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Film and Media Scholarship onContemporary India: The Assemblage,the Narrative, and “Bollywood”Madhavi Murty aa Department of Religion and Culture, and The Alliance for Social,Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT), Virginia TechVersion of record first published: 29 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Madhavi Murty (2012): Film and Media Scholarship on Contemporary India: TheAssemblage, the Narrative, and “Bollywood”, India Review, 11:4, 259-268

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India Review, vol. 11, no. 4, 2012, pp. 259–268Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN 1473-6489 print/1557-3036 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14736489.2012.731914

REVIEW ESSAY

Film and Media Scholarship on Contemporary India:The Assemblage, the Narrative, and “Bollywood”

MADHAVI MURTY

Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-Televisual Aesthetic. By Anustup Basu.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 262 Pages. Paperback, $37.50.

Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage. By Amit Rai.Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 304 Pages. Paperback, $24.95.

The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. By RaviVasudevan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 457 Pages. Hardcover, $110.00.

Popular Indian cinema in the Hindi language, globally known as “Bollywood,” hasemerged as an important field of knowledge production in Indian culture. It has founda place in American popular culture, too, more often than not, as a style or genre ofperformance, in television shows that range from the reality-TV-competition format (SoYou Think You Can Dance) to musical dramas (Smash), and even in international sport-ing contests (the Bollywood-themed dance performance by U.S. ice dancing nationalchampions Meryl Davis and Charlie White is an example). Moreover, scholars acrossdisciplines (History, English, Media Studies, Film Studies, and Anthropology) in India,as well as in England, the United States, and elsewhere, have turned their analyticalgaze on this popular form of Hindi film. Even the Indian state, which, as film scholarRavi Vasudevan reminds us, had ignored the demand that Indian film production beaccorded industry status for fifty years, has in the recent decades changed its stance. In1998, the Indian state accorded cinema recognition as an industry and, in subsequentyears, followed it up with formal instructions to banks and financial institutions thatthe entertainment industry, including cinema, had been approved as an “activity underindustrial concern” (Vasudevan, p. 345). This meant that film producers could nowreceive financing from banks and this shift in the state’s stance towards the industry setinto motion a series of processes that are often collectively termed the corporatizationof the film industry by the film press and filmmakers alike.

In recent decades, Bollywood has taken shape amid a global conjuncture (or momentwhen events, ideas and processes, some which may contradict or diverge from others,are linked together in an unstable unity) of significant political and economic events,

Madhavi Murty is an Assistant Professor of cultural theory in the Department of Religion and Cultureand the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech.

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including recession, rising unemployment, income disparities, social unrest, and warmixed with a certain hardening of right-wing political agendas, and the rise of Asianpolitical and economic influence (especially of China and India). In the national con-text of India, this conjuncture has been termed by scholars like Nivedita Menon andAditya Nigam as a “ruptural moment,” involving changes to the political environmentwith the political rise of lower caste groups, the initiation of the “structural readjust-ment program” pushed by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, the riseof the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the “beginnings of the mediaexplosion that gathered momentum through the 1990s and 2000s.”1 For scholars work-ing in Film Studies, the central research concerns are first, how to situate film within thisconjuncture such that a discussion of the specificity of the medium—its production, itsexperience and its consumption—is not subsumed by a discussion of the conjunctureitself, and second, how to conceptualize and discuss the specificity of the medium itself.

The three scholars under review here, Vasudevan, Basu, and Rai, address thesequestions in divergent ways. The differences among them pivot on their researchmethodologies as well as the way each conceptualizes significant terms, namely, iden-tity, ideology, hegemony, and assemblage. The position of the nation and nation-state isgermane to the way all three scholars address these core questions, but not in the sameway or for the same reason. As is clear from the titles of the three monographs, thereis also a difference in the usage of the moniker “Bollywood.” While Basu and Rai usethe term as if the object it signified was always already formed and stable (Basu uses theterm in quotation marks in the early and later portions of the book), Vasudevan under-takes a deliberate exegesis of the term in the concluding section of the book, tracingits more systematic and consistent usage in the latter half of the 1990s and linking itssignificance to the politics of knowledge production about film in and about India.

Noting the different ways in which the moniker Bollywood is used by scholars isimportant because, I believe, it is indicative of the different modes of contemporary filmscholarship (and media scholarship more generally). One mode—epitomized by thework of Rai and also Basu—assumes the “newness” of the contemporary moment, boththe political economic conjuncture and the film industry in India and involves itselfwith theorizing this “newness” through a deep reading of texts, spaces, and engage-ments. The second mode—reflected here in the work of Vasudevan and also Basu to acertain extent—is deeply invested in carefully parsing and defining what is new bothabout the conjuncture, filmic text, and the film industry; it is a mode therefore thatnecessitates a historical perspective.

In the pages to follow, I will chart out the contours of these modes that constitutecontemporary film and media scholarship focused on India by discussing the centralarguments of each of the three authors of interest in turn, starting with Basu, moving toRai, and concluding with Vasudevan’s monograph. I will also draw out the conceptualdistinctions that emerge as a consequence of reading the three monographs together.

Basu describes his project as “not just an excursion into film and media theory,but also a political analysis of the globalization of culture and urban life in a thirdworld situation” (p. 6). He is interested in discussing the “ways in which the Hindifilm adjusted to a new dispensation of media, capital, and political Hinduism roughlybetween 1991 and 2004” (p. 234). Basu’s empirical foci are Hindi films produced during

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the period of over a decade between 1991 (when the Indian state, with the IndianNational Congress at the helm, systematically implemented economic liberalizationpolicies) and 2004 (when the Hindu right political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party,which had been in power for a full term and had contested re-election on the slogan“India Shining” lost power). This period, Basu argues, is characterized by a newness,the contours of which he aims to trace. His work then provides us with a reading ofthe contemporary conjuncture, in the context of liberalizing India, as well as of a cen-tral cultural form, the Hindi film. He does not, however, assume a causal relationshipbetween the two. In other words, he deliberately rejects the notion that the conjunctureproduces the cultural form, which would then accord dominance to the conjuncture.

Basu’s reading of the contemporary conjuncture contends that economic liberal-ization in India has strengthened “traditional, anti-modern authorities . . . instead oferoding them” (p. 234). His reading of the Hindi film as a cultural form suggests that theBollywood phenomenon creates a “highly kinetic media universe” that does “not allowfor any naturalistic anchoring of signs or a persistent and unified cinematic inventionof the localized milieau” (p. 72). In other words, Basu renders the Bollywood phe-nomenon between 1991 and 2004 as an assemblage of signs, sounds, visuals, and affectsthat draw from different traditions, including Hindu nationalism, Hindu mythology,older iterations of the Hindi film and Hollywood films, ideas of modernity and lib-eralism, without suggesting that the elements of the assemblage exist elsewhere in apure form. As such, Basu captivatingly suggests, the “metaphysical aspect of ‘beingIndian’ becomes instantly portable, capable of assembling with randomly visited coor-dinates of time and space from across the world” (p. 76). This, he argues, is a differentaesthetic from that of “classical Hindi cinema” (p. 70) (i.e., cinema produced in thedecades immediately post-independence) where a construction of India qua India is setup in juxtaposition with a construction of the nation in the world. The aesthetic ofclassical Hindi cinema, in Basu’s argument, set apart the sacred from the profane, thenation and its essence from the world and its corruptions. As such, Basu argues, thenation in classical Hindi cinema emerges as contending with temptations and desiresboth within and outside of itself and “involves the calibrated extraction of an enduringessence that can withstand the profane temporality of capital, industrial development,and alienation” (pp. 70–71).

His central argument is that the contemporary conjuncture—new and different fromthe older post-independence moment—is not the end point in the line of historicalbecoming (“there is no overarching narrative of the nation that sorts itself out witha realist framework of reckoning, the final exile of idols, and the consolidation of ascientific temper” [p. 78])—but as the “affective convergence” (p. 87) of signs that wereonce considered profane (technology, sexuality, the body) to that most sacred of allsigns—the nation. “It is as if,” Basu states, “the pieties themselves must be affirmed anddistinguished by freely colliding them with what used to be profane or unthinkable”(p. 87), in contrast to the aesthetic of so-called classical Hindi cinema, which frequentlysuggested that “the self inevitably has to navigate the wide, clamorous circuit of mattersand desires in the world, but in the end the self must report to the self alone” (p. 71).

The assembling impulse itself in Hindi cinema is not new, according to Basu. Instead,both classical Hindi cinema (the 1966 film Love in Tokyo and the 1970 film Purab aur

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Paschim [East and West] are two well-known examples) and Bollywood cinema of thelast decade (the 2003 film Kal Ho Na Ho [Tomorrow May Never Come] is one exam-ple) have presented their audiences with a “geo-televisual aesthetic.” Basu defines thisgeo-televisual aesthetic as the “exchange of sights and sounds across global distances . . .

[in other words, involving] the perpetual incursions of “alien” pictures and hearingsthat always challenge and transform resident notions of the self, along with dialecti-cal reckonings of the home in relation to the world,” (p. 52) For many Bollywoodfilms this assemblage hangs together loosely, and results in a presentation of an infor-matic modernization. Basu’s argument here is that the loose assemblages that gave formto the Hindi film between 1991 and 2004—through the affective convergence of suchbinaries as the sacred and the profane and the real and the fantastical—did not pro-duce a closure that could work as a “final resolution to the agonistic battles” (p. 92)about tradition and modernity, the home and the world, the self and the other, and evenbetween so-called Western/normative modernity and alternate modernity. Instead, theinformatic nature of the assemblage “has to do with an advertised modernization thatattempts to bypass historical disputes or dissipate them into fungible, rootless parcelsof signification that can be neutralized in assembling with other signs” (p. 92, emphasisin the original). Such a cinematographic grouping announces, advertises, and informsits viewers about the modern. It presents a narrative where liberalization and liberal-ism can be coeval with the illiberalism of Hindu nationalism, feudal forms of patriarchyand authoritarianism, and this Bollywood is a cultural form where “real” cityscapes andideascapes of love, family, and nationalism converge with fantastical sequences, desires,and affects in a manner that does not produce dissonance. While the geo-televisual aes-thetic of an earlier Hindi film brought the sacred and the profane together in orderto articulate a “moral discomfort with the propelling impulses of capital,” (p. 84) andreify the family and the nation as sacred, contemporary Hindi film displays a “clutterof profane objects” in its mise-en-scène while simultaneously cocooning the sacred (thefamily, the nation) from the “atomizing modes of contemporary urban life . . . [and]from aspects of political economy and the profane money markets of the city” (p. 84).Similarly, illiberalism and authoritarianism can exist simultaneously with liberalism andliberalization because this is a conjuncture, in Basu’s argument, where there is informa-tion without knowledge, technology without expertise, and public Hinduness withoutmordant Hindutva.

This last point is one on which I would like to dwell. Basu’s discussion of the pro-cesses through which the idea of public Hinduness suffuses life, language, and affect (p.108) in the very midst of globalization and liberalization is compelling and useful. Hisovert assumption, however, that public Hinduness is something new, something “inde-pendent of representational or identitarian pieties and the works of caricatural dictatoraspirants like Bal Thackeray,” (p. 108) needs to be questioned. If public Hinduness issomething different from identitarian pieties, as he calls them, or from older, mordantforms and dictatorial aspirants, how do we then analyze the iconicity of Gujarat’s chiefminister, Bharatiya Janata Party leader, and prime ministerial aspirant, Narendra Modi?Moreover, how do we explain the aggressive masculinity of Modi’s political rhetoricand the aesthetic of his political campaign or the sensorium created by it, which some-times involves his supporters attending his rallies wearing Modi masks, signifying, I

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believe, in grotesquely macabre terms the subsuming and indeed masking of all desires,affects, and experience at the altar of a superior authority? How does one explain theanti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 and the rise of Hindu terror?

Scholars like Leela Fernandes and Patrick Heller have written about the illiberalismof liberalized India and of India’s new middle class.2 Unlike Basu, though, Fernandesand Heller do not suggest a new form of public Hinduness or a new form of Hindutva.Nor do they suggest a looseness to the formations that make up this conjuncture in theway that Basu postulates it. Instead, Fernandes and Heller argue that this is a hegemonicformation, a structure in dominance, to use cultural studies scholar and theorist StuartHall’s terms. They argue that contemporary politics in India takes hegemonic form,such that the interests of dominant classes, defined by class, caste and religion, are mademost significant. Moreover, they suggest that an internal unity is forged between thediverse factions that make the middle class in India. But, they argue, this structure indominance is at odds from the pattern of classical liberal hegemony, where dominantclasses attempt to win the consent of subordinate groups in order to establish, maintainand reinforce their hegemony. In India, this hegemonic formation is marked by middleclass illiberalism and a distancing of this class from subordinate classes.

For Basu, who also observes this illiberalism and aims to map out its contours, itis the newness and looseness of both the conjuncture and the assemblages that con-stitute its most important cultural form that define this illiberalism. He posits thegeo-televisual aesthetic of the contemporary Hindi film as a “fungible yet sensuousstyle.” After a point, there was no emphatic and singular “guardianship of view” on thepart of the nationalist upper-caste/class-cultural authorship that succeeded in resolving. . . matters through top-down hegemonic or proscriptive measures” (p. 7). The laxityaccorded to the filmic assemblage in Basu’s argument is significant therefore becauseit also posits a looseness to the social formation of the contemporary conjuncture; themedia assemblages of the contemporary time do postulate a public Hinduness; how-ever, Basu would like us to believe that this public Hinduness is different—new—whencompared with more mordant forms. Thus Basu argues that hegemonic efforts do existin the contemporary moment, but that these have “limited powers of intervention” andthat the “cluttered but innovative dynamism in Hindi cinema in the age of global media. . . is indicative of the ways in which a new metropolitan Hinduness, of which militantHindutva is only a small part, asserts itself . . .” (Basu, p. 7). From Basu then, we get adifferent picture of the contemporary conjuncture than we do from political scientistsand theorists like Fernandes and Heller who are also discussing the new social forma-tions of liberalized India. For the latter, the contemporary time is defined by economicliberalization and political and social illiberalism because the dominant groups withinthe new middle class in India play a central role in the politics of hegemony. For theformer, it is the newness of the assemblage that allows the collision of old and new,sacred and profane, and the traditional and the modern that produces a conjuncturewhere liberalism and liberalization co-exist with illiberalism.

We see a trajectory similar to the one espoused by Basu in Amit Rai’s argumentsas well. A contemporary of Basu and very much in conversation with him, Rai statesin the first few pages of Untimely Bollywood that the aim of his project is to “shiftthe analysis of audiovisual media from a representational frame from where the image,

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discourse, narrative, signifier, and ideal are all in various ways master tropes that pro-duce a linear causal relation to consciousness and identity” (p. 3). Both Basu and Raiwant to chart a course for film scholarship focused on India that avoids what they see asthe “representational frame.” This, they argue, is a mode of analysis and a methodologythat accords primacy to the narrative and links the narrative in a linear, casual relation-ship to notions of identity. To give a simple example, according to both Basu and Rai,a methodology that accords primacy to the “representational frame” would analyze afilm for the tensions and conflicts that frame its plotlines, paying close attention to howthese conflicts are then resolved, reading in the resolution the dominance of an ideol-ogy, which would then be connected to the constitution and mobilization of identityand consciousness. Rai argues that “for too long, representation has been thought interms of an actualized product of given hierarchies of power . . . but what if represen-tation is an event that performs anew with each repetition and with each new scene ofcirculation being an unpredictable but patterned trajectory of present conforming topast but open to future mutations?” (p. 3) Rai assumes the newness of mediascapes inIndia in the contemporary moment, arguing that the frame of event allows us to thinkof media in India today as something “untimely,” that is, the witnessing of the dissolu-tion of the old forms of exhibition and consumption and the becoming of the new and“its untold mutations.” In other words, Rai suggests that the new, while present as anapprehension (the recognition that something new is taking place here; this is differentfrom what happened earlier), is not yet an actualized product. Therefore, he argues, “amedia assemblage approach” should be taken as an “approach to the evolving problemof media and its habituations” (p. 2).

The assemblage is a significant methodological and analytical idea in both Basu’sand Rai’s work. For Rai, media assemblages are “contagious and continuous multi-plicities or ecologies of matter, media, and sensation,” conglomerations of sensationswhere a “certain complicity is marked” but also “made strange by its becoming some-thing else” (p. 8). To follow Rai then, media assemblages, in contemporary India aremultiplicities that seem familiar—that hark back to older rituals and sensations—butare simultaneously something new, “strange,” or “something else.” Similarly but witha slightly different emphasis, for Basu “assemblages are energetic, diffuse, but prac-tical combinations of statements, bodies, sounds, events, matter, spaces, knowledges,beliefs, or subjective stances that come together and disperse constantly, in an oppor-tune manner, without being organized into, or even appealing to, stable diagrams ofhuman subjectivity and consciousness” (Basu, p. 12). What is most important about theassemblage—and therefore about new media and the contemporary conjuncture—is themovement that defines the coming together and the separating of “statements, bodies,sounds . . . knowledges, beliefs” (p. 12). Hence, Basu states, “it is the unfettered energyof cinematic figuration and not the fixed nature of identity (the psychotic stalker, thegood woman) that is of crucial concern in assembling” (p. 15).

For Rai, the crucial purchase of the assemblage approach is that it allows him to talkabout sensations and, more specifically, about affect and the affectivity of the body. Raiargues that the body connects to the world and the profusion of sensations that give itform through affectivity. Therefore, “the media phenomenon as a set of events assem-bled together through feedback loop relations is never fully experienced at the level

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of consciousness, representation, or identity” (p. 5). In other words, Rai argues thatthe consumer of media must be conceived of not as an already-formed individual withalready-formed identities who responds to complete and stable narratives that signifyparticular sets of ideologies (this, he suggests is what film and media scholarship haslargely done). Rather, media methodology must conceive of the consumer or the bodyà la Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological terms, as a “preindividual (that is, individualand population at once), self-organizing (a mutating multiplicity far from equilibriumand intuitively open to its own becomings), and dynamic” as being “situated at thecenter of a given media assemblage” (p. 5).

What is at stake with such a conception of an assemblage? Rai articulates this wellin the central argument of his book, which takes the reader on a journey through theexperience of watching the very first show of a film on the first day of its release (or thefirst-day, first-show experience, which Rai shows us as being central to film cultures inIndia) and the “malltiplex,” or the new urban spaces that combine the shopping mallwith the multiplex (the older single screen theatres did not coexist quite so neatly withshopping complexes). The significance of viewing or diagramming media through theanalytic of the assemblage, Rai argues, is that we can begin to see the formation of a“new regulatory mechanism of population” that is constituted as a “paradoxical con-trol without control” (p. 211). This “control without control” is constituted, Rai argues,through an “emergent sensorimotor schema,” that while new and tending towards “afuture shadowed by the value-added strategies of the malltiplex, insurance, and cellphone” and therefore strange, is also familiar and “stretches back to the habituated loi-tering of colonial bazaar culture, [and] to the nonlocalized performances of vernacularoral literatures” (p. 211). Even though Rai discusses “control without control,” he is nottheorizing a form of governmentality or even a discursive formation (he is emphatic, infact, that this is not case), because, he says, media assemblages in the time of globaliza-tion “swerve,” they produce excess, are excessive and are creative; these assemblages, inother words, are in a process of becoming (p. 218) and therefore cannot be analyzed ascompleted representations.

This argument about the media assemblage is particular to the conjuncture of glob-alization and India post-liberalization because, Rai argues, it is in this context that themedia assemblage becomes a “sensation machine, which taps directly and without medi-ation into the body’s affects serially across specific media” (p. 216). He suggests thatwhile “the media assemblage has both form and substance” depending on the mediumthrough which it is formed and circulated, the assemblage itself is not “exhaustedby that actuality” (p. 217). Therefore, media criticism in the contemporary momentshould be invested in diagramming what he calls the “intensive processes of becom-ing.” Criticism should “define media in terms of swerves, intervals, and durations . . .

[and] produce functional diagrams of becomings through the events of media ratherthan their representations” (p. 218).

Both Basu and Rai espouse an analytic for film and media scholarship that takeswhat I will call here a “post-identity” position. In doing so, both authors make twoarguments—one about media and media scholarship and another about India’s socialformation amidst economic liberalization. About the media and media scholarship, Raiand Basu argue that narrative is neither an efficient nor sufficient unit of analysis for

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Indian media analysis. They understand narratives as closed and stable units of repre-sentations, and seem to read narratives as moving teleologically from set-up, conflict,climax to conflict resolution. Basu and Rai argue for the inadequacy of such a conceptwhen dealing with the experience of and the text of the Indian film, but particularly theBollywood film. Such a film rarely espouses an abiding belief in linearity or teleology,moving as it often does between fantasy, desire, a larger-than-life quality, and the ethno-graphic and swerving (to use Rai’s term here) between past and future. Although neitherclaims Indian film to be an exceptional form, Basu, does state that “Hindi cinema [oneof the many instances in this work where there is a slippage between the category‘Hindi cinema’ and ‘Bollywood’] is capable of an assembling impulse that overrides thecentralizing economies of the modern—namely, authorial/subjective narration—and ametalinguistic grammar of plausibility, broadly called realism” (p. 16). In other words,Bollywood may not be utterly unique, but it is a special enough case to require a methodof analysis that rejects the primacy of narrative. Similarly, about post-economic liberal-ization India, Basu and Rai argue that nation-ness and publicness take loose, affective,unstable forms through the sensorium produced by Bollywood and its consumption.These forms cannot be sufficiently grasped through the analytical category of identity,which for both scholars seems to suggest a stable, already formed self and community.

Both Basu and Rai regard Ravi Vasudevan as an important interlocutor in the fieldof Indian film studies. Vasudevan’s book, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form andSpectatorship in Indian Cinema, provides us with a different perspective on mediascholarship and the contemporary conjuncture than the works of Basu and Rai. Writinga history of melodrama in Indian film, Vasudevan delineates what is new about so-callednew India and its film industries. But he takes particular interest in the relationshipbetween the Hindi film industry, media consumption, and the contemporary conjunc-ture. The Indian state’s relationship with the Indian film industry, especially the Hindifilm industry, is a significant marker of change and newness. Vasudevan shows us howthe state has moved from being the purveyor of an “authentic rendering of culturalidentity through a national aesthetic,” to an embrace of film cultures as somehowimportant to the building and circulation of “brand India.” The post-independenceIndian state regarded entertainment media like film as largely superfluous and distract-ing to the task of development in a postcolonial nation (p. 339). Consequently, theindustry was “taxed and regulated in order to control its dubious attractions for a massaudience” (p. 336). However, the post-economic liberalization Indian state sees film asimportant to the “identity requirements” of a nation born anew:

For fifty years, Indian governments had ignored the demand that Indian film pro-duction should be recognized as an industry so it could get subsidized loans fromstate-owned banks and benefit from taxation and customs policies designed to fos-ter indigenous industries. Clearly, the goalposts have shifted, for popular cinemaseems to have emerged as a powerful vehicle for Indian identity requirements inthe newly defined global space of Indian national interests. (p. 3)

Vasudevan defines the contemporary period in India as being marked by a “newurbanism” and a consumer economy that is defined by “an accelerated availability

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of communication and media forms, from telephony through to satellite broadcastingand cable television” (p. 335). Much of these new spaces and products have emergedthrough the corporate endeavors that have significant state support (p. 335). Moreover,this contemporary moment has also witnessed the emergence in significance of the non-resident Indian for a state that is interested in maintaining its foreign exchange reservesand developing foreign direct investment across diverse sectors of the economy and forpopular culture that accords salience to all things American. He shows us that whilethe Indian state was invested in “providing an authentic rendering of cultural identitythrough a national aesthetic,” in the decades that followed Indian independence fromBritish colonial rule in 1947, the state is less concerned in the contemporary conjunc-ture with attempting to “avoid the trap of derivative culture, especially the influence ofAmerican culture . . .” (p. 339). Vasudevan argues moreover that this is a moment wheresuch transformations have not been “controllable” and have, as such, “given rise to dif-ferent and contested circuits of production, circulation, and consumption” (p. 335). Assuch, Vasudevan writes that “what we are observing now, at least at the crucial level ofthe high-profile, export-oriented Bombay film is the displacement of nation as art formby nation as brand” (p. 339). In fact, the emergence of Bollywood as a name brand, acategory and form of Hindi film, is, in Vasudevan’s argument, “one of the remarkablefeatures” of the transformations that have defined the contemporary conjuncture.

Identity is therefore a significant analytical term in Vasudevan’s monograph, whileit is not in the works of Basu and Rai. Through his focus on the relationship betweenthe Indian state and the Bombay film industry, Vasudevan reveals to us the manner inwhich identity categories, particularly the categories of identification created for thepostcolonial nation, have shifted over time as a consequence of shifts within social for-mations. Vasudevan delineates the intertwining of social formations and the popularcultural forms that are produced within it. He is therefore interested in “how the cinemaaddresses spectators by drawing upon culturally intelligible narrative and performancecodes, along with their adaptation and even outright unsettling by inducting new fea-tures . . . and in techniques for the construction of subjectivity” (p. 10). About the shiftswithin film studies, Vasudevan notes that the “entanglement between film and politicaltheory” has sometimes led “to too quick a reading of political structures onto filmicimaginaries” (p. 11)—a particular concern both Rai and Basu explicitly articulate – andsuggests that it is important to allow “the political to emerge from the specificity ofthe cinema as a rather distinctive mode of experience in the twentieth century” (p. 11).Unlike Rai and Basu, however, Vasudevan’s concern about maintaining analytical cre-dence for the distinctiveness of cinema does not lead him to reject either narrative orfilm’s significance to the formation of identity categories.

Vasudevan continues to be interested in narrative. And though he refers to Hindifilm as a “loose assemblage,” as do Basu and Rai, Vasudevan argues that “this looseassemblage is held together on the basis of a melodramatic axis of personalized experi-ence that relentlessly articulates itself in publicly expressive ways” (Vasudevan, p. 55).For him melodrama is an intervention in the popular assemblage (not coincidental withit) and that in Indian popular film, “it constructed a subjectivity at once personalizedand public.” Moreover, melodrama “also addressed its audiences in crucial ways aspublic rather than individuated” (p. 43). In other words, he argues that the particular

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axis of the narrative—developed and articulated through character types, characterexpression and the ways in which “intimate circumstances, perceptions, and familialties” are tied to a drama “beyond the individual” (p. 43)—is crucial to (not inimical orat odds with) the assemblage of visuals, sounds, affects and sensations engendered bythe popular film.

Vasudevan’s methodological and analytical imperatives also enable him to sidestepa simple rendering of special or exceptional status for Hindi film in India. His interestin melodrama as a popular intervention and engagement with modernity propel him tostudy its iterations in world cinema, particularly American cinema, as well as in Hindifilm in India. This larger frame allows Vasudevan to argue that what we are dealing withwhen we talk of a narrative axis such as melodrama, “is not different cultural incarna-tions and ‘national’ variations in . . . [its] itinerary . . . but instances of how melodramaworks as a mode, modality, and genre in specific historic, political, and film industrialcontexts” (pp. 63–64). Moreover, because he takes a broader canvas of analysis thaneither Rai of Basu, he is able to suggest that an easy argument about the “distancebetween the Euro-American path and the history of cultural forms elsewhere, espe-cially in former colonial contexts,” is not entirely tenable. Instead he suggests that thisdifference between the popular Hindi film in India and popular film emerging fromHollywood in the United States, for instance, “needs to be acknowledged but alsointerrogated” (p. 64). Vasudevan thus delineates both the differences and the similar-ities between various film forms, in order to work out an analysis that is attendant tothe specificities of the time, the industry, and the social formation.

The monographs authored by Basu, Rai, and Vasudevan present us with provocativereadings of contemporary India—a conjunctural moment that links together (amongother things) the events of economic liberalization, state-private capital relations anda telecommunications boom—and media in India. I believe that in Vasudevan’s work,we also get a compelling delineation (which does not emphasize causality) of the rela-tionship between the social formation and the cultural form. It is also clear from thethree monographs that media, particularly film, scholarship on India is formulating itsanalysis on two interconnected but nevertheless distinct routes: the first is invested intheorizing media beyond the narrative; and the second is attentive to the axes that giveform and consistency to the loose assemblages that define the Hindi film in India.

NOTES

Thanks to Juned Shaikh for being a sounding board as I worked out the wonderfully provocative arguments ofthe three scholars discussed in this essay.

1. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman,2008), pp. 4–5.

2. Leela Fernandes and Patrick Heller, “Hegemonic Aspirations: New Middle Class Politics and India’sDemocracy in Comparative Perspective,” Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2006), pp. 495–522.

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