the nineties listing its major developments finds almost exact
parallels in contemporary accounts of the state of the industry.6 The threat of video

3
Madhushree Dutta, “Popular cinema and public culture in Bombay,” Seminar #657, (May 2014),
http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html.
4
Rick Altman introduced the term crisis historiography to describe the radical opening of a
technology’s fixed meanings during periods of existential doubt. According to Altman, the identity of a
technology is inherently adaptable adjusting to social and historical contexts of reception. “Crisis” thus
refers not to impending obsolescence but to moments of redefinition. Altman qt. in John Belton, “If
film is dead, what is cinema?” in Screen, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter 2014), pp.460-470. 463.
5
Paul Young has elsewhere discussed the response of the American cinema to its new media rivals as
thematised in the particular category of the media fantasy film. Paul Young, Cinema Dreams its
Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006).
6
Madhu Jain intimated the crisis besieging the industry through the metaphor of an ocean liner sailing
through choppy waters. She notes how the decade began on a hopeful note, with Bachchan’s stardom at
its peak and a slew of blockbusters in the wings. Things seemed to take a sudden turn for the worse
with a lot of big films failing, the aging Bachchan’s charm wearing thin, and the formulaic lost-and-
found family socials that had delivered such massive hits for zeitgeist directors like Manmohan Desai
 156

and television has given way to the internet.7 In what follows, I argue that Film Hi
Film provides the template for a response to the industrial and technological crisis of
film, in an approach that actively engages cinema’s past as well as cinema’s
imbrication with the past.

Hindi Popular Cinema and the Eternal Return of the Past

The return of the past is nothing new in the popular Indian cinema. The generic
structure of the Hindi film, commonly referred to in a vernacular usage as the

in the previous decade suddenly fell out of favour. Music similarly suffered with melody disappearing
from the Hindi film song, while the influx of Hollywood thrillers and B-movies on the video market
led to copy-cat remakes. As cinema was increasingly hit by video piracy and by competition from
television, the decade descended into seediness with the rape-revenge action dramas that have since
become iconic of the decade taking over. Kamalhassan is dubbed the actor of the decade indicating the
rise to cultural prominence of the Tamil film industry. A non-heroic age, Jain concluded, looked
towards an uncertain future with gritty, real action cinema apparently showing the way. Madhu Jain,
“Hegemony of films is challenged, but show goes on,” India Today, January 15, 1990,
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/19900115-hegemony-of-films-is-challenged-
but-show-goes-on-812261-1990-01-15.
7
The perception of a crisis in Bollywood in the second decade of the millennium has been growing
apace beginning from about 2015, with a number of high profile flops and the entry of streaming
services and foreign content threatening the hegemony of Bollywood as an industrial and cultural
force. Successive bad years in 2016 and 2017 saw major studios like Disney India and Balaji Motion
Pictures Ltd. cut back production or shut shop altogether. The single-screen continued its steady
decline while the number of multiplexes did not grow at a commensurate rate. The biggest hits in
recent years have been non-Hindi language films as with S. S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali franchise, or the
notable success of The Jungle Book (2016) a Hollywood film which outperformed all other Bollywood
productions that year. The diagnoses of the industry’s ills include observations similar to those
analysing the eighties industrial formation, including the pernicious effects of a decadent star system,
the stagnation of the “formula,” the exposure to foreign content leading to a demand for different
genres and styles of film, the fragmentation of audiences and the rise of a consumerist middle class
evincing different patterns of media use, and finally, continuing film piracy. At the end of 2018, the
crisis of a certain order of Bollywood seemed to be encapsulated in the flailing careers of the Khan
triumvirate of male superstars Salman, Aamir, and Shah Rukh, all of whose films tanked at the box
office The superstar suddenly appears as a figure out of joint, his very scale standing in for a certain
grandiosity of the cinema which must now be adapted to the proliferation of screens. Actors who are
increasingly touted as the next generation of (actor-)stars – Rajkummar Rao, Vicky Kaushal,
Ayushmann Khurrana – all share a certain chameleon-like quality, an ability to disappear into roles that
is consonant with the inconspicuous presence of the screen in everyday life. These are truly digital
heroes who, unlike the distinctiveness of the star, are marked by a certain anonymity, embodying the
the participatory dreams of a faceless digital digital public. For more on the crisis in Bollywood follow,
Suprateek Chatterjee, “From piracy to an out-dated star system, why Bollywood is in crisis,” The
National, January 5, 2017, https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/from-piracy-to-an-out-dated-star-
system-why-bollywood-is-in-crisis-1.52286; A. Krishna, “An Insider’s View: Why is Bollywood
Going Bust?” The Quint, August 31, 2016, https://www.thequint.com/entertainment/bollywood-
studios-economy-disney-india-utv-motion-pictures-balaji-motion-pictures-dharma-shut-down; Lata
Jha, “Is Bollywood Losing its Small Town Audience?” LiveMint, May 17, 2018,
https://www.livemint.com/Consumer/zMMF1AZM2aUBgwqRcW2tgL/Is-Bollywood-losing-its-
smalltown-audience.html; Urvi Malvania, “2017: Bollywood’s Worst Year Yet?” Rediff, November 28,
2017, https://www.rediff.com/movies/report/2017-bollywoods-worst-year/20171128.htm; “Does 2018
mark the end of the reign of the Khans in Bollywood?” The Print, December 23, 2018,
https://theprint.in/talk-point/does-2018-mark-the-end-of-the-reign-of-khans-in-bollywood/167760/.
 157

“formula,” entails that individual films all operate within the spectrum of expectations
encompassed by a popular filmi form.8 The modular organization of the commercial
Hindi cinema, where films are fashioned from familiar detachable parts recombined
in new formulations, has been the subject of a number of studies.9 M. Madhava
Prasad’s influential Marxist analysis of the heterogeneous mode of manufacture in
Hindi film, reads formal aspects of the film text as a reflection of the aggregative
production practices in the film industry. This is the manner in which the Bombay
film industry marks its difference from Hollywood with its serial organisation of
production. Unlike the latter, where according to Prasad, a basic raw material – the
story – is processed to generate the final product – the film – in Hindi cinema, the
story of an individual film exists alongside a relatively stable repertoire of song,
dialogue and dance which are crafted by separate concerns. In a similar vein, Lalitha
Gopalan in an influential study of the apparently non-linear narrative form of the
Hindi cinema, argues that it combines the forward thrust of teleological classical
narrative with interruptions – songs and dance sequences, the interval, and censorship
– that are a function of local conditions of production and reception that shape the
adoption of genre in national cinemas that stand apart from Hollywood.10 Ravi
Vasudevan reads this back to a foundational opposition between realism and
melodrama in the critical discourse on popular film form.11 Dating from the 1940s-
50s, this has been the apprehension of an inferiority of the Hindi film melodrama due
to its failure to approximate classical Hollywood continuity codes and
psychologically driven narrative progression. Vasudevan, through a close reading of
the 1950s social film (a genre especially concerned with extolling the experience of
modern life), instead argues that it is not the absence of Hollywood filmic

8
This brings it in line with Stephen Neale’s conception of genre as process where “each new genre
film constitutes an addition to an existing generic corpus and involves a selection from the repertoire of
generic elements available at any one point in time.” Genre is thus mapped at the intersection of
habituation, the mobilisation of memory and the production of the new. See, Steve Neale, “Questions
of Genre,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, (Malden, Mass and
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 165.
9
For Prasad’s argument, refer to, M. Madhava Prasad, “The Economics of Ideology: Popular Film
Form and Mode of Production,” in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. in 42-46.
10
Lalitha Gopalan, “Introduction: ‘Hum Aapke Hai Kaun?’ Cinephilia and Indian Films.” In Cinema
of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2002, 1-24. pp. 16.
11
Ravi Vasudevan, “Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular
Film Form,” in The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema, US:
Pallgrave Macmillan, 2010.
 158

conventions, but their “unsystematic” assimilation alongside alternative modes of

visuality including iconic and tableau framing.12 He connects this to the larger
negotiation of postcolonial modernity, and the conflicting drives towards realms of
social responsibility and individual desire. This results in a film form that “may be
seen to set up a relay of appropriated and adapted narrative modes and spectatorial
dispositions: as organizing premise, as in the induction of codes of continuity and
character subjectivity; but also attraction, in the sense that Tom Gunning has used the
term, where narrative is less significant than an amalgam of views, sensations and
performances.”13

The structuring dialect of difference and repetition that gives the Hindi film its
essential form has been remarked on separately by Rosie Thomas and Arjun
Appadurai. Thomas, drawing on Neale, observes that even as common Hollywood
genre classifications do not apply to the Hindi cinema, the notion of genre understood
more broadly as the governing principle organising the production of films along the
lines of given expectations and conventions, does seem to be largely operative.14 She
quotes filmmaker Manmohan Desai on the subject who claims audiences both want to
see the same thing and at the same time, something different.15 Desai’s remarks draw
attention to the elusiveness of the formula which, even as it determines the contours
of the cinematic experience and demands adherence, is ultimately unknowable.
Appadurai, putting a Deleuzian spin on the subject, makes a similar observation with
regard to the peculiar practice of repeat viewing associated with commercial
blockbusters in the Hindi cinema. He writes about the manner in which the success of
Hindi films devolves on their ability to create an experience of déjà vu on the very
first viewing. This is the unique pleasure of “seeing films in their first viewing as if
for the second time” that Appadurai characterises as a Nietzschean eternal return.16
Elsewhere, Amit Rai puts this slightly differently as Bollywood’s repertoire of
ephemeral pleasures that exceed the narrative. Like Appadurai, Rai emphasises the
ability of the Hindi film to incorporate unpredictability and contingency within the

12
Vasudevan, 83.
13
Ibid, 87.
14
Rosie Thomas, “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity,” Screen 26, Issue 3-4 (May-August,
1985): 120.
15
Ibid.
16
Arjun Appadurai, “The Ready-made Pleasures of Déjà vu – Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films,”
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6, Issue 1, (2019): 140-152.
 159

bounds of a closed narrative structure.17 In other words, the Hindi cinema, accused of
always producing the same story, actually produces the same story with a difference.
It is to this ability of the hit film to perpetually reconfigure a sensation of novelty that
encourages repeat viewings.18 But such a sense of the new can only be generated out
of and against an existing archive of film songs and imagery that provide the
particular pleasure of “revisitation, review, recall, and repeat.”19 The creation of a hit
film therefore is primarily a matter of the modulation or activation of the formula
(stars, singers, song sequences, dialogues) understood to be a continuous archive
spread across films.

Appadurai makes his argument with respect to two millennial blockbusters, Dilwale
Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (dir. Aditya Chopra, 1995) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham
(dir. Karan Johar, 2001), which are today recognised as heralding the new globalised
form of the industry designated as Bollywood. The citation of the filmic past, even as
it is an aspect of the conventionalised form of the Hindi film, took on a particular
accent during this change in industrial order. In the phenomenon of Bollywood Retro,
Ashish Rajadhyaksha sees an “insistent reference to an earlier epoch,” as imbricated
in a battle for cultural legitimacy that spans the history of the Hindi cinema. If
Bollywood represented the emergence of the popular Bombay cinema as the officially
recognised (through the granting of industrial status) repository of “Indian values” in
a transnational world, the historical mandate for such an embodiment of the “national
culture” was sought in a so-called golden age of the Hindi cinema located between
Kismet (1943) and Deewar (1975). In other words, the selective references to cinema

17
Amit S. Rai, “On Purple Pleasures: Digitally Assembling Bollywood,” in South Asian Technospaces,
eds. Radhika Gajjala & Venkataraman Gajjala, (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 90.
18
This is reflected, for example, in accounts of screenings of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge at
Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theatre, where the film has been running continuously since its release in
1995. One writer in 2017 describes the unabated enthusiasm of the film’s audience, which continues to
gasp in suspense and yell “Ja Simran Jaaaa” in encouragement at the film’s thrilling climax Another
friend similarly recounts a group of men – who had evidently watched the film before as they knew the
dialogues verbatim – rising from their seats during a scene towards the end of the film where the stern
father played by Amrish Puri is about to slap Shah Rukh Khan’s aspiring suitor. The hall resounded
with their cries of “AEEE, MAARNE KA NAHI!” (Hey, don’t you dare hit him!) before they settled
down again, giggling with excitement. Cara Shrivastava, “The Film That Lived Forever – Watching
DDLJ At Maratha Mandir,” Homegrown, November 11, 2017,
https://homegrown.co.in/article/801932/the-film-that-lived-forever-ddlj-completes-22-years-at-
maratha-mandir.
19
Appadurai, Op. cit., 147.
 160

history – crucially disavowing the “rowdy” decades of the 1970s and 1980s20 – are
part of an attempt to retrospectively create a classical lineage in line with the identity
of the contemporary industry. Usha Iyer, writing about the intertextuality evinced in
three famous song-and-dance sequences from the 2000s – “Woh Ladki Hai Kahan”
from Dil Chahta Hai (dir. Farhan Akhtar, 2001), “Dhoom Tana” from Om Shanti Om
(dir. Farah Khan, 2007), and “Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte” from Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
(dir. Aditya Chopra, 2008) – draws further attention to the new self-reflexivity of the
uses of the past in Bollywood playing out in various combinations of pastiche and
parody. The latter stand for separate strategies where pastiche refers to a largely
celebratory homage to a glorious past tradition through re-enactment, while parody
highlights the differences from the past through hyperbole and exaggeration.21
According to Iyer, the song sequences in question mobilise a cinematic past in order
to stage Bollywood’s difference, both vis-à-vis an international standard set by
Hollywood, as well as relative to the Hindi cinema’s own past. Whereas the first
position corresponds to a textualisation of Bollywood’s vernacular pleasures as
against Hollywood’s international film style – the valorisation of kitsch and camp that
constitutes the Bollywood style in the global imagination – the second position is that
of the newly corporatised industry asserting its superiority over the pre-liberalisation
formation of the Bombay cinema. If as Appadurai suggests, the Hindi film has always
embodied India’s postcolonial fate to repeat modernity with a difference, Iyer shows
how this continues into the era of globalisation, with Bollywood emerging as the new
iteration of this project. The granting of industrial status and the projection of
Bollywood as soft power provoke a particular reflection on Hindi cinema’s past that
takes a long view of its historical implication in the developmentalist project of the
nation-state.

Ranjani Mazumdar tracks the invocation of retro in three films Om Shanti Om, Once
Upon a Time in Mumbai (dir. Milan Luthria, 2010), and Guru (dir. Mani Ratnam,
2007), as a reaction to the palpable global modernity evident in the ubiquitous cell
phone, shifts in urban planning and new infrastructure characterising the new Indian

20
Usha Iyer, “Looking for the Past in Pastiche: Intertextuality in Bollywood Song-and-Dance
sequences,” in Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films, eds. Pauline Manley, Mark
Evans, (London: Equinox, 2016), 223-224.
21
Ibid, 208.
 161

metropolis.22 All three interrogate Bombay/Mumbai’s millennial transformations

through an examination of its cinematic past. Mazumdar, undertaking a study of the
role of production design in the films, detects a historical imagination that is tied up
with the objects and textures of popular culture. They reflect a notion of the popular
cinema as having not only represented the history of the city/country but as actively
constitutive of it. The archive of Bombay cinema is thus a form of retro – comprising
fashion, architecture, design, technology – source of Bombay’s history. Here
Mazumdar marshals the conceptualisation of retro offered by Elizabeth Guffey as a
“non-historical way of knowing the past,”23 through a focus on the everyday. Retro as
a retrospective modality is distinguished by its preoccupation with “historical
footnotes,” bringing these into the purview of mainstream culture.24 Such a relation of
retro to the everyday brings it in line with Amad’s argument, cited at the beginning, of
the counter-archival drive of cinema. This is cinema’s ability to produce a record of
that which goes unregistered in the official archive, “the unclassifiable, but
nonetheless highly valued, fragments of private rather than public life, ordinary rather
than extraordinary events, and the unceremonious rather than epic history.”25
Cinema’s historiographical significance issues precisely from such an affinity with
the everyday, and that underwrites its particular relation to modernity which, to quote
Amad, was “often experienced at the level of banal, daily events as opposed to the
domain of official and formal culture.”26

Trond Lundemo further notes the manner in which cinema was pressed into recording
a world that it was – as the techno-apparatus of a new global order – causing to
disappear. So in a way, the cinema recorded its own effects. Lundemo, writing
specifically in relation to Albert Kahn’s famous film-archival project, the Archives de
la Planete and its documentation of local cultures, draws attention to the manner in
which a particular rhythm of life could paradoxically only be made visible by the
same technological means responsible for its displacement. Cinema as part of an

22
Ranjani Mazumdar, “Retro in Contemporary Bombay Cinema,” in The Routledge Companion to
Global Popular Culture, ed. Toby Miller, (New York: Routledge, 2014), 366-376.
23
Guffey quoted in Mazumdar, Op. cit.
24
Elizabeth Guffey, “Introduction,” to Retro: The Culture of Revival, (London: Reaktion Books, 2006),
20.
25
Paula Amad, “Introduction,” in Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday and Albert Kahn’s Archives de
la Planète, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 4.
26
Ibid, 14.
 162

arsenal of new technologies of communication and representation was instrumental in

forging the new global order that would incorporate the local as nodal points in a
world system. This is similar to what Mahadevan, writing in a different context,
observes with regard to the construction of a quaint “pre-Kodak” temporality that is
nonetheless enabled by the Kodak camera.27 To wit, it is a perception of the past that
is engendered only through a contrast with the present. If cinema marked a particular
fin-de-siècle moment of globalisation and mediatisation, Mazumdar’s reading of
contemporary Bombay cinema recognises the cell phone as marking a new millennial
horizon of the same processes in an age of finance capital. Now, it is the cinema
which comes into view archivally as a nostalgic formation of the past.

Om Shanti Om in particular is symptomatic of Bollywood’s memorialisation of the

commercial cinema tradition it inherits. The film transforms the anxieties around
Bollywood’s difference into a celebration of its local hegemony by drawing on its
illustrious history of having dominated the South Asian market for half a century.28
The film famously clashed with Sony Pictures’ ambitious entry into the Indian market
with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya. The failure of Bhansali’s film, designed to
mark a new cross-cultural transaction between Hollywood and Bollywood, and the
resounding success of Om Shanti Om on the other hand, seemed to indicate to
observers the unrelenting grasp of Bollywood on the cultural imagination of the
country. Om Shanti Om, as a response to Hollywood’s manoeuvres to obtain a share
of the “impenetrable South Asian market,” exemplified Bollywood’s approach to its
media rivals, understood not merely in technical terms as a competition between
celluloid and digital, but also in cultural terms as a clash with the western media
formation of Hollywood.29 As such, Om Shanti Om speaks not so much to concerns
about the impending obsolescence of celluloid but rather to Bollywood’s negotiation
of a transnational media sphere. Indeed, Bollywood as Ashish Rajadhyaksha points
out, marks precisely a post-celluloid formation, a culture industry where film itself is
only one among a repertoire of commodities, musical styles and fashions peddled
under the name. This is exemplified in a prominent scene in the film where a hoarding
27
Sudhir Mahadevan, “The Emergence of Topicality: Snapshot Cultures and Newspaper
Photojournalism,” in A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of Indian Cinema, (New York: State
University of New York Press, 2011), 112.
28
“The Winner between Saawariya and Om Shanti Om is… Bollywood,” UCLA Centre for Chinese
Studies, November 30, 2007, https://www.international.ucla.edu/ccs/article/83001.
29
Ibid.
 163

which had in the seventies carried a poster for the fictional film-within-the-film
Dreamy Girl, becomes in the noughties a receptacle for an advertisement of the Tag
Heuer brand of watches, endorsed by the film’s hero Shah Rukh Khan offscreen as
well. Khan is pictured against this hoarding first as the bumbling junior artiste of the
seventies, Om Prakash Makhija, who carries on fictional conversations with his
“dreamy girl” Shanti Priya, her face monumentalised on the gigantic canvas,
announcing her superstardom. He is pictured a second time, in his re-incarnated form
as the superstar Om Kapoor “OK”, indifferent to his own face blown up in the
background as he catches up with his friend from (quite literally) another life time.
The almost imperceptible detail in mise-en-scene gestures to the wide-ranging shifts
that have occurred in the transition between two eras of the Bombay industry.
Stardom in the seventies is firmly attached to the iconic space of the cinema even as it
figures in a landscape of commodities from Huntley and Palmers’ biscuits to Exide
batteries. In 2007, however, the sign of success is reconfigured to reflect the expanded
sphere of operation of celebrity, built as much through brand and luxury
endorsements as through screen appearances. The death of Shanti Priya, triggered
through an explosion of a canister of film, marks the cinema as already dead by the
time of Om Shanti Om’s present.

At the same time, its rival Saawariya could also be read for a slightly different
deployment of the cinematic past. Inaugurating what has since become a well-
acknowledged tendency to cast the children of established stars, the film was heavily
publicised as the debut vehicle of industry scions Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor.
The character played by the former is even named Ranbir Raj for the actor’s
legendary grandfather, and is shown to work at a bar named RK – the name of the
family-owned studios – the façade of which sports a bedazzling neon display of these
initials. Much of the action in the film takes place in a strange nether landscape,
whose heavy artifice recalls the elaborate painted backdrops of early cinema à la
Baburao Painter. Scenes of the central couple’s courtship visually allude to the
famous iconography of Raj Kapoor romancing Nargis under an umbrella in the song
“Pyaar Hua Iqrar Hua” from Shree 420 (dir. Raj Kapoor, 1955). And if Om Shanti
Om represented a take on a particular form of the Indian masala potboiler, Saawariya
as Anustup Basu observes, recodes the “lost genre” of the Muslim social from “Hindi
 164

Cinema 1” in the style of “Bollywood 2”.30 Thus, even as it does not partake of an
overt retro style in the manner of Om Shanti Om, Saawariya seems to mount a
symmetrical challenge to the formers’ avowed intention to pay homage to the
industry. It does this in particular through the device of the star child, and the insistent
claims to the filmi lineage of the two lead actors, who are as such, called upon to
embody the history of the industry.31 In Saawariya perhaps even more than Om
Shanti Om, the subtle but unmistakable address to the past of Indian cinema is of
particular consequence when one considers the future of foreign investment it was
meant to herald.32 Saawariya’s quotations of the cinematic past are thus framed by the
absences that Rajadhyaksha sees as marking the globalised formation of Bollywood
more generally. This includes the alienation of the domestic film industry from the
Bollywood mania unfolding globally, the recession of the Indian state from its
cultural supervisory role vis-à-vis the Indian cinema, and the evacuation of films
themselves from a notion of Bollywood glitz that has more to do with an economy of
consumption.33 Where Om Shanti Om worked through activating the archive of the
cultural insider, Saawariya unsuccessfully sought to win over converts to the
unfamiliar aesthetics of the Broadway musical through genuflection to an exalted –
Raj Kapoor, Baburao Painter, V Shantaram34 – if obscure legacy of the cinema.35 In

30
Anustup Basu, “Deleuze, Hindi Film 1, Bollywood 2,” in paper presented at Many Lives of Indian
Cinema Conference, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, 2014,
https://archive.org/details/sarai_the_many_lives_of_indian_cinema_conference_anustup_basu.
31 Elsewhere Diana Taylor draws an analogy between the transmission of cultural memory through
performance and the transference of biological information through DNA. Speaking in the context of
the political performance of the mothers and grandmothers of the Cinco de Mayo, Taylor describes the
mutual mobilisation of the different paradigms of the scientific and performatic in drawing attention to
a public trauma. The archive of genetic inheritance, the DNA, was sought to be activated through the
embodied representational practices of the relatives of the dead. Taylor links this to the relationship
between the archive and the repertoire, the former largely stable and the latter performative, to
emphasise the mutual implication of the two. Reading Saawariya in the light of Taylor’s model of
cultural memory, one can detect the operation of similar logic in the figure of the star child. Both
debutantes in Saawariya quite literally embody links to the industry’s past. The connection is
established however through a performative staging of kinship, both through the incessant discourse
generated around the film, as well as the staging of sequences that recall moments from the
filmographies of their illustrious forbears. The film’s claims against Om Shanti Om arise in this
strategic positioning of Ranbir and Sonam Kapoor as the latest embodiment of lineal stardom. Diana
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003).
32
“The Winner between Saawariya and Om Shanti Om is… Bollywood.”
33
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency,
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009), 55.
34
The comparison to Shantaram is found in Baradwaj Rangan, “Review: Om Shanti Om/Saawariya,”
Bardwaj Rangan, November 10, 2007, https://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/review-om-
shanti-om-saawariya/.
35
Farah Khan has mentioned in interviews that the inspiration to make Om Shanti Om stemmed from
her experience working on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Bombay Dreams. The conception of the
 165

both cases however, a search for fresh narratives and the desire to assert its difference
at both the global (against Hollywood) and local (against the informal, pre-
liberalisation domestic industry) level has provoked self-conscious comparisons with
the past.36

Om Shanti Om and Saawariya by all accounts, then, mark a moment of industrial self-
reflexivity in a period of the ascendancy of Bollywood.37 Bhaskar Sarkar regards such
meta-industry narratives as in Om Shanti Om, as one of the means by which the
ubiquity of Bollywood as a “modern global cultural complex” was rendered
palpable.38 In other words, Bollywood realised a cultural imagination consonant with
a period of globalisation in which the Hindi commercial cinema – even if understood
in an (ontologically) expanded and (historically) selective sense – continued to
function as pop cultural touchstone. Bollywood mediated postmodernity as the Hindi
cinema before it had encapsulated the experience of modernity. Towards the close of
the second decade of the millennium, it would appear that it is this very purchase on
experience, historically held by this cinema through the twentieth century, that is
endangered by the emergence of new technologies and their competing cultural
forms.

A succession of high profile flops and successive bad years in 2016 and 2017 led to
various postmortem being offered on the industrial recession. Suprateek Chatterjee

Indian film world in that foreign production – the idea that a slum dog could become a film star –
according to Khan precisely betrayed a lack of understanding and initiation into an Indian tradition of
cinema. Saawariya on the other hand with its baroque aesthetics and decidedly theatrical melodrama
seems to cleave to an imagination of Bollywood and (a style of musical) as found in a Hollywood
production like Moulin Rouge! (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2001). Even its references to Indian cinema’s
theatrical past are arcane compared to the more recent celluloid memories mobilised by Khan’s film.
Anupama Chopra, “10 Years of Om Shanti Om with Farah Khan,” Film Companion, 2017, video,
19:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=Xz_ewc7DVao.
36
Bhaskar Sarkar, “Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht after Om Shanti Om,” in Figurations in Indian
Film, eds. Meheli Sen and Anustup Basu, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 209.
37
That these years marked a threshold of sorts is clearly evident even in the thinking of the industry.
Farah Khan in an interview recorded to mark ten years of the release of Om Shanti Om, opined that “it
was probably the last time the industry was a big happy family.” Referring to the production of the big
musical number “Deewangi Deewangi” that saw an array of 31 stars, Khan notes that it would be
impossible today to assemble such a cast of cameos: “When I see that song, and I feel ke, yaar yeh toh
phir kabhi nahi honga! Date-on ke liye managers hi pagal kar denge! There were no managers that
time. That helped” Khan’s comments date a film that was ironically a nostalgia piece itself.
Throughout the interview in fact, there is the sense of an industry ending even before it could take off.
The song, then, with its exposition of an industry peak, becomes a record of a lost future. Anupama
Chopra, “10 Years of Om Shanti Om with Farah Khan.”
38
Sarkar, Op. cit., 2013.
 166

writing on the subject, observed that the very identity of the mainstream industry, its
masala character, was undergoing a transformation. He enumerated the economic
factors plaguing the film business among which were its status as the most under-
screened major territory in the world, average incomes which had not kept apace with
rising ticket prices, declining theatre admissions, the withdrawal of major studios
from the movie business and the disastrous impact of the Indian Government’s policy
of demonetization on the cash-dependent industry.39 Chatterjee went on to note the
competition from streaming services like Netflix and Amazon as well as video
platforms like YouTube which displaced cinema’s position as “the most common
mode of entertainment.”40 In addition, the mainstream film industries of the South
registered great advances during the same period. Such changes were moreover
discernible in the films themselves which reflected the fragmentation of the cinematic
landscape attendant on the emergence of the multiplex and the exposure to foreign as
well as regional content. This includes the drive towards a realist aesthetics, the
emergence of small town narratives as well as “offbeat” and “niche” themes, the
reduction in the run-time of films, and – perhaps most striking of all – the increasing
disappearance of the song-and-dance sequence from the mainstream Hindi film.
Several accounts have hailed such developments and the consequent demise of the
masala film as an indicator of audiences’ more discerning tastes. But as several
studies have observed, the form of the Hindi film exemplified by “new Bollywood”
(the films of a new crop of filmmakers including Vishal Bharadwaj, Anurag Kashyap,
Dibakar Banerjee, Anand L. Rai, et al.) marks the eclipse of a certain mass character
of the cinema, captured in Ashish Nandy’s suggestive formulation of the “Indian
popular cinema as a slum’s eye view of politics.”41 The new Bollywood is considered
to encode a middle-class imaginary as opposed to the all-India address of the masala
film.42 The supercession of the latter at the same time entails a scuttling of the

39
Suprateek Chatterjee, “From piracy to an out-dated star system.”
40
Ibid.
41
The wide-ranging shifts in film culture and their accompanying taste economies have become a
target of pointed jokes, as for instance in the 2013 blockbuster Chennai Express. The hero in the film
criticises a gag made at his expense, referring to it as a “pathetic massy joke, bloody single screen
humour!” before going on to tell the heroine that she has no class. The film itself, made by the director
of a spate of successful action comedies Rohit Shetty, represents a variation of the all-India formula,
especially in its alternately satirical and affectionate nods to film industries of the South which have
risen as formidable threats to the clout of the Bombay industry. See, Athique, 2011; Brosius, 2013;
Dwyer, 2006, 2013; Paunksnis, 2017.
42
Sarunas Paunksnis, “Towards neurotic realism: Otherness, subjectivity and new Hindi cinema,”
South Asian Popular Culture 15, Issue 1(2017): 74-76.
 167

heterogeneous appeal of the popular cinema, which as Rajadhyaksha has noted, has
been central to its claim of representing national-cultural values by approximating a
national market and audience.43 To put it another way, the work of the cinema
historically in assembling a public out of a differentiated audience has been
coterminous with the modernising drive of the Indian nation-state to fashion a
citizenry out of heterogeneous populations.44 Similarly, Appadurai has written of the
repetitive, formulaic pleasures of the Indian cinema as the site in which modernity,
and especially its contradictions, is imaginatively negotiated.45 For Appadurai, this
prerogative of mediation of the cinema is increasingly being ceded to various kinds of
electronic comunications – the cellphone, Facebook, WhatsApp, the selfie – that now
induct a digital (formerly cinematic) public into the order of global capital. In these
spaces moreover, it is increasingly Hindutva rather than cinema which forms the basis
for claims to an Indian identity.46

What seems to have occurred according to journalist Nandini Ramnath is a

“Hollywoodization” of Bollywood, which could be regarded as a further stage in the
Bollywoodization of the Indian cinema. This is evident in such things as the
restructuring of the box office towards the promotion of 100 crore films and the
consequent move towards an experience that, as one commentator puts it, is “less like
cinema and more like an amusement park.”47 Ramnath explains the sweeping changes
inaugurated by the industry craze for so-called 100 crore films. This is a box office
model based on precise calculations of the price of tickets multiplied by the number
of tickets sold and further multiplied by the number of screens. A film is increasingly
expected to recoup its production budget and register profits in a small window
extending barely beyond a week, with a lot riding on opening weekend sales.48 The
emphasis on box office numbers, as Anupama Kapse points out, is also a function of
an insistent media discourse that increasingly reorients cinema in terms of monetary

43
Rajadhyaksha, Op. cit., 83.
44
Adrian Athique, “From cinema hall to multiplex: A public history,” South Asian Popular Culture 9,
No. 2, (2011): 150.
45
Appadurai, Op. cit.,151.
46
Arjun Appadurai, “Indian Popular Cinema in the Making of a Decolonized Modernity,” lecture
delivered at Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, MPI, January 22, 2016.
47
Josh Dickey, “The end is near for cinema. Go to the movies while there's still time,” Mashable, April
5, 2017, https://mashable.com/2017/04/04/movies-theaters-dying-cinemacon-pvod/#WkyAVXKlBPqX
48
Nandini Ramnath, Personal Interview, 2019.
 168

and consumption value as opposed to its narrative and affective impact.49 Shortening
theatrical windows are further exacerbated by the burgeoning of OTT platforms
which are increasingly more affordable than the price of cinema tickets in India.50
One report in fact rates the threat of streaming to cinema as unprecedented precisely
because it can deliver the same product – movies – simultaneously.51 This is a far cry
then from the days in which the success of a film would be registered by the length of
its run in theatres with the legendary stints of Kismet (150 weeks), Mughal-e-Azam
(150 weeks), Sholay (286 weeks), and DDLJ (1000 weeks and counting). The shorter
life of films at the box office, the decline of the “silver” and “golden” jubilees, is thus
yet another way in which the new multiplex culture marks its difference from the era
of the single screen.

The diminished life span of films and the corresponding transformation of film
culture is also understood within the coordinates of a digital economy of distractions
where cinema is only one among an expanded landscape of media and leisure. The
logic of the 100 crore film dictates the need for a film to register its mark in a
competitive arena of entertainments. Ramnath notes, that for a film to succeed it must
be “THE big release” capitalising on people’s attention. The phenomenon of the 100
crore club is thus one of the more visible ways in which cinema is transforming under
the sign of the digital. Films are being realigned in accordance with the “crisis of
attention” caused by the overabundance of entertainment sources as well the
instantaneous and telegraphic nature of modern communication characterised by
platforms like Instagram and Twitter.52 This is evident in things like the shorter length
of feature films, increasingly capped at two hours, as well as the – perhaps
unprecedented – move towards songless films.53 Where songs are used they are

49
Anupama Kapse, “Producing film heritage,” South Asian Popular Culture, 13(1) (2015): 90.
50
Prabhjote Gill, “India produces the largest number of films in the world — But a large section of its
population still doesn’t have access to cinema screens,” Business Insider, December 27, 2018,
https://www.businessinsider.in/india-produces-the-largest-number-of-films-in-the-world-but-a-large-
section-of-its-population-still-doesnt-have-access-to-cinema-screens/articleshow/67272159.cms.
51
Josh Dickey, Op. cit.
52
For notes on the attention economy engendered by digital media, see Tiziana Terranova, “Attention,
Economy and the Brain,” Culture Machine 13 (2012): 1-19.
53
See, Rishabh Suri, “Shorter is hotter: Bollywood cuts length for a better grip on viewer attention,”
The Hindustan Times, September 5, 2017, https://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/shorter-is-
hotter-bollywood-cuts-length-for-a-better-grip-on-viewer-attention/story-
9yhUxGg3pV4ZK1LW5Cp1iO.html; Devarsi Ghosh, “Before size mattered: When Hindi film songs
were extra-long and all the better for it,” Scroll.in, April 2, 2019, https://scroll.in/reel/917102/before-
size-mattered-when-hindi-film-songs-were-extra-long-and-all-the-better-for-it.
 169

shorter, while song-and-dance sequences have been dispensed with almost entirely in
favour of a more diegetic use of sound. Such changes, encapsulated by Ramnath’s
phrase “Hollywoodization”, indicates an overhaul of the very identity of the Hindi
film as an epic-length narrative punctuated by song and dance performances.54

Kuhu Tanvir reads cinema’s adaptation to the changed media landscape precisely in
terms of distraction.55 Noting the increased consumption of films on cellphone
screens in India, Tanvir theorises a paradigm shift in the very viewing culture of film
from immersion to distraction. Even as immersion ostensibly continues to be an
elusive ideal, evidenced in such technological developments as the IMAX screen and
4DX screening technology, the reality of a visual culture with the five-inch phone
screen at its centre increasingly makes the question of immersion moot. Tanvir further
observes that films themselves have internalised the distracted culture of viewing
ushered in by the cellphone by opening up the text to various uses. She gives the
example of mobile gaming apps for films like Dhoom 3 and Sholay which combine
the template of popular video games with plot elements and mise-en-scene of the
films. Films are also broken into their constituent parts, memorable dialogues, songs,
action/romantic sequences, and increasingly conceived in terms of these fragments.
Tanvir concludes that what the film object has lost in stability and integrity, it has
gained in mobility. Such mobility moreover is central to cinema’s “mundanity,” its
increased rather than decreased presence in everyday life. With the phone, the film
experience is more fundamentally imbricated with, and more fundamentally open to
the world.

Tanvir’s reading thus makes the case for the ubiquity of cinema in the age of its
digital dispersion. Elsewhere she also talks about the proliferation of cinema’s
archives online on sites like YouTube as well as through peer-to-peer networks.56
Digital technologies enable the sharing and circulation of films and film-related
ephemera in a community structure untethered from the control apparatus of the

54
Philip Lutgendorf, “Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking?” International Journal of Hindu Studies
10, No. 3 (2006): 227-256.
55
Kuhu Tanvir, “Breaking Bollywood: Moving pictures on mobile screens,” NECSUS: European
Journal of Media Studies, Spring# Resolution, (July 31, 2018), https://necsus-ejms.org/breaking-
bollywood-moving-pictures-on-mobile-screens/.
56
Kuhu Tanvir. “Pirate Histories: Rethinking the Indian Film Archive,” BioScope 4, No. 2 (2013):
115-136.
 170

official archive. These informal archives often allow for material that is proscribed by
the state archive, circumscribed as it is by its mandate to represent the national film
heritage of the country. This then is a counter-archive of cinema admitting marginal
as well as mainstream histories. Even more, the pirate archive indexes what it is
perhaps not possible to record in the state archive – the love and desire for cinema.
Tanvir remarks that in its emphasis on accessibility (over quality) of the film image,
these pirate archives simultaneously depreciate the value of cinema as a cult object,
while at the same time expressing the constant demand for it. As with watching films
on the cell phone, the reduction of the film into a file that “can be discarded without a
thought” paradoxically demonstrates the voracious appetite for films that leads to
their circulation in the first place. Tanvir remarks on the stripping of such
monumentality: “This does not mean that it is not wanted anymore, but rather, that it
is endlessly available, perhaps precisely because it is wanted by a large number of
people.”57 At the same time, the form of archiving embodied in fan tributes and
compilations enables an inscription of cinephilia that is, in some sense, the only way
to archive the same.

Vebhuti Duggal similarly regards the communally-built collections of film songs on

YouTube as “a non-traditional and non-institutional archive driven by the love and
work of fans, collectors of film songs.”58 Noting the manner in which songs are
uploaded, searched, and commented on by a community of film music fans, Duggal
observes that such acts of collecting are driven by users’ memories and love of film.
Songs are recalled along a mode of remembrance that links the experience of film to
the everyday. What is invoked is not just the song, but the embodied experience of
listening to the song in a particular time and place. The songs are then in a sense
deterritorialised from their filmic contexts to become embedded in a shifting terrain of
sensate experience; to become properly idiosyncratic cinephiliac fragments. This is
moreover an aspect of the cinema experience, its affective context, that according to
Duggal the institutional archive has “never had the space/design/structure or form to
accommodate.”59 She concludes, “Thus, what this archive seems to be formed by is

57
Tanvir, “Breaking Bollywood,” 2018.
58
Vebhuti Duggal, “The Virtual Archive of Hindi Film Music,” paper presented at IASA Annual
Conference, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, October 7-11, 2012,
https://www.academia.edu/21660417/The_Virtual_Archive_of_Hindi_Film_Music.
59
Ibid.
 171

precisely its participation in a sensory surplus, an emotional excess that is part of the
experience of the Hindi film song.”60 What YouTube enables then is an expansive
archive of film reception that surpasses the empirical experience of cinema to
encompass people’s feelings and emotions about it. It also reflects the way in which
the history of cinema intersects with cultural memory more generally.

Abhija Ghosh has also studied the manner in which popular practices of the web
foreground memories and histories of the cinema. Ghosh tracks the afterlife of
nineties romantic Hindi cinema as it is generated across a range of different sites on
the internet including video sharing platforms, online radio channels, fan websites and
listicles and news compilation websites like BuzzFeed and ScoopWhoop.61 Like
Duggal, Ghosh draws attention to the anecdotal and affective contexts in which
materials related to popular nineties films and songs are circulated. She also observes
that the invocation of these cinematic memories takes place within a larger cultural
imagination of the decade which saw the video and cassette boom, the coming of
cable and satellite TV and the consolidation of a new urbanity organised around the
expression of youthful, heterosexual love. Ghosh’s research reveals how a particular
media history of the nineties is canonised through the operations of a media swirl in
which fan-nostalgic discourse merges with official channels of publicity. The trigger
for such collective remembrance is provided by the conversion of old media formats
into digital files. A nostalgia for the past is thus occasioned by the new-found access
to old media through digital channels rather than any actual desire to return to the
past.62 Moreover, the past survives as affective fragments, images and aural traces
displaced from their original context that feed into endless new cultural productions.
Ultimately, the digital circulation of such media signal a virtual independence from
cinema as such, even as Bollywood as a “global media industry” continues to amass
influence through these practices of citation, re-use, replay and reference.63

60
Ibid.
61
Abhija Ghosh, “Afterlife of the Nineties Romantic Film Song in the Virtual Public Sphere,” SARAI,
June 2, 2015, http://sarai.net/afterlife-of-the-nineties-romantic-film-song-in-the-virtual-public-sphere/.
62
Abhija Ghosh, “Streaming Nostalgia: Listening to Nineties Film Music Online,” SARAI, July 10,
2015, http://sarai.net/streaming-nostalgia-listening-to-nineties-film-music-online/.
63
Ghosh follows the use of the phrase global media industry as theorised by Ashvin Punathambekar
(2013), indicating the manner in which the Bombay industry is constituted as much through televisual
and digital media forms as film. Ashvin Punathambekar, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of
the a Global Media Industry, (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
 172

The common theme running through the writings of Tanvir, Duggal and Ghosh is a
renewed presence and iconicity of cinema’s past in virtual space. I would like to
correlate their accounts of the memorialisation of cinema to the discourse of crisis and
flux in the trade and popular press, in order to locate Bombay cinema’s treatments of
its history in a spate of recent films. Such historical ruminations, I argue, arise
precisely from the simultaneous apprehension of crisis as well as opportunity
activated by the digital turn.

The History of/in Cinema: Cinema as (Counter)Archive

In 2012, the commercially successful and critically acclaimed Barfi! was chosen as
part of the line-up of a festival of Indian films organised by the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO) to mark a 100 years of the Indian cinema. The festival,
part of the year-long centenary celebrations supervised by the Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting, sought to “provide an opportunity to look back into the golden age
of Indian cinema to better understand the emergence and growth of the biggest film
industry in the world.”64 Barfi! appeared to round off such a postulated “golden age”
heralding both the economic clout of the contemporary industry as well as its
proclivity towards offbeat, critical themes. The relatively meagre roster of films
shown at the festival comprising just four titles seemed to nonetheless represent the
Ministry’s broader conceptualisation of the official centenary discourse.65 This was a
discourse in which the history of the Indian cinema, even as it took its starting point
from the silent period, was identified entirely with the more recent history of the
Bombay film industry. The rhetoric of “Indian” cinema further elided the
disproportionate representation of mainstream Hindi cinema to the exclusion of other
film industries and traditions.66 This was accompanied by a largely utilitarian
classification of a parallel cinema/new wave as representing cultural capital, and a
popular cinema embodying the commercial potential of the mass industry. As
Tejaswini Ganti understands it, the Indian cinema centenary commemorations
indicated the changed status of the industry in the developmentalist project of the
64
Centenary of Indian Cinema: A Festival of Indian Films, (Geneva: WIPO and Government of India,
December 4-7, 2012).
65
The other films shown were 3 Idiots (dir, Raju Hirani, 2009), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (dir. Zoya
Akhtar, 2011), and 36 Chowringhee Lane (dir. Aparna Sen, 1981).
66
Baradwaj Rangan, “Century Bazar,” Caravan, June 1, 2013,
https://caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/century-bazaar.
 173

state.67 While already evident on the occasion of the Lumière anniversary in the mid-
nineties, the restitution of cinema from a culturally suspect object to being a source of
national and cultural identity was made explicit during the centenary celebrations of
Indian cinema. This was reflected in for example the Ministry-designed tableau for
the 2013 Republic Day parade, which conceived the cinema as the mythological
Mayurpankhi, a flying bird-boat, symbolising “Indian cinema as a carrier of a nation’s
collective imagination; with gigantic celluloid sails, suggesting how the vision of
directors through the ages, harnessed on film, has propelled the nation’s imagination
forward.”68 Ganti holds that the state’s investment in such an anniversary came at a
time when the industry’s own historical struggle for cultural legitimacy had largely
been allayed by its newfound economic heft and independence from state
endorsement. As she puts it, “Once the state starts to commemorate anniversaries
having to do with filmmaking, those by the Bombay film industry become fewer and
smaller in scale.”69 The state’s belated recognition then has much to do with the
Bombay industry’s emergence as a powerful economic force in the post-liberalisation
period, highlighted conspicuously through an emphasis on growth and revenue figures
in the WIPO report.

A film like Barfi! is chosen thus, both for its box office success – “one of the highest-
grossing films of 2012” – as well its cultural status – the “Indian official entry for the
85th Academy Awards” – indicating the commingling of economic and cultural
imperatives in the State’s conceptualisation of cinema. Barfi! would go on to figure
prominently in the somewhat cursory survey of contemporary film production in the
National Museum of Indian Cinema (NMIC) established under the aegis of the Films
Division. But even as it is inducted into a teleological narrative of film history, Barfi!
itself performs in a historiographical register that is distinct from the statist project. It
represents, in a parallel move, cinema’s rendering of its own history at a time when it
is being institutionalised and bracketed through the official centenary discourse. As
such, it both builds on and extends the largely prescriptive idea of cinema enshrined
therein, as a vehicle of cultural memory – cinema as Mayurpankhi.

67
Tejaswini Ganti, “The politics of commemorating the Indian cinema centenary,” South Asian
Popular Culture 13, No. 1(2015): 81-84.
68
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, “Annual Report, 2012-2013,” Government of India.
69
Ganti, Op. cit., 83.
 174

Barfi! follows the personal history of the eponymous character, Murphy “Barfi”
Bahadur played by Ranbir Kapoor, a deaf-mute man. The film unravels partly as a
documentary and partly as whodunit, as a collection of characters associated with the
protagonists are asked to provide their reminiscences of Barfi. Their testimonies are
used to piece together the narrative of a life that at the same time enfolds as a history
of the cinema. Set in the 1970s, the film with its deaf-mute hero is intended as a
homage to silent cinema. Modelled on the iconic figure of the loveable tramp
associated with Charlie Chaplin and Kapoor’s own grandfather, the character is quite
literally a personification of film history. Right away then, Barfi! foregrounds the
omission, conspicuous in the centenary discourse, of the silent cinema from which the
celebrations paradoxically issued.70 But here too, the reference to silent cinema is not
through India’s own, largely lost heritage exemplified by Phalke, but through Chaplin
and Buster Keaton by way of Raj Kapoor. The film’s invocation of silent cinema
therefore relocates it at a point in film history with greater resonance for the
contemporary industry. As Ganti notes with respect to the 1995-96 centennial
commemorations which might apply to the Phalke anniversary as well, the state
markers of cinema’s vintage bore no relation to any “identifiable progenitors of
anyone remotely related to the Hindi film industry.”71 In such a case, the industrial
remembrance of cinema’s past takes place through signifiers and references that trace
a continuity into its present. The figure of Chaplin in this regard is considered to be
more germane, his memory routed through Raj Kapoor’s Indian tramp, re-enacted by
Kapoor’s own grandson who was at the time slated to be the next big thing in
Bollywood.

Dispensing with the state’s concern to assert a specifically Indian heritage of the
cinema, Barfi!’s quest for cinema’s ancestors radically reframes the question of the
“Indianness” of the film archive. The references to a global history of cinema –
Chaplin and Keaton – underscores the essentially cosmopolitan character of silent
cinema.72 At the same time, there is the suggestion contra the state narrative that such

70
Neepa Majumdar, “The nostalgia industry and Indian film studies,” South Asian Popular Culture 13,
No. 1 (2015): 87.
71
Ganti, Op. cit., 83.
72
Emily Thompson notes the large international market for motion pictures during the silent era
predicated on the universality of the early cinema’s pantomimic style. Elsewhere Rachel Dwyer
mentions India as one of the largest territories for the reception of American films, especially in the
silent period. The mobility of silent films was in contrast to the parochialism of the talkies which soon
 175

an internationalist frame might better account for the subsequent development of the
industry whose antecedents are invariably located in a 1950s Golden Age of which
Raj Kapoor is the signal figure. The latter consciously modelled himself as an Indian
Charlie Chaplin, through a performance that approached Homi Bhabha’s notion of
mimicry as difference.73 Rachel Dwyer observes about his Chaplin-inspired persona
in Awaara (1951), that even as it riffed on the familiarity of Indian audiences with
American silent cinema and was clearly meant as a tribute to Chaplin, Kapoor’s
performance also partakes of a postcolonial reworking of a colonial legacy. She says,
“The hat is not Chaplin’s hat. Chaplin’s outfit as the degraded gentleman is not what
RK wears but perhaps leftover colonial clothes in a postcolonial situation.”74 Dwyer
notes Kapoor’s keen awareness of Hollywood films, and finds traces not only of
Chaplin, but also Clark Gable in Kapoor’s styling in Awaara. In Shree 420 (1955),
Dwyer identifies scenes that are reminiscent of Chaplin’s The Fireman (1916) and
Laurel and Hardy’s 45 minutes from Hollywood (1926), and remarks that Kapoor’s
humour, specifically his love of clowning, derives from an acquaintance with silent
cinema.75 A survey of RK films thus inevitably leads on to the larger problem of the
influence of other cinemas on the Hindi cinema.76 In Barfi!, the quotation of Raj
Kapoor, and through him, of a plethora of “foreign” influences, unpacks the
contentious “national” character of the Indian cinema.

That such insecurities continue to mark the industry’s present, its anxiousness to
assert its originality with respect to a global standard, can be seen in light of the

gave rise to a national consciousness of cinema (205). What was meant to usher in an American
hegemony in terms of standardised industrial practices and conventions unintentionally produced a
proliferation of different national cinemas. Thompson relates the expansion of the Indian film industry
in the wake of the release of the first talkie, Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara (1931). The Indian film industry
in fact replicated the drive towards unification of the American sound companies as it managed to
resolve at the national level, the problem that the talking pictures where everywhere facing. Thompson
quotes a contemporary producer, Chandulal Shah, who reports the consolidation of the Hindi language
through the talkies (207). In a sense then, the history of talking pictures in India is parallel to a process
of national integration proceeding through particular language and regional hegemonies. Emily
Thompson, “Wiring the World: Theater Installation Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion
Picture Industry, 1927-1930,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed.
Veit Erlmann, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004),191-209; Rachel Dwyer, “Fire and Rain, The
Tramp and The Trickster: romance and the family in the early films of Raj Kapoor,” The South Asianist
2, No. 3: Celebrating A Century Of Indian Cinema: Passions, Pleasures & Perceptions (2013): 9-32.
73 See Homi Bhabha, "Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse," in The Location
of Culture, (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92.
74
Rachel Dwyer, Op. cit., 23.
75
Ibid, 25.
76
Ibid, 23.
 176

scandal that marked Barfi!’s selection as India’s official entry to the Oscars. This was
the controversy around certain scenes that were considered to be derivative of foreign
titles like Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The Adventurer (1917), Cops (1922) and The
Notebook (2004), leading one commentator to remark that “critics will start
wondering at which stage does plagiarism end in Indian movies and at what stage is it
inspiration.”77 Basu defended himself against allegations of plagiarism, citing the
example of The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius, 2011), that had won the Best Picture
Oscar the year before. Basu’s reference to The Artist is significant because it places
Barfi! directly in dialogue with a cluster of films released around the time that
contemplate the ongoing transition to the digital. Andrew Gilbert reads the apparently
disparate titles nominated for the Academy Awards in 2011 as all responding to the
death of celluloid, symbolically sealed by the bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak in
2012.78 It is a moment marked in equal parts by nostalgia and uncertainty as well as
preparation for the future. Basu’s acknowledgement of The Artist thus implicates
Barfi! simultaneously in a “planetary consciousness”79 of cinema’s death, as well as a
parallel commemoration of cinema’s birth in India. The anxiety expressed in some
quarters about India’s inability to keep up with an imagined international standard of
criticism is paradoxically reflected in Barfi!’s own aspiration to participate in a
metaindustrial narrative at a global scale. Barfi!’s revisitation of the past might then
be seen to operate along the industry’s negotiation of a postcolonial temporality as
distinct from that of the state. Speaking about the latter, Ganti, regards the centenary
as an occasion betraying the preoccupation characteristic of postcolonial countries
with teleologies that compensate for historic developmental lags. She cites Itty
Abraham’s formulation of postcolonial time as “an obsession with rankings,
superlatives, and a technological temporality coeval with Western countries.”80 Such
a preoccupation on the part of the state Ganti contends, leads inadvertently to
highlight Indian cinema’s alterity rather than equivalence in a global cinematic
landscape.81 As opposed to this, Barfi!’s memorialisation of Indian cinema, in

77
Priya Joshi, “Anurag Basu defends ‘Barfi!’ amid plagiarism claims,” Digital Spy, September 28,
2012, https://www.digitalspy.com/bollywood/a408939/anurag-basu-defends-barfi-amid-plagiarism-
claims/.
78
Andrew Gilbert, “The Death of Film and the Hollywood Response,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 62,
(April 2012), http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/the-death-of-film-and-the-hollywood-
response/.
79
Neepa Majumdar, Op. cit.
80
Ganti, Op. cit., 81-82.
81
Ibid, 84.
 177

participating in an international mourning exercise, indicates the industry’s ability to

“catch up” where the state has failed. Through its indifference to “originality”,
identified in the critical discourse as the “Indianness” of Indian films, Barfi! deals in
the global currency of narratives of celluloid nostalgia. But at the same time, it
substitutes the context of obsolescence marking the Hollywood productions with a
sense of arrival marking the Indian cinema centenary.

Barfi! further opens out the centenary narrative through an excavation of the
intermedial origins of cinema. In a flashback, we are told that Barfi was named for the
Murphy radio, a consumer appliance and brand redolent of pop cultural associations
from the 1960s-70s.82 The musical voiceover recounts Barfi’s mother’s wish to have a
“Murphy Munna”, a reference to the cherubic baby featured in the brand’s popular
print campaign. To mark Barfi’s birth, his father tunes into the “Ceylon-wala station,”
i.e., Radio Ceylon, an allusion to the foreign network that became popular among
Indian listeners between 1954-57 when the All India Radio banned Hindi film
songs.83 The adult Barfi is introduced at the end of this sequence, pictured against a
large hoarding featuring an advertisement for Murphy radios, the image transforming
from a flickering sepia-tinted celluloid reel into high definition digital. Even before
this, the first glimpse we catch of Barfi as a greying old man is framed through the
LCD monitor of a DSLR camera. In these sequences and beyond, Barfi! works
through mobilising and telescoping different histories. Barfi’s birth is thus situated in
a convergence of the history of radio and film, as well as advertising, reflecting the
manner in which cinema has been spread across these media in the past century. The
radio as a vehicle of film music and the printed advertising image as bearer of icons
have been instrumental in disseminating the experience of cinema into the realm of
the everyday. Barfi’s – himself linked, as noted above, integrally with the birth of
cinema – origin story gestures towards these intertwined lineages of cinema which
cannot be tracked in a straightforward way. Further, there seems to be a subtle but
unmistakable connection made between the coming of the digital and Barfi’s death –

82
Himani Chandna, “Murphy Radio and a bonny baby are what pre-TV Indian memories are made of,”
The Print, November 25, 2018, https://theprint.in/economy/brandma/murphy-radio-and-a-bonny-baby-
are-what-pre-tv-indian-memories-are-made-of/154307/
83
See Shikha Jhingan, “Re-embodying the ‘classical’: The Bombay Film Song in the 1950s,” BioScope
Vol. 2, No. 2 (2011), pp. 157-179; Aswin Punathambekar, “Ameen Sayani and Radio Ceylon: Notes
towards a History of Broadcasting and Bombay Cinema,” in BioScope, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2010), pp. 189-
197.
 178

the last thing he does is to take a picture of himself on the digital camera. One could
alternatively read his life as a progression through technological regimes, the digital
marking the latest threshold.

The tribute to early cinema also raises the question of the cinema’s origins in the
theatre as well as oral storytelling traditions. Barfi! adopts a structure of narration in
keeping with the famous description of silent cinema as seldom ever silent,
incorporating an elaborate musical score and voiceover narrative. The film’s opening
and closing shots of the school-for-the-disabled run by an older Barfi feature a trio of
musicians recalling the convention of live performers who provided the musical
accompaniment to proceedings in silent cinema. A song, “Picture Shuru”, plays over
the opening credits. According to Basu, the song was intended to dispel the tedium of
the endless series of acknowledgement of brand sponsors and corporate partners that
increasingly mark the prelude to films.84 The insertion of a song introducing the main
theme of the film is also a convention borrowed from folk theatre forms like jatra and
nautanki. Later on, the autistic character played by Priyanka Chopra is shown to be
enthralled by a Chhau performance at a wedding, a sequence which leads into a
fantasy where Barfi assumes the role of a director playing back the dance on a film
projector. The third character played by Ileana D’Cruz provides a running
commentary on the progress of the story approximating the role played by the Bibek
or Conscience in a jatra performance, similar to the function of the Greek chorus. The
influence of popular entertainments and epic traditions on the form of the popular
cinema is well documented and forms what Philip Lutgendorf refers to as the
“cultural-historical” genealogy accounting for the distinctiveness of the Indian
cinema.85 In Barfi! however, cinema’s circuits with the theatre is not only a function
of cinema’s past but an integral part of its life in India. Basu relates the inspiration
behind the making of the film as issuing from a childhood fascination for the movies
that was only exacerbated by the injunction placed on watching them by middle-class
parents. But along with cinema, Basu mentions his exposure to folk entertainments
growing up in a small town in Chhattisgarh, and working on theatrical productions
including a pandavani adaptation of Shankar Shesh’s play about the Naxal
movement, Poster. He stated further:

84
Anurag Basu, Personal Interview, February 25, 2019.
85
Lutgendorf, Op. cit.
 179

“When you come to Hindi cinema in the black-and-white era, all these actors
were from nautanki and majma, continuing into the Laila-Majnuns in talkie
cinema. That’s why there was so much of song… it came naturally to them.
It doesn’t come naturally to us. This is how they used to perform on stage
and then they started to perform for the camera. And the songs are still there
in Bollywood because of that culture. We are a nation of telling stories
through songs, whether it is Pandavani or Kudiyattam, everywhere.”86

Basu’s comments convey an awareness of the historical development of the cinema –

the borrowing of a theatrical idiom, particularly from the Parsi theatre whose
popularity at the time apparently equaled that of today’s Bollywood; the hiring of
theatre personnel including well-known playwright-lyricists and actors and singers;
and the prevalence of filmed plays and costumed dramas as the staple of early
cinema.87 But an apprehension of the closely linked careers of cinema er is equally a
function of his “growing up years”. Basu’s biographical account disrupts the official
historical narrative which posits a linear succession of pre-modern performance
traditions leading up to the predominance of cinema as a mass medium. Rather than
one having displaced the other, cinema and theatre emerge as coextensive from his
account, continuing to inform and shape each other’s publics; “growing up” with
cinema and theatre. In Barfi! then we find an alternative archive of the relation
between cinema and theatre.

Basu’s next film Jagga Jasoos (2017) forms a piece with Barfi!. He continues to trace
similar concerns, especially the crossing of cinema with the popular visual culture of
the twentieth century spanning comics, novels, theatre, video and broadcast media.
But if Barfi! is centrally concerned with film history, Jagga Jasoos engages cinema as
a source of national history. Where Barfi! deployed a non-linear narrative, Jagga
Jasoos borrows the episodic format of comic books as well as the three-act structure
of theatre to mount the story of a teenage detective. Like Barfi, the titular Jagga (also
played by Ranbir Kapoor) also suffers from a speech defect and can, as a result, only
communicate by rapping or singing. Jagga is on a quest to find his adoptive father,
Biplab Bachi, a former teacher and journalist turned agent, who has disappeared
following his unwitting implication in an international arms racket. The film weaves
the real-life Purulia arms drop case into a fantastical narrative modelled on the
86
Anurag Basu, Personal Interview.
87
Virchand Dharamsey, “The Advent of Sound in Indian Cinema: Theatre, Orientalism, Action,
Magic,” Journal of the Moving Image (2010): 20-49.
 180

adventure stories of Indiana Jones, Tintin, and the fictional Bengali detectives Feluda
and Byomkesh Bakshi. There are further references to films Le Circle Rouge (1970),
Oldboy (2003), A Bridge too Far (1977), Hirak Rajar Deshe (1980), Safety Last!
(1923), among many others.88 Jagga Jasoos’ citational form however is more than
merely a matter of style. Film history here serves an elliptical function opening out
onto difficult and neglected histories of the nation. This is predicated on, following
Elena Gorfinkel, a “film historical imaginary”, indicating a situation in which there is
no history outside its media representation.89 History itself has become apocryphal,
known only through its circulation as iconic images, memorabilia, styles and re-
enactments. The history of a shadowy event like the Purulia arms drop can then only
be accessed through a staging of these media traces. In the context of Indian history,
Ravi Vasudevan writes about the importance of film as an essential archive of
modernity having been actively “constitutive of social perception and identity.”90 In
other words, cinema not only represents history but actually makes it. Elsewhere Aarti
Sethi assessing cinema’s status as a “publicly available archive, and publicly accessed
structure of affect,” wonders whether cinema may not be taken up as a resource to
reconceptualise the writing of Indian history.91 The circuit through film history thus
becomes a way of writing Indian history by other means.

What distinguishes Jagga Jasoos is its conscious deployment of this film historical
imaginary. The film works precisely through activating the implied but never fully
acknowledged historicity of film. It does this moreover through the medium of
cinema itself, thus constituting a specifically filmic mode of doing historiography, or
writing history through (and with) film. The status of the cinema as a medium for the
inscription of history is evident right from the incredible opening sequence, where a
documentary film crew shooting an adivasi dance becomes accidental witness to the
arms drop. Bagchi who is part of the crew and inexpertly wielding a large light
diffuser, unintentionally flags down the plane carrying the consignment of arms after

88
Devarsi Ghosh, “True copy or heartfelt tribute? The unsolved mystery of Anurag Basu’s ‘Jagga
Jasoos’,” Scroll.in, August 2, 2017, https://scroll.in/reel/845780/true-copy-or-heartfelt-tribute-the-
unsolved-mystery-from-anurag-basus-jagga-jasoos.
89
Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener, “Introduction,” in Cinephilia: movies, love and memory, ed.
Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 15.
90
Ravi Vasudevan, “Film Studies, New Cultural History and Experience of Modernity,” Economic and
Political Weekly 30, No. 44 (Nov. 4, 1995): 2809-2814.
91
Aarti Sethi, “The Currency of Character,” Seminar #598: Circuits of Cinema, (June 2009),
http://www.india-seminar.com/2009/598/598_aarti_sethi.htm.
 181

his actions are mistaken for a signal. The plane flies by its actual target, a gang of
border smugglers, while TV crews descend on the sleepy hamlet to cover the
sensational news. In this short sequence, we get a set of different claims about
cinema’s ability to document history. The first is the claim of the ethnographic film,
the team of urban filmmakers recording the traditional dance of the villagers wearing
papier-mâché masks. The documentary drive of ethnographic film is located in the
originary archival promise of cinema to be able to provide a thoroughgoing document
of all human activity. This is undercut too by a colonial prerogative to preserve or, to
use Christopher Pinney’s phrase, “ salvage” primitive cultures before their extinction
in the face of modernity. In the sequence to which I refer, the first shot is a flickering
image of a pastoral landscape rendered in watercolours. The strains of a flute and
strings ring out as figures tentatively enter in procession from the left of the frame.
The scene is remarkable, combining the impressionistic textures of paint, the
flickering, unstable quality of film and the pixel-grid of digital imaging. The scene of
rural idyll forcefully brings to mind the genre of landscape views that prefigured the
documentary paradigm of the ethnographic film. This was the image of an eternal
world outside of time itself. The dehistoricising drive of such a documentary
paradigm is however immediately disrupted by the progress of the sequence, as a
train, erupting into the scene from the right of the frame, transforms the image on the
screen. The documentary crew are suddenly made acutely visible in all their
difference from their tribal subjects, where the earlier picturesque view had
deliberately obscured such delineation. The mediation of the crew of a real rather than
mythic landscape is further underscored by drawing attention to the staged aspects of
the shoot. The passage of the train and its accompanying siren as well as the plane
passing overhead finally decisively break the illusion of an untouched
landscape/world before the cinema, as it demonstrates the coexistence, or rather co-
constitution of the modern and the pre-modern. It identifies the tribal dancers, the
documentary crew, the train and plane as existing along the same continuum of
modernity that facilitates such a framing of archaic human activity in the first place.
The disruption generated by the descent of large crates attached to parachutes leads
the adivasi performers to abandon their masks and investigate the mysterious
consignment. As the mask slips off the face of a female performer, the ethnographic
framing of the tribal as the mystified and abstracted other is immediately undone.
Later, news channel anchors debate the complicity of the villagers in the apparent
 182

conspiracy against the state, foregrounding the question of their citizenship. The arms
drop then like the shooting of the documentary film, rather than freezing out, actually
inducts the adivasi into history by drawing her world inexorably into the regime of
modernity exemplified by air and rail travel and mass media and their attendant
connections with bourgeois nationhood. Finally, cinema’s ineluctable relation to
history is figured through the accident. The film crew inadvertently become witness to
a crime that would have otherwise flown under the radar. Sudhir Mahadevan talks
about the recruitment of cinema and photography to the vocation of crime solving. He
writes, “The promise of fortuitous sightings turned the camera itself into a fetish and
the Kino-Eye acquired a generalized authority as a metaphor for the possibility of
acquiring facts and insights that would otherwise be elusive.”92 A similar logic seems
to be at work in this scene, where the deep penetration of the film camera into this
isolated rural hinterland makes it possible to witness that which would have gone
undetected. This might apply equally to the ritual dance of the adivasi as to the illicit
activity of weapons trading. But the camera is as instrumental in making history as it
is in merely recording it, considering it is the mix-up of signals that enables the
emergence of the arms drop as an event. It is this sense that history happens through
cinema that ultimately drives Jagga Jasoos’ historical investigation as a path through
the memory of cinema.

Further, it is cinema’s affinity for capturing accidental, momentous detail (that slips
through the cracks of official narratives) that is at the crux of Jagga Jasoos’ quest for
an alternative history. The film’s narrative of a separated father-and-son pair is yoked
to a larger search for one of India’s lost founding fathers, Netaji Subhas Chandra
Bose. Netaji is considered to represent a strand of the nationalist movement that is
often neglected as compared to the mainstream of the movement embodied in the
Gandhian struggle. Netaji’s advocacy of armed struggle and his association with the
Indian National Army (INA) outlined a radically different approach from Gandhi’s
promotion of ahimsa or nonviolence, and marked him as a renegade figure. The post-
Independence consecration of Gandhi as the “father of the nation” continues to frame
Bose’s movement as a fringe-like formation distinct from the legitimate body of
nationalist struggle. Bose’s legacy has been rendered even more enigmatic by his

92
Mahadevan, Op. cit, 122.
 183

mysterious death by plane crash in 1945 which continues to be contested by popular

conspiracy theories. Anurag Basu acknowledges his tribute as coming out of an
ongoing fascination with Bose, derived in part from his Bengali background, as well
as from a sense that Bose has not been as well served by history as he deserved.93
Netaji then comes to stand in for an apocryphal, vaguely perceived episode in the
history of national struggle.

Jagga Jasoos’ excavation of this history accordingly proceeds through appropriately

cryptic paths. Jagga, along with investigative reporter Shruti Sengupta (played by
Katrina Kaif), stumbles onto a large arms smuggling operation run by the same ring
leader who had earlier been involved in the failed Purulia arms drop. After doing
some research, Jagga and Shruti are able to deduce that the route once taken by Netaji
to launch an attack on the British via Burma, is now being used to carry on the arms
trade. In the course of their research, Jagga recalls tales of Netaji narrated by his
father, in which the nationalist leader comes across as the protagonist of an adventure
story. The history of Netaji is captured thus in two very different media, in written
histories that the older Jagga and Shruti refer to, and in an oral narrative that figures
Netaji as an epic hero. The film itself pictures Netaji as a largely totemic presence,
appearing first on the cover of the book His Majesty’s Opponent by Sugata Bose, and
then as a statue installed in a village square. Jagga himself, with his fair complexion,
clean-shaven face and glasses, somewhat resembles Netaji, a fact emphasised as he
raises the book to his face, Netaji’s visage consequently superimposed over his. Even
as he does this, Jagga straightens out the tuft of hair that through the film typically
juts to one side, identifying him through this style with the comic book character
Tintin who has similarly windswept hair. In this momentary coming together of Netaji
and Tintin and the corresponding mixing of historical and fictional registers, the film
suggests the shared iconic space of the two figures. If Tintin as the protagonist of a
comic series exists in a realm of the imagination, in a way, so does Netaji as a
historical figure who is known only through mediated representations. This is not
however to disavow the reality of Netaji and his place in history. Rather it is the
recognition that Netaji can perhaps now only be recovered through this recourse to

93
Sankhayan Ghosh, “Anurag Basu on the making of ‘Jagga Jasoos’,” LiveMint, July 20, 2017,
https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/2MaY18o856ET5BFmspMH6L/Anurag-Basu-on-the-making-of-
Jagga-Jasoos.html.
 184

fantasy. As if in keeping with this insight, the retelling of Netaji’s tale takes the form
of an adventure piece rather than a forensic re-enactment. Jagga and Shruti retrace
Netaji’s steps to the lair of the villains who have appropriated his noble legacy. The
resolution of Jagga and Shruti’s tryst with the arms dealers occurs through a comic
Indiana Jones-type set-up, the action unfolding at an underground stream in a cave
and then in a chase sequence on a railway track.

The film returns to Netaji again in the final episode which is centrally concerned with
Jagga’s search for the missing Bagchi or “Tuti Futi” as Jagga refers to him. Early on,
the parallels between Bagchi and Netaji are set up. Bagchi pursuing the sensational
story of an international nexus between arms traders and national governments is
forced to go on the run. He periodically sends Jagga VHS cassettes of himself taped
in different locations, including a snowy mountainscape, in a desert, onboard a ship
and even in some sort of research facility in Siberia. Bagchi’s nomadism is directly
contrasted with Netaji’s transnational travels, regular bulletins of which used to be
broadcast on the Azad Hind Radio service, contributing to his aura as a legendary
revolutionary figure. Bagchi like Bose is also presumed dead in the course of his
quest to shed light on an international conspiracy. News of his whereabouts is
deliberately suppressed by a corrupt former police officer, while an even larger force
keeps a close surveillance on all the different actors in the plot. Jagga’s mission takes
him to faraway Mombaca where a triennial underground arms fair is to be held. After
a longwinded search, Jagga eventually narrows down on Bagchi’s trail. In a journal
left behind by the latter, Jagga reads of Bagchi’s intention to travel to the upcoming
fair in order to gather information on a certain Bashir Alexander, a crime lord so
elusive that even intelligence agencies do not have a photograph of him. Bagchi’s
intelligence-finding mission, crucially linked to obtaining photographic and video
evidence of an obscure syndicate, intersects with Jagga’s personal quest to find his
lost guardian. Jagga’s discovery of Bagchi coincides with the busting of the arms
racket. Netaji is significantly evoked in these climactic scenes with Jagga assuming a
disguise that matches almost exactly Netaji’s iconic image in military uniform down
to the flat topi.94 The emotional reunion with Bagchi, also dressed in military fatigues,
could be read at one level as a sort of historical wish-fulfilment, the recovery of

94
Basu acknowledges consciously styling Kapoor to resemble Netaji in these sequences (quoted in
Shankhayan Ghosh, Op. cit., 2017).
 185

Bagchi speaking to the desire to apprehend Bose. The film, through its alternative
historiography, is thus able to pin down that which has evaded capture in official
history. Not only Bose, the film through its elliptical adventure-fantasy structure is
able to foreground a rhizomatic network of international crime as it flows through
different channels and locales. In doing so Jagga Jasoos realises Paula Amad’s notion
of the counter-archive, albeit in a qualified sense. To recall, Amad designates
cinema’s ability to record the historically marginalized and quotidian events that fall
outside the purview of institutional history as its counter-archival modality. While
Bose does not quite qualify for the tag of the ordinary subject of history, the
formulation of the counter-archive nonetheless applies in that it stands for the
extrapolation of fugitive historical content. Amad further draws on Kracauer to
theorise the connection between cinema and the everyday, specifically in his article
on photography where he argued, “that thanks to its photographic-based, archival
qualities of accumulation, film had the capacity to stir up and rearrange its positivist
warehousing of daily life, in the process archiving the world anew and revealing the
provisional, denaturalized, and open nature of history.”95 Two things emerge here,
first being cinema’s ability – because of its indiscriminate nature – to register the
secret or hidden life of things, as well as the ability to make what is hidden visible.
This is the basis according to Amad of film’s alternative historicity against which she
reads a loose cannon of early pre-documentary nonfictional films. Jagga Jasoos
mobilises such an alternative historicity but in a very different film tradition. Here, it
is the resolutely non-documentary popular forms that are considered to encode
submerged histories. Jagga Jasoos’ historiography issues from a counter-archive of
the popular.

Basu’s cinematic tribute to Bose is not a one-off however. Despite his lamentation
about the relative neglect of Bose, the release of Jagga Jasoos coincided with a
summer of commemorations of Bose and the INA legacy in a series of films and
shows, including Vishal Bharadwaj’s Rangoon, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Raag Desh and
the webseries Bose: Dead/Alive. This had been preceded the previous year by the
publication of a number of volumes on the 1946 mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy as
well as a light-and-sound installation by artist Vivan Sundaram and Ashish

95
Amad, “Introduction,” in Counter Archive, 15.
 186

Rajadhyaksha on the same. Jagga Jasoos must then be read against the memory work
discharged by these disparate cultural texts which nonetheless seem to proliferate at
the same moment.96 One must then ask what it is in the present that provokes such
recursions into relatively uncharted episodes in Indian history. One article points to
the “guilt of omission” driving the publications on the naval mutiny, seeking to
restore an integral chapter of the freedom struggle into the annals of history from
which it had been unceremoniously expelled.97 The naval mutiny represented a
historical alternative rejected in the adoption of the “Congress’ version of freedom.”
At the same time, the article continued, the story of the naval uprising resounded at a
time when the question of nationalism and the telling of history have become newly
fraught issues.98 Jagga Jasoos’ evocation of the past might then instead be read as a
picture of the anachronistic present. Jagga Jasoos by Basu’s own admission unfolds
in an indeterminate time period despite being nominally set in the present, with old
media such as VHS tapes, 8-bit video games and rotary phones thronging the film’s
visual landscape. Jagga and Shruti’s travels across Africa are traced across an old
explorer’s map and in one sequence, a monoplane driven by the amateur Jagga
crashes onto a highway with modern cars. But nowhere is the film’s anachronism
more apparent than in a post-interval sequence which comes seemingly out of the
blue, that details through song the apathy towards incidents of riots, farmer suicides
and factory strikes. The song further mentions the talismanic nimbu-mirchi held up as
a guard against all these political ills by a rampantly consumerist (Hindu) middle
class. The references to contemporaneous news headlines locate the film’s historical
project in a context of the rise of majoritarian politics connected to the ascendancy of
the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The recourse to Netaji and the
historical alternative of a militantly secular tradition of national struggle must then be
seen as arising out of the contingency of the present. This is a history which, to quote
Benjamin, “flashes up at a moment of danger.”99

96
Basu speculates about the influence of Amitav Ghosh’s writing on himself and Bharadwaj, leading to
similar concerns in their respective films. Anurag Basu, Personal Interview.
97
Ipsita Chakravarty, “Reclaiming history: Why Indian artists and writers are re-examining the naval
uprising of 1946,” Scroll.in, September 2, 2016, https://scroll.in/article/813887/out-of-time-the-naval-
mutiny-has-been-written-out-of-the-history-of-the-national-movement.
98
Ibid.
99
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
ed. with an intro. by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schochen Books, 2007), 255.
 187

Basu especially recognises the correspondences between his own film and Vishal
Bharadwaj’s Rangoon. The latter even more than Jagga Jasoos teases out the
connections between cinema and history through a dramatisation of film history. Set
against the backdrop of the Second World War, Rangoon follows the conflict between
the forces of the INA and the British on the Indo-Burma border. The story is told
however through the fledgling relationship between an ex-POW turned INA agent,
Jemader Nawab Malik (played by Shahid Kapoor) and a stunt-action star Ms. Julia
(played by Kangana Ranaut). The character of Ms. Julia is a loosely fictionalised
version of the real-life Mary Ann Evans, known by her screen-name as the Fearless
Nadia. She even approximates a version of the latter’s famous catchphrase “Hey-y-y”
with the bolder “Bloody Hell!” Julia is shown to be attached to a studio run by a
Parsi, Rustom ‘Russi’ Bilimoria (played by Saif Ali Khan), a character amalgamating
the brother-proprietors of the actual Wadia Movietone studios, JBH and Homi (to
whom Nadia was married), as well as the silent film star Dinshaw Bilimoria. Russi
who is shown to be close to the resident British Major General David Harding,
persuades Nadia under pressure from the latter to travel to the Burmese border to
perform for the British Indian troops. While initially reluctant, Julia and Bilimoria
threatened with the withdrawal of raw stock now supplied by the English, bow to the
inevitable. Julia’s eventful journey to the border intersects with that of an antique
sword belonging to a Maharaja that is entrusted to the care of Malik, also in charge of
Julia’s safe passage. A small group of double agents, including a female Manipuri
soldier and Julia’s Muslim assistant are part of the plan to get the sword across the
border to aid the INA cause. Rangoon’s presentation of a period of Indian history
assembles a cast of characters consciously straddling the world of politics and the
world of the cinema. Indeed, it points to the inextricable connection between cinema
and the burgeoning movement for freedom, highlighting the Swadeshi origins of the
cinema that can be traced back to Phalke’s desire to establish an Indian
cinematograph.100 Even more interestingly, through cinema, Rangoon mounts an
investigation of contemporary debates on nationalism, including the dispute about
who constitutes a properly national subject. This is a period of cinema, which like the
contributions of the INA, is marginal to a national history of cinema. The latter

100
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology,” in
Interrogating modernity: culture and colonialism in India, eds. Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, and
Vivek Dhareshwar, (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993): 47-82.
 188

registers a chasm between Raja Harishchandra (1913) as the fount of Indian cinema
and Kismet (1943) from which Bollywood draws its lineage, largely overlooking the
intervening years that saw the rise and eclipse of the silent film industry, the transition
to sound from the late-1920s and the predominance of a studio culture in the 1930s.
Rangoon leans into this past without a future, to vary the famous saying, in order to
answer pressing questions in the present.

As noted above, Rangoon clearly relates the historical crisis of the Second World War
with a crisis of film. The film opens with archival footage and a voiceover giving the
context of the World War and the Freedom movement. The sequence itself recalls the
genre of newsreels that occupied a special role in war correspondence, bringing news
of the unfolding events to people across the world. The onset of the war between
Allied and Axis powers meant the cessation of supplies of raw film stock which used
to be imported from Germany. Film journals of the period attest to the crisis of film
stock that severely disrupted the operations of the industry. In the film, Bilimoria
mentions the closure of film studios as a casualty of the ongoing shortage. A crisis of
the studio system is thus directly tied with the fortunes of the war, and in a sense, an
impending death is already heralded.

The industry of the thirties is depicted as remarkably cosmopolitan and egalitarian,

featuring a comfortable mixing of individuals of different communities and
nationalities. This seems to be based on accounts of the real Wadia studios which
Rosie Thomas mentions as having a heterogeneous composition representing “all that
was peripheral,” including Parsis, Christians, Muslims and Anglo-Indians.101 Thomas
also relates the struggles surrounding national self-definition in this period, as an
essentialised idea of Indian tradition competed with the industrial and scientific
modernity of the west.102 The hybrid vision of the Wadias entailed a reconciliation of
the two. Thomas writes especially of the elder JBH Wadia, that he “understood
market forces and saw that popular passions would be the seed for new modernities
that could not be neatly controlled from the centre.” Therefore, the successful
resolution of the contradiction of nationalism and modernity would have to proceed

101
Rosie Thomas, “Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts,” in Bollywood:
Popular Indian Cinema Through a Transnational Lens, eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J Sinha, (New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), 67.
102
Ibid, 49.
 189

from a playful mimicry and miscegenation rather than a top-down imposition.103

Nadia herself embodied this fluid character of national identity, having been born to
an English father and Greek mother, but having grown up in India and considering
herself Indian. Thomas notes that her screen persona referred as much to the popular
Hollywood stunt genre as to the virangana tradition of heroic warrior women. Nadia’s
cosmopolitanism fed into the hybrid character of the stunt-action film as a secular,
democratic form drawing simultaneously on folk traditions of body building and
wrestling and the technological fascination of modern machines.104 The
internationalism of the industry of the thirties is attested in other sources, specifically
with regard to the popularity of the international Art Deco style, first introduced at the
Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1925, and disseminated
around the world by the modern mass media of cinema, graphic arts and
advertising.105 The Eros cinema, at which Julia’s latest film Toofan Ki Beti is shown
to premiere, was one of two newly inaugurated Art Deco cinemas in Bombay,
opening in 1938. The style which was to fall out of favour by the 1940s because of its
association with “foreignness”, in the thirties embodied the progressive vision of
mechanisation and industrial modernity.106 Nadia herself, and indeed the stunt genre
as a whole, became victim of the altered nationalist vision from the 1940s which
ceased to accommodate the hybridity that they represented.

Rangoon squarely tackles this historical imbrication of cinema with questions of

nationalism and modernity, staging through the story of Nadia the historical struggle
of the popular cinema to assert its nationalist credentials. The internationalism that the
cinema represented thus emerges as a problem. In an early scene in the film, stuck in
traffic during a Quit India demonstration, Julia remarks to her valet Zulfi that the
people are insane if they can do without the British. Zulfi retorts that she is mindlessly
parroting Russi’s opinions. Russi is shown to be a comprador businessman, cynically
affiliated to the British cause out of self-interest. At the premiere of Julia’s film, he

103
Ibid.
104
For more on Fearless Nadia, See Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives,
Bodies, Bloomington and Indianopolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010; Neepa Majumdar, Wanted
Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s, Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 2009.
105
Divia Patel, “The Art of Advertising,” in Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film, eds.
Divia Patel and Rachel Dwyer, (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 124.
106
Ibid.
 190

hails the British Major General for his engagement in the battlefield, “with us, and for
us,” and commends “his ennobling empire.” Later when traitors are found among his
company, Russi is shown to deal ruthlessly with their insurrection, expressing no
remorse when Zulfi is shot down by a British lieutenant. He is only shown to relent at
the very end, transformed by his love of Julia who has herself been converted by
Malik. The ambivalence of their characters digs into the historical struggle for
legitimacy of the cinema itself, and its prerogative to define the coordinates of
Indianness. Indeed, one of the ways in which cinema sought to overcome its
disreputable origins and came to be recognised as a legitimate art form was through
its commitment to the cause of nationalism and social uplift. Thomas, points to the
preponderance of social melodramas and allegorical narratives from the thirties as
filmmakers sought to demonstrate their ideological moorings in the popular
nationalist discourse of the day.107 The melodramatic ‘social’ moreover registered a
special critical cachet even as the stunt film was derided as a base form. Thomas notes
JBH Wadia’s affiliations first as a Congressman and then as a follower of the
communist M. N. Roy that sparked a dedication towards making films incorporating
social themes. She also records his life-long desire for critical acclaim even as it
continued to elude him. Thomas speculates that one of the reasons that such critical
respectability did not accrue to Wadia was precisely because of his embrace of the
pulp and popular forms disavowed by the reformist social. Thomas quotes JBH
expressing his contempt for the “male chauvinist ideology which infested the so-
called social film.”108 The Wadia films on the other hand, catering to a largely
working class constituency, partook of “a playful mimicry which explored and
reveled in the gamut of modern Indian identities.” Thomas concludes that the neglect
of Nadia and Wadia accompanies the larger film historical suppression of the stunt
and action genres which did not fit into the nationalist melodramatic template. In
Rangoon, the marginalisation of this film tradition with an alternative purchase on the
idea of national modernity is correlated with the relegation of “other freedom
movements” to the mainstream narrative dominated by the rhetoric of the
Congress.109 As noted above, the Azad Hind movement with its commitment to the
cause of military insurrection was received ambivalently by the Congress, and in a

107
Thomas, Op. cit., 45.
108
Wadia quoted in Thomas, Op. cit., 66.
109
Ipsita Chakravarty, “Reclaiming History.”
 191

sense ran parallel to the contemporaneous Quit India movement. Today, even as the
contribution of the INA is acknowledged, it is not accorded the symbolic significance
that the Gandhian movement enjoys in the national imaginary. Additionally, the film
explores through the character of Russi, the ambivalence of the Indian stand towards
the war as a larger fight against the forces of fascism vis-à-vis its own national
aspirations. JBH himself as a disciple of Roy, had been actively engaged in the war
effort, producing pro-war films and serving on the Film Advisory Board. The
Communist support of the international Allied cause was regarded by many at the
time to constitute a betrayal of the nationalist agenda. In Rangoon, the archive of film
becomes a gateway to these different historical trajectories.

In her essay, Thomas attributes the revival of Nadia from the nineties onward to the
new relevance of her international, postmodern legacy to the transnational cultural
formation of Bollywood.110 Rangoon’s evocation of Nadia and through her, of the
INA, can however be read as with Jagga Jasoos, in the light of the contemporary
politics of nationalism in India. It is possible at first glance to equate Rangoon’s
nationalistic overtures with the chest-thumping jingoism of a spate of military-themed
films that have been released since the election of the BJP. What distinguishes
Rangoon from this category however is its reference to an emphatically secular and
internationalist course of India’s history. The INA is posited as a third alternative
outside of the dual contest between the Congress and the BJP/RSS over claims on a
nationalist imaginary. Like Jagga Jasoos, Rangoon announces its contemporary
concerns through deliberately mounted anachronisms as with a sequence in which a
tabloid reporter questioning Julia about her romantic attachments states that the
“nation wants to know.” The latter refers to the notorious slogan associated with the
well-known news anchor Arnab Goswami, whose prime time debates are recognised
as having stoked the flames of political revanchism. Another sequence towards the
end of the film in which Malik is being paraded in a military truck after having been
discovered as a traitor, ineluctably brings to mind the image of a Kashmiri man used
as a human shield by the Indian army in the war-torn state. Perhaps most radically, the
film poses the mindless allegiance of the army itself at a time when the military is
being appropriated for political reasons, its prologue juxtaposing the movement of the

110
Thomas, Op. cit., 67.
 192

freedom fighters with the participation of Indian soldiers in the wars of their British
masters. The INA in contrast provides the model of a military driven by a truly
nationalist ideology. The film ends with the proclamation that the Indian Tri-colour
flag was hoisted for the first time in Moira Talang, on the 14th of April, 1944 by the
Indian National Army. The INA anthem, a version of Tagore’s “Jana Gana Mana,” is
a recurring motif. Rangoon is thus committed to an archaeology of an alternative
history of nationalism that signals an emphatic variant to its contemporary
articulation. Its glorification of marginal characters – the Muslim tailor, the mixed-
race stunt artist, the Manipuri rebel, the anglicised Parsi – repositions all those
deemed “anti-national” under a normative Hindu dispensation, as central actors in the
fight for India’s freedom.

It is crucial to note however, that such explosive arguments are mounted,

camouflaged by the story of a stunt actress. Film history thus serves an allegorical
function, becoming the form through which political critique can pass unobtrusively.
One could alternatively read Rangoon as deploying the embedded historicity of film.
Rachel Dwyer remarking on the relation between cinema and the historical
imagination in India, distinguishes cinema from official history by its emphasis on a
popular view of the past, or an oral bazaar tradition.111 She further notes that histories
related by the cinema often replace academic history in the public imagination, such
that history itself is identified with the cinematic staging of a plot rather than an
empirical structure of facts and events. Dwyer draws on Christopher Pinney’s planned
history of visual culture in which the visual rather than merely reflecting history
“established by other means,” constitutes its own distinct history. Similarly, Thomas
highlights cinema’s place as part of a broader public culture, as a terrain on which
identity is actively negotiated rather than simply reflected.112 While the realist
melodrama offered a paradigm of resolution that denied ambivalence, the action and
stunt genres indicated a model of playful mimicry. In either case, cinema served as
the means through which such historical processes of identity formation proceeded.
The archive of cinema thus encodes the making of a nationalist imagination. It can as
such, substitute for an archive of the nation.

111
Rachel Dwyer, “Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Modern India,” Asian Affairs XLI,
no. III (November 2010): 386.
112
Thomas, Op. cit., 66.
 193

Such a substitution of the history of cinema for the history of the nation is reflected in
the film’s climactic sequence where Julia races to the rescue of the incarcerated
Malik, laying siege to the train that is transporting him to Calcutta. Julia is shown to
prepare for the rescue as she would for a film, donning make-up and her signature
vigilante’s costume replete with leather gloves, riding boots and a mask. She catches
up with the speeding train, drawing up in a motorcycle framed against the setting sun,
soundtracked by a theme song that introduced her earlier in the film. The rest of her
rescue is orchestrated as an action scene straight out of an actual Fearless Nadia film,
running on the roof of the train to apprehend the villainous British general alongside a
series of other feats of daredevilry. The scene corroborates Dwyer’s observation of
the inherently cinematic nature of popular history, where the fight against the British
is remembered in melodramatic and heroic terms. A cinematic image is correlated and
interpolated into the stream of images that constitute the public imagination of the
INA struggle. At the film’s end, the transfer of the royal sword is facilitated by
Russi’s skill as a former stuntman himself, carefully funambulating his way across the
blasted remains of the Rangoon bridge in order to get the precious consignment to the
waiting INA soldiers.

This staging of history as film history is elsewhere seen in Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay
Velvet (2015). Based on historian Gyan Prakash’s book Mumbai Fables (Harper
Collins, 2010), Kashyap’s film traces the exploits of a small time thug who becomes
embroiled in a high-stakes criminal conspiracy between the state and private interests.
It is set in the sixties against the backdrop of prohibition as well as the planned urban
development of Bombay through the reclamation of backbay lands. Gyan Prakash’s
urban history charting the transformation of the city from a formerly industrial centre
into a finance capital – encapsulated in the terminological shift from the cosmpolitan
“Bombay” to the parochial “Mumbai” – takes as some of its primary sources,
depictions of the city in a range of popular urban forms including tabloids, pulp
novels, comics, and the cinema the city has become synonymous with. It is in these
forms and genres Prakash argues that the experience of modernity through city life
has registered itself. It is through them that a certain historical lived experience of
Bombay has acceded to the order of myth. Bombay, Prakash avers, circulates widely
as an imagination of urban modernity. The Hindi cinema has perhaps been the most
 194

successful disseminator of the Bombay myth extolling images of the great metropolis
in a number of noir and socialist-themed films as well as in songs. Kashyap’s
adaptation takes Prakash’s postulation of a mythic city or “city of dreams” and
embeds it in a cinematic history of the city.

Inspired directly by James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, Kashyap’s exposition of Bombay

history unfolds through film noir. Johnny Balraj (played by Ranbir Kapoor) is an
ambitious hustler looking to make it big; he watches matinee shows of The Roaring
Twenties (1939) and picks pockets on trams after. An oedipal relationship with a
largely absent mother leaves him with a hardboiled outlook on life. Johnny’s paths
cross that of a wealthy lobbyist Kaizad Khambatta (played by Karan Johar) who is
looking to get into the good graces of the city’s mayor, Romi Mehta, who has the
ultimate say on land allotments. Johnny soon becomes Khambatta’s main henchman
and the manager of his club Bombay Velvet. At the same time, he takes up with a
Jazz singer, Rosie Noronha (played by Anushka Sharma), a character loosely
modelled on the Goan nightclub singer Lorna Cordeiro. Rosie is initially drawn as a
femme fatale, working as a spy for a tabloid owner Jimmy Mistry, a Parsi with
communist sympathies, based on the charismatic real-life proprietor of the famous
Blitz, Russi Karanjia. Mistry pursues the brewing scandal over property
developments, as skyscrapers begin to be requisitioned on the vacant backbay plots.
Johnny himself begins to demand a larger stake in the ongoing distribution of wealth
among Bombay’s official and entrepreneurial classes. His demand for a seat at the
table denied, Johnny turns rogue. With its tale of the underdog straining against a
turgid class system and a corrupt moral order, the film has its lineages in a series of
Bombay crime films of the fifties including Baazi, Shree 420, CID (1956), Kala
Bazaar, and the “angry young man films” associated with the Bachchan persona in
the seventies. The film refers as well to the cycle of gangster films kicked off in the
nineties by Ram Gopal Verma’s Satya (1998) on which Kashyap had worked as
screenwriter, and which partook of a global flowering of the neo-noir style.

Kashyap’s deployment of film noir, while not unprecedented in the light of his own
filmography and cinephiliac tendencies, becomes interesting when one considers the
relatively marginal presence of the genre and the style in the history of the Bombay
cinema. Lalitha Gopalan staking out a category of what she dubs “Bombay Noir”
 195

highlights the complicated origins of the genre. She cites Cory Creekmur’s reading of
Raj Khosla’s CID as the first sighting of film noir in Indian film scholarship, with a
discussion of the influence of the Hollywood cinema on Guru Dutt’s oeuvre.113 Film
noir as a particular expressionist style of lighting is moreover deemed to be missing
until the “primogenitors” of Bombay Noir arrived in 1989, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s
Parinda, and Aditya Bhattacharya’s Raakh. Gopalan further notes that the coming of
colour in the sixties and the standardisation of flat lighting as the signature
“Bollywood style”, sent the noir style into eclipse for much of the sixties and
seventies.114 Significantly, Bombay Velvet is set precisely in this timeframe as if to
substitute for such a historical absence. Gopalan’s argument draws in part on Ranjani
Mazumdar’s theorisation of the “urban fringe” as a series of films emerging in the
wake of Bombay’s millennial transformations into a globalized megalopolis. The
urban fringe refers to a set of films militating in their logic and style against the
dominant melodramatic mode of the Hindi cinema.115 In the Indian context,
Mazumdar suggests, it is the melodramatic form with its ethical frame that has
historically assumed the prerogative of mediating the experience of postcolonial
modernity. Melodrama constitutes a stylistic code readily accessible to the Indian
audience through the accumulation of stock figurations and tropes. In other words, the
filmic style which continues to inform Bollywood, and the archive of film elements
on which audiences continue to draw, is that of melodrama. The films of the urban
fringe, in which Mazumdar counts Kashyap as well, engage in a deliberate subversion
of melodrama’s codes through a worldview which approximates the bleak, nihilist
vision of film noir. She describes their operation as “a cinema that exists on the
periphery of Bombay’s cinematic excess where the ‘blindness’ generated by habitual
cultures of seeing is rearranged to make the spectator see what has not been seen
before.” In the writing of both Gopalan and Mazumdar, noir emerges as an alternative
or submerged form that is peripheral to the history of Bombay cinema dominated by
film melodrama. Kashyap’s retelling of Bombay’s urban history thus ostensibly takes
place through a genre paradoxically without a history in its cinema. It is possible to
read this alternatively as a deliberate disavowal of the mainstream archive of

113
Lalitha Gopalan, “Bombay Noir,” Journal of the Moving Image, (2010): 65.
114
Ibid, 67-68.
115
Ranjani Mazumdar, “Friction, Collision and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay
Cinema,” in Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, ed. Gyan Prakash, (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2010), 152.
 196

melodrama, with its particular purchase on Indian modernity, in favour of a lost or

missing archive of noir to narrate a similarly marginal history of urban modernity.

Film noir, much like the stunt film, has a resolutely urban disposition, having first
arisen in the context of post-War Hollywood cinema, painting a dystopic image of the
modern city. The centrality of the urban in noir however finds limited parallels in
India where the experience of urban modernity is not a given, as Mazumdar notes,
even in the twenty-first century.116 The Gandhian imagination glorified the village
instead as the basis of India’s civilisational ethos. Prakash however contends that the
cosmopolitanism of Bombay represented a form of the Indian modern nurtured by
industrial capital rather than anticolonial nationalism.117 He points to the city’s
swinging culture including jazz bands, cabarets, the fashionable Art Deco architecture
and design objects, and the cinema, that unrolled the thrills of industrial modernity in
a cornucopia of sensorial pleasures. Bombay’s modernity preceded the urban
imagination that Mazumdar states would take hold from the 1970s onward, following
the first crisis of postcolonial nationalism. This allowed, according to Mazumdar, a
reflection on the urban experience that had not been possible before, and that marked
a difference from nationalist narratives of the past. But, as Prakash notes, the
particular urbanity of Bombay had always stood out as a special case in the Indian
negotiation of colonial and postcolonial modernity. Bombay Velvet, through noir,
engages this archive of Bombay’s difference, its easy multiculturalism and pragmatic
embrace of western modernity. As Johnny says to his sweetheart, “Pata hai Bambai
ke bahar kya hai pata hai? India!” (Do you know what lies outside Bombay? India!)

Jazz and its associated culture of bars, dives, crooners and gangsters becomes the
aesthetic form par excellence defining such an alternative modernity. Kashyap states
that the intention was primarily to tell the story of the city’s financialisation
proceeding through land development – the coming up of a premiere business district
in Nariman Point – as well as its forgotten histories of jazz. In Mumbai Fables,
Prakash names jazz music alongside ballroom dancing at celebrated venues like the
famous Taj Mahal Hotel, and Hollywood films at the Regal and Capitol as part of the

116
Ranjani Mazumdar, “Introduction,” in Bombay: An Archive of the City, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), xx.
117
Gyan Prakash, “The City on the Sea,” in Mumbai Fables, (New Delhi: Harper Collins India with
India Today Group, 2010), 104.
 197

repertoire of Art Deco modernity. Unlike the stunt film, which provided entertainment
for the working classes, the particular pleasures of the flesh evoked by Art Deco were
the prerogative of the city’s elite. But jazz also had a longer association with film
dating back to the silent era, as for example, the Tivoli theatre which by 1900 was
playing 25 pictures daily, with musical accompaniment provided by a string band.118
This continued into the so-called golden age of Hindi film song in the 1950s, when
Goan musicians started working as arrangers alongside Hindu composers and Muslim
lyricists, constituting as jazz historian Naresh Fernandes points out, a veritable
Nehruvian musical ensemble.119 Famous among such arrangers were Frank Fernand,
Chic Chocolate, Sebastian D’Souza and perhaps most iconic, Anthony Gonsalves,
immortalised in the 1977 Bachchan-starrer Amar Akbar Anthony with Bachchan’s
bootlegger named after composer Pyarelal’s violin teacher. Fernandes writes about
the influence of such musicians, “Drawing from their bicultural heritage and their
experience in the jazz bands, the Goans gave Bollywood music its promiscuous
charm, slipping in slivers of Dixieland stomp, Portuguese fados, Ellingtonesque
doodles, cha cha cha, Mozart and Bach themes.”120 Apart from facilitating the
westernisation of Hindi film sound, the Goan also found his way onto the screen as
the figure of the racially ambiguous Catholic, fond of his drink and speaking in a
heavily accented Hindi.121 The Hindi film vamp was often identified as Christian and
therefore subscribing to a different set of sexual codes than governed the Hindu,
upper-caste, upper-class heroine. The cabaret number which became a staple of Hindi
film of the 1960s and 1970s became the site for the vamp’s performance of
westernised femininity, while the backing band consisted of musicians with
Anglicised names like George, Sidney and Michael.122 Elsewhere Aarti Wani
describes the anxieties produced by such westernisation, drawing from sources of
popular rather than high classical western music more in consonance with Indian
bourgeois tastes, leading to the brief ban on Hindi film music on the All India Radio

118
Naresh Fernandes, “A story of love, longing and jazz in 1960s Bombay,” Quartz, May 19, 2015,
https://qz.com/india/407489/a-story-of-love-longing-and-jazz-in-1960s-bombay/.
119
Naresh Fernandes, “Remembering Anthony Gonsalves,” Seminar #543: Amchem Goem: A
symposium of the many facets of Goan society, 2004, https://www.india-
seminar.com/2004/543/543%20naresh%20fernandes.htm.
120
Fernandes, Op. cit., 2015.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
 198

between 1952-57.123 Jazz influences and the perceived licentiousness of its associated
culture of swing were considered to mark the modernity of the city, departing from
the bucolic rhythms of traditional Indian life.

It is to this countercultural force of jazz, and its alternative to the morals and milieu of
the nationalist melodrama that Kashyap turns to tell an urban history of Bombay,
itself an exceptional case in the Indian experience of modernity. The jazz player, as a
liminal figure “not quite Indian”, personifies Bombay’s difference. Bombay Velvet
purports to be a tribute to the love of Lorna Cordeiro and Chris Perry, fixtures on the
city’s jazz circuit during Bombay’s own “swinging sixties”. Their story as well as the
larger jazz scene is an episode in the city’s history considered to have left few traces
in public memory. But Bombay Velvet routes this history through a certain historic
formation of jazz in Hindi cinema, including music, characters and spaces that
indicated, in however oblique terms, the presence of a current contra to the national
mainstream and its discourse of sensory austerity. Kashyap’s gesture, then, is to
animate latent elements in the history of cinema that further point to different lineages
of the modern. In a different context, Madhava Prasad in his analysis of artist
Pushpamala’s photographic performances, refers to a modernity disavowed in the
pursuit of tradition, defining national identity.124 He contends that the forms taken up
by the artist, the low popular genres of comics, films, and bazaar prints, are the only
repositories of a lost historical sense of modernity as fantasy. Such a recovery of
modernity, moreover, becomes especially urgent in the light of contemporary battles
over cultural identity evincing renewed revivalist tendencies, as with the Bollywood
consecration of an essential Indianness. Rangoon and Bombay Velvet taking up the
stunt film and jazz respectively, attempt a similar archaeology of modernity
embedded in an archive of the mongrel popular.

In the film, a connection is made between the ambivalent sociality of the space of the
nightclub, cinematically purveyed through the generic cabaret, and the shadowy
business economy of the city similarly bordering on the illicit. In her discussion of the
vamp’s dangerous sexuality within the nationalist frame of female virtue, Mazumdar

123
Aarti Wani, “The Song of Love,” in The Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema
in the 1950s, (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 83.
124
M. Madhava Prasad, “The Last Remake of Indian Modernity?” in Pushpamala N: Indian Lady, BP
Contemporary Art of India Series 19, (New York: Bose Pacia, 2004).
 199

describes the nightclub as it was figured in Hindi cinema upto the 1970s, as a den of
iniquity, drawing together characters of varying levels of criminality, including
gangsters, smugglers and of course, the female dancer-performer on whose gyrating,
ecstatic body converged anxieties of the transgression of national values.125 But the
nightclub can also be seen as more generally representative of the city’s larger
business ethos, operating through practices of venture capital constituting an economy
made in the image of the casino. Further, the cinematic nightclub is not merely a
figuration of this otherwise intangible formation, but an active participant in the illicit
structures propping up the city’s economy. Elsewhere, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his
reading of Shree 420 as an early cinematic text connecting the art of making money in
Bombay with the sensory pleasures of city life, refers to scriptwriter K. A. Abbas’
lament to Gandhi extolling the sins of the city including satta, racing, gambling and
drinking – all of which form set-pieces in Kashyap’s film.126 These are activities
moreover which are considered to have a murky connection to the cinema itself.127
The nightclub can then be read as not only the cinematic representation of the city’s
vices, but as an encoding of the cinema itself, the entertainment industry, as an
integral part of the city’s economy which is illicit by default. The taint of illegality
haunting the nightclub thus looms large over the city’s broad structures of capital.
Rajadhyaksha carries this further to suggest that contemporary forms of finance
capital often draw on the structures and logics of this pre-existing formation of
indigenous capital as a protean mass that can take any shape. Corporatisation, of the
economy and of the film industry, merely entailed a formalisation of the previously
informal, and a whitewashing of manifestly “black” money. Bombay Velvet, produced
by Fox Star Studios is precisely a product of such corporatisation, thereby implicating
itself in the history it dramatises. Even the collaboration with Karan Johar
representing a brand of frothy mainstream cinema which Kashyap has famously railed
against, seems carefully calibrated to produce a meta-commentary on globalisation
proceeding through the cinema. For Johar, hailing from a traditional film family of
Sindhi financiers and subsequently turned proprietor of one of the leading corporate
production houses in Bombay, himself represents the passage from the industry’s
125
Ranjani Mazumdar, “Desiring Women,” in Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, 85-90.
126
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous
‘Exhibition’ Capital (part I),” Journal of the Moving Image 5, (2006),
http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2006/the_curious_case_of_bombays_hindi_cinema_the_career_of_in
digenous.pdf.
127
Ibid.
 200

disreputable origins into its sleek corporate avatar. His casting as the villainous
Khambatta evokes the figure of the capitalist driving the city’s transformation across
decades. Bombay Velvet thus deliberately taps into the Hindi cinema’s archive of vice
as the anchor for its own production history. Such an archive, it suggests, is a key to
understanding the present working of the city-cinema hybrid in the throes of
globalisation.

The careers of the city’s changing economy are reflected in Johnny’s rise from rags to
riches. His strategy of dabbling in a series of petty criminal enterprises to move up in
the hierarchy by any means, resonates with the “whatever sticks” attitude
characterising venture capital. Johnny is shown to be recruited initially to pilfer
incoming bullion supplies by the smuggler Larsen. Bombay, as Rajadhyaksha
mentions in his essay, was a centre of the global bullion trade from the 19th century, in
an age when gold rather than property engaged the attentions of the mafia. Johnny is
shown as part of a midnight raid on a beached ship, when the operation is intercepted
by police and Larsen is arrested. Johnny makes away with a few gold “biscuits” only
to have these stolen later by his wayward mother. He goes on to make a clumsy
attempt at robbing Khambatta as he leaves a bank bearing a suitcase full of notes, but
becomes nonetheless engaged by the latter as his personal henchman. Khambhatta’s
operations are more sophisticated than Larsen’s involving blackmail, bribery,
lobbying and cold murder. Johnny’s services are rewarded by making him the face of
the new club Bombay Velvet, itself a front for a host of shady business dealings that
are arranged under its roof. An even larger plan is finally set afoot to create a
“Manhattan” in Bombay’s vacant backbay plots, requiring the suppression of an
incipient trade union movement. This succession of business ventures encapsulating
the economic history of Bombay in the twentieth century is accompanied by a
corresponding passage through the spaces of entertainment as the pleasure grounds of
capital. Johnny, when still a petty thug, is shown to frequent an opium den where
Rosie, garishly made up, does her best Geeta Dutt impersonation. Later, as he comes
up in life, he is made the manager of Bombay Velvet, a glossier but still decidedly
debauched venue. At the height of his success, on the verge of being accepted into the
inner circle, Johnny is shown to conference with an elite gathering of politicians and
businessmen at the exclusive Cricket Club of India. This progression from opium den
to nightclub to cricket club is not a simple move across a sliding scale of prosperity,
 201

as the spaces of leisure become increasingly more instrumental to business itself. If

the seedy opium den with its melee of patrons including both drunken sailors and
posh Parsi businessmen is merely a place to blow off steam, the Bombay Velvet club
with its opulent trappings, all velvet and gilt, is calculated precisely to lend an air of
respectability to the wheeling and dealing of its clientele. The club in a sense, allows
for corruption to take place in plain sight, only closing down once its influential
proprietors have lost use for it. The Cricket Club of India, the great symbol of colonial
pomp and intractable to pretensions of mobility, represents the essentially feudal basis
of latter-day crony capitalism. It also anticipates the unlikely sources that will become
the centre of corruption in the future, as the scandals over the Indian Premiere League
(IPL) exposed cricket as a second front after the film industry, for the laundering of
money and the generation of huge wealth through the acquisition of a host of
subsidiary rights. The IPL like Bollywood represents a corporate structure where
spectacle is not incidental but central to business, or what Prakash refers to elsewhere
as “image capitalism”.128

While the nightclub in 60s-70s cinema remained nameless and placeless, standing in
for dimly perceived fears of the evils of urban life, in Kashyap’s film, such a space is
named for the city which can itself be seen as producing a system of sensorial capital,
bringing together business and glamour. The eponymous nightclub in Bombay Velvet
is no underbelly – it is a visible, glittering edifice announcing the nexus of politics,
entertainment and business that is the city’s lifeline. It is no coincidence that the club,
with its imposing Art Deco facade and marquee sign located at a busy city crossroads,
is reminiscent of a film theatre.129 The earlier film melodrama, still governed by a
nationalist code of morality – but even then threatening to spill over into its dystopic
inverse in films of the Bombay noir – had circumscribed the nightclub as the
supposed other of a national mainstream, privileging the village instead as the
exemplary space of the nation. In Bombay Velvet, such a narrative of origins is
displaced to instate the nightclub instead as the archetype of the country’s
development under globalisation. Unlike Shree 420’s Ranbir Raj, who is per force
128
Gyan Prakash, “Image City: The Whirlwind Movement of the Nomad,” in Project Cinema City, ed.
Madhushree Dutta and Kaushik Bhaumik, (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013), 65-73.
129
Production designer Sonal Sawant confirms that the appearance of the fictional club was modelled
on the iconic Eros theatre in Bombay. “The Making Of Bombay Velvet Sets | Anurag Kashyap”
Youtube video, 4:13, “FoxStar Hindi”, April 21, 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8vo1b1YyLw.
 202

drawn into a dishonest and exploitative business world, in Bombay Velvet, Johnny
Balraj ascends the ladder through an escalating order of crimes which he commits
with impunity. Readings of the song “Ramayya Vasta Vayya” from the earlier film
note its division of the “bad” city and the good “city”, with Kapoor’s character
recoiling in revulsion from the nightclub as the representative of the former.130 On the
other hand, the song “Behroopia” serving as a romantic signature for the central
couple, opens on the newly-opened club as the pinnacle of Johnny’s professional and
love life. The song’s lyrics, “mere har ek armaan se zyaada, chaahe re tujhko jiya,”
juxtaposed simultaneously with the image of the club’s opulent lobby and the
heroine/vamp come to surrender herself, communicate the twin-objects of Johnny’s
desire which are in turn metonyms of the city itself. In this moment, the two
objectives within his sight, Johnny’s mastery of the city is almost complete. Johnny,
the proud manager of Bombay Velvet, crucially reverses the film historical alienation
of the hero from the nightclub as the film resituates him at the centre of its amoral
universe. The temptations teased in earlier texts like Shree 420, only to be resolved
through the hero’s rehabilitation as a Robin Hood-esque figure, are succumbed in
Bombay Velvet, with Johnny shown to be acting with an almost nihilist self-interest.

Indeed, Johnny goes out in a hail of bullets and glory, in an action climax that sees
him single-handedly take on Khambatta’s entire armed guard with a pair of Tommy
Guns. The Tommy Gun as Ramnath notes in a piece on the film, is a motif drawn
from the history of film noir rather than a period detail, linking Kashyap’s story of
Prohibition in sixties Bombay with the great cinematic texts on Prohibition in
Depression-era America.131 The anachronistic and ahistorical appearance of the
Tommy Gun and the easy passage of imagery between different film industries and
eras indicates a levelling of the film archive in the digital, which can finally make
good postcolonial lag – bridging the gap between thirties America and sixties
Bombay. Ramnath further mentions that machine guns were only introduced into the
city in the nineties against the backdrop of communal violence, becoming associated
with notorious arms possession cases, as in the incident involving film star Sanjay

130
Mazumdar, “Desiring Women,” in Bombay Cinema, 85.
131
Nandini Ramnath, “In Bombay Velvet, cinematic liberty flows out of the barrel of a Tommy Gun,”
Scroll.in, March 23, 2015, https://scroll.in/article/715390/in-bombay-velvet-cinematic-liberty-flows-
out-of-the-barrel-of-a-tommy-gun.
 203

Dutt.132 The machine gun going off with violent, staccato precision thus acquires a
further charge in the context of the city’s recent violent history, as well as indicating
the industry’s own implication within it. The cinematic image of the Tommy Gun (as
AK-47) becomes emblematic of the shift from Bombay to Mumbai in the turbulent
nineties – the same information boom that produces a newfound mobility of
Hollywood style and motifs also facilitates the spread of violence in a new media
regime.

Finally, Bombay Velvet represents a very contemporary concern to say the unsayable,
and to make visible the invisible. This is most evident in the recreation of the song
“Jata Kahan Hai Deewane” from the soundtrack of the 1956 film CID. Even as the
song has endured in popular memory, it was actually censored out of the original film
over the ambiguity of its lyrics, specifically the nonsense word in the refrain,
“fiffy”.133 The original footage of the song is lost forever with only a few stills
surviving. Bombay Velvet restores the orphaned song to the screen, picturised on
Sharma’s character. Interestingly, the song is presented as a Geeta Dutt standard, who
Rosie professes to be a fan of, rather than associated with Waheeda Rahman on whom
the song was originally to be picturised. Aural stardom is foregrounded here, where it
so often takes a back seat to screen stardom. Even more, it indicates the tendency
implicit in the system of aural stardom itself, to exceed the film text and assume a life
of its own. The survival of “Jata Kahan Hai Deewane” as a trace anchored to the
memory of its playback singer demonstrates such independence, even overcoming
censorship. But ironically, Kashyap’s gesture of remedying a historical erasure was
met with its very own share of policing, as the film ran into trouble with the Central
Board of Film Certification during the controversial tenure of chief Pahlaj Nihalani.
The objection was to the use of certain expletives as well as scenes depicting physical
intimacy between the leads. Bombay Velvet, Kashyap laments, is a film that he had
least control over; even apart from the censor cuts, the sheer scale of the budget
introduced commercial imperatives that prevented Kashyap from successfully
translating his vision onto screen.134 While Kashyap refers mainly to logistical issues,

132
Ibid.
133
Karan Bali, “When Fifi Was a Four Letter Word,” Upperstall, 2015,
https://upperstall.com/features/when-fifi-was-a-four-letter-word-2/.
134
Among several issues, he relates how the story came to be dictated by the presence of stars, with
production house Fox Star insisting on a greater focus on the love story rather than the fable of urban
 204

there is a more fundamental sense in which the cinema – understood as a system

organised around theatrical releases – is increasingly felt to be constrictive of
creativity.135 From Kashyap’s account one gets the sense that it is no longer possible
now to tell a story of the cinema at the industrial scale of the cinema. Indeed,
Kashyap’s own cinephilia has always been honed through noncinematic media,
having started out with low-budget video productions for television. He is even now
hardly sentimental about the transition to digital services, in fact welcoming the new
freedom afforded by OTT platforms. Sacred Games (2018), the Netflix series
Kashyap co-directed with Vikramaditya Motwane, can be seen as a sequel of sorts to
Bombay Velvet, carrying forward the Bombay mythos.

Analogue Nostalgia: Film, Technology and Cinephilia

“Awesome song! Brings back old memories. Where are you Pramod Sinha? –

“With love from denmark –

In an early scene from Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun (2018), aging yesteryear actor
Pramod Sinha (played by the real-life seventies actor Anil Dhawan) scrolls through
the comments on the Youtube video of a song from one of his films. Having long
abandoned acting in exchange for a career in real estate development, Sinha’s heart
still lies with the cinema. He watches his old films over and over again, much to the
chagrin of his younger, more glamorous wife, and his house is a shrine to his short-
lived acting career, with large posters of the films Honeymoon (1973) and Darwaza
(1978) framed on the wall. Through Sinha/Dhawan, Andhadhun incorporates and
deliberately blurs the line between cine fact and fiction. The Youtube video is of a
real song “Mere Pyase Man Ki Bahar” from the film Honeymoon posted on the
Rajshri Productions official video channel – the camera lingers only momentarily on a

development. Kashyap also explains how the editing process must per force become more
“democratic” when there are multiple investments in a film, compromising the streamlined vision of
the director. He ultimately ascribes his own failure as the inability to grapple with the scale of a big
budget film, being used to work in the alternative mode of independent filmmaking (Anurag Kashyap,
Personal Interview, February 25, 2019).
135
This ties up with Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s argument mentioned in the previous chapter, about the
liberation of the independent filmmaker from the tyranny of the commercial medium. A filmmaker like
Mani Kaul, for example, can now accede to the status of visual artist, no longer dependent on the
cinema theatre for exhibition. Cinema, which had in a sense been “trapped in celluloid” is liberated by
the infrastructure of the digital. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Personal interview.
 205

thumbnail of the video as a prolonged shot would reveal the name of the actor, Anil
Dhawan, and not Pramod Sinha as he is called in the universe of the film. The posters
and other photographs of Sinha shown in the film are taken from Dhawan’s personal
collection. The comment read aloud by a user going by the name ‘surfing ghost’ can
be seen on the YouTube page for the song. In an interview, Raghavan along with his
co-writers Pooja Ladha Surti and Arijit Biswas admitted to posting the comment to
the existing video of the song.136 After the release of the film, a fresh round of
comments seem to have flooded the video, revisited by an audience previously
unacquainted with the song, the film or indeed Dhawan himself. One comment by a
user ‘wifistudy ka bhakt’ commends Pramod Sinha for his work in the song,
expressing the confusion created by the film’s cinephiliac tribute. Raghavan and
Ladha Surti also recount the reaction to the film’s trailer on Twitter, with many
registering surprise and delight at the casting of Dhawan.137 Andhadhun thus stands
out as an example of the way in which cinephilia for older Hindi cinema, especially
channeled through digital platforms like YouTube and Twitter, is increasingly
textualised into the narrative of contemporary Bollywood films.

The ready availability of Hindi cinema’s back catalogue including songs, posters,
clips and even full prints on the internet and the transition of a previously off-line film
culture online, mark the horizon for the production of a series of films which
variously respond to such an ongoing digital mediation. These films contend with a
landscape in which the smart phone and not the cinema is at the centre of visual
culture. At the same time, digital platforms have affected new memorial cultures
around the cinema. Along with cinema’s archive, a vast spectrum of fan activity and
affect has also been brought into view. Collections of filmic material online as in
YouTube videos and Torrent files can be traced to fan labour, and through comments,
debate and discussion, index an affective relationship with the archival material which
can be read as a source of tracking fan culture.138 Social media simultaneously
enframe and generate fan nostalgic discourse through formats and structures

136
Nandini Ramnath, “‘Andhadhun’ revisited: The twists and turns that resulted in one of 2018’s best
Hindi films,” Scroll.in, December 17, 2018, https://scroll.in/reel/905864/andhadhun-revisited-the-
twists-and-turns-that-resulted-in-2018s-best-hindi-film.
137
Sriram Raghavan and Pooja Ladha Surti, Personal Interview, February 20, 2019.
138
Duggal, “The Virtual Archive of Hindi Film Music,” 2012.
 206

predicated on an “always-archiving mentality.”139 I would argue that these constitute

a form of cinema’s counter-archive, to again borrow Amad’s term, indexing those
aspects of cinema’s life – its association with personal biographies, its implication in
different technological and media regimes, its extracinematic circulation in the
everyday – that cannot be archived through traditional institutional means. Such a
counter-archive is enabled by the participatory logic of the digital which not only
renders access but also facilitates fan production.

It is against this backdrop that Raghavan’s cinephiliac style, evident right from his
noirish first feature film Ek Hasina Thi (2004) through the heist thriller Johhny
Gaddaar (2007) and even in the revenge drama Badlapur (2015), finally comes into
its own in Andhadhun. His modus operandi has always consisted of making
references to a multitude of films and film traditions in original narratives, rather than
affecting a period style or remaking older films. Raghavan attributes his compulsive
quotation as arising spontaneously from a wellspring of film memories that
reverberate through the world of his own films. He gives the example of a scene from
Badlapur, where the aggrieved hero, on a mission to avenge his slaughtered wife and
son, tells the receptionist at a lodge that he will be staying for 20 years. The scene
then cuts to the jail where the film’s villain is watching a screening of Sholay, and the
dialogue “Bees baras jail mein rehne ke baad, sab bhul jaoge, Gabbar” rings out.
Badlapur’s revenge arc thus draws on the memory of perhaps the most famous Hindi
film about one man’s abiding vendetta. The reference came about however, not
necessarily through a conscious decision but because, as Raghavan figures, “I must
have seen Sholay about 25 times.” He elaborated:
“The old memories are very vivid and lurid… it is not important that
everybody in the audience today knows the exact reference. So many people
don’t even remember Sholay-ka this particular line because we don’t see the
image, we just hear the dialogue. It is iconic, for me, but it may not be iconic
for a fourteen-year old guy or girl watching the movie. For some it is, for
some who may want to go and discover, it is there. All these movies open up
little keys for you.”140

139
Ryan, Lizardi, “The Now-stalgia of Social Media,” in Nostalgic Generations and Media:
Perception of Time and Available Meaning, (Lanhan, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books,
2017), 118.
140
Sriram Raghavan and Ladha Surti, Personal Interview.
 207

Such a citational method closely parallels the manner in which film fragments as bits
of image, dialogue and song now circulate affixed to memories as in the nostalgia
listicle or feed into expressive forms like memes and gifs. Freed of context, such
elements constitute a film vocabulary culled from the archive of cinema. Cinema
history thus becomes immanent in such narratives which are always teasing other
narratives and contexts. Indeed, Andhadhun, about a blind pianist who becomes an
accidental witness to a murder, is organised around the cinematic significance of the
piano in Hindi film. The jazz-driven soundtracks of the fifties and sixties and upto the
seventies prominently featured the piano, and the instrument was additionally
picturised as a symbol of wealth and western modernity. In Andhadhun, the piano is
both a vestige of this history and also a prime mover in the film’s plot. Raghavan and
Ladha Surti, noting the gradual disappearance of the piano from Hindi cinema,
intended the film as a nostalgic tribute to a previous era. It is interesting to note that
just around the time of the film’s release, the NFAI added to its collection a piano
formerly belonging to Shankar Singh, one half of the famous music-composer duo
Shankar-Jaikishan known for their characteristic jazz-infused musical style.141 The
acquisition of the piano by the national film body, as “a very precious piece of
musical history” provides a contrast to Andhadhun’s parallel move to recognise a
piece of film history. While the NFAI’s acquisition went largely unnoticed expect for
a few cursory press reports, Andhadhun’s homage to the piano reinserted it into the
contemporary film landscape. Displaced from its iconic and musical function in Hindi
film melodrama, the piano instead becomes the showpiece at the centre of the film’s
neo-noir universe.

The piano also features in a remarkable montage in the film’s final credits, culled
from clips from films including Teen Devian (1965), Maya (1961), Kati Patang
(1971), Andaz (1949), Hum Nau Jawan (1985), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995),
and Parineeta (2005). Running just over two minutes, the short video features stars
spread across the history of the Hindi cinema, including Dev Anand, Ashok Kumar,
Rajesh Khanna, Dilip Kumar, Shashi Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan,
Nargis, Suraiyya, Vyjanthimala, Zeenat Aman and the film’s own Tabu, in scenes
featuring the piano in some capacity. The instrument figures largely as an

141
Shoumojit Banerjee, “A new home for Shankar’s piano,” The Hindu, September 12, 2018,
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/music/a-new-home-for-shankars-piano/article24929436.ece.
 208

intermediary in courtship but is also used to express heartbreak, and in two sequences
is even used as a stage on which to dance. Embedded in the showcase is also a brief
glimpse of Naseeruddin Shah’s blind businessman from Mohra (1994) playing the
piano, which filmmaker Atul Sabharwal sharing a screengrab on Twitter, dubbed
“Hindi cinema’s ‘blind’ man piano player moment 1,” foreshadowing Andhadhun’s
own blind piano player moment. Initial theatrical showings of the film, however, did
not feature the montage owing to copyright concerns, and the video was originally
circulated by Sabharwal on Twitter. Raghavan reveals that the montage was compiled
from YouTube clips of songs, and permission for their use had only been sought from
the owner-publishers on the video sharing website. This however left the work open
to possible claims of copyright violation by production houses which might hold the
ultimate ownership of the footage. The excision of the montage from the film’s
theatrical print finds an interesting counterpoint in the similar montage of kisses from
Guiseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988), a comparison which Sabharwal
significantly evokes. In that film, sections of different films censored for romantic
content are stitched together to form one long cinematic kiss. Tornatore gestures
towards the survivals on celluloid that adhere “crustacean-like” through the
vicissitudes of history.142 Cinema Paradiso’s fictional censorial regime issuing from
religious conservatism is replaced in the real-world context of Andhadhun by the
increasing copyright restrictions placed on digital content. The account of the making
and exhibition of Andhadhun’s piano montage exemplifies the simultaneous ease with
which film fragments can be sourced and re-used in the digital era as well as the
continued impediments to their democratic distribution by the incipient proprietary
structures governing online life. In Cinema Paradiso, the contraband celluloid reels
are able to survive fires and the demolition of the cinema theatre to be screened at the
film’s end, while in the case of Andhadhun, tantalisingly accessible digital clips
paradoxically retreat into invisibility. Ironically, the copyright claim becomes
significant precisely when the digital object leaves the relatively informal structures
of YouTube to enter the still hallowed space of the cinema theatre. One suspects there
is at play an apprehension of the re-auratising quality of the cinema in a time of its

142
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Film Fragment: Survivals in Indian Silent Film,” Post: Notes on
Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, February 7, 2017,
https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/921-the-film-fragment-survivals-in-indian-silent-film.
 209

diminished ubiquity. The digital in other words replaces the cinema as the destroyer
of the aura of the art object.

Nonetheless, Andhadhun, like Cinema Paradiso, signals the cinephiliac labour and
investment in the preservation of film history. Raghavan recalls the goodwill of the
YouTube video holders who readily granted permission to use the clips, and a number
of the images bear watermarks that gesture to their original – if one can still use the
term – digital contexts. Elsewhere Vebhuti Duggal reminds us that such material
traces indicate the channels of circulation of the film song through television,
DVD/VCDs, and audio CDs.143 The film itself is dedicated not to any personality, but
to the memory of the musical programmes Chhaya Geet (1972-82) and Chitrahaar
(1982-97), as vehicles that circulated the archive of film songs in an era before
YouTube. But ultimately, Andhadhun’s piano tribute perhaps comes closest to
Christian Marclay’s film installation The Clock, which Catherine Russell places
alongside a tendency in art practice since the 1920s “to recast the archive as a series
or collection lacking a principle of provenance.”144 In Andhadhun, as in The Clock,
film fragments are in a sense dehistoricised even as the montage creates paths through
the past that are oriented towards a perspective in the present. This extends to the
wider remix culture of the internet, dominated by compilations, samples, and
supercuts made by professional and amateur alike. Andhadhun’s overtures towards
film history are therefore determined by the affordances of digital technologies and
platforms.

The film enters the landscape of cinephilia mobilised by digital archives and social
media like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. To go back to the video of “Mere Pyase
Man Ki Bahar,” one can see a clear division in comments marked by the release of
Raghavan’s film. Comments from up until a year ago seem to reflect an older
audience familiar with the song’s singers and stars as well as it’s female music
composer Usha Khanna. Several users thank the publisher for having made the song
available and reactivating old memories, especially of college and youth. Post the
release of Andhadhun, the page seems to have acquired an entirely different set of

143
Duggal. Op. cit.
144
Catherine Russell, “Phantasmagoria and Critical Cinephilia,” in Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and
Archival Film Practices, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 153.
 210

viewers. Several users outrightly acknowledge having been made aware of the song
because of its use in the newer film. Some even repeat the comment posted by
‘surfing ghost’ so that now more than twenty users appear to be enquiring as to the
whereabouts of the fictional Pramod Sinha. Anil Dhawan moreover emerges of
interest to millennial viewers through the knowledge that he is the uncle of the
leading young actor, Varun Dhawan. An interesting dialectic is thus set up between
the past and the present such that the memory of the older movie is now embedded in
the context of the new film. The same video now reflects annotations from two
different but now ineluctably linked films and film histories. Raghavan and Ladha
Surti also point to the increased traffic around the video for a relatively unknown Salil
Chowdhury song “Guzar Jaye Din” from the film Annadata (1972), a version of
which was recorded by Khurrana for Andhadhun. A user Sri N had posted five years
ago,

“Yes, I remember when they played this song on doordarshan just after it
was announced that Kishore Kumar had passed away....the shock...I hadn't
heard this song before and I was left marveling at the brilliance of KK. This
happens every other day even today....there will never be anyone like
Kishore-da.”

Compare this to the comment posted by Abhishek Kumar 5 months ago,

“Who came here after andhadhun ?(or Ayushman khurrana)”

Here too, a division is evident between older viewers who recall the song in
conjunction with biographical information as well as the context of the Anil Dhawan
film, and younger viewers accessing the song through a form of digital postmemory
of a past they never lived.145 The makers seem to actively rely on the feedback loop
created between the film and YouTube as an archive, anticipating the curiosity to
explore the connections teased by the film. Their desire to restore an underrated gem

145
Hirsch, addressing the problem of the preservation of Holocaust memory as the generation of
survivors began to die out, explained the way in which trauma can be transmitted to bodies that did not
necessarily experience it firsthand. Her concept of postmemory has come to signify more generally the
way in which memory travels across generations. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory:
Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
 211

like “Guzar Jaye Din” is now anchored in the provision created by YouTube to access
the material alluded to.146

In these circuits between past and present YouTube emerges as a space in which the
two are simultaneous, approaching the first Deleuzian formulation of the crystalline
time-image, holding together “presents which pass” and “pasts which are
preserved.”147 This is an antihistorical conception of time in which the past is a
general pre-existence, an already-there, of which the present is the latest articulation,
or “the infinitely contracted past.” Thus, Anil Dhawan’s filmography variously
quoted, and Anil Dhawan himself, becomes the ever-present past that informs the
reading of the present in Andhadhun. Indeed, the film purposefully utilises YouTube
as a space in which such a continuum of past and present is actualised and visibilised.
In the film, Pramod Sinha reading the comments by ‘surfing ghost’ rediscovers his
career as an open-ended archive on YouTube. Beyond the film, the intervention of
‘surfing ghost’ on a real YouTube page activates a tension between the real and the
fictional, the past and the present.

Raghavan was part of a loose collective of aspiring young cinephile filmmakers in the
nineties who were lured into a dubious production venture initiated by a builder,
Janak Mehta. Gopalan, who narrates the short history of the company, Media Classic,
notes that while it was the ambition of the collective to work with analogue, the
production and aesthetics of the Media Classic films were shaped by video and
television.148 Their cinephilia had been expedited in the first place by the archive of
VCR, and the films made at Media Classic were shown on the new satellite channels.
The filmmaker’s analogue nostalgia is thus framed by the nineties media boom and
the attendant opportunities created for low-budget production and distribution.
Gopalan directly correlates the rise of the cinephile filmmaker with the exposure to
international cinema fostered by video and cable, even as these technologies
generated a nostalgia for older Indian films.149 Further, the exposure to foreign
cinema brought into relief the singularity of Indian cinema in its difference especially
146
Sriram Raghavan and Ladha Surti, Personal Interview.
147
Gilles Deleuze, “Peaks of present and sheets of past: fourth commentary on Bergson,” in Cinema 2:
The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 98.
148
Gopalan, “Bombay Noir,” 79-80.
149
Ibid.
 212

from the global hegemonic formation of Hollywood. This produces according to

Gopalan, a reflection on style and genre conventions in certain films of the nineties,
that while not without precedent, is born of the particular changes in aesthetic,
technical and reception conditions that occurred at the time. The spectator is newly
acknowledged within the diegesis of film, as in Rangeela (dir. Ram Gopal Verma,
1995) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun? (Sooraj Barjatya, 1994), as is the familiarity with
cinematic tropes and style born of the longstanding relationship with the cinema.150
Thus, cinephilia comes to be thematised significantly in films of the nineties, out of
both the disruptions and affordances created by new technologies of production,
distribution and reception. A comparable tendency can be discerned in films of the
last five years as well when seismic changes have remapped the media landscape of
the contemporary. The mobile phone and OTT platforms have once again focused
attention on the relationship between media and its audiences, and as the video boom
before made visible a historical cinematic public, the digital sparks a reflection on the
media cultures that preceded it. Such a reflection, crucially proceeds through
nostalgia.

Sharat Katariya’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) places itself squarely in the middle of
the technological changes of the nineties. Set in the twin North Indian pilgrimage
centres of Haridwar and Rishikesh, the film follows the troubled early days of the
marriage of its protagonist, Prem Prakash Tiwari to the overweight but far better
educated Sandhya Verma. Prem along with his father runs a dusty old shop selling
audio cassettes, and is an avowed fan of famous nineties crooner Kumar Sanu. The
small shop however is under increasing financial strain and is threatened when a new
business opens selling recordings with superior CD quality. Prem’s own marriage
suffers from his deep resentment against his lot in life, as well as a sense of impotence
to do anything to change it. He is part of the local shakha or chapter of the Hindu
nationalist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which espouses an
austere code of masculinity including extreme bodily self-discipline. Prem’s sense of
inadequacy is further exacerbated by his academically qualified wife, who is eligible
for and seeks employment in a government school. The film unfolds Prem’s crisis of

150
Lalitha Gopalan, “Introduction: ‘Hum Aapke Hai Kaun?’ Cinephilia and Indian Films.”
 213

masculinity alongside the crisis of the technology with which he is all but identified
with.

The film opens on shots of Prem tinkering around with a clunky tape recording
apparatus, checking for audio quality, reeling back tape that has come undone from
the spool with a pencil, and painstakingly inserting hand-cut labels into the clear
plastic covers of the cassettes. The camera lingers on dusty shelves stacked with row
upon row of cassette tape, and faded walls adorned with posters of Kumar Sanu
reflecting Prem’s avid fandom. The song “Tu” plays on the soundtrack, an original
composition for the film by Anu Malik, but arranged in the vein of nineties romantic
ballads built on orchestral sounds with tabla and dholak. This song, as well as the
song “Dard Karaara” that plays over the end credits were specially recorded for the
film by Sanu after a lengthy hiatus from Hindi film music. Prem listens to it as he
works till it abruptly comes to a stop, the cassette reel having become caught in the
recording wheel. He carefully takes it off, solders the magnetic tape back into place,
and wipes dust from the player. The sequence indicates the manual labour and
dexterity required to operate the technology, that implicates machine and man in an
intimate relationship. What is foregrounded is the sheer materiality of the audio
cassette as technology, compared to the minimalist logic and design of the digital.
Unlike the latter, where the sensory output is in a sense abstracted from the
mysterious workings of the code embedded within ever-sleeker casings, there seems
to be a direct correlation between the mechanical movement of the cassette and the
music issuing from it. The slow turning of the tape recorder’s wheel picturised
prominently in close-up shots, quite literally crystallises the sound we hear, Sanu’s
voice breaking off at the exact point the wheel stops. Like celluloid film which bears
the scratches and grime as marks of contact with the real world, analogue tape is
similarly vulnerable to its environment, dust interfering with the playback as is shown
in the film. The impending obsolescence of the audio tape threatens the breakdown
thus of much more than merely a particular technological order, but a mode of
production that directly engages the body. If Christopher Pinney uses the term
corpothetics to describe the embodied relationship of viewer with image, a similar
condition could be postulated here with respect to the relationship between the user
and the technology itself. This is evident from Prem’s reverential attitude to the
artefacts of his trade, holding up a stack of cassettes to be blessed before a small idol,
 214

and his general air of asceticism as he goes about his work. There is a sense in which
his love of both his technical vocation as well as the music becomes actually inscribed
in the tape he laboriously spools by hand, a consonance thus emerging between the
romantic music and this labour of love.

The film would appear to participate in the ongoing fascination for old media
technologies designated technostalgia. Tim van der Heijden surveying the
proliferating literature on retro cultures of the contemporary, offers his own account
of the revival of analogue technologies and simulation of vintage aesthetics as
indicating a shift from memory mediated by technology to memories of
technology.151 This marks according to him, a new threshold in our understanding of
nostalgia beyond its classical sense of a longing for the past, to signal a performative
relationship between past and present.152 Several observers remarked on the
prominence of cassettes and VHS tapes in the film as invoking the spirit of the
nineties. One writer gushed, “What makes it special is that the film is like a time
capsule. From the costumes, the production design, the background score to the
dialogues, every detail is carefully chosen and placed to take you back to a time when
there were red Ambassadors on highways, Bajaj chetaks in narrow lanes, and ink
smears on the cheap paper of exam sheets.”153 Watching the protagonist record a
mixtape, she continued, is like being “transported back to a time when this music and
these cassettes were a part of your life.” The audio cassette is thus metonymic of the
era. Director Sharat Katariya’s account of the conception of the film however
problematises the reading of nostalgia in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. According to him, the
film was originally intended to have been set in Agra, as a city redolent of
associations with eternal and idealised love, to serve the backdrop of the film’s
examination of a less than ideal marriage.154 The move to set the film in a small town
came primarily from a desire to situate the film away from the metropolitan axes of
Bombay-Delhi rather than, as several articles concluded, from any essential

151
Tim van der Heijden, “Technostalgia of the present: From technologies of memory to a memory of
technologies,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 4 No. 2 (2015): 103-121.
152
Ibid, 104.
153
Simantini Dey, “Dum Laga Ke Haisha: From Salman Khan’s Jacket to Kumar Sanu’s songs, the
film is a nostalgia trip for 90s kids,” Firstpost, March 2, 2015,
https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/dum-laga-ke-haisha-from-salman-khans-jacket-to-kumar-
sanus-songs-the-film-is-a-nostalgia-trip-for-90s-kids-2130763.html.
154
Personal interview with Sharat Katariya and Manu Anand (cinematographer), February 21, 2019.
 215

attachment to the small town as a space of nostalgia. The film’s nineties setting also
came out of discussions among the film’s core creative team comprising the director,
producer Maneesh Sharma and cinematographer Manu Anand. The use of cassettes in
certain key scenes, as when Prem busies himself with recording a tape to avoid
sleeping with his wife, or another scene in which Prem’s father encounters current
Hindi film numbers blaring from a loudspeaker as he exits a temple, serve the
function of humorous set pieces rather than homage. Katariya is overall wary of the
film being read against the rhetoric of millennial nostalgia – of the current tendency to
anoint cultural objects of the recent past as worthy of commemoration – regarding
nostalgia to be more of the cyclical return of objects and themes than a specific
tendency of the contemporary.

In a way, Dum Laga Ke Haisha actively combusts the implied evolutionary logic
underwriting notions of technostalgia that assumes a rapid turnover of technologies.
Its juxtaposition of the audio cassette business against the hoary landscape of the
Indian temple town emphasises the essential anachronism of media in India, where to
quote Mahadevan once again, “no technology dies a predictable death.”155 Indeed, as
Peter Manuel has shown in the course of his study of cassette culture in North India,
cassette players and cassette duplicators having been introduced belatedly in India
after the relaxation of state-imposed import restrictions, actually “constituted a
quintessential ‘new media’ form: inexpensive to make and consume, and conducive to
decentralised and diversified production.”156 The antiquity of Haridwar, then, doesn’t
so much emphasise the relative mortality of the audio cassette, than reflect the
tenacious survival of the past into the present. The persistence of past media
technologies in India, and their particular imbrication in a milieu simultaneously
drawing on tradition and modernity, militates against the lens of obsolescence
colouring technostalgia. A similar operation can be seen with regard to the use of
Kumar Sanu’s voice to evoke the aural memory of the nineties, which as Abhija
Ghosh notes “epitomizes the nineties romantic imagination.”157 The film’s lead actor,
Ayushman Khurrana echoes this view, drawing attention to perhaps Sanu’s most
famous song, “Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Jaana Sanam” from DDLJ (1995), which

155
Sudhir Mahadevan, “Introduction,” in A Very Old Machine,” 1.
156
Peter Manuel, “The regional North India popular music industry in 2014: from cassette culture to
cyberculture,” Popular Music 33, Issue 3 (2014): 390.
157
Abhija Ghosh, “Media Encounters of the Nineties Romantic Song.”
 216

Khurrana dubs the “national film anthem” of the country that “everybody loves.”158
One imagines Sanu’s voice writ large across the fictional universe of Dum Laga Ke
Haisha set in 1995, the same year as the release of DDLJ. The use of Sanu’s voice,
replacing the signature alaap or opening refrain sung by the veteran Lata Mangeshkar
for all Yash Raj productions, was deliberately calculated to signpost the nineties
milieu. Permission for this was specially sought, and the unique device was noticed
right from the release of the film’s trailer. Sanu’s voice bookends the film, from the
song “Tu” in the opening credits and “Dard Karaara” used as an end credits song
sequence. The latter, along with Sanu, brought back other old hands including singer
Sadhna Sargam and choreographer Chinni Prakash, in an elaborate nineties-style
song-and-dance number. It is introduced in the film by Khurrana’s character, who
assumes the style of an All India Radio presenter, faithfully recording the song
credits, before leading into the song itself. The song fits within what Ajay Gehlawat
reads as the increasing trend towards introducing an end credits song-and-dance
vehicle as a compensatory device in films that actually feature, less and less, the
traditional lip-synced and choreographed song sequence “integrated into the
narrative.159 Through “Dard Karaara”, Dum Laga Ke Haisha, as an example of the
new hatke or offbeat cinema, pays homage to a film tradition that it actually runs
counter to. Unlike Mazumdar’s examples of the urban fringe, Dum Laga Ke Haisha
signals a stream of millennial Bombay cinema that engages the legacy of Bollywood
on affectionate rather than adversarial terms. Sanu even makes a cameo towards the
film’s end, as the guest-of-honour inaugurating the climactic wife-carrying

158
“Making of the Song - Dard Karaara | Dum Laga Ke Haisha | Ayushmann Khurrana | Bhumi
Pednekar,” YouTube video, 5:00, “YRF”, February 21, 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPQRb0xylNA.
159
According to Gehlawat, the end credits song sequence signals the way in which the Bollywood
masala style is being bracketed outside of the films themselves. He says, “It is precisely in this sense
that the end credits song sequence can be considered Bollywood par excellence – the pure form of
Bollywood marketing itself as such a form. The end credits song sequence allows Bollywood as a
media industry and the Bollywood film to both become and unbecome itself with, in some ways, the
cart now pulling the horse, that is, Bollywood being defined post hoc”. In other words, even as
Bollywood struggles to erase its difference on the world stage, the song sequence as emblematic of this
difference is sought to be accommodated in this changed landscape of film. The end credits song
sequence thus unfolds a spectacle of Bollywood’s difference while remaining distinct from the film’s
narrative, allowing films to simultaneously disavow as well as continue to draw on the symbolic capital
bestowed on Bollywood as a “minor ‘international’ cinema.” Ajay Gehlawat, “The picture is not yet
over!: The end credits song sequence in Bollywood,” South Asian Popular Culture 15, Issue2-3 (2017):
213; Kaushik Bhaumik, “Lost in Translation: A Few Vagaries of the Alphabet Game Played Between
Bombay Cinema and Hollywood,” in World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood, ed. Paul Cook,
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 201-217.
 217

competition. Sanu is framed as a hero would be, introduced first only through his
voice and then through shots of his back, as an MC hails him as “everyone’s
favourite, the voice that has captured a million hearts!” We see Prem’s reaction to the
unexpected announcement, his face lighting up with a fan’s delight at finally meeting
his idol, and Sanu becomes a sort of tutelary deity spurring Prem to victory despite
seemingly insurmountable odds. The spirit of the nineties is thus figured as a
benevolent force that watches over the progress of the contemporary industry – over a
“Khurrana” instead of a “Khan”.160

Sanu’s voice, heard after a fashion, and Malik’s deliberately retro composition could
at first be read as instances of what Svetlana Boym refers to as restorative nostalgia,
attempting to stage a return home by recreating the past as pastiche.161 Restorative
nostalgia is contrasted with reflective nostalgia which entails a meditative stance on
the longing for the past rather than the past itself. While the first preoccupies itself
with building monuments, the second outlines a more playful approach to the past
engaging ruins and fragments. One is dead serious, and the other, humorous and
ironic.162 Interviews given by the film’s actors and personnel indicate a desire to close
the gap between the nineties and our present day that would seem to align the film
with restorative nostalgia. The lyricist Varun Grover recounts:

“Humne aisa gaana banaane ki koshish ki, jo ki, uthake hum seedhe jaise 90s
mein rakhde, toh koi pehchaan na paye ki us time ka gaana nahin hai. Sharat
ka bhi tha again ki, humko aisa nahin karna hai ki log hanse.”163

[We have tried to make such a song that immediately transports us to the 90s.
One should not be able to tell that it isn’t actually a song of that time. Sharat
was also agreed, that we shouldn’t do something which makes people laugh
(at the decade).]

160
The shift from the typical Bollywood potboiler towards the realist dramas of the past decade can be
encapsulated in the shift in dominance of the star Khans to the current popularity of everyman actors
like Ayushmann Khurrana, Rajkummar Rao and Vicky Kaushal. The former index the traditional
social melodramas driven by star power, while the latter indicate the move towards a bourgeois realism
in the so-called multiplex cinema. Deepanjana Pal, “Sadhvi Prachi is right: It's time to boycott the
Khans and embrace Ayushmann Khurrana,” Firstpost, March 03, 2015,
https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/sadhvi-prachi-is-right-its-time-to-boycott-the-khans-and-
embrace-ayushmann-khurrana-2132867.html.
161
Svetlana Boym, “Introduction: Taboo on Nostalgia,” in The Future of Nostalgia, (New York: Basic
Books, 2001), 35.
162
Ibid, 178.
163
“Making of the Song - Dard Karaara” YouTube video, 5:00, “YRF”, February 21, 2015.
 218

Khurrana corroborates:

“Humne kuch spoof nahi kiya hai. Itna naturally kiya hai sab kuch film ke
andar, chahe woh Dard Karaara ho ya poori film ho, yeh 90s bahut hi earnest
90s hai.”164

[We have created such a spoof, such a naturally mounted throwback, whether
it is Dard Karaara or the really the film itself. The (decade of the) 90s in the
film is a very earnest 90s.]

Add to this actress Bhoomi Pednekar’s stated desire to relive the experience of an
actor in the nineties, and we get the sense that the aim was to facilitate a return to a
glorious past tradition that has languished in recent years. Once again however, the
particularities and realities of the Bombay industry complicate a straightforward
application of theories of nostalgia as of obsolescence. Boym’s formulation of
nostalgia, like van der Heijden’s delineation of technostalgia, presumes a loss of the
objects of nostalgia. Dum Laga Ke Haisha however, points to the ongoing currency of
the past, made newly present in the digital. If Sanu appears as a memorial trace, it is
precisely because as Katariya and Anand point out, as a filmmaker having grown up
with the popular culture of cinema in India, one cannot prevent the redux of movie
memories even in new productions. Citation of the cinematic past is a function, not of
cinephiliac idiosyncrasy or of a melancholic attachment, but of the presence of
cinema as a texture of everyday life. This is depicted in an extraordinary scene where
a fight between the couple is staged through a battle of film songs. As Prem continues
to avoid his wife, in her frustration she blares a song on the music player that she
hopes will convey her feelings. The song’s lyrical lament which express Sandhya’s
own anger and hurt wafts across the house, reaching the bathroom where Prem has
retreated. The latter does not take this lying down however, and fires back with
carefully chosen lyrics of his own. As the lyrical back-and-forth unfolds, the camera
tracks across the physical space and bodies traversed by the music, superimposing an
emotional architecture of the couple onto the world of the joint family. If the song has
traditionally served as a site of displacement and projection of desire within the
narrative of the Hindi film, the sequence highlights the manner in which the song

164
Ibid.
 219

functions off-screen as well, to crystallise competing investments and imaginaries and

battles over space and expression. Their musical war-of-words is reminiscent of the
qawwali duels, presenting opposing sides of a debate, that appeared as a standard
trope in films of the Muslim social, and continued to inflect the Urdu song lyrics of
film music, remediated here in a technologised form. It refers also to the popular
game of antakshari, memorably depicted in the two great family romances of the
nineties, Hum Aapke Hain Koun? and DDLJ, where film music is similarly deployed
as a cryptic vocabulary of love that can play out within the confines of the patriarchal
joint family. In this scene, and others in which Prem is accused of cultivating
untenable fantasies of landing a wife like the actor Juhi Chawla, or Sandhya’s jibe at
Prem’s aunt that her precious nephew is “no Vinod Khanna!” one gets a measure of
the extent to which these are people who make sense of their lives in cinematic terms.

The nineties film song can segue seamlessly from the spectacular romances of the
decade into the realistic setting of Katariya’s film precisely because the reference is
not necessarily to nineties films, but to their presence in the world outside the film.
Anand elaborated, “Bollywood or Hindi cinema, you’re constantly bombarded with it,
all the time, so anyone writes a film or writes a story, somehow that referencing will
come in because it is part of reality!”165 Katariya and Anand are in fact animated by
the sense of opportunity afforded by the digital, and dismiss the dire prognostications
associated with it, pointing out that pronouncements of the death of cinema have been
given since the sixties with the introduction of first television, and then the VHS tape.
Indeed, in Dum Laga Ke Haisha, TV and video are shown as intensifying the
presence of cinema rather than diminishing it. The cassette in Dum Laga Ke Haisha is
not so much a fetish object as it is emblematic of the way in which cinema in India
encompasses a media industry that extends beyond film to cannibalise all other
cultural forms – Katariya’s assertion that “popular culture (in India) is movies only.”
It emphasises the extracinematic life of film, of the independence of particular
pleasures like film songs which can circulate on their own, spawning satellite
productions and creativities which nonetheless draw sustenance from a final
cinematic referent. Elsewhere, Shikha Jhingan has related how the cassette boom of
the nineties mobilised cinema’s musical archive through nostalgia in the form of both

165
Sharat Katariya, Personal Interview.
 220

version recordings by new artistes as well as premium re-issues of songs by marquee

singing stars like Lata Mangeshkar.166 Dum Laga Ke Haisha’s invocation of a time of
nostalgia, thus, signals to a similar situation in the present, where the perceived threat
from a new technology is sought to be neutralised and contained through an appeal to
the aura of the past.

Even as Katariya denies being driven by a sense of nostalgia himself, viewing his
production more as a faithful recreation of a – if recent – historical epoch, he
acknowledges the renewed attention to mixtapes and their associated cultures which
seemed to bloom on social media websites in the wake of the film. Posters of the film,
which had initially been marketed as an unusual love story between a young man and
an overweight woman, soon featured the cassette prominently as the single most
representative image of the film. Discussion threads and featurettes on being a “90s
kid” often included a popular meme that juxtaposed an image of a pencil next to one
of a cassette with its spool undone, expecting the initiated viewer to imagine the
connection between the two. While it is difficult and perhaps also not important to
establish a causal chain between the film and the digital media landscape, it is
nonetheless possible to posit the emergence of a continuum between online retro
cultures and Bollywood’s exposition of nostalgia at a time when cinema’s past is
endlessly rehashed on the internet.

Akshay Roy’s Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017), about a lovelorn writer looking back on his
relationship with his childhood sweetheart is explicitly touted as a nostalgia trip. The
film, also coming out of the Yashraj stable and sharing the same producer and lead
actor, sparked immediate comparisons with Dum Laga Ke Haisha, not least for the
prominence of obsolete technologies like cassettes, boomboxes, transistor radios and
even the compact disc, which in Katariya’s film had beckoned as the shiny ensign of
the future. In both Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Meri Pyaari Bindu, Khurrana adopts a
variation of the Devdas persona, the quintessential wounded male hero from a
classical film tradition, refigured in nineties and millennial incarnations respectively.
Their romantic temperaments are shown to be crucially mediated by technology,
Prem waxing melancholic to the tape recorded sounds of Kumar Sanu, while

166
Shikha Jhingan, “Lata Mangeshkar’s Voice in the Age of Cassette Reproduction,” in BioScope,
Vol. 4, No. 2 (2013), pp. 97-114.
 221

Abhimanyu’s old soul is flagged by his obstinate attachment to analogue. Further,

while Prem’s failure to launch dovetails with the existential crisis of cassette
technology, Abhimanyu’s fixation on the object of his unrequited love parallels his
fascination for dead media. But unlike Dum Laga Ke Haisha, Meri Pyaari Bindu
foregrounds its retrospection as a self-conscious ode to popular culture. Roy recounts
the inception of the film in the screenplay by Suprotim Sengupta, about a mixtape that
triggers memories lending the film its nostalgic frame.167 For Roy himself, the
impulse was to pay homage to a love of cinema and old film music that encodes a
form of cross-generational memory, inherited from his parents and projected into the
future. At the heart of Meri Pyaari Bindu’s nostalgic project is thus a sense of the
cinema as entangled with the personal. Bhrigupati Singh, enumerates the three
dimensions of the object of cinema in India as a technology, as commodity, and as
implicated in modes of sociality.168 The third aspect relates to the way in which
cinema opens beyond film as a “specific technological apparatus” and becomes
embroiled in subjectivity, “in how we learn to express and inhabit intimacy, in the
ways in which we are produced as subjects of life and language.”169 Such a function
of the cinema further marks, according to Singh, a distinctive aspect of the life of
cinema in India as compared to the different modalities of Hollywood or European
cinema.

Meri Pyaari Bindu reinforces and expands on this apprehension of the experiential
dimension of cinema. In an early scene, Abhimanyu chances on a stack of old
recordings in the dusty attic of his childhood neighbour’s home. There along with
varied bric-a-bric, old furniture, a cracked mirror and a rusty and dented bicycle, he
spots a special mixtape. The cassette when played, pours out the spectral voices of
Bindu and Abhimanyu declaring the creation of a specially curated soundtrack. Bindu
initially introduces it as their “top 10 favourite songs” but is corrected by Abhi, who
asserts that the songs are those linked to their lives, a soundtrack to their lives as it
were. The first strains of the song “Abhi Na Jao Chhod Kar” from the old Dev Anand-
starrer Hum Dono (1961) ring out, sung by Bindu sans any orchestration. Her voice,
like Proust’s proverbial madeleine, has an immediate effect on Abhimanyu, shown to

167
Akshay Roy, Personal Interview, February 19, 2019.
168
Bhrigupati Singh, “The problem,” Seminar #525: Unsettling Cinema: a symposium on the place of
cinema in India, (May 2003), http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525/525%20the%20problem.htm.
169
Ibid.
 222

be suffering from writer’s block, and he is finally spurred to write the love story he
has long put off. He titles the manuscript “Meri Pyaari Bindu” (My Beloved Bindu)
named for both his childhood sweetheart, as well as the lyrics of an old song, and
explains:
“Some songs become part of your life. Wrapped in their tunes are stories big
and small. Many memories. Bindu and I had filled a cassette with our
memories. Our mixed tape. Our 4x2.5” dirty secret. A tape filled with Lata,
Kishore, Asha, Rafi, RD, Bappi-da… and Bindu

Going one step further than Dum Laga Ke Haisha, where the cassette is a prominent
motif, Meri Pyaari Bindu is actually structured like a mixtape, the central romance
unfolding serially in vignettes set to the track listing of Abhi and Bindu’s special mix.
The audio cassette as a technology is thus not merely a repository of memory. Rather,
the film demonstrates the way in which the very experience of memory, as a
particular mobilisation of the senses, is structured in the image of recording
technologies. Elsewhere, Carol Vernallis talks about the audiovisual turn effected by
the ubiquity of music in the environment at large. Referring to iPod culture, she says,
“We expect a musical accompaniment that fits the rhythms of our lives and even
structures our gait and our gaze. From these contexts we might have learned ways of
musicalizing our experience, as if an audiovisual bubble had enveloped our daily
routines.”170 Yoking Vernallis’s observations to Katariya and Anand’s remarks noted
earlier, that “in India, music is film music,” we can discern the manner in which
cinema is quite literally a film that lies thick over the landscape of life. Vernallis also
discusses the effect of music video aesthetics on digital filmmaking, not least in the
way in which films are increasingly organised musically, propelled by sound and
sonic elements.171 One can detect such a tendency in Meri Pyaari Bindu, where the
visual track – Abhimanyu’s procession of memories – emanates from the soundtrack
which functions as a trigger. In the manner of MTV-style non-linear editing, shots
flow from one to the next impelled by music, rather than the integrity of sensory-
motor relations between shots (i.e., the shot-reverse-shot structure). Music video
aesthetics, with an emphasis on unpredictability, are also conducive to the film’s
exposition of memory as an evanescent virtuality.172 Images come thick and fast and

170 Carol Vernallis, “Music Video into Post-Classical Cinema,” in Unruly Media: YouTube, Music
Video, and the New Digital Cinema, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 73.
171
Ibid, 69.
172
Ibid, 71.
 223

linger only briefly, affecting the quality of an overwhelming flood of memories. The
film relies heavily on montages, especially during character expositions of Bindu
relating her many quirks, featuring freeze frames, off-kilter hand-held shots, rapid
cuts and slow motion. She is often lit in soft focus, the camera wistfully
contemplating her face in medium and close-up shots before losing her, to the
ineluctable march of time as it were. Bindu, as a beguiling but elusive object of
affection, is in some ways a figure of memory herself. Her character falls in a long
line of what has been characterised as the trope of the manic pixie dream girl,
inherited here from films like Almost Famous (2000), Garden State (2004) and 500
Days of Summer (2009), as a particular male fantasy of an unattainable feminine
ideal.173 What generally goes unremarked in assessments of the trope, however, is the
manner in which it seems to relate quite directly to the larger phenomenon of
analogue nostalgia thrown up by the digital. The manic pixie dream girl is part of the
aesthetic of “twee”, of the efflorescence of retro and the love of quaint technologies
and lifestyles that grow against a disaffection with the present. The incidence of the
manic pixie dream girl in film corresponds closely with a period of the expansion of
digital technologies in the early 2000s. The oedipal fascination with this chimera of
feminine desirability could then be seen as an allegory of the regressive attitudes
fostered by the alienating character of the digital present as well as a loss of faith in
the future.

In this regard, Meri Pyaari Bindu’s anachronism unfolds slightly differently from that
of Dum Laga Ke Haisha where analogue technology served to delineate the film’s
nineties backdrop. In contrast with, Dum Laga Ke Haisha’s period setting, Meri
Pyaari Bindu has a bildungsroman structure beginning in 1983 and carrying into the
present day. In Roy’s film then, the persistence of analogue technologies into the
film’s present signals a time out of joint. If in the earlier film, Prem’s association with
technology aligned him with the general disposition of the decade, Khurrana’s
Abhimanyu is similarly in sync with his, his love of analogue technology betraying a
specifically digital subjectivity. Prem’s mechanical proficiency and general
technophilia strikes a contrast with Abhimanyu’s reactionary attitude towards

173
Nathan Rabin, “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown,” The AV Club,
January 25, 2007, https://film.avclub.com/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-elizabet-
1798210595.
 224

technology, shunning laptops and MP3s in favour of the more cumbersome

equipment of typewriters and tape decks. We are introduced to him as a reclusive
writer of pulp horror novels, who spends most of his time holed up in an airless dingy
room binging on cheap rum and cigarettes. He is suicidal at the film’s beginning,
shown perched precariously on a rooftop ledge, as anonymous hands type out the
prologue to the story. Abhimanyu’s inability to move on from his relationship with
Bindu is thus mirrored in his generally maudlin spirit, and melancholic attachment to
objects of the past. The film’s exploration of thwarted love comes embedded in a
diagnosis of the general pathology of the age. The film pulls off a double take,
bathing at first in the warm glow of nostalgia, but eventually cautioning against the
perils of dwelling excessively in the past. Abhimanyu is only brought back from the
ledge once he leaves the attic which is revealed to be a veritable prison-house of
nostalgia.

The film’s ambivalent attitude towards nostalgia can be read against developments in
the contemporary industry. For Meri Pyaari Bindu despite its invocation of a
cinematic golden age, is emphatically a product of what is touted as the “New
Bollywood.” Meenakshi Shedde, coining the term, defines this as the cinema which is
“usually independently made, engages with real issues, may or may not have stars,
and – blasphemously – may not even have songs and dances.”174 What Shedde
describes can be interpreted as a mainstreaming of the aesthetics and concerns of the
historic middle cinema with its emphasis on ordinariness, disavowing the spectacular
excesses of the popular cinema.175 This is a cinema in other words about the average
spectator of the popular cinema – the incorrigibly filmi Bindu and Abhimanyu who
become the subject of their own film. Both Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Meri Pyaari
Bindu have drawn comparisons with the films of Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh
Mukherjee, and Khurrana described as akin to famous everyman actors like Amol
Palekar and Farooq Shaikh. But if Meri Pyaari Bindu as an example of the new
Bollywood charts a lineage from an alternative tradition of cinema, it has equally to
contend with the legacy of the Hindi cinema as a quintessentially escapist form. This

174
Meenakshi Shedde, “A world beyond Bollywood: surveying the new Indian cinema,” Sight and
Sound, April 2017, https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/beyond-
bollywood-survey-new-indian-cinema.
175
See Suvadip Sinha, “Urban love, celluloid illusion: A re-evaluation of Bombay middle cinema of
the 1970s,” South Asian Popular Culture 17, Issue 1 (2019): 95-110.
 225

can be seen in its use of music. The film, even as it borrows heavily from assorted
yester-year hits and standards, suggests a very different use of song in film that is
symptomatic of the increasing tendency towards narrative realism in contemporary
Bollywood. Almost all the music is diegetic, issuing from tape recorders, Walkmans,
and radios, or sung by Bindu who is shown to be an aspiring singer, in sundry bars,
cafes, and recording studios. Songs, when they are picturised, are staged as tributes,
recreating iconic sequences from older films including “Mere Sapnon Ki Rani” from
Aradhana (1969) and “Pyaar Hua, Iqraar Hua” from Shree 420. Even the film’s
original compositions mainly appear overlaid onto montages, and the sole spectacular
dance sequence set to the song, “Yeh Jawaani Teri” is choreographed in a deliberately
mannered retro style. The sequence takes place in an abandoned tram depot, where
one wall is adorned with a monumental mural of the famous Bengali composer Bappi
Lahiri, so that the song becomes as much a tribute to the city in which the film is set,
mobilising a set of signifiers that constitute the popular imagination of Calcutta. The
erstwhile colonial capital, with its crumbling mansions, yellow Ambassador taxis, and
slow pace of life, unfolds a landscape of the past, with people, objects and
architecture petrified in time. Thus, in Meri Pyaari Bindu, the song sequence itself is
an object of nostalgia, a vestigial trace of a brand of Hindi cinema that has been
discarded in favour of a realist style.176

Through its unique use of music, we can see how Meri Pyaari Bindu manages
competing drives of the demand for realism on the one hand, and the historical
pleasures of song and dance. This is resolved in part through recourse to the lived
aspect of the cinema, to the ways in which the “fantasy” of the popular cinema
constitutes the “real” ground of life in India.177 Bindu, for example, drawing
inspiration from the hybrid singer-star assemblage of Waheeda Rahman and Lata

176
In his review of the film, Baradwaj Rangan notes that, “The more Bollywood distances itself from
older Hindi cinema, the more nostalgic it gets for the latter. The Rishi Kapoor romances of the 1970s
did not have endless nods to, say, the Dev Anand era, but today’s films positively revel in these
references, which range from song remixes to plot points (the Dev Anand segment in Tamasha) to
what we have here, songs that link to specific moments. For instance: Do naina ek kahani to depict
Bindu’s state of mind after a tragedy.” Bardwaj Rangan, “Meri Pyaari Bindu”… An interesting premise
that merely scratches the surface,” Bardwaj Rangan, May 14, 2017,
https://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2017/05/14/meri-pyaari-bindu-an-interesting-premise-that-
merely-scratches-the-surface/.
177
Sara Dickey unpacks the canonical reading of Indian cinema as inherently fantastical, marshalling
academic debates to argue that the fantasy in Hindi film “is rooted in and addresses the real.” Sara
Dickey, “Fantasy, Realism and Other Mixed Delights: What Have film Analysts Seen in Popular
Indian Cinema,” Projections 3, Issue 2 (Winter 2009): 1-19.
 226

Mangeshkar in the film Guide (1955), struggles to herself become a singer-heroine. In

several sequences, she is shown to affect the pose and hauteur of screen divas as she
belts out her covers of film hits while a worshipful Abhimanyu looks on. Bindu’s
performances indicate the manner in which, following Constantine V. Nakassis, film
fragments are continuously animated as aspirational style in the daily lives of millions
of film viewers.178 The film also shows the way in which individual memories
become mediated through the public memory of cinema – kuch gaane aapki zindagi
se yunhi jud jaate hai. It indexes the way in which people remember cinema, in
conjunction with memories of growing up, of inhabiting a particular time and space
and with formative experiences of love and death. For Abhimanyu, time itself is
registered through a series of external markers, as with the year 1983 which is frozen
into a set of disparate but linked images, including Kapil Dev and team winning the
Cricket World championship on the balcony of the Lord’s stadium in London,
Kishore Kumar singing the song “Taki o Taki”, Bindu arriving next door in a green
Ambassador car, and himself, carefully bearing a plate of homemade mince-meat
samosas to welcome the new neighbours. Later, the year 2005 is encapsulated in the
recollection – in no particular order – of the catastrophic Bombay floods, the Gulzar-
penned lyrics of the item number “Kajra re”, and Bindu re-entering his life in a new
city. Cinema, here, serves as the third term mediating between the big events of
history and the smaller moments that constitute the subjective time of the self. Annete
Kuhn writes about cinema memory as a subtype of cultural memory, registering both
a public and collective dimension, as well as an individual and personal quality.179 It
is the ability of cinema to simultaneously personalise the public that according to
Kuhn has implications for its imbrication with history as a particular experience of
place and time. Cinema thus figures as that which opens up a dialogue between the
linear time of history and the flexible and disordered nature of “lived time.”180

Historicising Bollywood
It is this intimate aspect of the cinema which is invoked in a number of recent
Bollywood narratives that, like Meri Pyari Bindu, characterise the bond between the

178
Constantine V. Nakassis, “College Heroes and Film Stars,” in Youth and Mass Mediation in South
India, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 160.
179
Annette Kuhn, “Heterotopia, heterochronia: place and time in cinema memory,” Screen 45, No. 2
(2004): 106-114.
180
Ibid.
 227

central romantic couple as arising out of a shared interest in popular culture. This is
the case for example, in director Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016). Johar,
whose films have become synonymous with the millennial incarnation of Hindi film
melodrama and thus exemplary of “old Bollywood”, provides a counterpoint to the
examples of the new Bollywood cited above, where filmi conventions are bracketed as
historical style. I end my survey of the mobilisations of nostalgia in recent Hindi film
with a brief discussion of Johar’s last directorial outing, which indicates the manner in
which Bollywood, jostling for space in an expanded cultural landscape, attempts to
fix cinema at the top of the hierarchy through an invocation of its historical eminence.

The film’s narrative figures various nostalgic encounters and returns, even going so
far as to characterise the hero and heroine of the film as movie buffs whose initial
acquaintance is built through a cinephiliac exchange. Their love of Hindi films,
especially “classics” from the fifties through the eighties are implied to ground them
as culturally Indian despite a jet-setting global lifestyle. While this might align Ae Dil
Hai Mushkil with the earlier staging of diasporic nostalgia in films like DDLJ and
Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, the rootlessness of the hero and heroine can be read
allegorically as the media drift of millennial subjects in virtual circuits of information
flow. The film further shows how cultures can be displaced from their physical and
historical milieu to circulate in the any-spaces-whatever of post-modernity. For
example, Ranbir Kapoor meets Aishwarya Rai’s character, a shaira or poetess in an
airport lounge in transit, after he has left Lucknow, the historical locus of Urdu
culture.

The film also features the re-creation of a number of iconic song sequences in
addition to the original soundtrack by Pritam, including “An Evening in Paris” from
Shakti Samanta’s eponymous An Evening in Paris (1967), and “Tere Mere Hoton Pe”
from Yash Chopra’s Chandni (1989) which originally featured lead actor Ranbir
Kapoor’s famous uncle and father respectively. In these re-creations, nostalgia is
framed spatially as they travel to the locations in which the songs were originally
shot, presenting Yash Chopra’s Switzerland and Shammi Kapoor’s Paris as topoi in a
film imaginary. But the songs, while presented as homage, also encode subtle critique
which I suggest, rather than reflecting an auteurial intervention, seem to acknowledge
the online commentary on the traditions represented by the songs. An explicit
 228

example of this is in the picturisation of “Tere Mere Hoton Pe,” where at the end of
the song on a snow-capped peak, Ranbir Kapoor’s character, wearing several layers
of clothes, collapses in a heap from the cold while Anushka Sharma berates him
contemptuously pointing to her own relatively scant clothing. Such self-reflexion
seems to be a direct nod to the kinds of revisionist histories that make up the content
of online series like Buzzfeed’s “An Honest and Accurate Summary.”181 These often
highlight the more regressive aspects of beloved film favourites as in the recent
criticism of Yashraj films for their depiction of a certain brand of femininity and
female beauty that required the woman to be provocatively clad regardless of context.
Additionally, in the “Tere Mere Hoton Pe” sequence, despite its meticulous recreation
of the colour scheme and setting of the original, choreographs its performance replete
with exaggerated gestures and comic expressions that betray an ironic distance from
the original which shows up the latter’s excesses. At the same time, ironic distance
becomes a measure of cinephilia itself as the attempt to describe the ineffable quality
of films.

A film like Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is not unduly troubled by the passing of celluloid. Its
protagonists negotiate their cinephilia through the new appurtenances of our digital
age like iPods, smartphones and laptops. Its hero even acquires stardom through
YouTube virality. If, according to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s hypothesis, new
media remediates cinema, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil charts the opposite course of the
cinema colonising the digital. On the surface, Johar’s film appears to be a residue of a
certain nineties brand of what Yash Chopra famously dubbed as “glamorous realism,”
that has since become passé.182 But it is really a strategic rebuttal by Johar to charges
that his style of frothy filmmaking is hopelessly outdated in a changed landscape of
film and streaming content. Johar, perhaps more than any other “old Bollywood”
hand has shown an acute understanding of changing tastes. But he also recognises the

181
See, for example, the piece on Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai: Imaan Sheikh, “An Accurate And
Honest Summary Of "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai," on BuzzFeed.com, October 16, 2017.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/imaansheikh/susheel-or-gtfo
182
The phrase recounted by Rachel Dwyer in several writings on the director Yash Chopra, refers to
the aesthetics of excess characterising the escapist fantasy of mainstream Hindi cinema. This involved
lavish exhibitions of wealth which over time became tied to particular signifiers in the mise-en-scene,
as in the grand staircase, the piano and the feudal mansion giving way to clubs, malls, and designer
clothes from the era of liberalisation onwards. For a short survey, refer to Rachel Dwyer, “Hindi
cinema: The Aesthetics of Excess,” in Open magazine, October 28, 2016,
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/wealth-issue-2016-essay/hindi-cinema-the-aesthetics-of-
excess
 229

power of nostalgia, and is speculated to have sparked the recent trend of remaking
older songs in films with the remix of the eighties indie-pop number “Disco
Deewane” in Student of the Year (2012).183 He appears at the beginning of the video
for the latest such remix, “Aankh Marey” from Simmba (dir. Rohit Shetty, 2018),
decrying the trend – “Oh God, one more remix!”

Johar brings us back full circle to the figure of the archive exemplified by the
mainstream, commercial industry itself. This is a continuation of the ways in which
the industry has always memorialised itself in the absence of the official recognition
of its history, including remakes, tributes, quotations and other gestures that
acknowledge the foundation of the past on which the industry is constituted. Johar’s
referential mode, often dismissed as self-indulgent nostalgia, comes into its own at a
time when such memorial exercises form a piece with a retrogazing sensibility writ
across the cultural landscape at large. But as with the fictional Gyan Chand, and so
with Johar, the look back at the past is always with a view to the future, to the making
of yet another film.

183
Devarsi Ghosh, “Bollywood 2018: The Bollywood remix reached saturation point (but shows no
sign of going away),” on Scroll.in, December 26, 2018, https://scroll.in/reel/905979/bollywood-2018-
the-bollywood-remix-reached-saturation-point-but-shows-no-sign-of-going-away
 230

Fig. 3.1. Om Shanti Om (2007): The Billboard and the Changing Face of Stardom

Fig. 3.2. Saawariya (2007): Tbt, RK

 231

Fig. 3.3. Saawariya: Painterly Aesthetics

Fig. 3.4. Barfi! (2012): Murphy Radio

 232

Fig. 3.5. Barfi!: Digital Death Masque

Fig. 3.6. Barfi!: Chhau Dancers

Fig. 3.7. Jagga Jasoos (2017): Opening Shot.

Fig. 3.8. Jagga Jasoos: Train breaks the idyll.

 233

Fig. 3.8. Jagga Jasoos: Purulia Arms Drop

Fig. 3.9. Jagga Jasoos: Traces of Netaji.

 234

Fig. 3.10. Rangoon (2017): Paean to Julia/Nadia

Fig. 3.11. Rangoon: Film Premiere

Fig. 3.12. Rangoon: Art Deco

 235

Fig. 3.13. Rangoon: Quit India

Fig. 3.14 Rangoon: INA anthem

Fig. 3.15 Bombay Velvet, Poster: Precious Evidence, the Film Negative.
 236

Fig. 3.16. Bombay Velvet: The club façade resembling Eros Cinema.

Fig. 3.17. Bombay Velvet: Opulent interiors, phallic chandeliers.

 237

Fig. 3.18 Bombay Velvet: Opium Den

Fig. 3.19. Bombay Velvet: At the Races

Fig. 3.20. Bombay Velvet: Cricket Club of India

Fig. 3.21. Bombay Velvet: Tommy Gun

 238

Fig. 3.22. Andhadhun: Dedication

Fig. 3.23. Andhadhun: Anil Dhawan/Pramod Sina’s house

Fig. 3.24. Andhadhun: Surfing ghost

 239

Fig. 3.25. Andhadhun: End Credits Sequence, the piano montage

 240

Fig. 3.26. Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015): Opening Sequence, cassette shop

Fig. 3.27. Dum Laga Ke Haisha: Unspooled cassette reel

Fig. 3.28. Dum Laga Ke Haisha: A new CD shop

Fig. 3.29. Dum Laga Ke Haisha: That 90’s show

 241

Fig. 3.30. Meri Pyari Bindu (2017): The writer of pulp novels

Fig. 3.31. Meri Pyari Bindu: The attic of memory

Fig. 3.32. Meri Pyari Bindu: Mixtape

Fig. 3.33. Meri Pyari Bindu: “Yeh Jawaani Teri”

 242

Fig. 3. 34. Meri Pyari Bindu: CD shop

Fig. 3.35. Meri Pyari Bindu: Polaroid Memories

Fig. 3.36. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016): “Tere Mere Hoton Pe” on the Saavn music app.
 243

Fig. 3.37. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil: Yash Chopra landscapes

 244

Conclusion

This project has attempted to look at modes of alternative archival practices that
approach film history creatively, introspectively, and from a perspective informed by
the transformation of cinema and film culture in the present. Following the imperative
to reimagine cinema’s archive, I have attempted to not only indicate alternative sources
of film history, but also delineate the way such sources might be read for traces of the
past.

In the first chapter, applications like Dubsmash and TikTok were seen to mobilise a
long tradition of quotation and doing “film style” in everyday contexts into a specific
platform to channel such filmi desire. These provide an index of how the cinema in
India has historically circulated as a general repertoire of gestures, expressions, and
fashions, with individual films contributing to this vast archive of popular film. They
also indicate the manner in which cinema informs an analogue aesthetic on digital
media. Cinema is sought for its familiarity, its popularity and for its connotation of a
sense of the larger-than-life. The appeal of these new digital media is precisely that they
are able to lend a sense of cinematic grandeur to everyday life, promising to transform
the ordinary user into a star. In a slightly different way, the nostalgia listicle situated
cinema in a wider ecology of childhood. Here too, cinema is foregrounded as part of
the rhythms and rituals of everyday life. Further, the nostalgia listicle indicates the way
in which the big events of history are often mediated through the memory of popular
culture. The chapter ended with a discussion of the late career of Shah Rukh Khan,
reading the films Fan and Zero as retrospectives on his journey thus far. These films
were seen as responding to the changing nature of stardom in the digital, prompting an
evaluative look back at the past in order to understand how to proceed into the future.
Metonymic of a certain formation of the film industry, the attempts by SRK - the “aging
star” - to navigate the new order open onto larger questions of how cinema itself will
transition into the digital.

In the second chapter, I attempted a survey of the different ways in which cinema has
been taken up in contemporary art. Such engagements of cinema were qualified against
the larger backdrop in which the gallery is increasingly coming to be seen as a halfway
house of sorts for the beleaguered institution of cinema. In India on the contrary,
 245

cinema’s gallery turn was part of a larger historical engagement of the popular in Indian
art. Two moments were signposted, at which cinema becomes taken up as a means of
interrogating the careers of Indian modernity. Two symptomatic exhibitions, Century
City and Cinema City framed the discussion; the passage from one to the other could in
some ways be read as that from a reading of cinema as an archive towards the building
of an archive of cinema. Most significant is the way in which such meditations on the
cinema challenge the paradigm of obsolescence that invariably accompanies
discussions of cinema in the gallery in the context of the productions of Anglo-
American art.

Finally, the last chapter looked at the way in which cinema looks back at itself, but not
in the sense in which cinema’s past has always been figured in the formulaic, repetitive
narratives of Hindi cinema. Here, I argued that films are actually reacting, on the one
hand, to the discourse of cinema’s historicity produced since the Phalke centenary, and
on the other, to the outpouring of nostalgia and cinephilia on the internet. I argued that
cinema mobilises these different rhetorics to index its continued prominence in a time
in which it is perceived to be in crisis. Films themselves hold a mirror to the
transformations in film culture, casting an ostensibly nostalgic light on an older
formation of the popular film. But at the same time, such a look backward is essentially
framed by the aesthetics, practices and concerns of the “New Bollywood.”
Narrativising film history and film historical discourse, the productions I looked at all
betrayed a preoccupation with the present and future of the industry. The interest in the
past extends only so far as its potential for telling a story for/of the present.

At the end, a number of paths remain for future research. Even as I have offered a way
to think through residues, traces and memories, the very process of writing has truly
brought home the heightened movement of time in our digital present. URLs accessible
even at the beginning of the year are now irretrievable. A name, a title, a video once
chanced across is lost to the vagaries of the search engine. BuzzFeed and ScoopWhoop
are on the wane, after their brief, bright day in the sun, while TikTok - in a matter of
mere months it would seem - is poised to become the biggest social media player,
threatening to overtake the Facebook and YouTube juggernauts. Halfway into the year,
TikTok India has already witnessed the implementation and lifting of a ban, two cases
of murder and several accidents that can be traced to it, and the circulation of
 246

controversial videos of mob lynching and fake footage of the Balakot airstrikes on the
platform. All of these have focused belated attention on an app hitherto the preserve of
the so-called Generation Z, too young to have a voice on traditional media platforms.
TikTok, then, exemplifies the dizzying rate of change in the present. But it is precisely
in light of such accelerated change that it becomes more interesting than ever to
understand the persistence of at least an appearance of the past. The ephemerality of
communication jostles against a continuing cultural imperative towards storage as the
structuring dialectic of our time.

I was particularly struck during the course of my research, by the paucity of existing
academic work on particular kinds of digital media which seem to be largely confined
to communications and marketing research. The disparity between the cultural
predominance of something like TikTok and the relative lack of critical attention it has
received is to my mind a glaring lacuna to be taken up by future research. Perhaps it is
the very speed of change, which Wendy Chun elsewhere observes, seems to “confound
critical analysis.”1 The only writings one can even now access on TikTok mainly tend
to be journalistic pieces, and it is perhaps precisely the different temporality of
journalism that must now inform the rate of theory as well. Such research promises to
be richly rewarding, considering the particular patterns of media use that emerge as
technologies travel through different spaces and cultures. The case of TikTok in India
where, as I have indicated above, it has already totalised a host of different functions
and performances, already warrants urgent attention. What is patently clear is that it is
no longer possible to think about the great changes of our time through narrow
disciplinary boundaries. Cinema, as I have attempted to show, is no longer the preserve
of just screen or media studies as its expansion causes it to interface with diverse forms
and spaces. The case of contemporary art and cinema has already been signposted, and
I would have liked to explore further the trajectory of the moving image in art, including
artist’s film, kinetic and video works which could not be included in the present study.

While the study of Indian cinema has always provided an opportunity to understand
film at the intersection of a network of forces, now perhaps even more, such
investigations acquire an added significance in a world historical frame. It is important

1
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory, in Critical Inquiry 35
(Autumn 2008), pp. 148-171. 151.
 247

to speak to questions of expansion which are only now becoming widely addressed in
Anglo-American contexts, while being an almost unremarkable aspect of the life of the
cinema in India. This is in some sense, the opposite of what Lev Manovich elsewhere
regards as the relative invisibility of technology in the US as opposed to countries where
the higher costs of adoption make technology uniquely visible.2 A similar idea, for
example, framed Sudhir Mahadevan’s media archaeological account of the cinema in a
location outside of the global North.3 While this project in many ways directly follows
Mahadevan’s attempt to qualify the rhetoric of technological obsolescence, at the same
time I have attempted to draw attention to something that is invisible precisely because
it is hypervisible and ubiquitous, namely the distinctive culture of the popular cinema
in India.

If the archival enterprise is about perpetuating rather than embalming the past, I hope
through this dissertation, to have implemented a fourth manner of doing film(i) history
– through theory itself.

2
Lev Manovich, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Monfort (eds.),
The New Media Reader, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2003. pp. 13.
3
Sudhir Mahadevan, Introduction to A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India,
US: SUNY Press, 2015. pp. 13.
 248

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Personal Interviews

Anand, Manu and Sharat Katariya. February 21, 2019.

Basu, Anurag. February 25, 2019.

Bhaumik, Kaushik. March 2, 2019.

Kapur, Geeta. June 19, 2019.

Kashyap, Anurag. February 25, 2019.

Raghavan, Sriram and Pooja Ladha Surti. February 20, 2019.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 2019.

Roy, Akshay. February 19, 2019.

Sharma, Himanshu. February 26, 2019.

Shivkumar, Rohan. July 6, 2019.

Sinha, Gayatri, March 27, 2019.

Filmography

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (dir. Karan Johar, 2016)

 268

Andhadhun (dir. Sriram Raghavan, 2018)

Barfi! (dir. Anurag Basu, 2012)

Bombay Velvet (dir. Anurag Kashyap, 2015)

Celluloid Man (dir. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, 2014)

Dum Laga Ke Haisha (dir. Sharat Katariya, 2015)

Fan (dir. Maneesh Sharma, 2016)

Film Hi Film (dir. Hiren Nag, 1983)

Jagga Jasoos (dir. Anurag Basu, 2017)

Meri Pyari Bindu (dir. Akshay Roy, 2017)

Om Shanti Om! (dir. Farah Khan, 2007)

Rangbhoomi (dir. Kamal Swaroop, 2013)

Rangoon (dir. Vishal Bharadwaj, 2017)

Saawariya (dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2007)

Tracing Phalke (dir. Kamal Swaroop, 2013)