BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

For almost three decades after independence, the ubiquitous presence of Lata Mangeshkar’s voice was enabled through the radio and gramophone records. The 1980s became a period of critical transformation in this trajectory as the arrival of new technologies of sound dispersion allowed listeners to participate in a range of activities involved in the circulation of film songs. Spurred by the cassette revolution, Lata Mangeshkar’s voice was reintroduced into the market, not in her own voice but that of the “copy artists.” Based on the art of imitation, these “version recordings” are reminiscent of an earlier practice of dubbing that formed the underbelly of the music industry in the production of a techno material voice. This brings to the surface an ambivalent relationship that the younger aspiring singers had with Lata Mangeshkar, simultaneously marked with anxiety and deep devotion. Finally, the article examines the strategies adopted by the Gramophone Company of India (HMV) in staking its claim over the rightful ownership of the most treasured archive—the authentic voice of Lata Mangeshkar.

This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essential part of the memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes, video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate archives of cinema.

Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” (Steyerl, 2009), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,” bringing them into the fold of history. I argue that its illicit, often incomplete, sometimes erroneous and ephemeral material then poses a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt to control cinematic history.

The incantatory aura associated with K. Asif’s magnum opus, Mughal-e-Azam (1960), a film that was marveled at as a technological benchmark for its experimentation with the new technology of color in Bombay cinema, has greatly mobilized the vocabulary of a “classic” as it traveled from the restricted and potentially obscure space of traditional archives back into the domain of public exhibition through its re-release in a colorized avatar. This article traces the material displacement and virtual dispersion of the film through the category of the remake. As the film goes through optical and chemical changes, memory of the film is mobilized to reflect on the digital and its relationship to the traditional film archive. In this process, the cultural biography of the film as a classic is employed to not just map the divergent impulses of cinema’s celluloid history and its interaction with contemporary digital culture, but also as a way of re-telling the history of the Bombay film industry as it recycles its archive and allegorizes the past.

The cellular phone has inaugurated a variety of foundational material and perceptual changes in our urban sensorium in the recent years. The rapid proliferation of the technology however also brought with it its own distinct set of ambiguities and anxieties. This article’s larger interest lies in tracing the recent emergence of two specific kinds of ambiguous figures in the cellular network—the anonymous terrorist caller and the unknown “lover” on the cell phone. While the former increasingly gets processed into various themes of surveillance and terrorism in recent Hindi films, the latter has begun emerging as a prominent presence in newer offsets of the romance genre. This article will first look at films like Aamir (2008) and A Wednesday (2008), instances where these menacing phone-presences untraceably maneuver the cellular network to activate, invigilate, and re-pace the movement of different sets of bodies throughout the city. In a film like Good Night Good Morning (2012) on the other hand, the incognito presences on the phone tend to usher in a radical and entirely novel form of romantic interaction.