About the Book
The
melodramatic public draws on melodrama as a key conceptual apparatus to
understand how entertainment cinema in India drew audiences into complex
passages of historical change. As the seeming consensus of the 1950s about nation-building
unraveled in the 1970s, and globalization introduced new economic and
territorial compulsions, Indian cinema offered compelling testimony to debates
about economic advancement, social justice, inter-community conflict, and urban
lifestyles.
Melodrama
provided a narrative architecture and an expressive form which connected the
public and the private, as well as the personal and the political, in ways
which engaged audiences emotionally. In continuous dialogue with cinematic
'others'-within American cinema, in Indian popular cinema, and in a realist art
cinema-mainstream melodrama also underwent significant mutations. This book
explores the dynamics of form and narrative strategy across a wide repertoire
of film practices. These include the pioneer D.G. Phalke,
popular 'auteur' Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, industry moguls Aditya and Yash Chopra, mainstream
innovators Mani Rarhnam, Kamalahasan,
and Ram Gopal Verma, and
art and documentary cinema icons Satyajit Ray and Anand Patwardhan.
The
book concludes with the contemporary global moment associated with 'Hollywood'.
It considers changes in state policy and industrial organization, and the
impact of digital technologies, new economies of consumption, and wider export
markets on Indian film culture.
About the Author
RAVI
VASUDEVAN works at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and
is co-initiator of Sarai, the Centre's programme on media and urban research. He has taught Film
Studies at universities in India and the USA, and held fellowships at the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and
Princeton. His articles have been widely published, anthologized, and
translated. He is editorial advisor to Screen, founding editor of Bio Scope (a
journal of South Asian screen studies), and has edited making Meaning in Indian
Cinema (2000).
Contents
|
Acknowledgements |
xiii |
|
|
Introduction |
1 |
|
|
1 |
Indian Cinema Today |
1 |
|
And yesterday |
4 |
|
|
2 |
The Thematics of Melodrama |
8 |
|
3 |
The shifting Agenda of Film Studies in India |
10 |
|
1 |
The melodramatic public |
16 |
|
I: |
DEBATES IN MELODRAMA STUDIEIS |
17 |
|
1 |
The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American Theatre and Cinema |
17 |
|
2 |
Melodrama as Generalized mode of Cinematic Narration |
20 |
|
3 |
Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema |
26 |
|
4 |
The post-Colonial Question: Melodrama vs Realism |
28 |
|
5 |
Deconstructing the Universal and the National |
31 |
|
II: |
THINKING ABOUT MELODRAMA IN INDIAN CINEMA |
34 |
|
6 |
Pre-Cinema Histories |
34 |
|
7 |
Film form: The Heterogeneous Popular Format |
38 |
|
8 |
Melodramatic Interventions |
42 |
|
9 |
'Horizontal' and 'Vertical' Articulations |
46 |
|
10 |
Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood |
56 |
|
|
PART I |
|
|
|
Melodramatic and other Publics |
65 |
|
|
Introduction |
67 |
|
|
Narrative Forms and Modes of Address in Indian Cinema |
67 |
|
2 |
Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form |
74 |
|
1 |
Critical Discourses in the 1950s |
75 |
|
2 |
Popular Narrative Form |
81 |
|
Visual Figures |
82 |
|
|
Appropriations and Transformations of 'Modern' Codes |
86 |
|
|
The Street and the Dissolution of social Identity |
88 |
|
|
Iconic Transactions |
89 |
|
|
3 |
Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism |
94 |
|
4 |
The Popular Cultural Politics of the Social Film |
95 |
|
3 |
The Cultural Politics of Address in a 'Transitional' Cinema |
98 |
|
1 |
Indian Popular Cinema Genres and Discourses of Transformation |
102 |
|
2 |
Dominant Currents in Contemporary Criticism |
105 |
|
3 |
The Politics of Indian melodrama |
108 |
|
4 |
Iconicity, Frontality, and the Tableau Frame |
110 |
|
The Reconstruction of the Icon |
112 |
|
|
Darshan |
114 |
|
|
Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity |
118 |
|
|
5 |
The political Terms of Spectatorial Subjectivity |
125 |
|
4 |
Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian Conflict in popular Cinema |
130 |
|
1 |
Community Typology and public Form in popular Cinema |
131 |
|
2 |
Phalke and the Typological Discourse of Early Cinema |
137 |
|
3 |
The Social Film: Community Typage/ Modernity/Psychology |
141 |
|
4 |
The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical and Contemporary Publics |
145 |
|
5 |
The Transcendental Location of Stellar Bodies |
150 |
|
Raj Kapoor |
151 |
|
|
Nana Patekar |
157 |
|
|
5 |
A Modernist Public: The Double-Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray |
163 |
|
1 |
Ray's Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and a History of the Present |
166 |
|
The Modernism of the Trilogy |
168 |
|
|
2 |
The Unfinished Agenda of History |
181 |
|
Charulata (1964) |
183 |
|
|
3 |
The Contemporary |
191 |
|
Aranyer Din Ratri (1969) |
192 |
|
|
Jana Aranya (1975) |
192 |
|
|
PART II CINEMA AND TERRITORIAL IMAGINATION IN THE SUBCONTINENT:
TAMILNADU AND INDIA |
199 |
|
|
INTRODUCTION |
201 |
|
|
1 |
The Formation of a pan-Indian Market: Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema of Social Reform |
202 |
|
2 |
Differentiated Territories of a Sub continental Cinema Before and After Nation-State Formation |
205 |
|
6 |
VOICE, SPACE, FORM: The symbolic and Territorial Itinerary of Mani Rathnam's Roja (1992) |
213 |
|
1 |
Kashmir and Tamilnadu |
213 |
|
2 |
The politics of Identity |
219 |
|
3 |
Tamilness as Intractable Edifice |
221 |
|
4 |
The Connotations of place |
223 |
|
5 |
The Recalibration of Popular |
224 |
|
7 |
Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics |
229 |
|
1 |
Plot Synopsis |
229 |
|
2 |
Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic Narrative Structure |
231 |
|
3 |
The Representation of Inter-Community Differences |
233 |
|
4 |
Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims: The pattern of Public Events |
234 |
|
5 |
The navigation of Sectarian Difference: Community and Sexuality |
245 |
|
6 |
Self-Alienation in the Constitution of Decommunalized Space |
251 |
|
7 |
Melodramatic Identification: The Claims of self-Sacrifice |
253 |
|
8 |
Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999) |
259 |
|
1 |
Plot synopsis |
259 |
|
2 |
A New History? |
262 |
|
3 |
Publicizing an Unofficial History |
266 |
|
4 |
Narrative Form: Dropping the Quotation |
268 |
|
5 |
Reading Hindutva Masculinity |
269 |
|
6 |
'Lifting the Mogul Pardha' |
271 |
|
7 |
Melodrama: performativity and Expressivity |
272 |
|
8 |
Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation |
277 |
|
|
PART III |
|
|
|
MELODRAMA MUTATED AND DIFFERENTIATED: NARRATIVE FORM, URBAN
VISTAS, AND NEW PUBLICS IN A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT |
291 |
|
|
INTRODUCTION |
293 |
|
1 |
The Urban Imagination |
293 |
|
2 |
Differentiated Film Publics |
296 |
|
3 |
Public: Bollywood, Globalization, and Genre Diversification |
299 |
|
9 |
Selves Made Strange: Violent and performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema 1974-2003 |
303 |
|
1 |
In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas Zanjeer, Deewar, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Kabhi Kbhie; Tarang, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Alberto Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai |
306 |
|
2 |
Our Violent Times: the Morphology of Bodies in Space |
312 |
|
|
Ankur, Tezaab, Parinda, Nayakan |
|
|
3 |
Diagnnosing the Sources of violence |
318 |
|
|
Naseem Zakhm, Maachis, Baazigar Darr; Bombay Hamara Shehar, Ram Ke Naam, War and peace, I Live in Behrampada |
|
|
4 |
Intimations of Dispersal: The poetry and Anxiety of a Decentred World |
322 |
|
|
Dahan, Egyarah Mile, A Season Outside, When Four Friends Meet, Jari Mari: Of cloth and other stories |
|
|
5 |
Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended Seductions of Performance: The work of Aamir Khan |
325 |
|
6 |
Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and Cinephiliac performativity |
329 |
|
10 |
The Contemporary Film Industry-I: The Meanings of 'Bollywood' |
334 |
|
1 |
Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of the Bombay Film Economy |
339 |
|
2 |
Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories of Indian Cinema |
346 |
|
11 |
The Contemporary Film Industry-II: Textual Form, Genre Diversity, and Industrial Strategies |
362 |
|
1 |
Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch-I: Father India and Emergence of the Global Nation |
362 |
|
|
Mothers, Communities, Nations |
363 |
|
|
Fathers, Social Order, State Form |
366 |
|
|
The Symbolic Functions of the Father: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) |
367 |
|
|
The Multicultural Father Deceased and Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004) |
375 |
|
2 |
Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch-II: The Emergence of Genre Cinema |
383 |
|
|
Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) |
384 |
|
|
Bhoot (Ran Gopal Varma, 2003) |
387 |
|
|
Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003) |
389 |
|
|
Beyond or Within Bollywood? |
392 |
|
|
Conclusion and Afterword |
398 |
|
1 |
The Cinematic public - I: Melodrama |
398 |
|
2 |
The Cinematic public -II: Cinema and Film After the Proliferation of Copy Culture |
406 |
|
|
Bibliography |
415 |
|
|
Index |
437 |
|
|
From:
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|
About the Book
The
melodramatic public draws on melodrama as a key conceptual apparatus to
understand how entertainment cinema in India drew audiences into complex
passages of historical change. As the seeming consensus of the 1950s about nation-building
unraveled in the 1970s, and globalization introduced new economic and
territorial compulsions, Indian cinema offered compelling testimony to debates
about economic advancement, social justice, inter-community conflict, and urban
lifestyles.
Melodrama
provided a narrative architecture and an expressive form which connected the
public and the private, as well as the personal and the political, in ways
which engaged audiences emotionally. In continuous dialogue with cinematic
'others'-within American cinema, in Indian popular cinema, and in a realist art
cinema-mainstream melodrama also underwent significant mutations. This book
explores the dynamics of form and narrative strategy across a wide repertoire
of film practices. These include the pioneer D.G. Phalke,
popular 'auteur' Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, industry moguls Aditya and Yash Chopra, mainstream
innovators Mani Rarhnam, Kamalahasan,
and Ram Gopal Verma, and
art and documentary cinema icons Satyajit Ray and Anand Patwardhan.
The
book concludes with the contemporary global moment associated with 'Hollywood'.
It considers changes in state policy and industrial organization, and the
impact of digital technologies, new economies of consumption, and wider export
markets on Indian film culture.
About the Author
RAVI
VASUDEVAN works at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and
is co-initiator of Sarai, the Centre's programme on media and urban research. He has taught Film
Studies at universities in India and the USA, and held fellowships at the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and
Princeton. His articles have been widely published, anthologized, and
translated. He is editorial advisor to Screen, founding editor of Bio Scope (a
journal of South Asian screen studies), and has edited making Meaning in Indian
Cinema (2000).
Contents
|
Acknowledgements |
xiii |
|
|
Introduction |
1 |
|
|
1 |
Indian Cinema Today |
1 |
|
And yesterday |
4 |
|
|
2 |
The Thematics of Melodrama |
8 |
|
3 |
The shifting Agenda of Film Studies in India |
10 |
|
1 |
The melodramatic public |
16 |
|
I: |
DEBATES IN MELODRAMA STUDIEIS |
17 |
|
1 |
The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American Theatre and Cinema |
17 |
|
2 |
Melodrama as Generalized mode of Cinematic Narration |
20 |
|
3 |
Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema |
26 |
|
4 |
The post-Colonial Question: Melodrama vs Realism |
28 |
|
5 |
Deconstructing the Universal and the National |
31 |
|
II: |
THINKING ABOUT MELODRAMA IN INDIAN CINEMA |
34 |
|
6 |
Pre-Cinema Histories |
34 |
|
7 |
Film form: The Heterogeneous Popular Format |
38 |
|
8 |
Melodramatic Interventions |
42 |
|
9 |
'Horizontal' and 'Vertical' Articulations |
46 |
|
10 |
Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood |
56 |
|
|
PART I |
|
|
|
Melodramatic and other Publics |
65 |
|
|
Introduction |
67 |
|
|
Narrative Forms and Modes of Address in Indian Cinema |
67 |
|
2 |
Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form |
74 |
|
1 |
Critical Discourses in the 1950s |
75 |
|
2 |
Popular Narrative Form |
81 |
|
Visual Figures |
82 |
|
|
Appropriations and Transformations of 'Modern' Codes |
86 |
|
|
The Street and the Dissolution of social Identity |
88 |
|
|
Iconic Transactions |
89 |
|
|
3 |
Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism |
94 |
|
4 |
The Popular Cultural Politics of the Social Film |
95 |
|
3 |
The Cultural Politics of Address in a 'Transitional' Cinema |
98 |
|
1 |
Indian Popular Cinema Genres and Discourses of Transformation |
102 |
|
2 |
Dominant Currents in Contemporary Criticism |
105 |
|
3 |
The Politics of Indian melodrama |
108 |
|
4 |
Iconicity, Frontality, and the Tableau Frame |
110 |
|
The Reconstruction of the Icon |
112 |
|
|
Darshan |
114 |
|
|
Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity |
118 |
|
|
5 |
The political Terms of Spectatorial Subjectivity |
125 |
|
4 |
Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian Conflict in popular Cinema |
130 |
|
1 |
Community Typology and public Form in popular Cinema |
131 |
|
2 |
Phalke and the Typological Discourse of Early Cinema |
137 |
|
3 |
The Social Film: Community Typage/ Modernity/Psychology |
141 |
|
4 |
The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical and Contemporary Publics |
145 |
|
5 |
The Transcendental Location of Stellar Bodies |
150 |
|
Raj Kapoor |
151 |
|
|
Nana Patekar |
157 |
|
|
5 |
A Modernist Public: The Double-Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray |
163 |
|
1 |
Ray's Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and a History of the Present |
166 |
|
The Modernism of the Trilogy |
168 |
|
|
2 |
The Unfinished Agenda of History |
181 |
|
Charulata (1964) |
183 |
|
|
3 |
The Contemporary |
191 |
|
Aranyer Din Ratri (1969) |
192 |
|
|
Jana Aranya (1975) |
192 |
|
|
PART II CINEMA AND TERRITORIAL IMAGINATION IN THE SUBCONTINENT:
TAMILNADU AND INDIA |
199 |
|
|
INTRODUCTION |
201 |
|
|
1 |
The Formation of a pan-Indian Market: Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema of Social Reform |
202 |
|
2 |
Differentiated Territories of a Sub continental Cinema Before and After Nation-State Formation |
205 |
|
6 |
VOICE, SPACE, FORM: The symbolic and Territorial Itinerary of Mani Rathnam's Roja (1992) |
213 |
|
1 |
Kashmir and Tamilnadu |
213 |
|
2 |
The politics of Identity |
219 |
|
3 |
Tamilness as Intractable Edifice |
221 |
|
4 |
The Connotations of place |
223 |
|
5 |
The Recalibration of Popular |
224 |
|
7 |
Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics |
229 |
|
1 |
Plot Synopsis |
229 |
|
2 |
Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic Narrative Structure |
231 |
|
3 |
The Representation of Inter-Community Differences |
233 |
|
4 |
Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims: The pattern of Public Events |
234 |
|
5 |
The navigation of Sectarian Difference: Community and Sexuality |
245 |
|
6 |
Self-Alienation in the Constitution of Decommunalized Space |
251 |
|
7 |
Melodramatic Identification: The Claims of self-Sacrifice |
253 |
|
8 |
Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999) |
259 |
|
1 |
Plot synopsis |
259 |
|
2 |
A New History? |
262 |
|
3 |
Publicizing an Unofficial History |
266 |
|
4 |
Narrative Form: Dropping the Quotation |
268 |
|
5 |
Reading Hindutva Masculinity |
269 |
|
6 |
'Lifting the Mogul Pardha' |
271 |
|
7 |
Melodrama: performativity and Expressivity |
272 |
|
8 |
Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation |
277 |
|
|
PART III |
|
|
|
MELODRAMA MUTATED AND DIFFERENTIATED: NARRATIVE FORM, URBAN
VISTAS, AND NEW PUBLICS IN A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT |
291 |
|
|
INTRODUCTION |
293 |
|
1 |
The Urban Imagination |
293 |
|
2 |
Differentiated Film Publics |
296 |
|
3 |
Public: Bollywood, Globalization, and Genre Diversification |
299 |
|
9 |
Selves Made Strange: Violent and performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema 1974-2003 |
303 |
|
1 |
In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas Zanjeer, Deewar, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Kabhi Kbhie; Tarang, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Alberto Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai |
306 |
|
2 |
Our Violent Times: the Morphology of Bodies in Space |
312 |
|
|
Ankur, Tezaab, Parinda, Nayakan |
|
|
3 |
Diagnnosing the Sources of violence |
318 |
|
|
Naseem Zakhm, Maachis, Baazigar Darr; Bombay Hamara Shehar, Ram Ke Naam, War and peace, I Live in Behrampada |
|
|
4 |
Intimations of Dispersal: The poetry and Anxiety of a Decentred World |
322 |
|
|
Dahan, Egyarah Mile, A Season Outside, When Four Friends Meet, Jari Mari: Of cloth and other stories |
|
|
5 |
Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended Seductions of Performance: The work of Aamir Khan |
325 |
|
6 |
Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and Cinephiliac performativity |
329 |
|
10 |
The Contemporary Film Industry-I: The Meanings of 'Bollywood' |
334 |
|
1 |
Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of the Bombay Film Economy |
339 |
|
2 |
Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories of Indian Cinema |
346 |
|
11 |
The Contemporary Film Industry-II: Textual Form, Genre Diversity, and Industrial Strategies |
362 |
|
1 |
Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch-I: Father India and Emergence of the Global Nation |
362 |
|
|
Mothers, Communities, Nations |
363 |
|
|
Fathers, Social Order, State Form |
366 |
|
|
The Symbolic Functions of the Father: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) |
367 |
|
|
The Multicultural Father Deceased and Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004) |
375 |
|
2 |
Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch-II: The Emergence of Genre Cinema |
383 |
|
|
Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) |
384 |
|
|
Bhoot (Ran Gopal Varma, 2003) |
387 |
|
|
Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003) |
389 |
|
|
Beyond or Within Bollywood? |
392 |
|
|
Conclusion and Afterword |
398 |
|
1 |
The Cinematic public - I: Melodrama |
398 |
|
2 |
The Cinematic public -II: Cinema and Film After the Proliferation of Copy Culture |
406 |
|
|
Bibliography |
415 |
|
|
Index |
437 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
