Abstract
This spring, films’ hold on the public imagination was even more tenacious than readers of BioScope already knew it to be. Oscar wins for RRR and The Elephant Whisperers fanned political debate that ranged across concerns with ecology, tribal comm- unities, language, Hindu nationalism, multicultural conviviality and history writing. Meanwhile, Pathaan rekindled a concern with, and enthusiasm for, the single-screen theatre that had seemed all but dead in India. Well-heeled Bangladeshi viewers hopped onto the short flight to Calcutta to see SRK on the big screen while in cities outside South Asia, first-day first-show rituals were re-enacted with fervour and some self-consciousness. This filmi enthusiasm seemed both to underscore the public significance of the cinema and perhaps to temper concerns about its longevity in the age of social media and streaming services. A closer look, however, would reveal that the very cinematic experience that these films offered, both inside and outside the theatre, was in fact shaped by social media, broadly understood. Rather than a return to times past, these films and their effects illuminate cinema in the age of social media.
This issue of BioScope attends to the cinematic dispositif in the age of social media. How does the social media environment amplify and reshape the cinematic experience, aesthetic and archive? What is the assemblage in which cinema continues to play a crucial part while its infrastructural, economic and political underpinnings have been significantly transformed over the last 20-odd years? Where the political dynamic across South Asia has shifted in the first decades of this century, so too has the social, cultural and technical formation of the cinema in the region. These two transitions are intimately linked. Single-screen theatres have made way for handheld screens and streaming services while older political certainties have been refracted through new technologies of control and exclusionary ideologies. Within this, cinema looks both radically different and surprisingly familiar. The cinematic practices, experiences and aesthetics described in this issue of BioScope are shown to be shaped by the logic of participatory and social media: whether in the recycling of well-known gestures and phrases from a golden age long past as discussed in Amrita Chakravarty’s research article in this issue; the possibilities created for marginal citizens to place themselves with the frame as the strategy Caroline Herbert discerns in her research article on Madhusree Dutta; or in the struggles of Deccani film producers and exhibitors in the Old Town of Hyderabad, as described in Eda Kandiyil Ahmad Faseeh’s fieldwork essay.
This issue of BioScope opens with an extensive dossier of short essays on ‘The Pathaan Effect’, a series of reflections on Pathaan in which the imbrication of cinema and social media is highlighted in myriad ways. BioScope’s Special Sections present a series of rapid responses and analyses of current events within the domain of South Asian film and media. In the case of this special section, it is a phenomenon more than an event: the arrival of the film Pathaan and what Ranjani Mazumdar calls the ‘maze of viral moments’ that the film set in motion. This ‘event film’ (Mazumdar) triggered a range of social, political and cultural forms and movements that Neepa Majumdar describes as a ‘Trojan horse’ for the way it carried into the public realm not only extensive references and layers of older films but also the clearly articulated ideals of conviviality and secularity in South Asia. Pathaan is not merely a spectacular action spy thriller, as Shohini Ghosh shows, but it is Shah Rukh Khan’s means of communicating with his audiences and detractors: ‘SRK speaks back with Pathaan. It is a love-letter to his fans and for his detractors, a declaration of war…’ (Ghosh). Reconfigured as an action hero whose signs of Muslimness are visibly present and loudly audible, SRK’s articulation of older ideals of conviviality in the public domain, reverberating in the single-screen theatre and online, also generated a backlash that Ira Bhaskar notes underscored ‘the lengths to which the state [and its supporters] will go to attack and humiliate a Muslim celebrity whose embodiment of India’s secular, multi-cultural social and cultural identity represents a perspective that openly challenges the majoritarian vision of the government in power’. Monika Mehta emphasises how the censorship controversies that the film faced in the run up to its release were amplified through ‘instantaneous and concurrent responses’ on news media and social media in which politicians, activists and citizens ‘reproduce a discourse that constructs the dominant Hindu majority as victims’. Pathaan responds vocally and viscerally to these crises in contemporary India. Anupama Prabhala draws our attention to the ways in which ‘elements of SRK’s Muslimness are recoded’ in Pathaan in response to the weaponisation of religious diversity within the Indian nation-state. Comparing the divergent strategies for mapping religious difference onto star bodies in Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977, dir. Manmohan Desai) and Pathaan, Prabhala suggests that Pathaan reassembles the possibilities of ‘a syncretic religious family’ in these changed conditions. Meheli Sen expands this register to foreground ‘the urgency of kintsugi’ in her analysis of the bruised and bloodied body of Shah Rukh Khan’s character in the film. She suggests that the injuries and exhaustion that Pathaan suffers on screen are laminated with SRK’s bruising of repeated ‘personal crises he handles with tact and grace in Modi’s India’. The broken body stands in for the broken continent, where ‘the singularity of gold’ can increase the beauty and strength as it is used to glue the fragments back together. SRK/Pathaan is both the broken body and the glue, enacting the capacity for repair despite injury and insult, and reaching beyond India to include Afghanistan and Pakistan in his embrace.
Both the cinema effects of Pathaan and the political conditions of its emergence are in crucial ways dependent on the emergence of social media. Social media forms the infrastructure through which emerge not only the political organisation of Hindutva and the spectral figure of the Muslim terrorist but also theatre dancing and repeat audiences. It illustrates what Amrita Chakravarty in her research article in this issue terms the extra-cinematic life of Bollywood cinema in the digital dispositif. In her article, ‘Film(i) Culture after Film: Lip-sync Media and the Expanded Archive of Hindi Cinema’, Chakrabarty traces the emergence of lip-sync videos on digital platforms to show how Hindi cinema’s filmi culture has been remediated in the era of social media. She argues that the archiving of cinematic gestures and phrases in the new digital media environment has come to pass due to the reorganisation of filmi culture away from the signs and sites of cinema to the spaces of digital platforms. More than the resilience of cinematic forms, she discerns a genuine transition in Hindi cinema’s extra-cinematic lives that transcend the intermediality that has long marked cinema, to a remaking of cinema as content appropriate to digital platforms and their users. The transformation of the Hindi film form away from the omnibus or masala form is one of the prerequisites for this transition, to which Pathaan directly responds and ‘stakes a renewed claim to the exceptional status of cinema’ (Chakrabarty, this issue).
SRK’s capacity to reframe himself through cinematic texts is exceptional, but it nonetheless chimes with Caroline Herbert’s findings in her article ‘Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro’. Herbert analyses the ways in which quotidianly marginalised, stigmatised or invisibilised subjects in twenty-first-century Mumbai may be participants in their own representation and narration in the experimental documentary form. Through a close reading of the film, Herbert argues that in 7 Islands and a Metro, we can discern filmmaker Madhusree Dutta’s search to find a documentary form that will allow these spectral citizens to narrate themselves. Focusing on the women, Muslims, marginalised castes and migrant labourers that are positioned between visibility and invisibility in contemporary Mumbai, Dutta insists on scripting and on blurring the boundaries between fiction and fact in her film. Herbert identifies the ‘visible, non-linear suturing of fact and fiction’ as the experimental form that allows Dutta to formulate a documentary aesthetic that challenges Hindutva’s purifying politics to lay out the multiplicity of the city. In this way, Dutta opens up spaces for her interlocutors to narrate themselves into the history and life of Mumbai in ways of their own choosing.
Eda Kandiyil Ahmad Faseeh’s fieldwork piece takes us deep into the heart of contemporary Deccani cinema and brings us close to another form of filmmaking set within Muslim lifeworlds in contemporary India. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among those who make popular films in the Deccani language in Hyderabad, Faseeh describes the close-knit group of film producers, directors and cinema hall proprietors who serve the Deccani-speaking Muslim community of Hyderabad. Taking the reader into the Sensation Insomnia movie theatre, Faseeh introduces us to the production practices and concerns of the Deccani cinema. Alongside this unique look into a largely unknown filmmaking culture, Faseeh teases out the ways in which the men in this not-quite-industry negotiate their own sense of Muslimness and the nature of Islamic principles and commitments within their everyday practice of film production in Hyderabad.
There are two book reviews in this issue of BioScope. Lalitha Gopalan’s Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India examines the emergent aesthetics of the digital medium. Framed by a painstaking account of the historical circumstances which we often simply designate as ‘the digital’, Gopalan closely analyses style and storytelling in contemporary independent films from Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai to understand the unfolding promise of a technological shift in film’s material base. Cinemas Dark and Slow, writes Kaushik Bhaumik in his review, is the first book ‘to formalize, historicize and aestheticize the advent of digital cinema in India in such a comprehensive manner’, its axes of intermedial history, collaborative biography and digital affordances intersecting to produce a work of ‘pioneering’ originality.
Elora Halim Chowdhury’s Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh tracks the cultural afterlife of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, demonstrating how the traumatic imprints of gendered and nationalist violence are inscribed in and challenged by cinematic form. Moving across a range of film genres, including war films, activist cinema and documentary features, Chowdhury explores a feminist ethic of justice in the creation and spectatorship of these films as a counter-archive. In his review, Fahmidul Haq notes how this is the ‘first book of its kind to illuminate, in depth, the challenges these new films mount to dominant gendered narratives’; by applying black and transnational feminist theory to her readings, Chowdhury renders complex this filmography, one which Haq further extends in his review.