Editorial

Cinema in the Political Imagination

Accounts of how political leaders who shaped the destiny of their countries and religions considered the function of cinema is an emerging area of interest. It has often been noted that Mahatma Gandhi’s indifference to cinema veered into outright hostility. There is also a substantial account of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s investment in the movies (Krishnan et al., 2022; Pandian, 1991). Irfan Ahmad (2008) has written about Maududi and his critics debating the possibilities of women acting in films. And J. Daniel Elam (2017) has drawn our attention to one suggestive instance. Bhagat Singh’s comrades and biographers note that he was an avid film viewer, and refer to two films that made an impact on him. One of these was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Pollard, 1927) from which he unexpectedly derived a revolutionary image of black uprising. The other was the Sulochana vehicle, Wildcat of Bombay (Bhavnani, 1927). In this film, Sulochana enacts eight different roles, and Elam points to the one of a British detective in which she has a moustache and a cap similar to the one worn by Bhagat Singh in the well-known studio photograph taken in Lahore. The allure signalled here of identity and sexuality as performance opens up startling possibilities of exchange and experimentation churning in the slipstream of popular photographic and cinematic imagery.

In this issue, Mohimarnab Biswas provides a careful account of an interview of B. R. Ambedkar for the leading Indian film magazine, filmindia, in 1942. Biswas teases out a richly suggestive spectrum of the iconic Dalit leader’s remarks on cinema, highlighting in particular the question of the caste system. There is perhaps an element of irony in Ambedkar’s extolling the value of film as entertainment for a society needing to escape the strictures of oppression, as he was otherwise critical of dominant genres such as the mythological and saint films for their ideological reproduction of social hierarchy and subordination. Biswas’ analytical technique is to frame Ambedkar’s often fragmentary allusion and passing remarks on films within the larger architecture of his thought or to show how elements of Ambedkar’s critique of the Hindu order could be productively deployed to understand film experience. Thus, he draws on Ambedkar’s critique of the concept of pranapratishtha – the ritual ceremony whereby the stone effigy of the deity is infused with life – as a critique of the credence given to the mythological deity in cinema. This observation contributes to the evolving discussion about darshana, the power exercised by the image over the viewer, in cinema (for a summary account of the concept, see Prasad, 2021). On the other side of critique, Ambedkar was entirely positive about the utilitarian functions of cinema, the rational suasion of audiences into the ways of health awareness, sanitary care, birth control (a key topic in his advocacy for women’s autonomy) and practical knowledge. For Ambedkar, it was also imperative that such information be effectively circulated and exhibited beyond the cinema theatre, a ‘rotary’ cinema that could reach rural and small-town populations. Here, Ambedkar’s observations resonate with the growing contemporary trend in Film Studies to explore a distributed and capillary form of cinema which enters the everyday life worlds of populations, the realm of ‘films that work’ (Hediger & Vonderau, 2009; Hediger et al., 2023) and ‘useful cinema’ (Acland & Wasson, 2011). However, there are other instances in which Ambedkar experiences cinema as a form which creates empathy and visionary engagement as when he was moved by viewing Achhut Kanya [Untouchable Girl] (Osten, 1935) – even if its figuration of Dalit as a victim should not have appealed to him – and, more understandably, the biopic of the leading Dalit intellectual and reformer, Jyotiba Phule, Mahatma Phule (Atre, 1954).

Key to Biswas’ argument is a focus on how Ambedkar engaged with multiple media in the communication of his arguments. Apart from a string of print periodicals outside upper-caste control, Ambedkar used radio broadcasts to promote the advancement of Dalit and labour interests, and the Allied war effort in the Second World War. This was at a time when the nationalist anti-colonial mainstream led by the Indian National Congress refused to participate in the British war effort, and was about to launch the Quit India movement. Another opponent of the Congress position, Subhash Chandra Bose, adopted an entirely different path from Ambedkar, escaping jail to join with the Axis powers to challenge British power through warfare. Bose also used Axis radio extensively to challenge the Congress position, promote his alliance with the German and Japanese forces and the setting up the Indian National Army (Alonso, 2023). We have in these media strategies an unsettling of a consensus about what emancipation would look and sound like, including the possibility that the voice which gave utterance to these ideas and strategies could emanate from a variety of sources, from the radio of colonial government through to relays coming from Britain’s wartime opponents. The outlines of a politically inflected intellectual history and media history come together in Biswas’s analysis. In filmindia, film journalism overlapped with political commentary increasingly of a Hindutva or Hindu majoritarian sort. There is a counterpoint between the strong intellectual and political assertion of Ambedkar’s interview and the magazine’s approach to him. This is by turns respectful, ironic and lampooning of Ambedkar and the Dalit cause. Thus cartoons frame him as a tool of upper-caste socialism pitted against the Nehruvian state, or, more intricately, as an incarnation of a new Brahmanical knowledge founded on law and the constitution.

Transnational Television and Islamic World-Making

If the history of modern caste and its representation, and of how caste inflects labour histories of the cinema, provide an important agenda for Screen Studies, another is the increasingly complex mapping of the community as life world, ecumene, everyday and as part of a landscape governed by sectarian conflict. Thus the Islamic and the Islamicate have been important research areas for Screen Studies in the subcontinent, especially in their problematisation of predominantly Hindu cultural configurations about the cinema and its audiences (Siddique, 2021, for a summary). Exploring the interaction between Pakistan and Turkey through transnational television studies, Sangita Gopal captures a vivid sense of TV as it is practised and consumed in Muslim-majority countries. From the 1990s, with greater flexibility in Pakistan’s import of media content from elsewhere, Turkish series or dizis came to acquire a presence on Pakistan’s screens and competed with the Urdu drama, which Gopal notes had acquired something like the status of a national genre. Greater economies of production gave Turkish TV an advantage over Pakistani TV products; additionally, a sense of glamour and greater expressivity in matters of romance and sexuality gave dizis an allure for TV audiences, if one subject to pre-censorship by Turkish TV companies alert to what would be acceptable in various territories. We are presented with a layered sense of often contrary drives and attachments, as audiences take pleasure from the novelty of scenes from this other Islamic space, even as public discourse castigates the licentiousness of Turkish serials. Here, there are the makings of a comparative and connected study of social and cultural lives and imaginaries in and across Islamic spaces. Gopal goes on to note the peculiar imagination of Pakistani serials using Turkish locations to capture a sense of migrant and diasporic Pakistani cultures. Often using these locales to stand in for others in the United States and Europe, these serials generate a somewhat inchoate and yet suggestive narrative world in which characters buffet uneasily between affiliations to the home country and the possibility of romantic and social experimentation in the new. Gopal notes the emergence in recent times of a shift to the notion of a shared Islamic historical and civilisational relationship, something promoted by Erdogan and Imran Khan as an alternative to dominant Western conceptions of the world. The investment in such historical serials is a part of the bid by right-wing populist leaders to draw on alternative imperial legacies as well as avowed religious commonalities to develop cultural complaisance from their subjects. Gopal, however, also points to a tantalising way in which the spiritual emerges as a more open and generous genre to connect spaces, bodies and aesthetic practices. Alongside and overlapping with the Islamicist historical dizi is the spiritual genre, with sufism animating both in different ways. Here, in tracing the movement of figures motivated by an engagement with the spiritual through the arts of calligraphy, while Turkey is identified as the fount of sufism, there is no sharp contrast in the relation between Pakistan and Turkey as would be typical of an earlier generation of the dizi. There is an evocative mapping here of Islamic world-making through televisual geopolitics. And there is a strong sense of transformative force, as an Islamic populism seeks to generate a transnational leadership of the ummah, Islam’s community of believers, even as a ‘softer’ affiliation emerges in the networks of spiritual community.

The Constitutive Instability of Conjugality

The relationship between the family form and film narrative has been a longstanding focus of Film Studies research inquiry and theorisation. The more recent transformations associated with the era of liberalisation and globalisation from the early 1990s highlight the couple as a key vehicle of story worlds, including a tracing of new patterns of consumption, lifestyle and sexuality. The question of family form extends beyond film narrative to encompass the morphology of film-industrial capital. As Aswin Punathambekar (2013) has shown, even as there was a bid to make the film industry over in terms of corporate protocols, including diverse finance located transnationally, the family-controlled firm and informal practices of accounting continued to hold sway. However, the neologism ‘Bollywood’, somewhat controversial for Film Studies a while back, has not only firmed up but also arguably requires a proper periodisation in terms of the formations of capital, technology, film form and film consumption, so that we can now start thinking of ‘early Bollywood’ ‘New Bollywood’, and so on. Early Bollywood could be said to showcase not only the persistence of the family film of yore and its forms of capital but also its avowed ‘other’, a genre cinema anchored in the couple, even if this is a formation rendered unstable in thriller and horror formats. Think Karan Johar’s family movies versus Ramgopal Varma’s horror, thriller and gangster movies in the early 2000s. This was an opposition that Varma especially cultivated to distinguish himself from the mainstream, even as he mirrored the dominant players’ bid for corporate investments and foreign capital, in his deals with Tata Motors and Fox; and Johar, Yash Chopra and others undertook a differentiation of product to use thrillers and so-called ‘hatke’ movies to diversify audience address for the era of the multiplex (Vasudevan, 2010).

Following Sangita Gopal (2011), in this issue, Sragdharamalini Das focuses on the ‘New Bollywood’ in terms of the conjugation of the couple, but as a constitutively unstable form. For Das, the key objective is to move beyond romance narratives which culminate in the triumph of the romantic couple over the challenges posed by the traditional family and class differences. Rather, it is the actuality of marital experience which is her subject, a focus she sees emerging through new Bollywood, and its address to the niche audiences assembled in the multiplex and through OTT services. Taking a key woman scriptwriter and film director, Reema Kagti as her subject, she suggests that Kagti recurrently takes up the theme of marriages in crisis, or in the process of a transition resulting from loss – of a child, of a sense of self and of the emotional viability of the couple, extending to the vulnerabilities of older age remarriage. While Das’ analysis is centred on Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd (2007), she explores a diverse range of formats, including web series and several other films. In web series such as Made in Heaven (Akhtar & Kagti, 2019–) the fraught process of arranging a wedding is relayed through a marriage agency sensitive to social and gendered injustice, even as the woman consultant’s marriage unravels as a web of lies, manipulation and escalating distrust. In Dahaad (Kagti & Oberoi, 2023), marriage is a dupe for unsuspecting poor lower-caste women whose families cannot afford dowry, making them vulnerable to the seductions and marital promises of a serial killer.

In looking at the theme of marriage in crisis, we are reminded of earlier instances from art and so-called middle cinema such as Anuradha (Mukherjee, 1960), Jotugriha (Sinha, 1964), Ray films such as Charulata (1964), Mahanagar (1963) and Kapurush (1965), the Basu Bhattacharya films Anubhav (1971) and Aavishkar (1974), through to the more recent, and unusual, popular commercial example of Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Johar, 2006). However, these, along with Kagti’s web series, are character-driven works, and Das addresses a different configuration when she analyses Honeymoon Travels. Here, she seeks to engage the make-up of a contemporary cinephiliac audience, one alert both to Bollywood conventions and internationally circulating idioms. Key to her argument is that Kagti’s film works on traditional Bollywood narrative tropes and film songs to unsettle romantic conventions. In Das’s analysis, Honeymoon Travels does not provide a detailing in depth of characters; rather, the characters are part of an ensemble, rendered through a patterning of relations as these emerge in the layout of an excursion bus. Here, she analyses physical dispositions and lines of sight as couples interact internally, and in relationship to other couples. Das draws on Gilles Deleuze’s assemblage theory to explore shifting configurations of this sort. Her key formulation is that the phenomenology that plays out along the surfaces of these conjugal formations discloses a constitutive instability. However, rather than marriages breaking up, the conjugal facilitates a holding together and recomposition of parts constantly subject to rending by flashes of past relations, the inequalities of gender ties, and a queering of desires. Here, the conjugal comes across as a strategic formation as opposed to a clear-cut ideational, romanticised or institutionally repressive arrangement. Das’ analysis makes these observations through the filter of media technologies, from genealogies of posed marital and honeymoon photographs, to tourist videos and more abstractly rendered camera captures.

Influence, Instigate, Monetise: Women Social Media Influencers

The cultural historian Martin Jay (2010) noted that to lie was a crucial dimension of the political, key to a governance that took fabrication as necessary to the management of public affect, and also to mobilisations of diverse sorts. Subjects and citizens know that their leaders are not always telling the truth, and may even find this acceptable if, for example, the objective is to contain panic and fear. When limits are being breached, however, and frontiers of the acceptable are crossed, there is a greater focus on the lie. When Trump urged Mike Pence not to ratify the electoral vote in 2020, and Pence demurred, Trump remarked that Pence was too honest (Farley, 2023). So, Trump clearly knew that he was asking Pence to countenance a falsehood. However, there is a subtle difference when J.D. Vance, amplifying the false claims that immigrant Haitians were eating pets, said he was willing ‘to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention’ (Astor, 2024). Vance effectively admitted that he was telling a story and not recounting facts, but that it was legitimate to do so to draw attention to the phenomenon of immigrants who were unsettling ‘American’ life and also the ‘fact’ that ‘Americans’ feared them.

Here, the lie is dressed up as a story that communicates a self-attested truth allegedly suppressed by mainstream media. It is possible that both types of disinformation, one as outright lie and the other as a story, also define the outlook of the female influencers researched by Sarah Khan. The key story is of love jihad, the belief that Muslim men set out to seduce and convert Hindu women. Taking up two such influencers, Khan provides enough evidence to indicate that disinformation is knowingly fabricated, for example, by the selective use of video clips or news items. In this sense, they conform to the existing scholarly consensus on practising disinformation, as opposed to misinformation:

While disinformation is false information that is deliberately passed on with the intention to deceive or otherwise cause harm, misinformation can be defined as false information disseminated by someone who believes it to be true. (Wardle, 2020, cited in Maci et al., 2024)

However, like Vance, the female influencers may believe the narrative they recount is true, even if the material they use is false or, at best, not verifiable. This seems to complicate a clear-cut distinction between disinformation and misinformation. And the distinction is further unsettled in the context of machine-driven logics of dissemination.

Crucial to establishing a presence on social media, specifically Facebook, are a series of techniques. Khan shows how the two influencers she has chosen, Kajal Shingala or Kajal HINDUstani as she calls herself, and the self-proclaimed journalist, ‘Suman Pandey With Facts’, set about generating a media presence and acquiring followers. Key to Shingala’s success was real-time interaction set up in advance with her followers and involving at least an initial phase of greeting and interaction. Such real-time is also punctuated by recorded material, the insertion of videos taken of Shingala’s participation in the activities of the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP). Further, there is the production of an aura, something Khan refers to as ‘virtuous intimacy’, the way in which the influencer lays claim to an experiential identification with her female viewers, making her more accessible for women to communicate their fears than they would to a male counterpart. The influencer embellishes this by assuming the image of the ‘tradwife’, a figure who observes conservative familial roles for women. In Khan’s account, the key to virtuous intimacy is also the phenomenon of virtue signalling, a variety of techniques that amass the image of moral superiority. With Dubey, Khan notes a wide-ranging panoply of media techniques, including a spectrum of video forms, explainer, vox-pop, POV (point of view), Reels and livestreaming. While these influencers follow the topics highlighted by the Information Technology Cell of the BJP, they do not appear to be directly financed by the party. They use platform affordances for revenue generation, and Pandey, in particular, is adept at using a variety of forms to ‘incentivise’ her followers – special ratings among fans, gifts and rewards – to crowdsource funds, and to secure advertising. This includes government advertising, as when as a journalist she covered the farmer’s agitation of 2021 and promoted the government record in agricultural improvement. Khan assembles in this account the complex interweaving of images, narrative, media, online techniques and revenue-generating strategies that go into the making of the right-wing female influencer today.

Reviews

Edited by Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan and Pavitra Sundar, the volume Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice offers a rigorously interdisciplinary set of reflections on how accent helps us understand the uninterrogated habits and habituations that shape looking, listening, speaking, reading, and thinking. Together, the collection compellingly makes a case for ‘thinking with an accent’ as a methodological attunement to these processes, in fields that include, but are hardly limited to, cinema studies and South Asian studies, where questions of language, accent and sound continue to open up key nodes of inquiry. In her review, literary scholar Nalini Iyer praises the volume’s editorial rigour through which individual essays effectively speak to one another across the volume, prompting readers’ reflections over their own attunements to language and perception in different fields: in considering, for example, the way that a reader of literature hears (or does not hear) accents written into characters’ voices and bodies; or the way that a spectator of cinema reads (or does not read) accents when apprehending them through subtitles.

Gender, Streaming, Platforms: Shifting Frames in Neoliberal India is another recent volume relevant to the fields of both cinema studies and South Asian studies. Edited by Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis and Šarūnas Paunksnis, the essays in the volume consider the ambiguities, trends and contradictions that inhere through the ostensibly feminist and postfeminist content distributed through SVOD (subscription video on demand) platforms in contemporary India. Detailing the case studies and reflections in each chapter’s engagement with questions of gender and SVOD platforms, reviewer Z. Rubi S. Lozoya lauds the collection’s analyses of varied SVOD content, ranging from films to television series to the often-overlooked form of web series. Through her review, one recognises the volume to be especially promising for those who seek an expanded understanding of contemporary cinema and its contexts, across both large and small screens.

Sudha Tiwari’s recent monograph The State and New Cinema in Contemporary India, 1960–1997 offers a historical account of India’s Film Finance Corporation. Her account takes neither the ‘state’ nor ‘new cinema’ as fixed entities. Instead, as noted by reviewer Parichay Patra, Tiwari’s granular historiography compellingly focuses on the dynamism of the people, practices and institutions that constituted both the state and the new cinema. Situating Tiwari’s work within various strands of Indian cinema studies to date, Patra identifies its significant contributions to a key emerging shift. Despite the ample production of film criticism with respect to the Indian New Wave on the one hand, and the ample production of film scholarship on South Asian popular cinemas on the other, Tiwari’s book is among a handful of recent scholarly historiographies focused on the Indian New Wave, marking eagerly awaited retrospectives within a corpus of Indian, South Asian and world cinema studies.

Samhita Sunya’s Sirens of Modernity takes up the period of the Cold War through the prism of Indian popular film circulation. Ranjani Mazumdar’s review appreciates the assurance with which Sunya travels with Indian films, film songs and the key figure of the female dancer to map a transnational approach. She notes how this vantage point facilitates a cogent critique of the category of World Cinema that emerged after the Second World War, which centred on the exhibition of a realist canon through the Film Festival circuit, neglecting the vernacular circuits travelled by entertainment films. Mazumdar applauds Sirens of Modernity for its refreshing ‘ability to reinvigorate the conceptual terrain of transnational cinema debates with new insights garnered via Bombay films.… There is much to learn from this, and many doors have opened for others who wish to connect with the same period’.