Imaging Deities and Deifying Images

Review of Celluloid Deities – The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India by Preminda Jacob, Orient BlackSwan



Celluloid Deities is about banners and cutouts that, for almost half a century was ‘an integral part of the visual processes by which Chennai’s residents made the cultural texts of Tamil cinema and politics their own’. Film making was always an industry where inscrutable vagaries of audience preferences coupled with the massive volume of financial investments put at risk every product. But behind each such venture that enters the market is also the irresistible allure of windfall profits and fame. It is such elusive push and pull factors that propel ‘culture industries along schizophrenic tracks, spinning from conservative reaffirmations of the status quo to wildly creative high-risk ventures’. Ironically, in politics too, matters are not very different. With the gradual evacuation of politics and erosion of ideological differences between coalitions, the fortunes of individual politicians and parties also follow the same track. The second part of the book, in fact, has a chapter dedicated to ‘political cutout’. The central questions around which the study and its methodology are organized are: ‘How did the social and political context of these images produce particularities of their subject matter and artistic style? How did a local audience perceive them? And how are we, from an international and global perspective, to perceive and historicize them?’



Structured around two sets of research questions, the first four chapters of the study probes the status of banners and cutouts as art objects by focusing on their production and semiotics of the medium, as to who created these images, their conditions of production, and the aesthetic criteria they employed. The next two chapters on The Coalescence of Tamil Nationalism and the Cinema Industry and The Political Cutout, analyses the social, political and religious contexts of these images to map the complex functions of cinematic and political imagery in contemporary South Indian society. The last two chapters examines the relationship between the notion of darshan and spectatorship, and the future of cinematic spectatorship.



The job of the cutout and banner advertisement workers is to amplify and magnify the desired impact of their subjects, something that has increasingly become tough and unenviable. Their work is at once a craft, an art form, and a means of livelihood. Most importantly, it is a kind of work/art that is evanescent by its very nature; mounted with great aplomb, its relevance wanes after a few weeks, the material itself gets faded or defaced, and it is soon removed and recycled. This could be the reason why no artist preserves their creations in this field, which again impinges upon their creation as art and places them somewhere between ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’. But their work is an endless and chaotic play with size, colour scheme, layering, mass, scale, likeness, composition, positioning of figures, font type, design and placement, and one that changes according to locality and target population. What makes the study interesting is the way it delves into the dynamics of this sector, drawing out both the grind and routine aspects of the job, as well as the creative and spontaneous, bringing forth a lot of surprising insights into the workings of banner advertisements and their multiple agendas of art, advertising and propaganda.



The breadth and scope of the second part of the study is vast and it analyses this evanescent media in the background of the larger context, that is, as ‘representative of cyclical shifts in media: from melodramatic theater to academic painting; from academic painting to cinema; from the moving image to film stills and, finally, from the photographic images of cinema to banner painting. Each successive mode of visual representation derived its popularity by entwining the emotive power of rasa with the unambiguous binaries of melodrama’. In the process, the study brings out a lot of interesting insights on Tamil cinema and stardom, as well as the celebrity cult in Tamil Nadu and its political dimensions. But while exploring the complex relationships between film, fame, charisma and political fortunes, in certain places, one can feel the ‘weight’ of such a wide scope. It sometimes pans across certain complex and nuanced concepts and historical moments in a compressed and simplified manner. Instead of as part of main body of the text, they could have been provided as detailed footnotes and references.



Celluloid Deities, as a pioneering attempt in this area, is undoubtedly a significant contribution to film/cultural studies in India.

Bharathipura

by

U. R. Ananthamurthy

Translated by Susheela Punitha,

Oxford University Press (2010)

“I shall await the new man from within me – seeing with one eye the present reality with compassion and, with the other, cruelly lancing it in a bid to transform it, loving it passionately and yet being detached from it; understanding why there’s a caste system even within me, but trying to overcome it through action, I shall await the man who walks tall with his head held high. Letting go and at the same time embracing; gradually getting into shape; walking the wake of cruelty, abuse, greed…” p 234

This reverie of Jagannatha at the end of the novel Bharathipura provides an entry into it and the conflicts and yearnings of the man, who is caught between several contradictions: West and East, modernity and tradition, brahmin and dalit, secular and religious, skepticism and belief. Bharatipura is the name of Jagannathan’s native village and the novel begins with his return to it after discontinuing his studies in London. The rest of the novel is about his idealist attempt to convert the holeyaru (the lower caste people) working in his farm into human beings (to liberate them from the womb of god) and as a symbolic gesture of rebellion, to make them enter the famous Manjunatha temple. The temple forms the epicenter of the village in various ways, the physical and spiritual economy of the village is centred around this temple. Upon his return to his native land, Jagannatha feels that ‘my position, my prestige, my duty towards these people has been predetermined. I could easily bloat like a chickpea in water. Probably, the only way I can make an impact on them is by rejecting Manjunatha first, by hurting them where they trust him.” (p44)

He is the typical post-colonial middle class (brahmanical) intellectual who has to bear the weight (or burden) and the liability of tradition on the one, and has on the other, tasted the freedom of modernity, of being anonymous and free-floating in an exhilarating world of flux and fluidity, where you are not ‘fixed’ by your caste or social identity. It is the hardness of tradition and the enchanting lure of modernity that splits his world into two: there is a certain past that keeps on haunting him, one that is loving, tender, nostalgic and assuring. But he is also pulled by an imagined future – uncertain yet thrilling, potentially tumultuous yet exhilarating. Not at home in both the worlds, he flits between the two, rending his body and mind apart. While one yearns to fly high, the other weighs him down, while the one wants to destroy and demolish, the other wants to cherish and hold on. And the characters in the novel turn into embodiments of his existential angst and conflicts. Jagannathan’s childhood hero and mentor Sripathi Rao, is a Gandhian idealist, who finds himself left behind in the post-Independence scenario, and is skeptical of everything: ‘swallow your atheism and survive’ he advises Jagan. Raghava Puranik who too was once a revolutionary by daring to marry a child widow, totally cut off from his ‘medieval’ surroundings and has created a fort around him with everything British. According to him, ‘the only way is to Westernise ourselves’. There is Subbaraya Adiga, his childhood pal, who had godly visions earlier, and is now a drifter: ‘All of us are in Manjunatha’s womb – the good ones, the bad ones, the greedy ones like me, the brave ones like you..” Likewise the local believers, sycophants and politicians who swarm around Jagan are also post-colonial phantoms or unexorcised spirits of the past.

For Jagannatha, only by fulfilling his mission can he finally purge the seething duality within him; so his every brush with the outside world and the real becomes an encounter with himself. For instance, the sudden suicide of Nagamani, hurts him ‘personally’ and he seethes with self contempt: ‘Yesterday afternoon, I was rejected all over again. I guess I’ll continue to be a slimy, formless mass despite my anguish to firm up unless I take on Manjunatha’ (p75). In another instance, he rants: ‘I must split open in anguish. And I must strain to push forth a shoot from the darkness of the earth into the light’ (p83)

Bharathipura is one of the most wrenching portrayals of the ambivalent post-colonial brahmin subjectivity – one that is sensitive and also condescending to the pettiness and cruelty both within and without; sometimes it breaks out as hatred for blind beliefs and explodes as rage, like when Jagannathan takes out the saligramam from the prayer room in his house and forces the holeyaru to touch it, and desecrate it. In other situations, it also manifests as hatred towards those he wants to arouse, the holeyaru; he often frets and fumes over their sloth, blindness and fear. It is this constant shift and grappling with perspectives and positions that weaves the complex web of the novel’s narrative, with fragments of thought, letters to Margaret, diary notes to himself, storytelling, quotations, reminiscences, memories, and also actual dialogues and events...

Obviously, a novel like Bharathipura that abounds with allusions to local myths, usages, rituals and beliefs, does not easily lend itself to translation. But Susheela Punitha’s translation conveys the spirit of the original, with Kannada words and usages easily melding with the flow of English. The introduction and interview with the author by Manu Charkravarthy put the novel in its historical and cultural perspective, especially as the English avatar comes almost three decades after the novel was published.

digital reflections 3

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Webcam Series - Priyaranjanlal

This series takes further the celebration of the inter-play with surfaces and various media. Images of the artist and his room captured through the web camera is interlaced with drawn images, and everyday symbols. The enclosed nature of the room is constantly under attack by these images of freedom and flight. The image of an aeroplane seeks its way from inside the room to the window to and outside; kids zigzag in joy; a dog, watching the rain outside, thinks up an umbrella; the walls imagine light bulbs, the man walking upside down thinks of his obverse, the shadow of a cat watches over the shadow of a fan; couples, hand-in-hand, meander through the digital image of the window; the artist’s hand tries to capture the imaged butterfly; the plastic chair dream of a wheel chair; people tug a plane across the enclosed space of the room; a cat leaps into the one-dimensional plane of colour from the image of the room..

webclips Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper

In this series, there is a constant interplay and collision between spaces and images, imaged and recorded, made and dreamt. Flat, one-dimensional spaces of colours, trisect the other planes that populate the room - the image of the artist, his reflection upon the mirror, the little animal-images, and thought-balloons. What is ‘picturised’ is the room of the artist as well as his ‘interiors’, the stuff with which he works, and the planes he has to juggle with constantly to make sense of the real, and also memory. Like spaces and images from the past and present, memory and imagination, real and imagined, all seem to gather life to swarm around, at the same time underlining and erasing, affirming and negating, constantly yearning to make sense of the ‘stuff’ experience and reality is made of.

Straddling the Analog and the Digital

Like the past and memory, the problem with the digital is not only its infinite vastness and immateriality, but also the poignant impossibility of ‘mastering’ or taming it to our own essentially limited parameters of cognition and expression. For instance, how do you make sense of your own biography, or how do you place yourself (or find a place for yourself) in this realm of the diffuse, the incorporeal and the virtual?

The series of digital images by Priyaranjanlal addresses this question head on, by taking the digital horse to the pond. He uses the digital to confront both his personal past and the very process of his growing up as an artist. For this, he turns back to the ‘basics’ as it were, to the remnants of his own past: the drawing book which brought him face to face, not very pleasantly though, with the task of representing the world in its own image, and the family album, those fragments from the past, that captured images as moments of past for future consumption. In his digital studio, these ‘found’ objects of memory turn into tools of reflection upon one’s own past and the art. And by exhibiting them, they take corporeal forms to straddle the worlds of the analog and the digital.

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hide&seek Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper Hide and Seek

This series works with an old childhood album containing photographs of the artist and his family. These yellowing and moth-eaten fragments of frozen moments from the past, enter into a dialogue with the digital, bringing alive the dubious connections between the analogic ‘real’ and the digital. These specular images of the artist’s childhood are digitally ‘mastered’ here – erased, cut up, duplicated, scribbled over, superimposed.. In a way, they extend themselves, like from the past into the present, from the analog into the digital plane. New digital objects in the form of miniature animals finds their habitat in this world; they nuzzle themselves into the empty hands of kids, peep into the old tin boxes that contain photographs, while a cockroach (yet another superimposed image) nibbles at them.. New skies take over as backdrops, the scars and bruises on the body, magnified digitally, re-live both pain and memory. The uncle in uniform dominates the foreground, like in the artist’s childhood, who is relegated to the background, or is taking refuge behind the bars of the digital. The artist, playing hide and seek with different media, constantly shies away from the brutal frontality of the photograph. He uses the digital planes to hide his face; he doodles on them, or soften them. It is a ploy that works both ways, for it is both a hiding as well as a revealing, a way to ‘bring one’s self in’ to the image. What is also brought into the foreground is the materiality and hence the transience/fragility of the photographic medium itself. We find visible signs of wear and tear, of time eating its way upon/through it. In one of the images we find the moth-eaten parts of the photographs digitally magnified, and in another, an all too real cockroach is working at a photo.

Surfaces collide, analog and digital, past and present, one and two-dimensional, personal and public, memory and forgetting, real and virtual.

digital reflections

On the digital art of the Trivandrum based digital artist Priyaranjanlal.

The shift to the digital is also a move away from the hitherto corporeal viscerality of graphic and plastic art. It is a shift from the feel of the surface of the canvas, wood, mud or stone, the smell of paints, the leaves of the sketch books, the pencil stubs, the swish of the brushes, the stains of charcoal, the wood shavings, and the dirt and dust of mud and stone… The digital domain is one of immateriality, where nothing is tactile, and one that exists (?) in a virtual space where touch, smell and taste are alien – where sight (and sometimes sound) alone reigns supreme. It is this virtuality that gives it an ethereal and oneiric quality, which makes the very process of imaging and also reception a very baffling and intriguing experience.

Having been liberated from the obligations of fidelity to the object-world, the digital domain is made of stuff that dreams and thoughts are made of, occupying a limitless and enchanting, yet elusive virtual space.. So, it has something in it that is alien to what is around, the concrete, the tangible.. How does one capture the aesthetics of sensation through something incorporeal? How does one tell one’s own story, convey one’s own experience and fears through such an elusive medium?

Interestingly, the chaotic expanse of the past is also akin to a virtual space, strewn with images, memories, spaces and experiences that are malleable in an infinite number of ways. One conjures up images from both to make sense of the present, and to ‘fix’ their elusiveness and immateriality into something visible and ‘concrete’.

Drawing Book Series

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01 ClassIV Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper

This series consists of a series of images reworked from the ‘unfinished’ sketches – of primal forms and shapes – from the school drawing book. In a way it is an attempt to go back to the past, to establish vital connections with it, to capture it and bring it into the present. It is also an exercise in linking the digital present with the analogic past, a dialogue between two periods in art history as well as the artist’s life. But instead of being the ‘childhood’ of the digital, the sketchbook here is a presence that captures the ever-youthful yet deeply frustrating yearning to capture/recreate the object-world and its basic shapes and colours into the two-dimensionality of an art form, painting.

So here the circles, trying to take shape within the grids, dream of being a rounded pot, the semicircle is a future umbrella, the straight line is a future leaf-nerve, the oval an owl, and the model stork waits for the other grid to create its replica. What is and was past suddenly becomes pliable and plastic yielding themselves in the digital present for re-formation and encounters with new planes. They find new lives in the digital planes added to them; they ‘re-draw’ and draw upon the drawing book figures creating a tension between the irredeemable past and a present that is in constant flux. Thus the digitally overlaid spaces play with and rework these images, bringing into their ‘grid-bound’ and limited domain the ‘visions’ of the sky and the freedom of colours and shapes. The ‘lessons’ and regimen of ‘learning’ art are also ‘re-worked’ and recaptured to the digital present, which seems to defy all rules and lessons, fighting yet larger grids and ‘rules’ as it were.

The fact that the drawing book, inert and stubborn, has stayed behind and remained, further underline its materiality. It is this very materiality that comes back to haunt the digital domain which in turn tries to ‘capture’ it and re-draw it and draw it into the digitized world.

Hide and Seek

This series works with an old childhood album containing photographs of the artist and his family. These yellowing and moth-eaten fragments of frozen moments from the past, enter into a dialogue with the digital, bringing alive the dubious connections between the analogic ‘real’ and the digital. These specular images of the artist’s childhood are digitally ‘mastered’ here – erased, cut up, duplicated, scribbled over, superimposed.. In a way, they extend themselves, like from the past into the present, from the analog into the digital plane. New digital objects in the form of miniature animals finds their habitat in this world; they nuzzle themselves into the empty hands of kids, peep into the old tin boxes that contain photographs, while a cockroach (yet another superimposed image) nibbles at them.. New skies take over as backdrops, the scars and bruises on the body, magnified digitally, re-live both pain and memory. The uncle in uniform dominates the foreground, like in the artist’s childhood, who is relegated to the background, or is taking refuge behind the bars of the digital. The artist, playing hide and seek with different media, constantly shies away from the brutal frontality of the photograph. He uses the digital planes to hide his face; he doodles on them, or soften them. It is a ploy that works both ways, for it is both a hiding as well as a revealing, a way to ‘bring one’s self in’ to the image. What is also brought into the foreground is the materiality and hence the transience/fragility of the photographic medium itself. We find visible signs of wear and tear, of time eating its way upon/through it. In one of the images we find the moth-eaten parts of the photographs digitally magnified, and in another, an all too real cockroach is working at a photo.

Surfaces collide, analog and digital, past and present, one and two-dimensional, personal and public, memory and forgetting, real and virtual.

Webcam Series

This series takes further the celebration of the inter-play with surfaces and various media. Images of the artist and his room captured through the web camera is interlaced with drawn images, and everyday symbols. The enclosed nature of the room is constantly under attack by these images of freedom and flight. The image of an aeroplane seeks its way from inside the room to the window to and outside; kids zigzag in joy; a dog, watching the rain outside, thinks up an umbrella; the walls imagine light bulbs, the man walking upside down thinks of his obverse, the shadow of a cat watches over the shadow of a fan; couples, hand-in-hand, meander through the digital image of the window; the artist’s hand tries to capture the imaged butterfly; the plastic chair dream of a wheel chair; people tug a plane across the enclosed space of the room; a cat leaps into the one-dimensional plane of colour from the image of the room..

In this series, there is a constant interplay and collision between spaces and images, imaged and recorded, made and dreamt. Flat, one-dimensional spaces of colours, trisect the other planes that populate the room - the image of the artist, his reflection upon the mirror, the little animal-images, and thought-balloons. What is ‘picturised’ is the room of the artist as well as his ‘interiors’, the stuff with which he works, and the planes he has to juggle with constantly to make sense of the real, and also memory. Like spaces and images from the past and present, memory and imagination, real and imagined, all seem to gather life to swarm around, at the same time underlining and erasing, affirming and negating, constantly yearning to make sense of the ‘stuff’ experience and reality is made of.

Straddling the Analog and the Digital

Like the past and memory, the problem with the digital is not only its infinite vastness and immateriality, but also the poignant impossibility of ‘mastering’ or taming it to our own essentially limited parameters of cognition and expression. For instance, how do you make sense of your own biography, or how do you place yourself (or find a place for yourself) in this realm of the diffuse, the incorporeal and the virtual?

The series of digital images by Priyaranjanlal addresses this question head on, by taking the digital horse to the pond. He uses the digital to confront both his personal past and the very process of his growing up as an artist. For this, he turns back to the ‘basics’ as it were, to the remnants of his own past: the drawing book which brought him face to face, not very pleasantly though, with the task of representing the world in its own image, and the family album, those fragments from the past, that captured images as moments of past for future consumption. In his digital studio, these ‘found’ objects of memory turn into tools of reflection upon one’s own past and the art. And by exhibiting them, they take corporeal forms to straddle the worlds of the analog and the digital.

Asian Film Journeys

A chronicle of Asian cinemas

C. S. Venkiteswaran

ASIAN FILM JOURNEYS — Selections from Cinemaya: Edited by Rashmi Doraiswamy and Latika Padgaonkar; Wisdom Tree, 4779/23, Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 1495.

C. S. Venkiteswaran

The film magazine, Cinemaya, by any count, was an adventurous attempt. For, when journals even on Indian cinema (which were few and far between) almost invariably proved to be short-lived, it ventured to keep track of the various trends in Asian cinema and promote the best in it — a task considered impossible because of the diversity and complexity of the terrain. If the magazine managed to survive (and thrive) for more than a decade and half (1988-2004), it was due to the commitment, passion, and ingenuity of the people who were behind it — Aruna Vasudev and her team of dedicated cineastes. As Rashmi Doraiswamy, in her introduction puts it, “it [ Cinemaya] was the product of historical circumstance of looking inwards at our own continent.

The information revolution, internet, proliferating festivals, new technologies and digital media that have changed the rules of production and distribution, the aesthetics and reception of cinema, have also necessitated a different kind of writing and focus on cinema. Cinemaya fulfilled a task it had set to perform: of making the cinema of Asia known in all their fine details.” Coincidentally, Cinemaya came into being when Asian cinemas were beginning to make their presence felt, thanks to the national cinemas as well as notable film festivals.

This volume puts together select articles from the magazine and from the five Cinefan catalogues (1999-2003). It painstakingly presents the rich mosaic of film history, auteurs, events, films, and trends in cinema in various parts of the continent. In between are interviews with filmmakers, historians, critics, and curators. This combination gives the book a dual character — that of a historic chronicle and a first person account. The very list of the countries covered is an indication of its breadth. They include: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. The book also has sections like ‘Musings' (by critics and filmmakers), ‘Beyond Boundaries' (which looks at the interface between various cinematic cultures within the continent, and that between Asia and the West) and ‘Reflections' (a collection of writings that addresses the question: ‘Is there such a thing as Asian cinema?')

A distinguishing aspect of this volume is that it gives, from a historical perspective, a panoramic view of Asian cinemas in their varied dimensions — aesthetic, industrial, sociological, and technical, besides discussing issues related to censorship and identity. Some of the illustrious personalities and stimulating thinkers of cinema figure in this volume. For instance, the section on Japan has writings by luminaries like Nagisa Oshima, Tadao Sato, Donald Richie and Mark Schilling, and that on India feature Ashis Nandy, Madan Gopal Singh, Partha Chatterjee, Amrit Gangar, P.K. Nair and Ravi Vasudevan, among others.

Relevance

Interestingly, by way of self-reflection as it were, the very necessity or relevance of a journal like Cinemaya in today's context is discussed and debated. According to Rashmi Doraiswamy and Aruna Vasudev, the very context that necessitated a publication like Cinemaya no longer exists. Doraiswamy says its ‘classical vision' and its ‘enlightenment' projects are “probably no longer relevant in an age when your neighbourhood is the globe itself, and information about every nook and cranny is available at the click of the mouse.” Vasudev argues that Asian cinema “does not need the sort of promotion that was our single-minded determination when we set out…The histories, cultures, societies of the countries and their cinemas are known and documented…”

But many of the observations made and the anxieties expressed by cineastes in the book strongly suggest that such a journal is indeed as much relevant now as it was before. In Ma Ning's view “the usefulness of the concept lies in the definitive and differential values it has acquired in usage.” Obviously, in the global context, regular and meticulous mapping of the art and industry continues to be essential, not only to demarcate the common ground of such a broad identity but also to delineate the differences between and within. While the new context of digital technology seems to offer a lot of ‘information' as far as perspectives are concerned, one still looks forward to journals like Cinemaya for keeping the debate going on a sustained basis and to serve as a document for researchers and film-lovers to access and work upon. The book stands testimony to such an effort.

Celebration of the Local

Bhojpuri Cinema – by Avijit Ghosh, Penguin India, 2010

C S Venkiteswaran

… at a time when regional political parties continue to assert their identity, the rise of Bhojpuri films is only part of the remodeling of Indian cinema. The availability of cheap technology has allowed dozens of ‘little cinemas’ to flourish in dialects such as Chattisgarhi, Kumaoni, Gharhwali and Khariboli. Even Ladakhis have begun making films in their local dialect. Avijit Ghosh, Bhojpuri Cinema (p 94)

Within a few years of its inauguration at Grand Café, Paris, cinema had cast its magical spell over people in all continents luring a number of showmen and entrepreneurs who made it the most massive mass art ever in the history of humankind. Though cinema has such an international history, enthralling people and drawing them into its global network and idioms, it also has ‘national’ and ‘local’ histories with its own specific characteristics. The latter exhibit a great variety as they followed trajectories of their own depending on local narrative traditions, existing conditions of performing arts and appreciation, openness to new forms, and of course, the socio-economic environment that enveloped all these.

One can see that the new magic of cinema illuminated several hitherto unrealized/unrealizable desires of ‘seeing’ as well as ‘making visible’. In this process of seeing and making visible, the medium – as an industry with a mass base/market – had to necessarily contend with existing or constantly evolving global formats on the one hand, and on the other, the narrative and scopophilic desires of the local. Moreover, it was not just a question of making oneself visible to the world outside; it was also an attempt to make oneself visible to oneself – something that unleashed many a hitherto repressed facets of social and psychological lives in the public domain. Ironically, they were largely played out and imagined within the idiomatics of the national/global, as an assertion of the marginal/regional vis a vis the centre/national/global. And to imagine into being its ‘pure’ untrammeled self, it more often resorted to imitations and ‘remakes’, and brings into play interesting discourses about ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. When films flop, the blame is put on the avaricious producers from ‘outside’. When they succeed it is due to the verve and vigour of the land and its indigenous culture. But like any cinema of the local, even while it celebrates one’s own ‘culture’, its thematic concerns are with its discontents – casteism, class exploitation, dowry system, illiteracy etc.

The film histories of cinemas in India have a tumultuous history of competition between the ‘vernaculars’ and the national marked by the constant rediscovery and assertion of local identities. Avijit Ghosh’s Cinema Bhojpuri is a very interesting account of the same in the Bhojpuri context. The book narrates the history of Bhojpuri cinema, which virtually turns out to be an account of its encounters with the national-popular – the Hindi cinema that threatens to subsume all sub-nationalities that constitute its market-hinterland and also catchment area of themes and locales. The rise of Bhojpuri cinema in that sense is also a moment of pride and a new sense of selfhood, against the all-consuming tide of the national. Avijit Ghosh quotes a newspaper article written in 1965 about the perception of ‘outsiders’ about Bhojpuri people: ‘A few years ago the rest of the country considered Bhojpuri as the language of the rustic people of east Indian villages. In Bombay, it was known as the language of the ‘bhaiyas’. In Calcutta and other cities, it was known as the language of labourers of north India and Bihar.’

The book tracks Bhojpuri cinema from its beginnings in 1962, when Nazir Hussain, at the behest of Dr Rajendra Prasad, made Ganga Maiya Tohe Piyar Chadhaibo(O Mother Ganga, I’ll offer you the Yellow Cloth). Obviously the offering was indeed a very auspicious one, for since then, there was no looking back for Bhojpuri cinema. This is something really astounding if one takes into consideration other ‘vernacular’ cinemas that constitute Hindi cinema’s market, which have grown more and more marginal and almost non-existent.

Avijit Ghosh follows an episodic style and summarizes major trends in the history of Bhojpuri cinema, which he divides into three major periods. The first period (1962-68) begins with Ganga Maiya..; and the next extends from 1969 to the beginning of 21^st century, and is a volatile one of crests and troughs. But the last one starting from 2001 marks the advent of ‘a new, confident Bhojpuri cinema’ with a big boom in production (with around 275 films between 2004 and 2008), and ‘the fledgling cottage industry of the 1960s’ turning into ‘a bustling regional film industry’. In the chapters that follow, the author provides brief sketches of the major personalities – actors, musicians, producers, exhibitors and critics - who made all this possible.

Obviously, the major thread is the relationship with the other – Hindi cinema – which is one of love and hate, and absorption and imitation. Storylines, themes, music, songs, dance and action – all resonate with the ‘other’. For instance, Mother India turns into Dharti Maiya, Sholay into Gabbar Singh, Judaai into Saiyan Se Solah Singaar, Hum Paanch into Pandav, and eventually Bhojpuri cinema having its own stars similar to the trio of Khans. Evidently, we find here the local celebrating the same old clichés that the qasbah and small town audience enjoys everywhere: ‘the rich-poor conflict, urban-rural differences, tradition-modernity contradictions, a good-as-gold brother-bhabhi relationship, lustful villains, stupid comedians and a class-conscious father-in-law’ (p 60). As character actor Brijesh Tripathy observes ‘the scenario has changed completely from the days when we started out. Now we have film parties, premieres and awards. We get interviewed like Bollywood actors do.’

Yet, despite this overwhelming ‘sameness’, Bhojpuria is asserted over and over again, most loudly through its rural locales and rustic themes. (The promo for a Bhojpuri film Hamar Sansar announces: ‘A ground-breaking Bhojpuri film where you’ll see India’s soul – the village environment, the fields, a glimpse of the real life of a farmer’). But the most important of all is music: the 1990s witnessed a virtual revolution in terms of the rediscovery of local folk tunes and lyrics, singers and musicians.

This expansion of local cinema is not without resistance from the ‘other’. The book provides glimpses of brewing tension that is triggered by the success of the regional. Elsewhere, Bhojpuri films have been the target of some sectarian groups like Maharashtra Navanirman Sena and Babbar Khalsa in Maharashtra and Punjab. In urban centres like Nashik, Mumbai, Thane or Ludhiana, cinema halls become virtual congregations of minorities as they are thronged by labourers from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. It is an instance where ‘local’ cinema becomes a vulnerable ‘locality’ that can be easily targeted.

What is most interesting from a film-theoretical point of view, is Ghosh’s attempt to explain the phenomenal rise of Bhojpuri cinema in the last decade. According to him, “One should rather view it as a process with various interweaving strands which at certain points are complimentary and, on other occasions, contrast with each other. At one level, the resurgence of Bhojpuri films could be construed as a reaction to the way Bollywood refashioned in cinematic language and landscape after the arrival of satellite television in 1991. With the growth of the dollar-rich NRI market and multiplexes becoming urban India’s new temples of entertainment, young gel-and-cologne film-makers with Hollywood sensibilities found a formula to bypass ‘India Unhappening’. Soon, Hindi commercial cinema’s alienation from vast snatches of middle India was complete…It was this fissure in aesthetics that the region-specific Bhojpuri cinema adroitly filled.’

Avijit Ghosh also hints at the predicament of the regional identity of Bhojuri cinema now. Growing confidence resulting from geographical widening of locations and expanding storylines, it has stepped out of its comfort zones and experiments with the larger world, which is increasingly blurring the distinct identity of the regional film. A paradox that leads to questions like the one raised by Arti Bhattacharya, first woman director of Bhojpuri cinema: ‘When we watch a Hindi film, it feels like a Hollywood film. When we go for a Bhojpuri film, it is like watching a Hindi film. Where’s our film?’

One major gap in Indian film studies is the lack of writings in English about the history of regional cinemas. Such lack has often led to the preponderance of Hindi films in film studies about Indian films. Ghosh’s book – about one of the youngest cinemas in India - is a significant contribution in this direction – and one that reminds us of the absence of similar attempts about other cinemas in India.