Amit S. Rai is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, and Power, 1750–1860.

UNTIMELY BOLLYWOOD

Globalization and India’s New Media AssemblageBy Amit S. Rai

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4394-3

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………xiIntroduction: India and the New Nonlinear Media Assemblage………………………………………………………..1ONE “First Day, First Show”: Bollywood Cinemagoing and the New Sensorium…………………………………………..23TWO Contagious Multiplicities and the Nonlinear Life of the New Media……………………………………………..55THREE “The Best Quality Cinema Viewing … Everywhere, Everytime”: On the Malltiplex Mutagen in India…………………133FOUR “With You Every Moment in Time”: On the Emergent Ittafaq (Chance) Assemblage……………………………179Conclusion: Clinamedia………………………………………………………………………………………..211Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………….221Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………275Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………….291

Chapter One

“First Day, First Show”: Bollywood Cinemagoing and the New Sensorium

“First day, first show.” It’s a common phrase throughout India, sure to bring a smile to both speaker and interlocutor: a recognizable coding of one of South Asian cinema’s singular events. It conjures up images of Bollywood faithfuls gathering, struggling, and scrambling to be one of the elect few to say, coolly, “Dekhli [saw it]-first day, first show.” In this quintessentially Indian experience, one that is being re-created by new media practices and global consumerist habituations, we can see how fans from economically and socially diverse communities are renegotiating older structures of film and media culture today. Over the past six years, I have had the privilege to explore this film culture in various sites in India (Bhopal, Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi), the United States (Times Square and Jackson Heights in New York, and Artesia in California), and the United Kingdom (Birmingham, Manchester, and London). The chapters that follow build on these site-specific encounters, drawing most heavily from my extended research into new media assemblages in Bhopal-the City of Lakes and the capital of Madhya Pradesh. Bhopal is a city that was torn through by a rampaging death-gas secreted by a Union Carbide plant in December 1984, which killed thousands and thousands of mostly poor Muslim people within hours, and which continues to claim the lives of fifteen people each month. It is also the city of my birth and home to my father’s extended upper-caste, middle-class Hindu family. Historically it was a walled-in city ruled for over a century by the Begums of Bhopal, the Muslim descendants of its founder the Afghan Dost Mohammed Khan. Today, Bhopal is a segregated city: the old gated city, home to the now minority Muslim population, is overwhelmingly poor and overcrowded; the new Bhopal, Hindu dominated, is home to politicians, state legislators, landowners, businesspeople, and Dominos Pizza (and the Dalit workers who service them).

Of the thirteen movie theaters in the city (all owned by Sikhs or Hindus), only three of them are in new Bhopal. The rest are all in the Muslim-majority areas of the erstwhile walled city. The difference is not only in location but can be seen in terms of numerous factors such as accessibility (quality of roads, density of traffic, availability of parking, etc.), regular programming clientele (“family” or soft porn genres, all-male clientele or gender mixed; single teenagers or families; poor, middle class, or rich; day or night crowds; Muslim or Hindu), services (box office, types of intermission snacks, ushers and “crowd control,” cleanliness of toilets, lighting, drinking water), and theater “attractions” (Dolby sound, star and director visits, faade design, MTV-style digital advertisements and billboards, date of construction, style of architecture; condition of balcony, dress circle, stall seats; climate control via fans vs. water-cooled air, privatized dedicated power generators, etc.). This spectrum of differences indexes the emergence of a new kind of connectivity across the multiple dynamic thresholds of media technologies, cultural forms, subjectivities, neighborhoods, regions, nations, ideologies, and perception; it indexes as well the complex relationship between the new media and the changing strategies of India’s globalizing elites.

Very simply, all these new connectivities imply a fundamental shift in the sensations of cinema. Certainly today cinematic practices, not just the cinematic image, are indissociable from the Internet, Dolby sound, or satellite TV as folds of each other. And certainly the form of bodily attention-exteroception, proprioception, interoception; in short, affect-produced through the cinematic sound-image and its constitutive intervals (practices, institutions, sensori-motor circuits, and spatiotemporalities) has fundamentally changed in being folded into the new media. Thus, if a qualitatively different human-media interface is coming into dominance through these technologies and the active bodies of media consumers, then the thought of cinema itself must change. We chart these becomings through diagramming the body’s sensations in and through the nonlinear dynamics of this new media assemblage.

But whose body? And which media technologies? In response, two initial “method” problems present themselves. First, does this suggest that all bodies, regardless of gender, religion, class, caste, race, sexuality, etc. are equally implicated in this new dynamic threshold? Second, does this assume that satellite, Internet, and cable, etc. have transformed the totality of film-media culture in postcolonial India where access to and knowledge of such technologies are themselves technologies of social and economic exclusion and control?

To my mind these two questions should be reposed as: How can we think of the transformation in Bollywood cinema’s ecology of sensation in the era of its new media assemblage as a qualitatively different kind of solicitation of the body’s essential creativity, its openness as a center of indetermination-in short, its virtuality? Simultaneously, how can we think of the assemblage’s specific form of power-as a violent machining, as the reproduction and containment, or reframing of deeply entrenched and repeatedly produced inequalities, clichs, and habituations across heterogeneous populations, a human multiplicity structured in dominance? Throughout this study I attempt to hold these lines of critique in productive tension: namely, Bollywood’s global media assemblage as a historically specific unfolding of virtualization-containment, the unpredictable but patterned emergence of new media habituations. This approach follows through on Bernard Stiegler’s startling suggestion that a “people”-ethnic, racial, national, regional, populational-is not defined by its past (memory, culture, traditions, “genius”) but by its future; that is, by the line of mutation that orients it to a technologically constitutive outside, by its assembling along a machinic phylum. I will return to the question of the machinic phylum in the next chapter. Here I take up my initial point of departure and pursue some founding elements of this changing diagram of media, exhibition space, bodies, and power: Bollywood’s biogram.

Consider the site for this first day, first show: Jhumpa Talkies. Like thousands of other ardent fans I went to the first day, first show of Mohabbatein at Jhumpa, which is located in the Jahangirabad section of Bhopal-an overwhelmingly poor, and largely Muslim section of town. As such, I was warned repeatedly that there would be a mad rush for tickets and I was incurring needless danger by venturing into that part of town. Jahangirabad has a reputation: it is a highly policed subsection of the city, known as much for its narrow, potholed, underserviced streets and overcrowded slums as for the crime that, say the police, justifies their continual presence. In 1992, in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalists, it was this neighborhood that was first engulfed by communal violence. The hostility subsequently spread throughout old Bhopal, where it was aided and abetted by the police and the army. Eight months after the screening of Mohabbatein at Jhumpa, this same neighborhood movie hall would become the site of renewed communal violence as the blockbuster Gadar (dir. Sharma, 2001) sparked a national controversy by its chauvinist depiction of the partition of India and Pakistan.

But that was all yet to come, or it was already in the narrativized past.

It was the day after Diwali, and I made arrangements with my eighteen-year-old friend Abhishek (a lower-middle-class, upper-caste Hindu who never misses a first day, first show) to meet me at 10 AM. I got to Jhumpa before he did-but not nearly early enough, even though the show was supposed to be at 12:30. By 10 AM the line for the balcony seats, dress circle, and box seats was already beyond the outer gate. There were hundreds of people, mostly men, milling about the courtyard. Jhumpa is a single-screen theater, with seating for around twelve hundred. It is built in the molded concrete style of late 1970s and early 1980s movie halls in Bhopal-namely, a cross of classical art deco and administrative functionalism where shooting molded spires tiled with crumbling marble frame impassive grey blocks that are hidden behind faded white and red lime-paint. There are no fewer than three gates through which one must pass in order to get inside the theater: the outer gate leads into the hexagonal courtyard, whose centerpiece is the gnarled remains of an ancient tree; the heavily guarded theater gate leads into the inner courtyard lined with refreshment stands; and the final gate leads inside to the dress circle and stalls on the first floor, or up the staircase streaked in red paan juice to the balcony and box seats.

The Connectivity of Art Deco

Here I will pause to consider the relations of motions established between a particular design style and exhibition timespace. Generally, the design of the art deco talkie in India is thus a series of enfolded half circles that funnel through strategic gates of passage and blockage, with the molded facades offering modernity, speed, and intensive image-sound. Art deco had a singular life in the Indian media assemblage; in spilling far beyond exhibition space it links experiences of consumption through a postcolonial temporality, and I will consider it a form of connectivity in this assemblage. No doubt, in its dominant spatial aesthetic, cinema in India has always been associated with a spatial and temporal disjuncture. Here the postcolonial temporalities of colonial materiality-European technology, African primitivist design, and a modernizing drive into the past and future at once-connect with the sensational intervals produced in the event of this material assemblage’s functioning. It is not that the movement from village to city to diaspora and back is recapitulated or resembles the disjuncture of the stylized body within cinema and the disciplined body within exhibition space. Rather, we can speak of nested temporalities that have their own affordances in relation to various populations of material and phenomena. The movement invoked by the modernist ethos of the post-1950s talkie should be understood as a pedagogy of national belonging and a reductive coding (or subtractive image) of a potentializing excess of sensation.

Taken together this combination could be seen as an extension of what Gilles Deleuze calls cinema’s sensory-motor schemata, but already this implies that we are no longer only considering what is specific to cinema but also what is specific about its becoming something else-a media assemblage. Consider the articulation (functional connectivity as dynamic feedback loop) of visual and musical style and exhibition space: India’s art deco talkies deform into the globalized multiplex. If we compare, for instance, the diverse visual and aural styles of Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955) and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002) with the art deco talkies of the 1950s and the multiplex of today’s globalizing India, we can discern how differently the media body can be articulated with cinematic space (I will return to these cinematic examples in the next chapter).

Art deco was a popular international trend that surfaced in Europe between 1910 and 1935. As a ubiquitous aesthetic style, art deco affected all aspects of world design including fashion, crafts, housewares, jewelry, statuary, architecture, and interior decoration. Of heterogeneous origins with multiple branches, art deco was insistently modern, and as such it formed an assemblage with the machine age in its technologies, imagery, and graphics. As Lucy Fischer notes, not only did art deco adopt “a rhetoric of the mechanical,” it also utilized new technologies of fabrication. In its commercial production, art deco employed synthetic materials like plastic (Bakelite, Lucite, Vitrolite) and metal (chrome, stainless steel, aluminum, and wrought iron). Stylistically, art deco was known for its streamlined, geometric, and symmetrical patterns-traits associated with Western industrialization. In keeping with art deco’s stark high-tech facades, color was often reduced to the basics: black, white, and silver. Not unlike modernism itself, art deco was tied to the city and thus deemed the “skyscraper style.” In its articulation of Western modernity, art deco also echoed various avant-garde movements. Through constructivism and futurism, technology became central to art deco’s form; from cubism came a practice of pure form itself; and from German expressionism came distortion effects.

More significant in terms of its colonial and postcolonial deployment, art deco also assembled disjunctive temporal dispositions-enfolding its futurist tendencies into a pronounced fetishism for the “primeval.” Like many styles of the era, it was influenced by what Euro-American elite culture understood as “traditional and even primal forms.” Specifically, art deco evinced a fascination with the racialized and “primitive” other, as rendered through a litany of tropes. In Fischer’s words: “From Egypt where King Tutankhamen’s tomb had been discovered in 1922, Deco embraced Pharaonic imagery (from sphinx heads and scarabs to cats). From the broader Middle East, Deco recycled the Assyrian/Babylonian ziggurat structure-a pyramidal, terraced tower. So popular was this motif (as the base of furniture or objets d’art) that an entire strain of Deco came to be known as ‘zigzag moderne.’ From pre-Columbian Mexico, Deco drew upon the sunray image; and from Africa, it took the stylized mask as well as such materials as ivory and animal skins (zebra and tiger).” Colonial flows of commodities, images, populations, and desire gave form to art deco by enfolding coded temporalities of exotic primitivism with the material duration of its substances, spaces, and media events. In these disjunctures a diagram of a postcolonial untimely emerges, with interruptions of linear progress embedded or nested in the intervals of its material and expressive form.

Art deco formed a machinic assemblage with Hollywood from its inception. Art deco greatly influenced set design through the work of a series of art directors associated with particular studios (e.g., Van Nest Polglase at RKO, Stephen Gooson at Fox, and Cedric Gibbons at MGM). As Fischer notes, art deco left its stamp not only on film costuming (especially that of women), but even the physiognomy of actors was used to create art deco-inspired designs. Further, an aesthetic of art deco informed the graphic idiom of many movie posters of the era as well as the font and layout of studio logos (RKO and Twentieth Century-Fox, for example). Finally, art deco had a tremendous effect on the architectural design of American movie theaters, especially those elegant and luxurious spaces (such as Radio City Music Hall in New York) known as picture palaces. Donald Albrecht suggests that the ubiquity of the art deco mode on movie screens helped to popularize contemporary design in America: “The adoption of architectural modernism by the popular arts had [a] notable effect…. It successfully promoted the modern style to the general public, making it both more accessible and more palatable.”

In this light, look at art deco palaces like Eros, New Empire, or Regal Talkies in Mumbai (and recall that art deco was the style of choice for talkies throughout much of India well into the 1970s). On a more modest scale, consider the Eagle Theater in Jackson Heights, Queens (made famous perhaps most recently by Suketu Mehta in his memoir of a diasporic’s life in Maximum City), or the design of three film posters from Homi Wadia productions: Lootaru Lalna (dir. Homi Wadia, 1938), The Return of Toofan Mail (dir. Aspi, 1942), and Magroor (dir. R. D. Mathur, 1950).

(Continues…)

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