This volume brings together some of the most distinguished film theorists working in India today, to examine the phenomenon of popular Indian cinema from the silent films of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters. The essays engage in the political implications of Indian popular cinema, exploring through formal and narrative analysis, archival resources and oral testimony, how it provides an arena for contests around political identity, social regulation and aesthetic hierarchies. How does the imaginative world conjured up by film narratives invite audiences to reflect on their relationship to social and political power? How do institutions and practices such as censorship, civic administration, public lobbies, film criticism and fan clubs shape the context in which we see films and the values we give them? These issues are addressed across a range of key films including the DMK film Parasakthi, the Bengali film Harana Sur, Mehboob Khan’s Andaz, Raj Kapoor’s Awara, the classic Amitabh Bachchan vehicle Deewar and more recent films like Mani Ratnam’s Roja, Raj Kumar Santoshi’s Damini, Shankar’s Kadaalan/Hum se hai muqabla and Abbas-Mustan’s Baazigar. Given the interest in serious studies on Indian film and the relative dearth of accessible critical material in this field, this is an extremely important volume. r•: r - Making Meaning in Indian Cinema Making Meaning in Indian Cinema Edited by S. Ravi Vasudevan OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paolo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India By Oxford University Press, New Delhi © Oxford University Press 2000 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above STAFFORDSHIRE I UNIVERSITY , L_ IlR3F fi«lWust n°t cirdulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must SITE •jEoBipSCi ljnpose this same condition on any acquirer ”1 2 0 DEC 2001 ISBN 019 564 5456 fi&L CLASS Nlj. 3L ypeset n Adobe Garamond by Wordsmiths, Delhi 110034 Printed by Saurabh Print-O-Pack, NOIDA Published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 04528285 This volume was inspired by a seminar, ‘Making Meaning in Indian Cinema’, held at the Indian Institute for Advanced Study, Shimla, in October 1995. The HAS has had a long and valuable tradition of supporting work in new fields of research, and I thank the Director, Professor Mrinal Min, and his staff for their generous hospitality. Four of the articles published here are substantially revised versions of papers presented at this seminar: ‘The Couple and Their Spaces: Harano Sur as Melodrama Now’ by Moinak Biswas; ‘From Subjecti- fication to Schizophrenia: the “Angry Man” and the Psychotic Hero” of Bombay Cinema’ by Ranjani Mazumdar; ‘Formal into Real Subsumption? Signs of Ideological Re-form in Two Recent Films’ by Madhava Prasad; and ‘Kaadalan and the Politics of Re- Signification: Fashion, Violence and the Body’ by Vivek Dhareshwar and Tejaswini Niranjana. Thanks to Radhika Singha, who did her best to make the introduction comprehensible; Rukun Advani, Anuradha Roy and Shalini Sinha of OUP who have been of great help at various stages of the volume’s development; and Anita Roy, for her good- humoured pursuit of the manuscript across several continents. Acknowledgements To the following editors and publishers for permission to republish articles from their journals: Economic and Political Weekly for M.S.S. Pandian, ‘Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film’, Economic and Political Weekly 26 (11-12), March 1991. journal of Arts and Ideas (JAI) for Vivek Dhareshwar and Tejaswini Niranjana, <Kuadalan and the Politics of Resignification: Fashion, Violence and the Body’, JAI 29, 1996. M. Madhava Prasad, ‘Signs of Ideological Re-form in Two Recent Films: Towards Real Subsumption?’, JAI 29, 1996. S.V. Srinivas, ‘Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity’, JAI 29, 1996. Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture’, JAI 23-24, 1993. Screen, UK, for Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema’, Screen 38(1), 1997.