An Unruly Modernity: The City in Bombay Cinema

In Mazumdar’s work, the city emerges as a compelling register of the modern, one that delightfully anchors Bombay cinema’s unique choreography of music, melodrama, fantasy and spectacle. Instead of identifying the imagined terrain of the city with the imagined community of the nation, Mazumdar shows us how the city visualizes a community that can never fully replicate the sanctified, rural utopia of the village. The utopian presence of the village is often invoked in prominent narratives of the nation. Turning away from this nostalgic consideration of the village as a pristine, uncontaminated point of origin from which the city has been cut off, she positions the city as a ‘mimic village’ (p. xxv); fake, entirely cinematic and totally accurate in its screening of the incompleteness of reason and modernity. Bombay Cinema invites us to become familiar with the city as a cinematic landscape of terror and phantasmagoria that uses masquerade, comedy, laughter and song to express the multiple facets of urban life. Mazumdar argues that in Hindi cinema the city is a place of identity-formation that produces fantastic, contingent selves which rarely lay claim to the benefits of enlightened modernity. In other words, it is through its engagement with the contemporary imagination of the city that Bombay Cinema provides a fertile intellectual ground for understanding the aesthetic, political and psychic imperatives of Indian cinema.

Leaving no doubt that the city offers a new historical paradigm for analysing the film industry in India, Mazumdar takes us through a Bombay that is a site of terrifying delirium and dislocation just as it is a playful, dialogic and unruly site of modernity. Using analytical tools that depend on allegory rather than fact, Mazumdar identifies new historical paradigms for thinking about the film industry in India. Allegory is especially appropriate to understand the fragmented narratives of city life since it is concerned with loss and rebellion rather than progress and uplift. Allegory can deliver a successful account of the partially complete narratives of the city that are often struggling and unsuccessful in their attempt to be seen and heard:

The allegorical gaze reorders its objects to offer a new reading … [of] surface reality … There are two levels of engagement here. The first is the cinematic medium, which … is the archive of the modern that houses allegorical images of the city. The second level of engagement [is] … the allegorical mode … [which] unravels cinema’s negotiation of … urban experience in India. These twin engagements are central to the writing of Bombay Cinema (p. xxix).

Thus Mazumdar argues that allegory is embedded in the popular narratives of Hindi cinema inasmuch as it is also a method for making sense of Hindi cinema’s complex and sometimes inaccessible visual and sensory topography. Like an archaeologist, Mazumdar digs beneath the surface of Hindi cinema to uncover topographies of rage, rebellion, desire, consumption and anarchy.

Unorthodox and flamboyant in its critical approach, Bombay Cinema is engagingly written and superbly crafted. Wide and broad-ranging in its intellectual scope, Mazumdar offers rigorous insights into existing debates on cinema’s mode of production and its ideologies of secularism while generating a new vocabulary that skillfully shifts the emphasis to emerging discussions of film, gender, genre and globalization. She is particularly alert to popular cinema’s tense mediation of visual performance and narrative desire, impulses that often messily militate against each other.

Making expert use of her training in cinema studies, she presents detailed analyses of the sense-making elements of Bombay Cinema: mise en scène, costume, gesture, performance, music, dialogue, space, emotion and landscape. This move toward understanding the language of cinema, conspicuous in its avoidance of terms from the social sciences is especially useful for the interventions proposed by Bombay Cinema. Attention to film language and aesthetics makes the cinema’s cultural work explicit in that it lays bare popular cinema’s ubiquitous, forceful urban address to people who are situated within as much as outside the academy. Mazumdar is most convincing when she puts her finger on those cinematic mechanisms that account for our visceral, volatile and invariably closeted reactions to popular Hindi cinema.

Bombay Cinema combines sophisticated film theory and inside accounts of film practice in the cinema industry in India. Mazumdar’s sources are as unconventional as are her critical approaches. Just as her critical formulations are drawn from theorists of cinema, urban experience and modernity, her comments on film form and the cinema’s exhibitionist practices are drawn from inspiring conversations and interviews with script and song writers, film directors and cameramen. For her theoretical reflections on the urban she turns to Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, and Henry Lefebvre; for her observations on cinema and its representations of the urban she mobilizes the work of Tom Gunning, Giuliano Bruno, Ashis Nandy, Veena Das and Miriam Hansen. Mazumdar excels in providing detailed theoretical commentaries on individual films that are substantiated by a resourceful archive of practical information on the movie-making business in Bombay.

Fittingly, she starts with films from the Emergency era in the nineteen seventies with Amitabh Bachchan’s Deewar/ The Wall to map cinema’s powerful architecture of macabre urban ruin during the first quarter of Indian independence. Mazumdar moves lucidly through the decades after the Emergency in chapter one, ‘Rage on Screen.’ In chapter two, ‘The Rebellious Tapori/ patois,’ she charts an urban archive that consists of fractious public memory, danger, violence, suspicion and rebellion. Here her comments on urban psychosis theorize transformations in Bachchan’s iconic star persona by examining Shahrukh’s manic, excessive performative style in Baazigar/The Gambler: what is really interesting here is that her comments on Bachchan build up a firm attempt to place Baazigar as a turning point in the history of Indian cinema.

Bombay Cinema’s discussion of the aesthetics of street culture merits special mention. If Mazumdar analyzes Deewar’s topos of silence and Baazigar’s interiorized rhetoric of pain in her first chapter, then, in her second chapter, Mazumdar turns to the boisterous language of the tapori in Rangeela/The Colorful. Unlike the death-driven urban characters played by Bachchan and Khan in Deewar and Baazigar, Mazumdar points out that Aamir Khan intervenes in the ongoing mediations on stardom and urban rage by his comic mediation of life in the city. Mazumdar’s quotations from interviews with script writers Javed Akhtar, Sanjay Chel, Anjum Rajabali and actor Aamir Khan insist on bambaiyya’s (Bombay patois) rich articulation of the diverse history of urban migration. Mazumdar shows how the central character of Rangeela, the homeless Munna (Aamir Khan), survives the onslaught of the city by drawing sustenance from the theater of the street and the spectacle of the cinema. Munna’s effusive performance of the film song on the streets of Bombay (yaaron sunlo zara/friends, lend me your ears) characterizes his relationship with the city as one of play, humour, irony and irreverence to power.

In contrast, Sidhu (Aamir Khan) in Ghulam/The Slave embodies a socially stratified city that is unable to reconcile the split between rich and the poor. Sidhu has no resources to combat the cosmopolitan anonymity that plagues the streets of Bombay. He is an exemplar of an urban heterotopia that produces a pervasive emptiness—he is a nobody who crumbles in the midst of the city’s cruel annihilation of moral and familial structures. As Mazumdar writes, ‘the lack of the family is …an important element in the formation of the tapori’s hybrid identity … he becomes the iconic body of the Bombay street … the tapori is a figure of transgression who creates a new space for the performance of bodily resistance (77).’ Ghulam gestures painfully toward cinema as a fragmentary archive of the city that persistently turns to the tapori’s body to anchor its empty memory of the city.

In addition, Bombay Cinema makes a forceful effort to rewrite accounts that dismiss the eighties and nineties as a fallow period of Hindi cinema. Further, the book also complicates the landscape of the city by asking how these films remember the woman of the city. In her third chapter, ‘The Desiring Woman,’ Mazumdar analyzes the vamp as a figure of wanton sexual excess who resides in the shadowy space of the nightclub. Ostensibly, the night club belongs nowhere in the city; not to the home, and not to the street. Characterized by gaudy decadence, the vamp personifies urban degradation and dislocation in the form of sexual excess and conveys it through her hybrid dance style which integrates revue with cabaret, and grace with awkwardness.

Perhaps no other figure embodies the contradictions of the city of Bombay like Helen, vamp par excellence. Simultaneously communicating the shock and pleasure that are so typical of the dream life of the nocturnal city—with its glittering city lights and hard surfaces—Helen’s gyrating nightclub performances enact a nightmarish urban experience that fetishizes titillation and spectacle to conceal boredom and dread. Helen offers important clues to dance as a unique aesthetic and narrative device of Bombay cinema that has created specific star attributes; increasingly prominent in Indian cinema’s post-liberalization career. Mazumdar conducts a rich conversation on Helen’s extraordinary embodiment of urban desire within a concretely gendered framework. Once again, Mazumdar shines in her unorthodox attention to the seemingly fragmentary impetus of the film song. The piece on Raveena Tandon’s shehar ki ladki/the girl of the city; Karisma Kapoor’s sundara sundara/beautiful, beautiful, and Manisha Koirala’s telephone dhun/song of the telephone is a riot.

Mazumdar’s critical spirit and acumen remain indefatigable through the course of the book. This is not an easy task. But she does not disappoint. She tops her sharp analysis of the figure of the vamp when, in chapter four, she turns to the scenic interiors, art direction and the new political economy of design in recent Hindi cinema. She calls this phenomenon ‘The Panoramic Interior.’ This is a move toward theorizing popular cinema’s spectacular retreat into lavish interior spaces as an expression of urban crisis in the era of globalization. These panoramic interiors, she suggests, package tradition as commodity and relay it directly to the home through the television screen. The lavish interior of Hum Apke Hain Kaun/Who Am I to You? and the designer aesthetic of Dil to Pagal Hai/ My Heart is Mad abstract real locations into virtual surfaces that panoramically survey the globe – from the interior of the home. They project an interior space that is duplicated across the set of the film and the viewing space of the spectator in the home who sits in front of the television set. In this way interior space generates a hypervirtual city that is, ultimately, intensely claustrophobic in spite of its global, panoramic visual expanse. In turn, the seamless commodity worlds, design catalogues and the ‘cool dudes’ of films like Dil Chahta Hai/What My Heart Wants play out the desire for a lost maternal love and organic human interaction that are increasingly invisible in a harsh, increasingly staggered contemporary cityscape.

In the last chapter of the book, ‘Gangland Bombay,’ Mazumdar’s reflections on the city emerge with the deepest conviction. Invoking Walter Benjamin’s resonant account of the city as a ruin in his book The Arcades Project (1988)—where he alludes to the city as a receptacle of detritus rather than pure death—Bombay Cinema’s final chapter dwells on re-collecting shadowy chases in slums and alleys that culminate in sudden, violent and fantastic death. Choosing films like Parinda/The Moth, Satya/Truth and Company that ‘grip you by the throat,’ Mazumdar explains that the ‘sexy’ violence in such films stages urban trauma through an aesthetics of ‘garbage’ (173). They picture a city which bears a ghostly, jagged residue of the dream-like, glossy, touristic images of the city found in advertisements and family extravaganzas. Rather than tying these narratives of the city into one consistent, tight rubric, Mazumdar’s conclusions are open rather than closed; and yet well-conceptualized so as to flow smoothly into the reader’s own, sometimes deeply familiar thoughts on the films under consideration. Read this book to see how cinema and urban life continue to imagine, shape and reflect our selves, our world, and our cityscapes. Mazumdar develops her work thoroughly and consistently, such that contemporary Bombay cinema is easily accessible to the general reader and the academic scholar alike. Bombay Cinema is lucid, provocative, stylish and substantial. It is an illuminating scholarly study that spares no effort to bring Bombay cinema out of the academic closet.

Anupama Kapse is currently completing her PhD. in the Department of Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley; where she teaches classes on the theory and history of cinema. She has also held an appointment in English Literature at Gargi College, University of Delhi.