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Unraveling countrysides: provincial modernities in contemporary popular Indian cinema
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Unraveling countrysides: provincial modernities in contemporary popular Indian cinema
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Content
UNRA VELING COUNTRYSIDES: PROVINCIAL
MODERNITIES IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR INDIAN
CINEMA
by
Arunima Paul
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A dissertation presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH, GENDER & VISUAL STUDIES)
December 2014
© Arunima Paul
Paul 2
Dissertation Abstract
This dissertation examines the reappearance of provincial and rural spaces within post-Liberalization
Indian cinema across a range of 'hatke' (or 'off-center') film genres, namely, the national cop film, the
provincial cop film, the provincial youth film, and the new rural film. It argues that this 'provincial
corpus' complicates political mythologies about governance, electoral democracy and political agency
that emerge in India through the 1990s at the historical conjuncture of financial Liberalization, Mandal
(or the democratization of caste) and Mandir (the rise of Hindu nationalism). This engagement is
evident in the ways in which different subjects are shown to relate to institutional, civic and
geographical spaces of the provincial small-town and the rural countryside. Successive chapters
explore the particular ways in which these encounters bring into view the disavowed historical
evolutions of structures of caste, gender, political power and crony capitalism within the edifices of the
developmental state, statist capitalism and electoral democracy. In doing so, it is argued, this corpus
pluralizes the conception of the postcolonial modern. The dissertation assesses the critical effectivity of
these cinematic interventions along twin axes of – previous iterations of the 'countryside' in
commercial, New Wave and transnational rural films; as well as contemporary film-genres centered in
the global or domestic metropolises.
Paul 3
Table of Contents
Dissertation Abstract.................................................................................................................2
Acknowledgments......................................................................................................................5
An Introduction.........................................................................................................................7
Of Filmi Asides and Repartee: Competing Tellings of the Present and the Past..............................7
An Intervention into Cinematic Modernity....................................................................................16
Colonial Optics on the Provincial: the Cinematic versus the Literary...........................................22
Provincial Histories, Discrete Publics............................................................................................29
Provincial Worlds in Postcolonial Indian Cinema..........................................................................36
Provincial Modernities in Contemporary Bombay Cinema...........................................................39
The Colonial and Post-colonial Provenance of the Rural...............................................................45
Dissertation Structure/Chapter Breakdown....................................................................................55
Chapter One Nation, Border, Hinterland: Cinematic Designations in
the National Cop Film.............................................................................................................58
Genealogies of the National Cop: The Bequest of the Five Year Plan Hero..................................63
The Inheritances from the Angry Young Man................................................................................68
The New Worlds of the National Cop............................................................................................73
Border, Homeland, Hinterland: Spatial Transactions in Sarfarosh................................................82
The Terrorist at Large in the Countryside.....................................................................................100
Khakee's Metacommentary on the National Cop and Space........................................................108
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................113
Chapter Two The Everyday and the Climactic: The Temporalities of
Jungle-Raj in the Provincial Cop Film.................................................................................115
The Social Text of 'Jungle-Raj'.....................................................................................................120
Reframing Bihar: Obscured Genealogies of the Present..............................................................129
The World through the Provincial Cop-film.................................................................................132
The Temporality of the Everyday: From Shool to Gangaajal......................................................136
The Provincial Public in the Temporality of Crisis......................................................................145
The Fractured Public in Aakrosh..................................................................................................153
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................163
Chapter Three "They point guns for money, we run the country!":
Other Modernities in the Provincial Youth-Film.................................................................165
Unraveling/deepening democracy................................................................................................169
Newer Narrative Frames for Masculine Rage..............................................................................175
Haasil or Provincial Modernity's Mundane Battles.....................................................................183
Sehar: the Criminal-entrepreneur and New Imaginations of Modernity......................................191
Gulaal: Mustached Nihilism and Secessionist Dreams................................................................197
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................210
Paul 4
Chapter Four “We thought, let's take Bollywood there!”: The New Rural
Film and its Cinematic Interventions...................................................................................211
Caste and the Rural in Postcolonial India.....................................................................................214
Evaluating the Cinematic History of the Rural.............................................................................222
New Commercial and Ideological Horizons for the New Rural film...........................................232
Omkara and its Multiply-interpellated Viewer.............................................................................239
The Explosive Conjugal and the Rural Widow as Femme Fatale................................................248
Conclusion: Critical Interventions and Afterlives of the Cinematic Provincial................268
Larger Implications of the Cinematic Provincial..........................................................................274
The Afterlives of the Provincial....................................................................................................282
Bibliography...........................................................................................................................292
Primary texts.................................................................................................................................292
Secondary Texts............................................................................................................................298
Paul 5
Acknowledgments
As I stand near the conclusion of my doctoral studies and reflect back on this journey, I feel an
overwhelming sense of gratitude for all the kind attention, support and camaraderie I have received
over the years from so many quarters. I would like to thank Tania Modleski for being a wonderful
mentor. As an advisor, she has provided me with a generative intellectual space where I could seek out
my own critical trajectory. Her patient feedback to my overly long drafts has always been deeply
affirming even as it challenged me to further clarify my contentions. Priya Jaikumar has been an
extraordinarily supportive co-chair of my dissertation committee. I have greatly appreciated her close
and careful reading of my work, and her sharp questions have been invaluable to the evolution of this
project. Karen Tongson has been a vital presence as a scholar as well as an engaged interlocutor
through this journey. It has been a great privilege to learn from these three amazing scholars.
The Visual Studies as well as Gender Studies critical concentrations at USC have been formative to my
thinking and research. The summer institute on 'Decolonizing Knowledge' conducted by Dialogo
Global in July 2014, enabled for me a transformative engagement with marginalized histories,
epistemologies and methodologies. These are critical inheritances that I shall bring to my future work.
Equally fulfilling have been the varied opportunities I received over the years to teach. While assisting
Mike Messner, Margaret Rosenthal and Sherry Velasco, I was able to learn from the simple
sophistication of three amazing teachers as they managed to engage students with challenging reading
materials, historical questions and social issues. Teaching with them was one of the most exhilarating
aspects of my doctoral education.
Paul 6
Besides intellectual mentoring, doctoral studies also require a great deal of material resources. I am
thankful to the Department of English as well as the Graduate School at the University of Southern
California for providing me with fellowships that allowed me to focus on my research and writing at
vital junctures. Tania Modleski and David Lloyd provided me with effective and timely
recommendations as I applied for competitive fellowships and teaching positions. While the Visual
Studies research grant gave me financial resources to begin my research, I was able to workshop my
chapters at various conferences because of the funding provided by the Department of English as well
as the Graduate Student Government at USC. I would like to thank Emily Anderson and Rebecca
Lemon for their positive and acute advice on the ways of charting the choppy waters of job markets as
well as the teaching profession in general. Flora Ruiz and Jeanne Weiss have been wonderfully
supportive graduate advisors who have very patiently helped me navigate the sometimes mind-
boggling bureaucracies that confront an international student.
And yet, none of this would have been possible without the early and enduring orientation toward
literature, history, and the politics of representation I received from my teachers at Hindu College,
University of Delhi: the late Lalita Subbu, Tapan Basu, Suroopa Mukherjee, Brinda Bose and Sunil
Dua. I am grateful for their continued friendship and guidance. Over the years I have also been honored
to enjoy the friendships of Prachi Mittal, April Davidauskis, Trisha Chambers, Shvetal Vyas Pare,
Manjita Mukharji, Tanaji Sen and Penelope Geng – thank you for sharing my journey and making me a
part of yours. Finally, I feel the deepest gratitude for the unflagging support and sustenance I have
received through life from my parents – Subir and Jaishree, my brother Robin, and my husband Dhiraj.
You all have taught me to be in the present, while also always putting the present into perspective. And
you bore with me through the times when I forgot to do either.
Paul 7
An Introduction
Of Filmi Asides and Repartee: Competing Tellings of the Present and the Past
1
We are introduced to the aging protagonist of Rajkumar Santoshi's Khakee (2004) Deputy
Commissioner of Mumbai Police Anant Srivastava (played by the inimitable Amitabh Bachchan) in a
humorous scene where he dozes off as a senior politician delivers a pedantic speech about patriotism at
the graduation ceremony of a police academy. When shaken awake to deliver his own speech,
Srivastava as a beloved teacher at the academy, causes much mirth amongst the students in the
audience by admitting that he “was following netaji's and his historical litany till he got to '74, after
that [he] got bored and fell asleep.”
2
Srivastava's politely irreverent comment is layered with
intertextual meaning. It refers slyly to, what Madhava Prasad has termed as, 'the moment of
disaggregation' of the national consensus around the moral legitimacy of the Congress leadership and
its socialist vision of national development that occurred in the 1970s (Prasad 120).
3
The comment
syncopates this moment of popular disaffection with the postcolonial dream as well as Bachchan's own
entanglement with this moment as the hugely popular cinematic figure of the Angry Young Man who
came to represent on-screen working class rage and mobilization in successive films.
4
It is however,
equally significant that this history is recalled in the present by Bachchan as Srivastava – a
sexagenarian and meritorious senior police-official who believes that he was appointed faculty at the
academy by those in power so that he could be prevented from fighting crime and corruption [“They
1 'Filmi' is a term used in common Hindi parlance to describe a style of speaking or comportment that is dramatic in a
way that is 'film-like'.
2 'Netaji' literally means 'leader' but in everyday Hindi is used to refer to politicians.
3 Prasad, Madhava. The Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
4 While Prasad has written about this figure as an 'industrial' hero in The Ideology of the Hindi Film; Ranjani Mazumdar
has discussed this figure in the context of the role of popular Hindi cinema as 'a hidden archive of the city' in Bombay
Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Paul 8
have taken much care of my comfort, transferring me to a 'peaceful district' every time there was a riot
or a terrorist attack, and when no such district was left, instituted me here”]. The speech invites much
cheer from the students and conveys the disillusionment expressed frequently by the country's
professional elites at the 'degeneration' of the nation's political culture since the 1970s. The comment is
typical of the overtly political mode of address and self-construction prevalent in, what has come to be
recognized culturally, commercially and critically, as one of contemporary Bollywood's most political
film-genres, the cop-film. And one of the most conspicuous features of the genre and its protagonist
(the metropolitan cop) is their casual as well as, on other occasions, more deliberate scaping of the past
and the present of postcolonial India.
While the Indian state's 'crisis of legitimacy' in the 1970s occurred primarily from the vantage of the
country's urban working class and rural agricultural labor (for the lack of progress on structural issues
of land, capital, redistribution despite over two decades of 'Independence' and the prevailing regime's
dictatorial response), Srivastava's citation of this moment performs the crucial maneuver of absorbing
the ethos of populist disaffection into the character's own elite disillusionment with the country's
political cultures. The specific context and contours of this appropriation are significant. Released in
2004, Khakee appears a decade after the implementation of the recommendations of the Mandal
Commission by the V .P. Singh-led government in 1993 whereby another 27% of seats were reserved in
government jobs and public universities for the Other Backward Classes (or OBCs) as a move to
redress mass poverty and its correlation to caste hierarchies. The implementation of these reforms
encountered violent resistance from upper caste youths who responded to this challenge to their
historical monopoly over these institutions paradoxically using the values of 'equality' and 'merit'. The
film also appeared thirteen years after the official initiation of financial liberalization of India's
Paul 9
protectionist economy, the developmental state, political economy and culture at large. These seismic
shifts within the Indian polity constitute the historical horizon of Srivastava's comment, as it routes the
popular disaffection of the 1970s into a neoliberal calibration of 'the state of the nation' through the
index of crime (terror and riots) rather than the developmental state's index of inequality (that may be
addressed by socialist policies and affirmative action). The equivalence of terror attacks and riots (a
mass civic violence) also demonstrates a fundamentally reactionary suspicion of the 'demos' and a
reactionary in the revitalization of governance through stringent law-enforcement. In a subsequent
scene in Khakee, a mob gathers in a small-town to attack and kill a suspect whom the state's Chief
Minister has declared an Islamic terrorist. Here, Srivastava confronts the mob single-handedly accusing
them of being cowards who hunt in packs, and as easily manipulated by politicians sitting in the
metropolis afar.
Khakee represents what might be described as a 'national' interpretive horizon for the state of
contemporary politics, the functioning and legitimacy of the postcolonial state, and the short/long
social and political history of the country. And in its evaluation of the same, Khakee remains steadfastly
aligned with the self-righteous vantage of the country's qualified, meritocratic, metropolitan middle
classes – noting with particular bitterness the imperilment of the lives of 'ordinary citizens' (private-
propertied denizens of the corporate class, residing in gated suburban communities) by 'rise' in crime,
their harassment by corrupt state-officials, and the regression of the Indian polity into caste-based
politics. These are seen to hold back the country despite the economic prosperity and social progress it
has made due to Liberalization – at the forefront of which has been this middle class.
However, as with any narrative, this one too is structured simultaneously by vision and blindness, focus
and peripherality. Several other events and transformations checker this same stretch of time since the
Paul 10
Indian state's crisis of legitimacy. While the 1970s were marked by the erosion of the political
preeminence of the Congress Party, they also witnessed the beginning of the emergence of a new brass
of political leaders from middle and lower castes in regional and subsequently national politics.
5
Since
then, two generations of these new political leaderships have mounted a serious challenge to the
entrenched power of the traditional upper-caste elites, and politicized constituencies of non-elite voters,
most notably dalits (or the ex-untouchables) and the OBCs. The 'provincial' origins of these leaders in
regions haunted by violent caste-wars, characterized by 'uncouth' cultures of sociality and masculinity,
contrast heavily with the western-educated, liberal, upper-caste leaders of the Congress Party.
6
While
these leaderships have been wholly identified with the much-bemoaned 'criminalization of politics' and
the rise of corruption (despite the similar culpability of previous regimes) in the metropolitan
mediatized public-sphere, they have also caused significant shifts within prevailing constellations of
caste and power in several Indian states in assembly elections since 1993.
7
The resistance to these
changes can be seen in the intermittent aggravation of intercaste and gender-based violence as well as
in visible interventions by governmental and non-governmental organizations for the protection of
'minorities' – such as the National Human Rights Commission. The Mandal Commission reforms were
first protested by middle and upper caste urban youths (ironically citing the values of equality and
merit), and then sought to be neutralized through a reintegration of the Hindu votebank with the right-
5 For a compelling and comprehensive analysis of this phase of electoral politics in India, see Corbridge & Harriss,
'Jealous Populism, Crises and Instability: Indira's India' in Corbridge, Stuart and John Harriss. Reinventing India:
liberalization, Hindu nationalism and popular democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000, pp. 67-92.
6 This is an incisive analysis-piece on the figure of Laloo Prasad Yadav: Swamy, M.R. Narayan. 'Lalu Prasad Yadav: A
maverick who made waves; in and beyond politics.' DNAindia. 30 September 2013.
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-lalu-prasad-yadav-a-maverick-who-made-waves-in-and-beyond-politics-
1896250. Accessed 30 July 2014. Lucia Michelutti's The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion
in India. Delhi, London: Routledge, 2008, offers a more scholarly consideration of the iconographic distinctiveness and
eclecticism of these political cultures.
7 Corbridge, Stuart and John Harriss. Reinventing India: liberalization, Hindu nationalism and popular democracy.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000, page 131; and Yadav, Yogendra. 'Reconfiguration in Indian politics: State assembly
elections 1993-95. Economic and Political Weekly. V olume 31, Issue 2-3, 1996, pp. 95-104.
Paul 11
wing Hindu neo-nationalist campaign for 'Mandir' at the alleged birthplace of the Hindu Lord Ram.
While income inequality has increased since the onset of Liberalization, more ambitious welfare
programs have sought to be introduced as compensatory gestures by the Indian state – such as the
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (or MGNREGA) of 2005, the National
Land Reform Policy to end mass poverty and landlessness particularly amongst dalit and tribal
communities as well as women.
8
Elsewhere in the forestlands of central India, tribal communities are
peacefully and violently opposing large-scale corporate mining on moral, ecological and political
grounds. In turn the state has characterized them 'the gravest internal threat' in order to legitimize the
deployment of military and paramilitary personnel on an unprecedented scale.
9
This litany of disparate socio-political realities conveys the competing impulses and moral-political
frameworks simultaneously animating the Indian polity, with thrusts toward the democratization of
access to representation and life-opportunities, as well as pushes for a more neoliberal state that
facilitates further marketization of industrial sectors, natural resources by ensuring a steady supply of
credit, infrastructure and 'raw-materials'. These expanding grids of marketization seek hegemony
through the institutions of electoral democracy, civil society, privatized media and an increasingly
neoliberal marketplace, even as they are thwarted occasionally by the bottom-up thrusts for
democratization. Seen against this disparate socio-political landscape, the past and the present are
many-tongued creatures which are variously reined in, refracted or positioned critically in
8 Introduced by the Congress-led UPA government at the center in 2006, the ambitious MGNREGA guarantees 100 days
of employment to every rural household at predetermined rates which have recently been hiked to account for inflation
(see Prabhu 2013). The National Land Reform Policy aims to tackle rural landlessness that affects approximately 50
million poor rural families by guaranteeing each family 10 decimals of land and also seeks to greatly improve rural
housing (see Sircar 2013).
9 Acclaimed novelist and non-fiction polemicist Arundhati Roy has called this 'the real battle of civilizations' where the
very definition of progress, humanity and the legitimacy of the institutions of liberal democracry are at stake in her
lecture in Chicago on 18
th
March 2013. A video of the same is available on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AaIcj4MV54.
Paul 12
contemporary popular cinema. This dissertation is interested in the varied figurations of the provincial
in contemporary, post-Liberalization, popular Hindi cinema and the narratives and counter-narratives
they offer about the 'state of the country' through a range of overtly political genres. Implicit in these
narratives is the hermeneutic dyad of the metropolis and the provincial. This inquiry is built with an
awareness that even genres that do not position themselves as 'overtly political' such as romantic
comedies, family dramas are also necessarily so. The choice of 'political genres' is motivated in part by
the pragmatic necessity of delineating a specific corpus of cinematic productions that would be viable
for the given scale and scope of inquiry, but more so by an interest in particular influential modes of
address and interpretive templates that map and re-map postcolonial histories of South Asia. This
dissertation is interested in the ways in which these visual-aural narratives effect or mitigate particular
kinds of spectatorial socio-political consciousness and self-recognition: as either the aspiration to
approximate the putatively secular-modern 'abstract' citizen, or to recognize the gender, caste/class
inflected experiences of violence that constitute the underside of contemporary modernity. Here, the
dissertation engages the ways in which scholars from different disciplines like history, rhetoric,
philosophy, political science, anthropology have explored the ways in which 'a culture-specific and
site-based reading' of the transition by ex- and post-colonies to Western modernity, have pried open the
seemingly inexorable link between 'the two strands of modernity – societal modernization and cultural
modernity' to reveal 'alternative modernities' that can be described as multiple and hybrid (Gaonkar
15).
10
This dissertation examines the ways in which a varied set of contemporary popular films enable
10 In his introduction to Alternative Modernities, Dilip Parmeshwar Gaonkar differentiates the societal modernity from
cultural modernity. The former includes a 'type of institutional order (popular government, bureaucratic administration,
market-driven industrial economy' and a 'mental outlook (scientific rationalism, pragmatic instrumentalism, secularism)'
(Gaonkar 16). Cultural modernity refers to 'a spirit of critique' adopted toward 'the present and to oneself' that originated
with the Enlightenment (Gaonkar 12). Gaonkar argues, that these two are not related by an inexorable logic, and at
every site, they were adopted through specific processes of 'creative adaptation' (Gaonkar 18). For the whole discussion,
see: Alternative Modernities. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 1-23.
Paul 13
in the spectator a recognition of his/her existence within alternative 'provincial' modernities where the
otherwise disavowed non-modern South Asian social, epistemological, cognitive structures have clearly
persisted through and shaped the different colonial and postcolonial projects of technological and
cultural modernization.
The dissertation commences with a consideration of how a dominant genre such as the national cop
film not only thematically expresses the expanding neoliberal grids for marketization and national
sovereignty with a dramatic narrative about a revitalized police-team countering the threat posed by a
mercenary terrorist, but also how a film like Khakee implicitly maps the present and the past with a
dystopia emanating from the perceived weakening of the national leadership at the center, the
disillusionment with the transformations promised by the socialist-developmental state, the emergence
of multiple 'provincial' centers of power as well as reactionary imaginations of national restoration and
revitalization. The same historical expanses are mapped in very contrasting ways by other
contemporary genres. For instance, in Prakash Jha's acclaimed Gangaajal/Holy Water (2004), when the
outraged Superintendent of Police, Amit Kumar asks how a lavish reception could be assembled at a
moment's notice for him at a decrepit rural police-station like Motihari when there isn't enough money
for stationery or gas for official vehicles, his eager local patrons (petty businessmen, industrialists and
shopkeepers) reply with alacrity, “Please do not consider us so backward that we may not be able to
offer you a decent welcome!” The repartee refocuses the lens on 'corruption' as a mode of survival and
self-preservation (in common parlance, described with the more ambivalent term 'jugaad' which
implies 'ingenuity amidst limitations') within a landscape checkered with scarcities and power-
structures that must be placated. With the repartee, Kumar's provincial patrons rename 'bribery' as
'welcome'. They both claim and disclaim the 'backwardness' imputed to them and draw attention to
Paul 14
their resourcefulness. They cite neither the temporality of progress nor that of degeneration, but rather
appear to live in an open-ended spatial dimension of relentless adaptability and negotiation to
reproduce their privileges.
However, in an unequal world the capacity to be resourceful is not possessed by all, and extending
resources and patronage to the marginalized becomes the means by which an emergent political
leadership contests entrenched political elites. In Tigmanshu Dhulia's cult-hit Haasil/Taken (2003) the
impoverished, thakur (upper-caste) pretender to the throne of student-president of Allahabad
University, Rannvijay Singh raises the flag of 'the backwards' (or OBCs) and asserts a poor student's
right to learn English since 'it's not anyone's private property'. Up-and-coming Lucknow gangster
Gajraj Singh in Kabeer Kaushik's Sehar/Dawn (2005), enthuses the new recruits of his criminal gang
with the call of 'no longer waiting'. As these provincial youths belligerently confront historical
inequities, the past as they see it is an unequivocal experience of deprivation and humiliation which the
present contests unrelentingly. Blurring the moralities of activism, their political and criminal
entrepreneurship both intervenes into and capitalizes on this contested terrain. 'Political fixer'
Vidhyadhar Verma in Abhishek Chaubey's Ishqiya/Romantic (2010) smuggles weapons across the
India-Nepal border to arm dalits who are the underdogs in the caste-war waging in the region. He funds
this operation with his kidnapping 'business' for which he scours Gorakhpur's proliferating nouveau-
rich class with the finesse of an 'artist' to choose 'suitable' candidates. Verma himself becomes the
interface between multiple temporal horizons – the unending pleasures of consumer citizenship offered
by a new neoliberal ethos, the competitive political marketplace created by the recent 'democratization'
of caste and politics, as well as that of ethnic genocide. He is brought to book by Krishna, his falsely-
widowed wife, who uses his kidnapping 'intelligence' as an elaborate ruse. These refocused provincial
Paul 15
characters, settings and narratives emphasize the open-ended and contestatory nature of multiple
transformations underway within the Indian polity. This 'provincial turn' is significant since Indian
cinema (much like the nationalist imagination) has always posited the metropolis against the rural
which (as will be discussed in a later section) has been transfixed by particular tropes (of stasis, pre-
modernity). It is also in this sense that the contemporary provincial emerges as an important cinematic
third space.
Taking cue from an expanding set of inquiries in the social sciences on the everyday terrain of
institutions of governance, development, education and marketization, the dissertation explores the
complex and self-aware ways in which these 'provincial' genres locate themselves within a broadly
conceived socio-political landscape where elite appraisals of the failure of the developmental state and
the desirability of a market-based economy, struggle against grassroots and regional pushes for the
'democratization' of political power and access to education, employment and development resources.
In the films discussed here, officials occupying the lowest rungs of a district police, provincial
townsfolk, 'lumpen' political youths, and cloistered rural women living on the fringes of the provincial
political cultures, appear within the criss-crossing optics of – on the one hand, a secular-modern,
developmental epistemology (espoused by the modernizing Indian middle class and derived from the
history of advanced capitalist countries of the West) that constructs all social structures that exceed the
modern-liberal values of equality and citizenship as 'pre-modern' and 'corrupt'; and on the other, the
gaze of non-elite figures who occupy the more ambivalent and negotiatory terrain of self-conscious
'backwardness', survival and adaptation. Their gazes variously call out and ridicule the elite fictions, as
well as the ethical and epistemological inadequacies of political modernity and constitutionality. In
critically engaging these aspects of representation within a longer cinematic history, the dissertation
Paul 16
demonstrates how this 'provincial' corpus of films within contemporary Hindi cinema have sought to
pluralize the understanding of the Indian modern.
This introduction continues to contextualize its own inquiries within a growing body of critical
scholarship on postcolonial and now post-Liberalization Indian cinema. Thereafter, it explores the
nature of the appearance of provincial spaces as 'the mofussil' in colonial cinema and literature – in
order to think through the significant continuities and discontinuities they exhibit in relation to
contemporary cinematic representations of the provincial. The subsequent section explores both the
approach toward the provincial within bourgeois-nationalist politics and imagination, as well as the
distinctive nature of provincial politics. Here it also considers the varied historiographical approaches
adopted toward the consideration of provincial histories and the bearing they may have for the
experience and study of cinema. In the final sections, the introduction considers the fleeting
appearances of the provincial through the post-independence decades and the relatively more
voluminous corpus of the rural during the same.
An Intervention into Cinematic Modernity
In the seminal Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, situated on the cusp of the
neoliberal turn in state and cultural ideology, Madhava Prasad reads the terrain of postcolonial popular
Hindi cinema as 'an institution that is part of the continuing struggles within India over the form of the
state'.
11
Unlike advanced capitalist countries, in India none amongst the triad of the modernizing
bourgeoisie, the agricultural landlords or the private industrialists has achieved hegemony that would
subordinate all other internal conflicts, instead they exist in an unstable coalition. He argues that
cultural productions such as the dominant form of the feudal family romance (which pushes for a
11 Prasad, Madhava. 'Introduction: The Ideology of Formal Subsumption.' Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical
Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, page 9.
Paul 17
reconciliation of 'tradition' and 'modernity') and the state-supported realist film-making, 'register' or are
'symptomatic' of this contested terrain. Building on the work of subaltern studies historians' critical
engagement with Gramsci and Althusser's work on state, ideology and capitalism, Prasad critically
reads cinema 'as a site of ideological production' that may be alternately coherent and incoherent, but is
always implicated in 'the question of the production (and reproduction) of new subjectivities
compatible with capitalist development'.
12
In Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Ranjani Mazumdar argues against approaching cinema as
overdetermined by the top-down 'overarching analytical category' of the nation, state or ideology.
Instead, Mazumdar utilizes the analytic of 'the urban delirium' (drawing upon the work of Walter
Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Jonathan Raban, David Clarke, Arjun Appadurai; as well as poets of
postcolonial India like Dhumil, Narayan Surve, Namdeo Dhasal, Nissim Ezekiel) with its associations
of violence, fear and terror to explore how popular Hindi cinema has rendered the 'tissue and texture of
everyday life' in the post-globalization city. By evoking this delirium, popular cinema has pushed back
against sanguine ideologies of a consumer paradise, to foreground experiences of increased urban
density, inequality, squalor, haunting, crime as well as playfully crafted survival. Elaborating this new
optic on the cinematic city through the filmic figures of the working class 'angry young man', the urban
tramp, the gangster and the urban stalker, Mazumdar argues that 'cinema thus constitutes a hidden
archive of the Indian modern'.
13
And yet, even as Mazumdar provokes a reconsideration of the textures of life accentuated by popular
cinema, she is compelled to draw attention to how the spatial politics of films dovetail with emergent
12 Ibid., 9, 54.
13 Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, page
xxxiv.
Paul 18
ideological horizons – as the NRI films virtually remake the contested space of the city (where
squatters, slum-dwellers and lower class laboring populations agitate for their residential and civic
rights) with aspirational 'panoramic interiors' and artificial city-skylines projected through windows.
14
Contributors to Bollywood, Nation, Globalization have emphasized the altered 'return' of the nation in
the mid-1990s – most prominently with the film Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge/The Braveheart Shall
Will Win the Bride [popularly called DDLJ] (1995). In the film, the affluent NRI (non resident Indian)
hero proves his cultural and ethical essence as a 'true Indian' by appeasing a family-patriarch in the
picturesque fields of Punjab (designated as the much-longed for homeland for the immigrant) to 'win
his bride'. The film set up a new equivalence between the 'almost fetishized' (upper-caste, affluent,
diasporic and patriarchal) family and the nation. However, the film's tourism through Europe in its first
half, its glamorized depiction of Northern Indian Hindu wedding rituals in the second, blatant product-
advertising and the NRI hero's return to his life in London as the son of a rich industrialist at the end of
the film – also signaled a 'radical diminishing' of the 'postponement of assertion and gratification'
which till the 1990s, had been projected in Indian culture and politics as an essential aspect of
patriotism
15
. These aspects of the film are resonant with changes wrought by the liberalization of the
Indian state and economy in the early 1990s leading to the privatization of vital state-controlled
economic sectors, the increased presence of foreign capital in entertainment, manufacturing and retail,
14 'NRI films' is a descriptor derived from the term 'non-resident Indian' or 'NRI' in short; and is used in common parlance
for a broad set of popular Hindi films from the 1990s onward which were set prominently in the wealthy Indian
diaspora in western metropolitan cities of London, New York, Melbourne, Toronto. The tag is used most commonly for
the films by director Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Subhash Ghai, Yash Chopra amongst others. The term is also used to
denote the particular appeal of these films for the newly ascendant, aspirational and consumerist domestic middle
classes in post-Liberalization India, as well as for the particular class of Indian diaspora that was now being courted by
the Indian state as exemplary cultural ambassadors of India to the world, as well as exemplary Indian citizens who
patriotically invested their money in India to boost its 'foreign direct investments'.
15 Mehta emphasizes the significance of the reposturing of the figure of the NRI who prior to the 1990s had been shown
quite memorably in films like Purab aur Paschim/East and West as an object of criticism and ridicule in comparison to
the Indian born-and-bred son-of-the-soil hero in Mehta, Rini Bhattacharya. 'Bollywood, Nation, Globalization: An
Incomplete Introduction.' Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora. (eds) Rini
Bhattacharya Mehta & Rajeshwari V . Pandharipande. London & New York: Anthem Press, 2011, page 2.
Paul 19
unprecedented availability of consumer-brands, an aggressive nuclear program and foreign policy, and
the resurgence of Hindu nationalism. As an altered signifier in these films, the nation mediates between
newer modes of commerce, consumption and subjectivities, as well as anxieties about the loss of
culture and identity by enabling the reconstitution of new patriarchies aligned with consumer-utopia
(Sen 2011, Virdi 2003).
16
As a direct beneficiary of Liberalization, Bombay film-making acquired
'industry' status from the Indian state which in turn facilitated the corporate rationalization of
production, financing and exhibition sectors. These structural changes within the industry and its new
status as India's largest cultural ambassador to the world led to its emergence as 'Bollywood'
(Rajadhyaksha, 2004).
An unanticipated consequence of the exhibition model of the 'malltiplex' has been the diversification of
film-genres with the emergence of the urban thriller, the gangster film, the horror film, a new male
friendship film/comedy – many of which have come to be seen as 'hatke', which literally means 'off-
center' or 'something different' (Gopal 15, Dwyer 198).
17
This 'difference' lies in their rejection of the
representational politics of spectacular 'Bollywood' (specifically the NRI family-films) for a greater
degree of realism, overtly critical-political themes, the use of non-stars and aim to generate 'safe
returns' by working with lower budgets and less ambitious commercial releases. They are sometimes
described in contradistinction to 'multiplex films' which are seen to occupy a more middle ground
between Bollywood and hatke cinema in their combination of degrees of realism with the elements of
16 See Sen's discussion of Benegal's Welcome to Sajjanpur in Sen, Meheli. 'Vernacular Modernities and Fitful Globalities
in Shyam Benegal’s Cinematic Provinces.' Many Cinemas, V ol. 1, pp. 8-22. 2011; and Virdi's chapter on the global
NRI family-film called 'Re-reading Romance' in Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as
Social History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
17 See Gopal, Sangita. 'Sentimental Symptoms: The Films of Karan Johar and Bombay Cinema'. Bollywood and
Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora. (eds) Rini Bhattacharya Mehta & Rajeshwari V .
Pandharipande. London & New York: Anthem Press, 2011; & Dwyer, Rachel. 'Zara Hatke ('somewhat different'):
The new middle class and the changing forms of Hindi Cinema.' Being Middle-Class in India: A way of life. (ed.)
Henrike Donner. Oxon & New York: Routledge. 2011.
Paul 20
Bollywood like song, dance, use of stars. Rachel Dwyer has argued that hatke films cater to a
demographic that consists of the new generation of the 'old middle classes' (of the urban, educated,
salariat consisting of civil servants and doctors) which in its time had patronized art cinema, the New
Wave; as well as the new middle classes that have emerged with Liberalization (Dwyer 201). Sangita
Gopal has described this demographic as the 'emergent subject [of] – the domestic cosmopolitan'
(Gopal 17). This demographic is educated in world cinema, enjoys Bollywood but is also enabled by its
increased disposable income to patronize hatke cinema. Through its consideration of several films that
are considered hatke, this dissertation opens to examination the ways in which this new ascendant
class visually imagines and enjoys its relationship to space, non-metropolitan places and experiences,
as well as how its exerts its hermeneutic sovereignty.
Scholarship on post-Liberalization cinema has focused almost exclusively on films set in the
metropolis (in particular Bombay). This dissertation takes cognizance of genres that refute this
metropolitan focus of contemporary cinema by conspicuously bringing the nation's dystopic 'interiors'
to the screen. From being minor genres, this spatial turn toward India's provincial hinterlands has
become a dominant trend in Bombay cinema. It has been noted as the 'return' of Bollywood from its
'aspirational fixation' with foreign locales in the 1990s to 'embracing the heat and dust of India’s rapidly
urbanizing hinterland' which now tends to 'almost constitute a character in these films'.
18
This change in
setting is seen to make the plots 'more real' by valuing the 'raw edginess and power in regional flavours'
of the mofussil (or small town) as 'big cities have been all but exhausted as a source of stories and
visual inspiration'.
19
Just as the tourism boards of Spain, Austria, Australia, New Zealand and the
United Kingdom have actively courted Indian filmmakers in the past as a strategy to encourage
18 Chatterjee, Saibal. “Bollywood comes home to India”. Al Jazeera. Last updated: 11 Feb 2014 08:59. Available online
at: www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/01/bollywood-comes-home-india-201412354058253506.html.
19 Ibid.
Paul 21
tourism, many domestic states are now doing the same. As producer Vishal Bharadwaj mentions, Dedh
Ishqiya (the sequel to Ishqiya discussed in Chapter 4) has been exempted from the entertainment tax in
the state. Now, several more films are scheduled to be shot in various cities of Uttar Pradesh.
20
It is
significant that this 'return' of provincial India as a cinematic setting has occurred overwhelmingly
through a range of crime-genres. While this aspect has provoked some to ask, “Bihar-UP: Why doesn't
Bollywood look beyond crime stories?”, the review-circuit, critical and lay blogosphere has largely
seen this dystopic refraction of the provincial to corroborate the realism of the cinema.
21
Following
Rick Altman's directive to treat genre as 'a complex situation' when 'a large number of texts [are]
produced, broadly distributed, exhibited to an extensive audience and received in a rather homogeneous
manner... [so that] genre lies somewhere in the overall circulation of meaning constitutive of the
process', this dissertation explores precisely the potentialities for cinematic explorations of postcolonial
modernity that are generated as well as foreclosed through this dystopic imaginary.
22
At a historical juncture where the discursive and material terrains of national politics, history and the
definitions of development and good governance are sought to be monopolized by the neoliberal
aspirations and meritocratic prerogative of the urban middle class (as conveyed by Khakee), these
'provincial' genres which this dissertation variously names as 'the provincial cop film', 'the provincial
youth film' and 'the new rural film', challenge the political and social norms instituted by such ventures.
This challenge is mounted through critical and duplicitous translations of prevailing dystopic political
mythologies about the 'hinterland' into visual narrative. In these narratives, the emerging cinematic
20 TNN. “Not just Lucknow, all of Uttar Pradesh under Bollywood spotlight”. The Times of India. Nov 19, 2013.
Available online at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news-interviews/Not-just-
Lucknow-all-of-Uttar-Pradesh-under-Bollywood-spotlight/articleshow/26027355.cms
21 “Bihar-UP: Why doesn't Bollywood look beyond crime stories?” ibnlive.in.com/news/biharup-why-doesnt-bollywood-
look-beyond-crime-stories/436359-8-66.html The article goes on to ask 'Does that mean Bihar-UP are short on stories,
apart from crime stories, that are worth telling on the celluloid?'
22 Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI Institute, 1998, 84.
Paul 22
provincial is at once a 'projection' of excessive corruption, crime and violence, as well as a space for
the ambivalent inhabitation of what appear as familiar albeit disavowed historical experiences of
inequality, power, marginalization and contestation. These histories are shown to be operative through
the institutional 'pillars' of liberal modernity – the classroom, the university, family, state legislatures,
policing, development-administrations, spheres of industry – whose norms of merit, equal opportunity,
and disinterested pursuit of knowledge are shown up to be the modalities of class alliance,
reproduction, exclusion that have created a fundamentally inequitable polity. The visual narratives
explore spatial dimensions of both, these modalities of power as well as the cultures of sociality,
survival and ingenious adaptation that emerge in response to them. Developing a form of dramatic
ethnography, the narratives link the material with the spatial and the affective – exploring the forms of
subjectivity, elite imaginations of 'correction' and 'cleansing' as well as non-elite ambitions of selfhood,
success and justice 'long overdue'. Thus, even when positioned as a 'hinterland' to postcolonial
transformation and modernity, the provincial reveals precisely the constitutive, inequitable as well as
creative dimensions of postcolonial modernity.
Colonial Optics on the Provincial: the Cinematic versus the Literary
The contemporary character of the northern Indian provincial as a distinct administrative, economic
and social horizon, originated within the context of British colonialism. The Revolt of 1857
(rechristened a 'Mutiny' in the colonial imagination) constituted a watershed moment in the tenure of
British colonial power in India, precipitating its transformation from a trade and military-based
initiative of the East India Company, to a military and revenue-generating administrative regime under
the British Crown. This change entailed an expanding technological infrastructure of roads, bridges,
dams, canals, telegraph, trains, secured by an expanding institutions for revenue-collection and law and
Paul 23
order (the Indian civil services, judiciary and policing). These proliferating colonial infrastructures and
administrative classifications re-inscripted centers and peripheries, 'the advanced, sophisticated
heartland of the Mughal empire became the provincial interior' situated disadvantageously on an
evolutionary scale of civilization and refinement.
23
Following the Revolt, cities like Lucknow,
Allahabad and Benaras were pulverized and remade, the buildings of the nawabs were either destroyed
or repositioned by new roads and thoroughfares.
24
25
The projection of civilizational gradations on to space that has been germane to the colonial and
postcolonial imaginations, are evident in the term 'mofussil' – the Urdu predecessor of the term
'provincial' in the lexicon of South Asia that derives from the Persian and Arabic term 'mafassal' –
which means 'to divide' and being 'properly, separate'. In the administrative and military re-organization
of India as a British colony, according to a glossary of British India, 'mofussil' connoted places
depending on the speaker's present location.
26
If one was located in one of the presidencies, then the
term referred to 'the provinces' or the country-stations. Alternately, if one was at a chief-station of a
district, it referred to the rural fringes. Mofussil and subsequently 'provincial' connote a separation,
difference and remoteness from the center. At the same time, the terms also entail a constitutive
ontological slipperiness between rural countryside, district-station, provincial city and the presidency –
on an implied scale of state-infrastructural and cultural modernity that was seen in various colonial and
23 Kumar, Nita. 'Provincialism in Modern India: The Multiple Narratives of Education and their Pain.' Modern Asian
Studies. V olume 40, Issue 2, May 2006, page 401.
24 Shepherd, Ian. 'A journey through Lucknow's schools and colleges.' Lucknow: Then and Now. Ed. Rosie Llewellyn-
Jones. New Delhi: Vedam Books, 2003.
25 The term 'nawab' is an Urdu term derived from the Arabic via Persian (see Bhaskar and Allen 337) and denotes an
aristocrat or man of noble birth. Historically it referred to any Muslim provincial governor in north India during the
Mughal empire. Even as the provinces and lands of the nawabs shrank following the decline of the empire, the title
became hereditary.
26 See Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India by Henry Yule, A. C. Burnell. Accessible digitally here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=-
lFoAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA346&lpg=PA346&dq=origin+of+term+mofussil&source=bl&ots=7kkp6pIvfu&sig=PMYk2V
3YmKkyeTqobG0A6RzGJgw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lmFRU6_mE4qdyATD6IKwAg&ved=0CFMQ6AEwCA#v=onepage
&q=origin%20of%20term%20mofussil&f=false
Paul 24
native pronouncements to be realized in the space of the presidency's modernity. The presidency, in
turn, was regarded by the colonial state as a deficient replica of the domestic-metropolis of London.
Particular colonial literary genres offered instances of more fertile and responsive conceptions of the
provincial. In them, the colonial metropolis or presidency's evaluative gaze toward the mofussil
encounter an opposing provincial gaze that regarded the metropolitan norms and expectations as
ridiculous, alien and impractical; and negotiated the putative ideality and rigidity of institutions and
their laws with a more improvisational 'make-do' set of strategies. This counter-gaze also had its own
normative assertions about how 'the real India, the spirit of the nation, its power and beauty, resides in
the provinces' (Kumar 398).
27
While mofussil and 'provincial' work within these flows in ontologically
slippery ways, their designation of particular places as such also proves 'sticky' in that they aid their
actual and material provincialization, dictating the particular ways and degrees to which the designated
places get incorporated into colonial, postcolonial and now neoliberal networks of development-
administrations, infrastructures, industry and commerce. Thus, the discursive flows between the
metropolises and the provincial, are linked in complex ways with material and commercial ones.
The archive of the provincial in colonial cinema is plagued by the fragmentariness that characterizes
the archive of colonial cinema itself. The provincial appears across a range of genres including amateur
factual films, travel/geography films, films based on specific occasions (a royal tour or coronation), and
historical fiction films. Their goals vary from education, entertainment, tourism or an overt political
goal (such as recruitment of native men for British war-efforts). Given the dynamics of colonial power
and authority controlling the use of the cinematic apparatus, these genres appear to be determined to
varying degrees by the cultural expectations of Orientalism, the consolidation of empire, and the need
27 Kumar, Nita. 'Provincialism in Modern India: The Multiple Narratives of Education and their Pain.' Modern Asian
Studies. V olume 40, Issue 2, May 2006.
Paul 25
to illustrate the necessity of the empire's technocratic intervention. In terms of the socio-spatiality of
provincial towns in 'factual films' like A Native Street in India (1906), The Fair City of Udaipur (1934),
or Darjeeling – A Foot-Hill Town (1937), as Richard Osborne points out, the emptiness of official or
elite architectural spaces emerge in strong contrast with the teeming bazaars and markets of the town
where ordinary natives find heavy presence.
28
The emphasis in the mis en scene and narration tends to
be on the presence of motifs familiar to British audiences from Oriental tales and travel fiction –
traditional attires of natives, half-naked holy men, women wearing veils, snake-charmers, monkeys,
cows, elephants. Motorized vehicles are entirely absent and the narration passes over the presence of
natives in western wear. The depiction of only local trades shown such as sword-makers, silversmiths
convey the absence of modern industrial technology. The absence of such temporal markers and the
non-intrusive strategy of film-making where a static camera appears to merely record activity on the
street while no member of the camera-crew enters the frame to ensure 'authenticity' also makes it
impossible to date the film (Robin Baker).
29
These strategies remove all temporal dimensions of Indian-
provincial being and narrators frequently emphasize how the sequences capture the essence of all
streets in India across time. Osborne notes how in Bikaner (1934) from the Secrets of India series,
Gunga Singh, the reigning king of the princely state of Bikaner is framed within royal gardens rather
than in relation to the sophisticated irrigation system he had built for the city – which is instead shown
in the film in isolation.
30
Just as the agency of the native political elites in technological transformation was denied, the presence
of provincial 'ordinary folks' in the expanding terrain of colonial land-acquisition, administration,
28 See the entry on The Fair City of Udaipur at http://colonialfilm.org.uk/node/857, and the entry on Native Street in India
at http://colonialfilm.org.uk/node/4610.
29 See the entry on Bikaner at colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1774.
30 Ibid.
Paul 26
judiciary and industry was also effaced. The depiction of the indigenous bhils as a distinct ethnic group
in The Fair City of Udaipur precludes any reference to their recent protests against colonial forest
officials as well as rich middlemen of the forest-trade. Similarly, the tea-plantations of the colonial
summer capital Darjeeling in A Foot-hill Town (1937) lack human geography or any exploration of the
cultural and political reasons for large migrations to the town. Tea-growing that was crucial to the
colonial exports, is shown in the film as pleasant labor. The camera pans to capture the town's ethnic
mix without any acknowledgment of how the new colonial economy of the region had caused an urban
agglomeration of laboring as well as wealthy classes, or the resistance militant-nationalists had evinced
to draconian laws imposed by the colonial state in the form of several attempts to assassinate the
governors. The potential for contrapuntal readings of these films remains limited to studying the direct
gazes 'ordinary folks' cast at the camera-crew riveted by the apparatus, betraying their presence, as well
as the ways in which movement may have been choreographed. Alternately, they may undermine
narratorial frameworks of meaning, glancing indifferently at royal retinues rather than looking
impressed. However, the films largely demonstrated to their audiences 'back home' the general good
and benefits of technological modernity brought to a backward and poor Indian society by the colonial
rule.
An even more repressive visual economy is evident in historical fiction films such as Relief of Lucknow
(1912), an Edison Company film shot in Bermuda for the British market. As Priya Jaikumar argues, in
its representation of an attack by native soldiers upon a Lucknow cantonment, the film overlooks the
societally broad-based 'siege' of Lucknow (as a part of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857) and instead depicts
its 'relief' with 'a triumphant march' of 'British courage and victory'.
31
Treacherous outdoors around the
31 The film itself can be accessed here: http://colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1836. For Priya Jaikumar's analyses of the film, see
her “An 'Accurate Imagination': Place, Map and Archive as Spatial Objects of Film History.” Film and the End of
Empire. Eds. Lee Grieveson & Colin McCabe. London: BFI Publishing, 2011. pp. 167-188; and “Insurgent Place as
Paul 27
Lucknow cantonments are contrasted with the feminized interiors of colonial homes. The film stakes
claim to 'authenticity' by incorporating actual events (attacks and rebuttals) and using intertitles 'like
taglines to historical photographs'. Jaikumar observes that despite its selective and ideologically-
determined representation, the film conveys a sense of the significance of native resistance in the
crowd-scenes where native soldiers chase colonial officers and their families, or storm the cantonment.
If colonial cartographies and ethnographies sought to grasp and fix the 'bewildering' variety and alterity
of the Indian landscape and society for administrative convenience (Nayar 2012, Singh 1996) , travel
writing provided more exploratory narratives about the lives and adventures of British administrators
and judicial officers in the variegated spaces of the presidency, mofussil and rural outposts. In these
writings the mofussil emerges as a distinctive social space and a site where colonial governmentalities
were devised, tested and consolidated. For instance, in Graham's Life in the Mofussil; or. The civilian in
Lower Bengal, the narrator provides a disaggregated view of the introduction and initial
implementation of the Police Act of 1861 and the new judicial system in the town of Tirhoot, from the
point of view of a cog in the colonial wheel, as it were.
32
Of particular interest in these narratives are
the behaviors and workings of personnel occupying the intermediate and lower echelons of police and
judicial institutions, who blur the boundaries between state and native society. The new culture of
working and military training introduced by the Police Act (with new hierarchies, functions,
nomenclatures and uniforms), Graham tells us, created unforeseen problems of 'translation' where the
older darogas (station-heads) feared that wearing the new uniforms would cause a loss of caste, or that
the abuses heaped on them during the drills by their 'quick-tempered imperious military superiors'
Visual Space: Location Shots and Rival Geographies of 1857 Lucknow.” Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space. Eds.
Jennifer Bean, Anupama Kapse & Laura Horak. Indiana: Indiana UP, 2014. pp. 47-70.
32 Graham, G. Life in the Mofussil; or. The civilian in Lower Bengal. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1878.
Paul 28
would 'defile and irreparably injure the person it is used against'.
33
The narrator mentions how these
problems relating to the superstitious stubbornness of the region's natives were 'solved' by the
recruitment of non-native police-officials from 'the more war-like populations of the West and North-
West' who had 'greater animal courage than the Bengalees, and bullied the people proportionately'.
34
Through these institutions the expanding colonial state sought to achieve specific goals: to transmit to
the natives the normative-colonial vision of secular modernity, to achieve political and administrative
control over the Indian mainland, and to create various classes of loyal natives. On ground, these efforts
however, necessitated a range of 'adjustments' and solutions where the push toward secular modernity
and political sovereignty was tempered by the tactical need for religious-cultural appeasement. This is
evident in the new 'secular' rituals established in the modern judicial process – where the older rituals
of making witnesses swear on symbols of religious ritual purity (such as holy water, a cow's tail, holy
scriptures) were replaced by an oral oath upon one's religious morality - dharma for Hindus or khuda or
God for Muslims.
35
Similarly, Bolton's visceral description of the relative comforts enjoyed by court-
officials and the hardships borne matter-of-factly by native complainants waiting outdoors on the sub-
tropical hot days, demonstrates how the monumental intent behind the architectural spaces of the court
and the cutcherry (police-station) to impress natives was overwhelmed by the contingencies of
frequently inclement weather of the countryside, the impinging wilderness and inadequate physical
infrastructure.
36
The intent behind the institutions was also compromised by, Bolton writes, the set of
native non-elite attitudes, behaviors and structures of mediation that developed around the new
institutions. Here, Bolton pits the learned, western-educated and friendly native 'pleader' against the
33 Ibid., 157-8.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 96.
36 Bolton, A.D. 'Reminiscences of the Mafassal Law-courts of Bengal.' The Gentleman's Magazine. Jul 1894; pp. 277,
British Periodicals. 1963; pp. 75.
Paul 29
pettifogging mooktar whom the 'unenlightened' litigants approached first with their complaints and
who overbilled them while advising them to embellish the facts in court.
3738
The mooktar's legal
'malpractice' included confusing witnesses of the opposition with questions about microscopic details.
Bolton also writes of ordinary natives who hired the European advocate not because of his education,
'superior abilities', 'European pluck and energy, better social position', but with the 'delusion' that he
would have 'great unofficial influence with the European dispensers of the law with whom they must
fraternize at the billiards-table or lawn-tennis games' and where he could 'grease the wheels of justice'.
39
Bolton's narrative about the statist struggles to implant modern structures in the provincial countryside
invariably refracts 'common-sense' appraisals by non-elite individuals and groups who did not
subscribe to normative view of these structures as pillars of the impartial rule of law. Instead, they
regarded them more starkly as structures of power and influence which may be persuaded in one's
favor by a well-chosen intermediary. These narratives provide the early contours of the emerging
centrist and technocratic colonial governmentalities that view the provincial as a place of unfinished
and difficult transformation to secular modernity. Intertwined with this narrative of 'incomplete
dissemination' is the socio-political resilience the provincial asserts with its 'stubbornness' and mis-
creativity'. These colonial narratives are significant predecessors to the cinematic 're-turn' and re-
imagination of the Northern Indian provincial in the present moment.
Provincial Histories, Discrete Publics
If the colonial archive gives us a glimpse of lay provincial outlooks refracted through emerging
governmentalities, contemporary histories of the variegated social landscape of colonial and native
37 Ibid.
38 'Mukhtar' transcribed here in an anglicized way by Graham as 'mookhtar' refers to the village or community head, who
also functioned as a legal advisor to villagers.
39 Ibid., 76.
Paul 30
educational institutions, literary circles and political cultures reveal the provincial as a dynamic
political theater with several rungs of socio-political actors and interests. Proliferating colonial
infrastructures and administrations necessitated the production of a loyal class of native personnel
through the introduction of structures of modern education. While the presidency towns of Calcutta,
Bombay and Madras functioned as centers for the growth of a Westernized, English-educated,
proficiently bilingual, professional class of lawyers, teachers, scientists and intellectuals, who went on
to form a national brass of anti-colonial activists and politicians; provincial centers and the countryside
also generated vital even if localized alternative imaginaries of the nation and national culture.
Moreover, the worlds of the presidency and the provincial were forced to encounter each other and
work together as political and administrative powers came to be delegated to Indian leaders in
provincial governments, and as the Indian National Congress sought to develop a broad base for its
movement for self-rule.
40
If the urban-based national politicians took a pedantic and condescending
approach to provincial political actors and rural constituencies, the elite provincial literary and political
brass postured themselves as speakers of India's true cultural heritage. Further still, activists emerging
from rural publicspheres drew attention to the systemic socio-economic divides that remained
unacknowledged in the nationalist discourses of metropolitan and provincial urban elites. In the
narratives of postcolonial (master) History, the multiplicity of publics and counter-publics that made up
colonial and anti-colonial theaters of struggle over culture and power, as well as the wide range of
social critiques and visions have been subordinated to the narrative of the national, and the national has
been harnessed to the career of the Indian National Congress.
40 The partial delegation of political and administrative powers were initiated by the Government of India Act of 1919
which implemented the recommendations of the Montague-Chelmsford reforms.
Paul 31
On the terrain of postcolonial historiography, vital counter-notes have been struck by historians from
the Subaltern Studies Collective like Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj who have probed the
fissures concealed by this History. They have underscored the bourgeois-nationalist elite's suspicions
regarding the incorporation of the rural masses into the national imaginary, given their 'incomplete
education' in the social institutions of modernity (Chatterjee 159).
41
In postcolonial India, this elite had
'feet of clay' (in other words, lacked experience with the grassroots) and undertook the project of
national transformation through a centralized and technocratic vision of planning.
42
This vision
emanating from the center was drastically reinterpreted by vernacular actors at the bottom-rungs of the
postcolonial state-administrations (Kaviraj 1998).
43
The limited authority of the nationalist elite was
combined with dependence on the landed, industrial proprietorial classes (Bardhan 1984). Visions and
promises of social redistribution through land reforms were severely curtailed by the contingencies of a
'passive revolution'. This is a Gramscian concept that Chatterjee revises to describe the process of
national transformation adopted in postcolonial states where unlike the nations of Western Europe, the
bourgeois-nationalist elite assumes political control before bourgeois values acquire hegemony in the
society at large. In the absence of this prior hegemony, the nationalist elite operates by building
alliances with existing proprietorial classes such as big landed classes, industrialists and the 'salariat' (or
the salaried professional class). In India, rather than working through a broad-based social mobilization
and change, socialist goals of redistribution were absorbed into the technocratic vision of a
developmental state.
41 Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragment s: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993.
42 Ibid. 205-220.
43 Kaviraj, Sudipta. 'On State, Society and Discourse in India.' Rethinking Third World Politics. Ed. James Manor.
Harlow: Longman, 1991.
Paul 32
If Chatterjee and Kaviraj provide an understanding of the particular subjectivity and tactical limitations
that informed the functioning of the urban-based bourgeois nationalist elite, Francesca Orsini provides
a sense of the competing interests and demands animating the equally fraught provincial socio-political
landscape.
44
Her book tracks the emergence of a provincial Hindi public sphere in the 'Hindi heartland'
(the North-Western Provinces of Agra-Oudh including the cities of Allahabad and Lucknow, and
Bihar). This sphere consisted of literary journals, associations and politics establishes by members of
the Hindu proprietorial upper-castes, and it came together along the unfolding and resolution of the
Hindi-Hindustani cultural debate where a high and Sanskritized form of Hindi (or Khari Boli) came to
be posited as the national language against Urdu-Hindustani which had been the language of court and
cosmopolitan art previously.
45
Orsini demonstrates how during this cultural-linguistic struggle Khari
Boli also drowned out other regional dialects as well.
46
New literature produced in the vein of Khari
Boli mobilized social critiques of the excesses of urban life through romanticized depictions of the
social harmony in rural living – bolstering the notion that 'India lives in its villages'. It also created
conceptions of Indian culture that carefully excluded the influences of British colonial and pre-British
Muslim rule and culture – and these representations and discourses pushed for the nationalization of
Hindi without upsetting existing social orthodoxies.
If the bourgeois-nationalist elite was severely constrained in its appeal to rural constituencies by its
unfamiliarity with rural realities and its own investment in the social institutions of Europe-styled
secular modernity, the provincial public sphere was constrained by its social conservatism which led it
to exclude from its institutional spaces, the visions of radical social change that were emerging from
44 Orsini, Francesca. The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
45 In 1936 Hindi novelist Premchand was appointed the first president of the Progressive Writer's Association in Lucknow.
See: http://www.varanasi.org.in/munshi-premchand
46 This particular form was written in the Devanagari script rather than Kaithi or Mahajani.
Paul 33
new politicized rural masses learning new lessons from the Russian Revolution. Several rural youths
led to activism by the appeals of leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress Party's rural outreaches
and the provincial leadership's demands (leading to the formation of the Congress Socialist Party), were
disillusioned by the ways in which landed elites were appeased by both tiers of leaders, and how all
forms of socio-economic redress subordinated to the goal of self-rule, national unity and the exclusive
political mandate of the Congress.
47
Figures like Swami Sahajanand Saraswati argued that for many
poor peasants, the local zamindars were the real oppressors rather than the distant colonial state.
48
Vital
peasant organizations such as the West Patna Kisan Sabha and the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha were
sought to be neutralized by the Congress and provincial leaderships through the creation of bogus
peasant organizations, and excluded by the new decorum, etiquette and language prescribed for
participation in constitutional forums. Rural masses courted during elections as future-citizens were
characterized as mobs when mobilizing of their own accord.
Avinash Kumar has discussed the ways in which pushes to create an exclusionary and high-brow Hindi
literary culture by the upper-caste, middle class Hindi nationalist brigade was challenged by a range of
literary productions that in their diversity of language (Braj, Awadhi, Maithili), vocabulary, spatial
location and social group reflected the emergence of dalit and lower-caste publics and middle classes.
49
If Rajendra Yadav, Amritlal Nagar, Manohar Shyam Joshi extended Hindi literary fiction toward the
space of the small town; Phanishwarnath Renu, Amarkant, Markandeya, Shekhar Joshi took it to rural
and suburban landscapes. Orsini argues that the exclusionary tendencies of the high Hindi literary
47 While Gandhi had posited the village-republic as an alternative to the political organization of the distant, centralized
modern-state and industrial modernity, he also idealized the village as a social community, seeking to reconcile peasants
with landlords. His address to ex-untouchables as 'harijans' (or people of God) also posited the spirit of charity as a
solution to caste indignity and violence (See Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari's discussion of the same in Recasting
Women : Essays in Indian Colonial History, page 20).
48 Orsini, Francesca. The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940, 2002, page 335.
49 Kumar, Avinash. ‘New Radicalism’ in Hindi Literature: Vijaydan Detha, Rajendra Yadav and Omprakash Valmiki.
Economic & Political Weekly. vol xlIX no 14, 5 April 2014. pp. 34-38.
Paul 34
culture and its distance from the multiplicity of the non-elite spoken dialects of the region,
paradoxically 'provincialized' it and its proponents. Equally, the limited bilingualism of these figures
with respect to English prevented their entry into the national political circuit. As a result, the domains
of national and provincial politics in the region remained interlinked but distinct. Beyond the pale of
both these realms, rural counter-publics formed and persisted, later gathering strength with the
emergence of the Naxalite movement against upper-caste exploitation and rural landlessness in the
1970s.
The architectural spaces of educational institutions have received much attention lately for the
understanding they can provide of the spatialized workings of colonial and postcolonial regimes of
secular modernity, values, power and authority. Ian Shepherd has explored the new educational
landscape in provincial cities where colonial homes and country-houses were converted by
philanthropic or missionary women into schools.
50
Sanjay Srivastava has looked at the ways in which
the architecture and spatial planning of new educational institutions such as the Doon School
simultaneously (re)produced racial segregations, spectacular colonial authority, conciliatory
incorporation of native aesthetics.
51
He demonstrates how the school went on to produce a particular
kind of postcolonial elite subjectivity. Srivastava's top-down model of institutional-architectural
ideology is challenged by Nita Kumar's more interstitial, speculative and phenomenological approach
toward the provincial educational landscape in her study of the relationship between provincial schools
and the production of provinciality in colonial India.
52
Using the technique of 'alternative narratives',
50 Shepherd, Ian. 'A journey through Lucknow's schools and colleges.' Lucknow: Then and Now. Ed. Rosie Llewellyn-
Jones. New Delhi: Vedam Books, 2003.
51 Srivastava, Sanjay. Constructing Post-colonial India: National Character and the Doon School. London: Routledge,
1998.
52 Kumar, Nita. 'Provincialism in Modern India: The Multiple Narratives of Education and their Pain.' Modern Asian
Studies. V olume 40, Issue 2, May 2006, pp 397-423.
Paul 35
she juxtaposes 'the role of the state', 'local power or the role of the family', with the young
pupil's/scholar's experience of 'pain'.
53
Kumar explores the ways in which the mofussil thwarted colonial pedagogic enterprises. Colonial
civilian-writers such as Lancelot Wilkinson frequently noted the 'stubbornness' of mofussil pupils and
families, and the fact that even when the education was completed, it was of little use to them. Not only
did the foundational principles of the new 'scientific' and bounded architectural spaces for education
run counter to 'indigenous' conceptions of spatially-unbounded structures and spaces of education, they
were replicated with some finesse only in the presidencies of Calcutta and Bombay, and rather poorly
by the straitened budgets in the provincial towns. While the colonial state's support for only modern
English-based schools starved many indigenous institutions of schooling, other structures of education
such as family, caste-based professional training persisted and frequently regarded the modern
institutions as useless or as teaching the wrong things. Kumar observes, that the internalized modern-
liberal underpinnings of present-day historians of South Asia, have disempowered them from exploring
these 'indigenous' structures as a form of politics in the face of colonialism. Here, the corporeal
experience of the provincial child-pupil in over-packed, poorly furnished, under-staffed shacks to gain
an education that undermined much of his larger social world without giving him the promised
benefits, offers a crucial and corrective insight into the processes through which modern India was
produced in the nineteenth century onward.
Kumar's work provides a hermeneutic density and opacity to the provincial, and foregrounds the
problems of reading it. The interpretive duplicity – of reading the provincial by categories and
epistemologies that were themselves constitutive of its historical deracination, is significant to this
53 Ibid., 399.
Paul 36
dissertation as it extends questions about the varied presence of the provincial in the contemporary
postcolonial, neoliberal mediasphere. Kumar develops a rich sense of how provincial places and people
had their own distinctive encounters with the colonial modern. While drawing upon her approach, this
dissertation explores the creative and other agential dimensions of provincial modernities that include
the culture of 'extra-legal' creative negotiations and economies of survival that developed in the
provincial in response to the new institutions. This dissertation draws upon the sophisticated ways in
which Shepherd, Srivastava, Orsini and Kumar develop a historicized, socially-striated and spatial
conception of the provincial and the rural – as dynamic theaters for the transaction of politics, culture,
authority and power.
Provincial Worlds in Postcolonial Indian Cinema
The most visible way in which northern Indian provincial cities featured in post-Independence Hindi
cinema, as Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen has shown, was through the Islamicate genres of - the
Muslim Social and the Muslim Courtesan film, both of which differently recreated the culture and
habitus of the historical imaginary and socio-cultural mores of the nawabi culture of 19
th
century
Lucknow (Bhaskar & Allen 46).
54
In this imaginary resided a heightened memory of the period of
Wajid Ali Shah – the last nawab of Awadh, when as the Mughal empire disintegrated, Lucknow became
a center for emigres from Iran and an efflorescence of the performative and visual arts, culture,
architecture. This moment was memorialized in popular consciousness of the subcontinent as Lucknow
was subsequently ravaged by the British following the Indian Revolt of 1857 and Shah was exiled to
Calcutta. As Abdul Jamil Khan points out, the imaginary of 'high-flung' Urdu and high Shia culture that
came to be associated in cinema with Lucknow was founded upon a series of displacements – of the
actual origins of this Urdu in the Delhi-Punjab region, as well as of the dialects native to the Lucknow
54 Bhaskar, Ira & Richard Allen. Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009.
Paul 37
and Kanpur regions such as Purbi.
55
While the Purbi dialect came to be featured in rural dramas starring
the actor Dilip Kumar, this high-flung Urdu generated a dynamic and cinematic Islamicate imaginary.
The Muslim Social of the 1940s depicted a fragile Muslim elite as a self-enclosed community,
however, the films of the 1960s came to depict a movement toward social reform where the nawabi
culture was now associated with moral degeneration (symbolized by the destruction of the aristocratic
haveli and the transformation of the men with lineage into modern middle class protagonists).
56
Bhaskar and Allen examine the dual tendencies of the genre – memorializing heightened aspects of
nawabi culture, tehzeeb (or etiquette), poetry, romantic idioms which ennobled not just the Muslim
community but the industry at large, but also developing a broad appeal with its concern for social
reform and progress
57
. The social institution of purdah [or veil] was shown to both generate desire and
romance, and as an oppressive custom that placed the burden of familial honor on women and caused
them to often be duped into unworthy marriages. Similarly, the Muslim Courtesan film sought to
mobilize forms of social critique through the figure of the courtesan as a performing artist and a lover
situated outside the normative institutions of marriage. At the same time, the setting for her
performance (the mehfil) also often evoked an enclosed never-never land of beauty and desire.
If the above-discussed genres expressed the pride and modernization of a community rendered into a
'minority' by the British colonial regime and the postcolonial nation, the New Wave of the 1970s
drastically revised the social setting of the Muslim Social to the lower and lower-middle class impacted
by repeated cycles of communal violence and social marginalization since the Partition of 1947.
58
The
later articulations of these genres in the 1990s anticipated and reflected the communalization of
55 Khan, Abdul Jamil. The Politics of Language, Urdu/Hindi ; An Artificial Divide: African Heritage, Mesopotamian
Roots, Indian Culture & British Colonialism. United States: Algora Publishing, 2006, 323-334.
56 Bhaskar and Allen mention the following films as reflecting this renewal and transformation: Najma (1943), Elaan
(1947), Mere Mehboob (1963), Chaudhvin ka Chand (1960), Benazir (1964), Palki (1967), Bahu Begum (1967).
57 Ibid. 89.
58 Ibid., 91.
Paul 38
everyday life for Muslims in India in build up to and wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid
(Garam Hawa/Hot Winds [1973], Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro/Don't Cry for Salim, the Lame [1989]).
They also foregrounded the oppression of women not only by patriarchal familial norms but also the
Muslim Personal Law (see Dastak/The Knock [1970], Bazaar/Market [1982], Naseem [1995], Sardari
Begum [1996], Zubeidaa [2000]) and the laws of nation-states (Mammo [1994], Fiza [2000]). While
some of these films were set in cities like Agra, Hyderabad, explorations of the Muslim working and
lower middle class came to spatially concentrate in the metropolis which pockets of Muslims presence
(such as Bombay and the walled city of Delhi). These new dramas exploring the overlaps between
religion and class, structural deprivation, non-assimilation experienced by Muslim youths within the
space of the modern and secular nation, were set in the underbellies of the metropolis. By contrast,
Lucknow and Allahabad remained associated with the older iterations of the genres and their nostalgia
for a pre-British and lost Islamicate imaginary – even as this nostalgia may be read in the context of the
rise of Hindu cultural nationalism and the marginalization of ordinary Muslims.
Contemporary genres discussed in this dissertation contrast sharply with the treatment of the cinematic
provincial of the Muslim Social and the Courtesan Film, specifically, in their mobilization of an
alternative mode of address developed from the contemporary political optic directed at the Hindi
hinterland and its 'degenerating' political cultures in the shape of 'Jungle Raj'. The contemporary
provincial cop film, the provincial youth film and the new rural film locate themselves firmly within
the dynamic and contestatory terrain of the provincial everyday state, electoral politics 'invaded' by
caste-based political leadership and the resulting predicament of a 'retreating' provincial middle class.
While working with a dystopic mythology, the films emphasize the contemporaneity of provincial
realities while underscoring the historical provenance of its realities in the colonial as well as
Paul 39
postcolonial histories of statehood, the dominance of the proprietorial classes, caste and power. As the
chapters will subsequently demonstrate, these genres variously interpellate the viewer as subject that
has derives coherence from multiple epistemologies – the normative structures of colonial-derived
western liberal modernity (electoral democracy, discourse of rights, equality and liberty), as well as
inherited intelligences, competencies, strategies devised and utilized on the plane of everyday
subsistence for negotiating modern institutions of state that have been historically monopolized by
traditional elites. In these dramas, the provincial becomes the space for the uneasy and ambivalent
playing out of the normative as well as the complicit, creative dimensions of contemporary modernity
of which the viewer is addresses as being knowledgeable. Here, the contemporary provincial genres
display inheritances from the social landscape and vision of colonial ethnographic, literary and travel
narratives as well as postcolonial 'regional' literatures that emerged from the later churning of a
dynamic political theater.
Provincial Modernities in Contemporary Bombay Cinema
The contemporary political moment in India is shaped by the simultaneous unfolding of twin political
impetuses – on the one hand, the drastic revision or abandonment of the overtly socialist goals of the
post-Independence nationalist elite and the developmental state by the ideology of neoliberalism; and
on the other, new pushes for the decentralization of political power and the 'deepening' of democracy
(with developmental resources and power being delegated to grassroots urban and rural legislative
bodies with the 73
rd
and 74
th
constitutional amendments, and the emergence of distinct voting blocs
from socially subordinate caste-class groups). In this context, the concern with the 'education' of rural
and urban masses in the institutions and discourses of liberal democracy (raised by Chatterjee and
Kaviraj), is modified into an axis of critical inquiry by ethnographers of everyday life who are now
Paul 40
curious about the 'everyday state' or the new ways in which the state had come to present itself to and
be seen by various social groups especially the poor in the countryside.
59
This new work builds upon
the re-theorization of the state in political science as simultaneously a set of structures (interlinked but
discrete and multi-tiered) not unified by a singular intentionality, as well as an 'idea' or symbolic
presence where the postcolonial developmental state in India is also seen to be responsible for the
dispensation of resources, subsidies as well as the guarantor of basic rights to all its citizens.
Liberalization and the devolution of political power has, as this corpus of work argues, transformed the
ways in which people, especially historically marginalized groups encounter, conceive of and negotiate
the state.
While Paul Brass has shown how 'Villagers in north India do not discern a society based on abstract
law and order' but rather 'a network of power relations among police, criminals and politicians'
functioning according to an informal set of rules, the work of Barbara Harriss-White and Akhil Gupta
demonstrates that even when the boundaries between state and society are blurred by the functioning of
a larger shadow-state, the idea of such a boundary remains strategically significant for people.
60
The
devolution of liberal-democratic institutions also produces citizens who are aware of and are ready to
wield discourses of civil rights, right to development funds, legal redress, state-accountability and anti-
corruption. These 'enable people to construct the state symbolically and to define themselves as
59 See Gupta, Akhil. 'Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.'
American Ethnologist, V ol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 375-402; and Corbridge, Stuart, Glyn Williams, Manoj
Srivastava and René Véron. Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
60 See Brass, Paul. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997; and Brass, Paul. The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Also see Gupta, Akhil. 'Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of
Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.' American Ethnologist, V ol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 375-
402; and White, Barbara. India Working: Essays on Society and Economy. Port Chester (New York): Cambridge
University Press. 2003.
Paul 41
citizens'.
61
However, as Harriss-White points out, these impetuses toward democratization are often
neutralized as intermediate classes (of rich peasants and the lower middle class) respond to the
shrinking developmental state by colonizing its rungs with their kin and developing informal
economies of private security services and benefit-providers. Nevertheless, what is indisputably
established by this scholarship is that 'the state in India is now being produced amid a competing set of
discourses' of citizenship, rights, corruption (Corbridge et al., 2005: 39). This is occurring in spite of
more astute calibrations by entrenched elites for reproducing class, privilege and influence even as they
disavow their inherent privileges with the discourse of equality, merit and the free market. Craig Jeffrey
has shown how these ideas have permeated and reshaped political cultures of youths around the spaces
of educational institutions, while Lucia Michelutti has demonstrated how such symbolic ideas have
fused in surprising ways with and reformulated gendered myths of caste-identity such as the 'wrestler'
political masculinity of Yadav politicians claiming divine lineages within the seemingly contrary world
of electoral politics.
62
Where social sciences seek an ontological understanding of the complex terrains of modern governance
in the form of 'a convincing causal explanation, as opposed to a suggestive narrative sequence', by the
late 1990s, Hindi popular cinema offers precisely a rich narrative elaboration of this dynamic political
terrain by refracting it through the journalistic and political mythology of 'Jungle-Raj' [or the 'law of the
jungle'] associated with the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (Corbridge et al., 3). This
mythology revolves around the absence of efficient governance and the rule of law, as well as the
criminalization of the state in these two states. However, this degeneration of political cultures has also
61 Gupta, Akhil. 'Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.'
American Ethnologist, V ol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1995), page 376.
62 See Jeffrey, C. 'Kicking Away the Ladder: Student Politics and the Making of an Indian Middle Class.' Internationales
Asienforum. V ol. 41, No.1–2, (2010) pp. 5–31; and Jeffrey, C. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in
India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Also, Michelutti, Lucia. The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics,
Caste and Religion in India. Delhi, London: Routledge, 2008.
Paul 42
come to be attached exclusively to the rise of lower-caste political leaderships resulting from the
gradual democratization of electoral power and the politicization of lower-caste communities since the
late 1960s. New and overtly political genres emerging in the late 1990s such as the provincial cop film
and the provincial youth film generate from this socio-political terrain and the mythology of 'Jungle-
Raj' a new cinematic imaginary of a provincial world animated by new caste-based and criminal
political leaderships, 'corrupt' everyday states, absent law and order, 'neutered' police and a stupefied
civic public. These genres distend existing generic formats such as the cop drama, the bourgeois-
romance, the feudal rural drama, to create new narrative forms and cinematic languages for non-
metropolitan manifestations of contemporary modernity that are built around sequences of travel,
dramatic encounters, conflict and resolution. A dramatic ethnography of non-metropolitan worlds is
developed by encounters between metropolitan subjectivities and entrenched provincial figures,
between middle class provincial families and lower class political youths, or between provincial
criminal-politicians and ordinary folks.
At one level, these encounters evoke the anxieties of the metropolitan elites regarding fundamental
shifts within the Indian polity in terms of the distribution of political representation power to
subordinate social groups, as well as neoliberal dissatisfactions with the developmental state. However,
as I demonstrate in the following chapters, these encounters are also animated by contrapuntal impulses
that illuminate the 'absence' or 'imperfect' realization of normative political and economic modernity in
more ambivalent ways. Here, the practice of 'belligerent' caste-based politics and criminal
entrepreneurship by a range of cinematic figures connected to provincial politics, such as MLAs (or
members of legislative assemblies), political fixers, student-politicians, give the lie to the narratives of
liberal modernity by bringing into sharp focus the inequitable history of a postcolonial state reigned in
Paul 43
by a 'passive revolution' and impoverished by a purely technocratic vision of modernization. In doing
so they displace the normative assumptions, hermeneutic centrality and sovereignty of the bourgeois-
citizen. They also call into question the false epistemological binaries instituted by colonial and
postcolonial modernity that counterposes itself to 'tradition' and subsuming under this rubric diverse
practices of religion and caste. This notion of 'tradition' removes social practices of caste and gender
from the contingent history of power (to instead enshrine them within the realm of the private),
effacing the ways in which they have inhered in the workings of statist and now neoliberal capitalism
to determine access to employment, education, capital resources, credit, status. These 'belligerent'
cinematic figures bring into view the non-normative histories of postcolonial modernity, as they
'invade' and 'monopolize' the spaces of the university, the public market, electoral sphere, the
legislature, development-administration, industry and the neoliberal mediasphere – spheres where
contestations and consolidations of power have occurred. While revealing histories of violent
dominance and exclusion, these figures also reveal the constitutive dimensions of caste, class and
gender as they determine not just material conditions of living but also subjectivity, socio-political
creativity effecting 'vernacularizations' of liberal democracy, and finally, demonstrating the nature and
limits of radical and progressive politics within established and emergent political frameworks. This
cinematic reconception of the provincial and its varied productivities defamiliarizes the cinematic
imaginary of provincial and rural worlds in previous cinematic genres as spaces of fetishized nostalgia
or as spaces for transformation.
This reframing of the provincial is often signaled within these new films by a reframing of provincial
space. Roads are usually depicted in national dramas along the vertical axis of the screen. Framed this
way, roads also figure as 'chronotopes' where the camera is either placed at its 'beginning' and faces the
Paul 44
road's end at the vanishing point of the future, or is placed at this future-point facing the protagonists
who as agents of national transformation are moving toward it leaving behind the past.
63
In the
provincial cop film Gangaajal, the road running from the city of Patna to the urban center of Tejpur
through agricultural fields, cuts across the screen from side to side, and is shown together with its
decrepitude and hurdles, laterally. Positioned this way, the camera does not face the end of the road
with its suggestions of onward movement toward a normative modernity away from backwardness, but
rather toward a cross-section of the road itself, capturing the doings of its various occupants. This
laterally-framed stretch is focalized as a theater where uncompromising constitutional agents (such as a
newly-appointed Superintendent of Police), social and technological hurdles, an structural paucity of
resources are negotiated by a range of provincial actors including local cops, businessmen and
manufacturers as well as ordinary residents, cheerfully, creatively and often through extra-legal
arrangements. If the Superintendent expresses shock at the lazing police constanble, 'unprepared' to
face an armed attack, the latter politely explains the unfeasibility of armed resistance given the
rustiness of official '303s' (revolvers) and the far superior weapons carried by bandits today. Some other
way would be found. In this dissertation, 'provincial modernities' designates the potentialities that such
lateral (re)framings of provincial spaces such as the road, open up for dramatizing the obstructive,
politically-trenchant, as well as creative and adaptive dimensions of subsisting within the socio-
political terrain of contemporary modernity.
The colonial mofussil's 'less than' and 'distinctive' aspects continue to permeate the contemporary
provincial as an increasingly neoliberal national state and its affiliated elites project the evaluative
categories that the colonial state had used against it to defer political independence, on to its provincial
63 Sanjay Srivastava discusses the idea of the road as chronotope in the 'Five Year Plan hero' films of the 1950s in
Constructing Post-colonial India.
Paul 45
and rural heartlands. The provincial's mis-practice of modern institutions appears simultaneously, in
developmental evaluations (calibrated by global social indices) and journalistic reportage as the lack of
modernity, and in other performative, literary and filmic representations as the evolution of alternative
modernities. However, a critical study of these genres and their visual narratives enables a
consideration of not only the nature of non-metropolitan modernities, but also the political capacities
(and incapacities) of available cultural optics and interpretive templates. As it inquires into the
provincial as a distinctive dramatic space in post-Liberalization Indian cinema, the dissertation probes
the connections between reigning and emergent political economies, discourses and cinematic
subjectivity, space, optics and narratives.
The Colonial and Post-colonial Provenance of the Rural
While the provincial figures as a fleeting and ontologically slippery entity in colonial cinematic and
literary archives, the rural constitutes a weighty and overdetermined signifier – which while being
defined with great certainty, remained recalcitrant to colonial and nationalist overtures of governance,
transformation and assimilation. In this section I shall merely suggest some of the optics through which
it has been seen – the history of the rural in Indian cinema will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter
4. Mediated by the travel-fiction of the 'discovery' of the Orient, colonial films, as will be subsequently
shown, routinely depicted rural life as the essential nature of India, emphasizing the existence of holy
men, wildlife, social customs (related to weddings, funerals etc.), and the complete absence of
industrial technology from the life of back-breaking labor for the Indian peasant. These representations
indicated new structures of knowledge-making that both disavowed the ways in which rural life was
being impacted by new colonial governmentalities and created pretexts for the very same interventions.
These interventions occurred in the form of new systems of land-ownership and revenue collection
Paul 46
such as the Permanent Settlement introduced in eastern province (current day Bengal and Bihar) which
put in place a new class of urban-educated landlords who would be required to pay a fixed revenue to
the colonial administration – a measure that was touted to incentivize capitalist investment in Indian
agriculture by the landlord and thereby ameliorate the plight of the tiller (Ranajit Guha 1982).
64
However, as has been amply demonstrated by historians, this settlement only aggravated absentee
landlordism and destroyed community-based ownership of land and enabled even more exploitative
extraction of revenue – leading to repeated man-made famines in the region. Following the Revolt of
1857, as the Indian colony came under the direct purview of the British Crown, a large initiative of
technological and infrastructural transformation was set in motion in the Indian countryside. This
initiative was represented through the familiar Orientalist tropes of an essentially spiritualist and
sensualist land and culture being bound by the emancipatory and civilizational structures of European
reason and technology (see Gyan Prakash's Another Reason).
65
Changes in land distribution and class-structures, colonial appeasement of the landlords, heightened
forms of revenue-extraction also led to many forms of retaliation in the countryside. Most notable
amongst these was the practice of 'Thuggee' or banditry by numerous gangs that targeted wealthy
landlords and travelers. New criminal and legal frameworks were developed by colonial state officials
such as William Bentinck and William Henry Sleeman, leading to the suppression of the practice with
the deportation or hanging of 1400 thugs.
66
Colonial studies of Thuggee explained it as a devious and
religious cult-like fraternity – obfuscating the ways in which the practice also constituted a mode of
political resistance. Founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, Ranajit Guha has famously
64 Guha, Ranajit. A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. 1963. 2
nd
ed. New York:
Apt Books, 1982.
65 Prakash, Gyan. Another Reason : Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University
Press,1999.
66 Sleeman's reports inspired Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1858).
Paul 47
read an archive of peasant insurgency hidden within the discourse of colonial anti-insurgency, that
offers a complex and non-modern conception of political agency that relied on notions of god,
hierarchies of class, myth, metaphor and unindividuated agency such as rumor.
67
These non-modern
modalities, Guha argues, make peasant insurgency recalcitrant to modern colonial and postcolonial
historiographies of the nation-state.
The practice of caste and caste-based divisions of labor continued to be used in colonial ethnography
and in elite forms of anti-colonial mobilizations as an intransigent and ancient aspect of rural society in
India that made every village a cohesive and organic social community.
68
It has been demonstrated that
colonial governmentalities like the Census and social ethnographies, gave multiplicitous caste identities
and practices a coherence and fixity they did not earlier possess as these new identities became the
basis of new forms of affirmative action. Western ethnographers and sociologists of caste in the
nineteenth and twentieth century (up to Louis Dumont and Barrington Moore) saw 'the' caste system as
the primary reason for Indian society's 'stagnation' and averseness to change. Colonial films depicting
rural India often deployed sophisticated and varied shot-taking and technicolor to the ends of
corroborating Orientalist stereotypes and illustrating how 'the Indian village' was a place of subsistence,
temporal stagnation and superstition. In World Window's documentary-travelogue film A Village in
India (set in Rajputana), the narrator described the film's rural subjects as 'content if they can build
their houses, clothe themselves and cook their food from the materials yielded by the jungle forest on
the fringes of which they live’.
69
While the appearance of the spinning wheel may locate the village for
67 Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
68 Examples of colonial ethnographies would be Reverend M.A. Sherring's Hindu Tribes and Castes, James Tod's Annals
and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Or the Central and Western Rajput States of India, H.H. Risley's The People of India.
Nicholas Dirks illustrates the ways in which colonial ethnographers 'remade' caste in Chapter 3 of his Castes of Mind:
Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.
69 A Village in India. Dir. John Hanau. Prod. E.S. Keller. 1938. Film. Details available at:
http://colonialfilm.org.uk/node/4676.
Paul 48
some viewers in the time and influence of Gandhi, the narration glosses over this as a 'time-consuming'
and customary village-craft' to move on to how the British are transforming a primitive agricultural
country to modern model.
70
Similarly, Indian Background (1946) compiled from several wartime
Indian documentaries, emphasizes how the land continues to be tilled by the slow, hungry oxen' and the
plough 'whose design has not altered in a thousand years'.
71
The narrator continues, 'From the rich land
comes a poor living one with an extravagance of work.... To live is an achievement of which there is
little to be remembered'.
While Gandhi saw the village republic as the ideal social unit, the more modern brigade of the National
Congress Party, led by the likes of Nehru regarded the rural masses as unfit for participation in the
processes of modern democracy. This brigade had inherited from the British a techno-industrial vision
of development that was to be implemented by a group of planners and scientists. This vision was
partly realized by the Green Revolution of the 1970s which saw the expansion of irrigation facilities
and use of high-yielding crops. However, despite promises land reforms have been implemented in
very partial ways. While the national political parties continued to patronize upper-caste elites, the
partial realization of these reforms led to the emergence of a sizable class of medium-scale landholders
from the middle castes that in time became an influential political bloc.
72
This new formation has
necessitated that the national parties 'woo' middle and/or lower caste electorates.
While the colonial and nationalist elites sought to fix rural worlds in India within romanticized or
'outmoded' practices of caste, the rural also emerged within Hindi literature as an important site for
70 Ibid.
71 Indian Background. The Crown Film Unit. 1946. Film. The film and recovered information about its making and
circulation are available at: http://colonialfilm.org.uk/node/111.
72 See Rudolph L.I. & Rudolph S.H. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press, 1967; Rudolph L.I. & Rudolph S.H. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the
Indian State. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987; and Jaffrelot, Christophe. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of
the Low Castes in North Indian Politics. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.
Paul 49
native critiques of Indian society as well as the modern state – most notably in the social-realist work of
Premchand – whose Godaan/The Gift of a Cow (1936), Premashram or Gosha-e-Afiyat/The Abode of
Love (1922), Rangbhoomi or Chaugan-e-Hasti/The Arena of Life (1924), Karmbhoomi/The Field of
Action (1930s) – expressed prominently amongst others, perspectives of the lower-caste and
untouchable landless laborer. Subsequently, as the Hindi public sphere became increasingly settled in
the provincial town and characterized by Khari Boli, Phanishwar Nath Renu provocatively re-inserted
the lived realities of the rural, and spoken dialects into the stream of Hindi literature (see Avinash
Kumar, Kathryn Hansen).
73
Postcolonial cinema through the 1960s, simultaneously demonstrates urban
elite as well as non-elite rural-identified representations of the rural (discussed at greater length in
chapter 4, and briefly recapitulated here). While the Nehruvian technocratic vision of development
underpinned the 'five-year plan hero' films where a young engineer or doctor moved to a rural district
to put his metropolitan education to good use (see Srivastava's discussion of the same in Passionate
Modernities), the feudal drama featured a range of rural figures who through their hardships articulated
trenchant critiques of the absence or failures of the developmental state. If as a poor and lower-caste
agricultural laborer Radha, demonstrated the resilience of the peasant-mother against an oppressive
upper-caste landlord in Mother India, the figure of the local dacoit in Gunga Jamuna/Ganga & Jamuna
and the much later Ganga ki Saugandh/ I Swear by the Ganges, took up arms against the exploitative
landlord and burnt his account books. The village tangewala (or horse-carriage man) in Naya Daur/A
New Age wins a race against the landlord-industrialist who seeks to install machinery in his timber
factory to eliminate all need for workers, and makes a case for a conception of industrial modernity that
is considerate of the livelihoods and dignity of rural and working communities.
74
73 See Avinash Kumar 2014 and Renu, Phanishwarnath. Teesri Kasam/The Third V ow and Other Stories. Trans. Kathryn
G. Hansen. Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1986.
74 These films can be contrasted with later films like Sholay/Embers (1975) or Virasat/Inheritance (1997) where loyalty to
the 'conscientious' and paternalist zamindar or landowner was celebrated.
Paul 50
Despite these iconic representations, Ranjani Mazumdar has argued that Bombay Cinema has never
accorded with the primacy granted by nationalist discourse to the village, and has instead centered its
stories on the metropolis, especially Bombay.
75
In these stories, Mazumdar observes, the village has
lingered as a memory (inviable for the present), and recreated as a community of the poor on the city's
footpath (or sidewalks). This gradual disappearance of the rural from the screen was temporarily
challenged by the New Wave cinema which, as Madhava Prasad has argued, emerged from 'the
moment of disaggregation' of the post-Independence national consensus around the Congress Party and
the developmental state.
76
This 'wave' was also provoked by the spectacular visibility gathered by the
Naxalite movement where educated urban youths participated in violent campaigns in concert with the
rural peasantry against oppressive upper-caste landlordism, and the urban working class against
inequitable industrialization. In this moment, films by Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani developed
secular demystifications of the rural as no longer the site of an organic and mythic community
characterized by a harmony of castes, or as a repository of Indian tradition, faith but rather used the
idiom of 'developmental realism' to foreground the co-existence of economic, social and sexual
exploitation which made it a site of resistance and contestation. The 'scathing' visual and political
economy that came to typify these films offered its own kind of voyeuristic pleasure in sexual and
physical violence.
77
The moral force of its engagement with the dystopic rural was conveyed by the
impossibility or futility of migration to the metropolis by the disaffected rural protagonists (Goutam
Ghose's Paar and Prakash Jha's Daamul). Benegal's films raised the question of how the transformation
of the rural may be achieved since pre-colonial and feudal structures of power in the rural countryside
75 Mazumdar's Bombay Cinema (2007), page xviii.
76 Interestingly, this movement was led by graduates from the Pune Film Institute, who received funding from the Film
Finance Corporation of India to make non-commercial films which would be showcased by the Indian state at
international venues. See Prasad's Ideology of the Hindi Film (1998) pp. 117-137 and pp. 188-216.
77 Most notable films in this vein are Benegal's Ankur/Seedling (1974), Nishant/Dawn (1975) and Nihalani's
Aakrosh/Fury (1980).
Paul 51
had survived the political independence of the country. While Ankur/Seedling concluded with a
relatively ineffectual and individual moment of rebellion (a small boy throws a stone at the landlord's
house), Nishant/Dawn ended with a fearful spectacle of a violent mass rebellion by villagers who kill
many innocents in their wake, Manthan/The Churning ended with the conscientious five-year plan hero
leaving the village so that the onus of rebellion must be shouldered by the revolutionized rural youth.
His later Sansodhan/Amendment (1996) showed rural women staking their claim on the constitutional
benefits granted by the developmental and democratizing Indian state (by reserving 1/3rd seats in
grassroots electoral bodies for women), as they force a difficult bottom-up transformation of rural
patriarchy. Jha's Daamul emphasized the ways in which the terrain of constitutional reforms (political
reservation for the lowest castes and access to development resources) where being co-opted with the
use of violent power by middle and upper castes.
Other filmmakers like Mani Kaul (the director of Uski Roti/A Day's Bread (1969),
Duvidha/Conundrum (1973)) and Kumar Shahani (director of Kasba/Old Quarter (1991)) developed
more experimental cinematic languages for their rural stories. Here, as Madhava Prasad has argued,
Mrinal Sen's allegorical Bhuvan Shome (1969) offers a more reciprocal drama about the ways in which
the metropolis and the rural outpost may impact each other – where the distant power of the
unsympathetic bureaucrat who has spent his entire life pushing papers and theoretical ideas at a desk,
undergoes a piecemeal bodily transformation after encountering a rural woman in a remote desert-
village. By contrast, Sen's later Akaler Sandhaney/In Search of Famine (1980) depicts the inefficacy of
such an encounter, when a film-crew spends a few weeks lavishly in a drought-affected village as it
shoots a film about a recent drought. The New Wave posits a range of inherited cinematic optics on the
rural for contemporary filmmakers. If the early films of Benegal set his rural dramas about feudal
Paul 52
structures in a pre-Independence past (thereby, as Prasad argues, preserving the vantage of the
contemporary spectator-citizen), later films of the New Wave such as Manthan, Paar, Daamul and
Sansodhan show their rural worlds to be riven with structures of caste, land ownership, capital, power
and violence, and situated in the present of the postcolonial state and democracy.
The New Wave brought a provocative visibility to the rural which interrupted the narratives of
decolonization, the developmental state initiating a technological transformation of agriculture, the
'inevitable sway' of liberal democratic values enshrined in the constitution and political discourse, as
well as the assimilative narratives of the rural in cinema. To this end, they used a realist aesthetic that
heightened earthy textures of arduous labor, a perilous, vast and parched land, undernourished bodies,
tattered clothes, brutalized women, burnt villages. The dystopia of these visual textures implicitly tore
through notions of an immanent, peaceful and consensual transformation of a deeply inequitable socio-
political terrain, and instead depicted the legal and extra-legal modes of dominance and contestation
animating this landscape. Even when situated in the past, as in the case of Benegal's Nishant, images of
rebellion called up for viewers uncomfortable reminders of the contemporary peasant movement in
Telangana.
78
Nevertheless, this rural counter-imaginary presented by the New Wave to its metropolitan and
international festival audiences, combined in its representation of heinous practices of caste and
gender-based exploitation, pedagogy with voyeurism (for a specific example, see Prasad's discussion of
Benegal's Ankur). The contemporary provincial brigade of filmmakers, both draws upon and rejects the
inheritances of the New Wave. A primary difference with its (re)presentation of the rural is the
78 This was an armed Communist peasant rebellion waged in the 1950s against the feudal landlords in nearly 3000 villages
in the region located in central-southern India, and subsequently against the princely state before it joined the Indian
union. The movement aimed at a violent re-appropriation of land from the landlords and redistributing it amongst its
actual tillers.
Paul 53
disappearance of agricultural land and the presence of the peasant. The New Wave films had
relentlessly depicted the vantage of the rural lower-caste, landless laborer. The disappearance of this
figure has been crucial to the loosening of the rural from cinematic tropes of heinous exploitation and
pitiable abjectness. On the one hand, this has meant the disappearance of structural issues of land
ownership, capital, credit and violent power as cinematic themes; on the other, this has enabled other
kinds of cinematic explorations of the intersections of caste, gender, patriarchy, and desire. Just as the
contemporary provincial cop and provincial youth films explore non-metropolitan formations of caste
and modernity, the new rural film presents dramatic narratives revolving around the social and political
elites of rural and provincial northern India, that explore the repressive as well as (in a Foucauldian
sense) the enabling aspects of caste as they work through cross- and intra-caste emotional economies
within the familial and the conjugal. Instead of the lower-caste landless woman, the protagonist of the
new rural film is frequently an upper-caste young woman. She is represented as a sexual and emotional
agent who chafes against the proscriptions and prescriptions of caste within what are primarily conjugal
dramas. Such a cinematic subjectivity finds great appeal within a neoliberal climate where emergent
forms of citizenship are founded upon the capacity to desire. The new rural film engages and
complicates the trope of Jungle Raj as it revels in homosocial as well as heterosocial cultures of
fellowship, entrepreneurial politics, entertainment, desire and violence. This rural world is at once
dystopic and cruel but also robust in its poetic idioms, ethics and vantages. As I demonstrate in the
Chapter 4, these dramas restore a degree of ambivalence to the overdetermined cultural and political
binaries of caste and modernity through which the rural had been dramatized thus far. Moreover, they
address the viewer not merely as a denizen of liberal and metropolitan modernity, but also as an insider
to all that which co-exists and evolves within it inseparably – in the public realm of politics, but also
the intimate worlds of fellowship, camaraderie, the familial, the conjugal, the erotic.
Paul 54
And yet if the forms and relations between cinematic genres ought to be seen as 'historically
contingent, culturally overdetermined outcomes' and 'as maps with temporary and contested borders',
then one must ask what remains at this point beyond the pale of these cultural and creative recognitions
of provincial modernities?
79
This dissertation ponders this question in the light of several simultaneous
realities that point to the heightening of 'primitive accumulation' by neoliberal policies: a renewed
process of the acquisition and channeling of agricultural lands to corporate mining and industrial
purposes, the increasing inviability of farming hitting agricultural communities (rising rates of farmer
suicides in Andhra Pradesh), the continued caste-based monopolies over land, access to credit and
ability to diversify into other professions, and exacerbating physical and sexual violence against dalit
women in Uttar Pradesh. These transformations are also being contested by a range of 'rural'
communities – sustained tribal resistance to mining in the forestlands of central India, jal satyagraha
by farmers in Kerala, long running resistance by farmers to the raising of the Narmada Valley dam in
Gujarat, the concerted opposition by farmers to setting up a car-manufacturing plant by Tata Motors in
Singur in West Bengal.
80
The force of these contestations have left their impress on policy-making with
new constitutional amendments to 'devolve' democratic and administrative powers to urban and rural
grassroots bodies, new welfare outreaches in rural employment guarantees, land reform laws.
Therefore, the reappearance of the rural in popular cinema and the revision of the rural corpus of the
New Wave must be read against this dynamic socio-political landscape, and within the ideological
possibilities of a neoliberal media marketplace.
79 Nick Browne. ed. Refiguring American Film Genres : Theory and History. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1998, page xiv.
80 'Jal satyagraha' denotes a Gandhian strategy of peaceful resistance or 'struggle [agraha] for the truth [satya]' - in
this case, by standing in water [jal] for several days.
Paul 55
Dissertation Structure/Chapter Breakdown
The first chapter of this dissertation is titled “Nation, Border, Hinterland: Cinematic Designations in the
National Cop Film” and it commences the dissertation with a critical exploration of the 'national cop
film'. This chapter posits a vital spatial and analytical counterpoint to the rest of the chapters of the
dissertation by focusing on a genre of films that is structured around venturing out of the metropolis to
border-towns in remote deserts, forestlands, the countryside and back; while the rest of the chapters
deal with genres that are set exclusively in provincial towns and the rural countryside. The chapter
demonstrates how probing the ways in which rural, provincial and border agencies are harnessed into
the interpretive framework of the 'nation-in-crisis', forays into fundamental questions about the nature
of the cinematic subjectivity of the postcolonial citizen, his relationship to geographical and filmic
space, as well as normative conceptions about productive, industrial and governmental flows between
borders, hinterlands and the metropolitan 'capital'. If modernity is not merely a set of values and
institutions but also normativized material flows between different kinds of spaces, then an inquiry into
alternative cinematic modernities must consider not merely the depiction of non-metropolitan spaces
but also the construction of the metropolis and metropolitan subjectivity. The chapter traces the
divergent political and cinematic histories of the figure of the angry national cop (in the Five Year Plan
hero of the 1950s and the Angry Young Man of the 1970s) as the metropolitan citizen-subject par
excellence, before it considers two national cop films: John Matthew Mathan's Sarfarosh/Martyr (1999)
and Rajkumar Santoshi's Khakee/Khaki (2004).
The second chapter titled “Everyday Being & Crisis: The Temporalities of Jungle-Raj in the Provincial
Cop Film” looks at a set of three cop-films: Eeshwar Nivas' Shool/Lance (1999), Prakash Jha's
Gangaajal/Holy Water (2004) and Kumar Mangat's Aakrosh/Fury (2010), all of which are set in
Paul 56
provincial towns in Bihar – the state most identified with 'Jungle Raj'. This chapter is interested in the
ways in which contemporary cinema engages and complicates ambient political mythologies through
its depiction of 'corrupt' and crime-ridden local state in a provincial small-town as well as modes of
survival and protest developed by its residents. It demonstrates how the provincial cop film deploys the
twin temporalities of 'everyday being' and 'crisis' as it invites the spectator to inhabit the town's 'climate
of fear', its risqué homosocial folk-cultures, and waves of irrepressible civic rage. Both these
temporalities of being and crisis complexly challenge the rigid constitutional outlook and functioning
of the upright and meritorious Superintendent of Police dispatched from the police academy in Delhi.
The chapter tracks the ways in which the three films utilize this split temporality differently to render
'Jungle Raj'.
Titled '"They point guns for money, we run the country!": Other Modernities in the Provincial Youth-
Film', the third chapter considers three provincial youth films including Haasil/Taken (2003),
Sehar/Dawn (2005), Gulaal/Vermilion (2009) to draw into focus the ways in which they defamiliarize
the much-bemoaned degeneration of provincial education and politics by critically re-inserting the
liberal-democratic institutions and sphere of the university, formal politics, state development
administrations, as well as the neoliberal marketplace of telecommunications, transportation and real
estate; into the inequitable history of statist, crony capitalism and its unholy alliance with upper-caste
proprietorial classes. As it traces the ideological effectivity of the genre's depiction of the political and
entrepreneurial activities of elite and non-elite provincial youths, the chapter draws upon recent work in
history, anthropology and urban studies on the nature and co-existence of political and civil societies
within inequitable terrain of modern institutions. The chapter posits the concept of 'provincial
modernities' to designate the new visual narratives through which post-Liberalization Indian cinema
Paul 57
articulates provincial experiences of the colonial past and postcolonial nation-building, as well as the
provincial's strategic adaptability and creativity in the fashioning of complex and contested
modernities.
Chapter 4 is titled '“We thought, let's take Bollywood there!”: The New Rural Film and its Cinematic
Interventions'. It considers the representation of new rural femininity in Vishal Bharadwaj's 'vernacular'
adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello in Omkara (2006) and Abhishek Chaubey's femme fatale and
buddy-caper Ishqiya/Romantic (2010) against the rich and checkered history of the figure of the rural
woman in Hindi popular cinema and the New Wave. As discussed earlier, this figure has been the visual
and ethical pivot for the mythification of the rural within the national imaginary as well as the New
Wave's scathing indictments of the failure of the postcolonial state in dismantling structures of caste-
based land ownership, capital power. By contrast, in the contemporary neoliberal ethos, the new rural
film presents the upper-caste rural woman as a modern entrepreneurial and sexual subject. The chapter
considers the dual productivities of the figure and the genre – dramatizing in richly ambivalent ways
how structures of caste/class and gender are formative of the economies of desire, power and violence
that circulate within the familial, the conjugal and the erotic. These intimate worlds are placed against
the cinematic 'backdrop' of the 'democratization' of the public worlds of electoral politics, education
and employment. However, the chapter illustrated how these explorations of the intimate within a
predominantly upper-caste milieu, also obfuscates other transformations that are underway and have
transformed the rural into a vital even if disavowed site for contestation over the nature and ethics of
neoliberal development and modernity.
Paul 58
Chapter One
Nation, Border, Hinterland: Cinematic Designations in the National Cop Film
By the late 1990s, the Hindi cinemascape had witnessed many significant transformations that have
together been described as the 'Bollywoodization' of the industry (Rajadhyaksha 2003, Kavoori &
Punathambekar 2008, Gopal 2011).
81
The most notable amongst these changes had been a renewed
valuing of Indian diasporas in the West (or the NRIs), but also as Sangeeta Gopal, Adrian Athique and
Douglas Hill have pointed out, the emergence of a sizable domestic cosmopolitan audience serviced by
the multiplex. These two commercially weighty audiences were serviced by the different modes of
address adopted by a range of new genres – such as the spectacular family romance (also called the
'KJo' film), the romantic comedy, and a range of 'hatke' genres such as the new urban horror/thriller, the
gangster film. Much scholarship has looked at the ways in which genres like the spectacular family
romance addressed newer anxieties about cultural identity in an age of increased participation in global
capitalism and lifestyle-cultures, their management through newer forms of gendered identity.
However, another cinematic mode of reflecting upon the national and questions of citizenship was
emerging in a set of 'domestic' genres which re-anchored the nation and national identity in the
homeland. These genres engaged other aspirations evident in India's new aggressive global and
domestic posturing as one of the fastest-developing labor and consumer-markets in a new neoliberal
global order, as a participant in the West's fight against 'Islamic terror', and as a new Hindu majoritarian
81 For discussions of this transformation of Bombay film-making, see: Kavoori, Anandam P. & Aswin Punathambekar eds.
Global Bollywood. New York: New York University Press, 2008; Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “The Bollywoodization of the
Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in the Global Arena.” City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience. Ed.
Preben Kaarsholm. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2004, pp. 113-139; Gopal, Sangita & Sujata Moorti eds. Global
Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; Jaikumar, Priya.
“Bollywood Spectaculars”. World Literature Today 3, nos. 3-4 (October-December 2003), pp. 24-29.
Paul 59
secular power that has subsumed divisive domestic challenges like communal violence, caste-
contestations, Naxalism. While the genre of the war-film deflected these anxieties on to the 'enemy
nation' of Pakistan to work them out in the war-zone (for example, Border and LOC Kargil), the
national cop-film dealt with a range of internal anti-national political and mercenary agencies, and was
frequently counterposed in reviews to the violent and jingoistic excesses of the war-films.
1999 onward, there was a fairly continuous stream of cop films including: Sarfarosh/Patriot (1999),
Shool/Lance (1999), Gangaajal/Holy Water (2003), Kagaar/The Edge (2003), Garv: Pride and Honor
(2004), Ab Tak Chhappan/56 till date (2004), Dev (2004), Black Friday (2004), Khakee/The Uniform
(2004) Sehar/Dawn (2005) and more recently, Dabangg/Audacious (2010). Most of these films were
made in a dramatic-realist vein, and elicited glowing reviews and awards for the career-
solidifying/reviving performances by their male leads, and for the gritty depiction of crime and
corruption – proving Bollywood's ability to create 'serious cinema' to audiences at home and abroad.
The genre spawned sub-categories based primarily on its settings: the national cop film, the urban cop
film (set primarily in the underworld and crime-networks operating out of Bombay) and the provincial
cop film (which delve into the provincial dystopia and political corruption of small-town Northern
India). This chapter examines John Matthew Matthan's directorial debut Sarfarosh and Rajkumar
Santoshi's Khakee – both of which exemplify the national cop film in their exploration of terrorism and
communal disharmony on a national scale, traversing a range of metropolitan and non-metropolitan
spaces such as porous desert frontiers and borderlands, provincial small-towns, expansive countrysides
and lush forest-lands. In Sarfarosh, protagonist Ajay Singh Rathore overcomes the trauma of a terrorist
attack on his family to become an Assistant Commissioner of the Bombay Police and his effort to break
a cross-country arms-trafficking network leads him to confront the mastermind – a seditious Muslim
Paul 60
refugee to Pakistan who enjoys Indian hospitality as a feted singer and cultural ambassador. In Khakee
the aging Deputy Commissioner of Bombay Police, Anant Velankar leads a motley group of policemen
on a dangerous mission to convey a suspected Islamic terrorist from a provincial town across the
countryside to the court in Bombay, while being targeted by a terrorist group hired by the chief minister
of the state. In both films the protagonists have a series of encounters with terrorists, mercenary
middlemen, provincial mobs, rural-folk. The nation emerges through the extensive travel sequences of
both films as a conglomeration of discrete 'occupied' or 'deserted' spaces over which the protagonist
cop and the viewer exert visual and hermeneutic sovereignty.
Recent scholarship has examined cop films either in the light of new rationalities of a security-state
sustained by 'states of exception' such as 'encounters' (or extra-legal killings) where antagonisms
generated by processes of modernization (like 'Islamic terror') are contained by 'pragmatic' subversions
of the law (Basu 2010); or for representations of masculinity in the context of the ascendant ideology of
Hindutva (or a right-wing Hindu nationhood) and the communalization of social and political life in
contemporary India (Murty 2009). This chapter commences the dissertation by addressing the national
cop film's propensity to visually subsume discrete spaces into the symbolic space of 'the nation'. In the
course of its prominent travel sequences, the national cop as the patriotic subject par excellence,
encounters a range of national 'threats' and 'complaints' such as provincial entrepreneurs, ex-refugees,
corrupt politicians, tribal militants. This chapter approaches the expanded geographical scope of the
genre, and its staged encounters between the national cop and various social agencies as the expression
of a metropolitan will to hermeneutic sovereignty. It reads this will and the spatialized encounters
against a more broadly conceived and embattled sociopolitical landscape of contemporary India where
neoliberal ideologies of statehood and marketization remap and 'develop' land (as space) in new ways,
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even as historically-subordinated castes enforce the democratization of state-power, tribal communities
pose fundamental challenges posed to the epistemology of development, and a reactionary Hindutva
seeks to bring these 'divisive' agencies back within the fold of a modern Hindu nation.
This chapter is interested in the mutual imbrication of the particular metropolitan subjectivity
represented by the national cop and questions of (material and affective) space and spatial occupation.
Marxist-humanist social theorist Henri Lefebvre has argued that the complexity of social space may be
grasped as 'moments' in which it is revealed as: spatial practices (that reproduce social relations),
representations of space (or spaces conceived in top-down ways by institutions), and representational
spaces (which convey the poetic, mythic dimensions of living).
82
While all these dimensions were fused
in the 'absolute space' enjoyed by the ancient civilizations, modernity with its thrust toward
desacralization has led to the dominance of 'abstract space' and its Cartesian grids within which 'place'
becomes 'space' – uniform, continuous, interchangeable and available as such to the market. This
chapter approaches the question of space informed by the Lefebvrian critique of modernity. As at once
a modern visual-narrative form, a cultural product and a media industry (impacted by national and
international commerce and policies), popular cinema is implicated by virtue of its modes of
production, narrative world, spaces of consumption, in the expanding spatial grids of late industrial
modernity. The Hindi film industry has been a conspicuous beneficiary of the liberalization of media
and telecom in India, and its narratives and aesthetics have been instrumental to the repositioning of
Indian diaspora in the West as well as the domestic cosmopolitan upper-middle class as the bulwark of
the country's neoliberal transformation.
82 See Lefebvre, Henri. La production de l'espace. Paris: Anthropos, 1974. Trans. The Production of Space. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991.
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While space as setting or landscape is an inevitable aspect of the visual narrative of cinema, its
functions and effects can vary greatly. Within the contemporary cop film, the grids of neoliberal
modernity may be projected through the broader geographical canvas revealed to the viewer by a wide-
ranging camera lens, or it may be deflected through the subjectivity of the national cop who encounters
'disobedient' people in different places. The genre also has the ability to transform the 'conceived space'
(or 'representation of space') of the nation from a uniform Cartesian grid to a dappled, poetic and
affective ('representational') space constituted by social and geographical 'diversity' – linked to
economies of tourism. Conversely, a cop film film may 'world' a place as a place of 'dwelling' replete
with its own 'parochial' concerns and terms of being that interrupt its subsumption into national space –
thereby setting it up as a space for 'development'. Occasionally, it may also create a sense of
recalcitrance in the viewed space to draw attention to projection of affective plenitude or parochial
insufficiency as the hermeneutic propensity of a metropolitan and statist-technocratic/neoliberal
consumption-oriented subjectivity.
While the representation of space in the national cop film is the specific focus of this chapter, the
designation of 'national space' in particular ways has been salient to colonial, postcolonial and
neoliberal governmentality. Cognizant of the salience of the imagination of space in this history, the
chapter begins by tracing the genealogy of the national cop to the cinematic figures of the 'five year
plan hero' of the 1950s who represented the postcolonial governmentality of “planning”, and the 'angry
young man' of the 1970s who represented popular disillusionment with the developmental state. Both
these figures offered spatialized critiques of the 'state of the nation'. The chapter demonstrates how the
national cop reworks the ethical legitimacy of the former and the affective energies of the latter into a
new elite consensus constructed and enjoyed by the upper-middle castes/class that supports the new
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economies of consumption, urbanization and corporatized capitalism while thwarting challenges to its
own historical monopoly over avenues of education, employment and political representation. The
chapter goes on to demonstrate how the consolidation of this consensus is achieved in the selected
films cinematically through the depiction of metropolitan as well as non-metropolitan spaces and
modes of being. As a result, critical attention to the rendition of space enables us to trace the strategic
'worlding' (or designation) of 'threats' and 'complaints' against the national in Sarfarosh and Khakee.
The chapter demonstrates how the representation of 'occupied' or 'deserted' space sets the terms for the
subsequent acknowledgement and invalidation of these agencies by the national cop. It also explores
the potential within the genre for a more self-reflexive treatment of space that allows for a
consideration of the desire for spatial sovereignty as a function of the national cop's subjectivity.
Genealogies of the National Cop: The Bequest of the Five Year Plan Hero
The elevation of the cop to the status of the patriotic citizen par excellence, with the capacity to
intervene on behalf of the nation's other innocent subjects requires a consideration of one particular
strand of his lineage – namely the Five Year Plan hero, who represents and is the outcome of the
particular mode of technocratic governmentality that was introduced by the colonial state and was
further elaborated by the postcolonial one. As British colonial power reconfigured itself from a trading
entity to a political and administrative state-apparatus, it also reconfigured its relationship with the
geographical expanse of India through, what historian Gyan Prakash has described as, a 'setting upon'
or 'enframing' of the land through the use of 'technics' of science and engineering such as railways,
bridges, irrigation-canals, telegraph, postal services, into a modern colony (Prakash 159). On the
administrative plane, the same grip or 'coherent strategy of power' translated into new histories, land-
surveys, ethnographic censuses – which furnished India empirically as 'a distinct and unified space'
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(Prakash 4). In the poem “Bridge-builders”, Rudyard Kipling described the bridge over the river
Ganges as the symbolic 'triumph of over India's unruly nature and mythic culture' (Prakash 167).
Prakash draws attention to how early nationalist thinkers such as Romesh Chunder Dutt, Madanmohan
Malviya and Meghnath Saha responded to the colonial state's claims of having brought technological
modernity to India, by not disputing with its fundamental aspects but rather by questioning the manner
and ends to which it had been executed to transform India into a de-industrialized, resource-providing
colony. Their interactions with the leaders of the Congress such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash
Chandra Bose led to the birth of the Indian “planning regime” in the form of National Planning
Commission in 1938, which after Independence became the Planning Commission. The successive
Five Year Plans developed by this institution enshrined the idea of planned development based on
scientific and modern expertise, and also attributed this goal and capacity to the Indian state.
83
This
developmental ideology became the mainstay for the Congress Party.
Partha Chatterjee has argued that these institutional mandates marginalized other postcolonial visions
(most prominently, Gandhi's critique of industrial modernity) and established 'the idea of planning as a
way of determining 'national' interests by 'experts' outside the domain of politics' (quoted in Corbridge
& Harriss 2000: 56). Corbidge and Harriss insist that this idea went a long way in discounting other
influential political visions such as the Gandhian critique of industrialization.
84
On the ground, this
83 The five-year plans are drafted by the Planning Commission and they list the growth-goals for the industrial and
agricultural sectors of the economy and also lay out the budgetary allocations and state schemes to achieve the same.
84 Based on various studies of the Five-year plan models, Corbridge and Harriss argue that this development
ideology disavowed the actual political terrain of postcolonial India where the state had to negotiate the industrial
and landed proprietary classes through 'networks of intermediation and of clientelism' – where the execution of
policies as well as opportune backtracking happened. They trace the contradictory and inconsistent articulations
(such as the various drafts of the First Five Year plan, the Report of the Agrarian Reforms Committee of 1949 and
the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act of 1951) through which the Indian state attempted to execute its
'Utopian' vision to combine socialist goals of poverty-alleviation and equitable distribution of wealth with the
'strengths' of capitalism by not curbing private players too stringently and granting them various economic
subsidies.
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translated into an emphasis upon new agricultural strategies that focused on technological improvement
of existing irrigation and fertilization systems rather than the correction of systemic problems such as
the concentration of 41 percent of agricultural land in the top 8 percent of the households during the
early 1950s (Daniel Thorner 1956, quoted in Corbridge & Harris 2000: 64).
The conflictive terrain of postcolonial state policy-formulation produced the cinematic figure of what
Sanjay Srivastava has called “Five year plan hero” who, in films like New Delhi (1956), Sujata (1959)
and Anuradha (1960), embodied a middle class masculinity anchored around the ideals of patriotism,
mobility, modernity, technological expertise and saving. Subscribing to 'the Keynesian model of
economic thought... he stood both for government intervention and delayed gratification through the
reinvestment of savings for the 'national' good' (Passionate Modernity 99). Further, Srivastava observes
that cast in films variously as a doctor, engineer, scientist or a bureaucrat, the FYP male improver-
hero's home in the present was the metropolis. However, given the 'differential development of
metropolitan and provincial systems of education [and professional avenues] … in postcolonial
societies', Srivastava reads the character's emphasis on scientific and technical expertise as indicative of
his provincial bourgeois origins where in the absence of opportunities to acquire cultural capital (that
his metropolitan counterparts had profited from), he had needed to rely almost entirely on educational
and technical qualifications to advance professionally (Passionate Modernity 106). The FYP hero's
critical distance from consumerism and his association with merit and expertise give him an aura of
disinterested patriotic purpose.
Another equally significant aspect of this hero was his representation as a dynamic wayfarer who
'imbued with an individualism... hurtles along national highways and train tracks, en route to the
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cinematic village' (Passionate Modernity 104).
85
Pertinent to the discussion at hand regarding the
complex genealogy of the contemporary cop are the observations Srivastava makes about the FYP
hero's motility and the spatial strategies through which he was represented on screen. Drawing upon
Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope which makes 'a rich metaphorical expansion on the image of the
road as a course: 'the course of life', also evokes the sense of 'set[ting] out on a new course' and 'the
course of history''
86
, Srivastava argues that the FYP hero was repeatedly framed as being in motion on
the road (frequently as the dexterous driver of an automobile) having set out from the metropolis.
While he confronted the western-colonial construction of the 'effeminate Eastern native' with his own
modern personality, he deflected the latter on to the 'irrational' villager whom he would then proceed to
transform with his own scientific attitude, into the modern citizen.
87
The FYP hero enshrines a particular kind of technocratic patriotism emanating from the metropolis
within the national imaginary that is defined by an 'improving and scientific' orientation toward the
rural. He can be seen in a different guise in the 'developmentalist aesthetic' of the New Wave cinema of
the 1970s and the 1980s in the films of Shyam Benegal
88
where the protagonist is a bureaucrat whose
intervention into the rural is premised upon a prior critical attitude toward its blind superstition and
obedience of social hierarchies of caste. The FYP hero can be counter-posed against the territorially
anchored figure of the peasant-leader who frequently turned to dacoity in the feudal-rural dramas of the
85 Several scholars of this period including Corbidge, Harriss and Srivastava have mentioned that physicist and
distinguished statistician P.C. Mahalanobis, a prominent member of the Planning Commission, and one of the chief
architects of the Second Five Year plan was the representative figure for this planning regime and possibly the
inspiration for the FYP hero.
86 Quoted from Mikhail Bakthin's The Dialogic Imagination by Srivastava.
87 Srivastava observes that frequently in the films, the provincial male's anxiety about provincial women's adoption of
modern modes of education, movement and sexuality was played out and contained in the sphere of romance where the
woman was often infantilized through the use of 'village dialects' for the explication of love and the particular
'adolescent girl' resonance of Lata Mangeshkar's voice.
88 Madhava Prasad provides a very nuanced reading of this aesthetic in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical
Construction – which I discuss in some detail in Chapter 4 where I examine the New Rural Film.
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1950s and 1960s like Mother India (1957), Gunga-Jumna (1961), Naya Daur/A New Age (1957) and
Ganga ki Saugandh/I Swear by the Ganga (1978), and who challenged oppressive landlordism and
sought to cure the landlessness, back-breaking debts and and extreme poverty of his peasant-
community. In these dramas, the peasant-protagonist frequently became a dacoit who destroyed the
account-books of the upper-caste and gun-toting landlords, and captured their granaries to redistribute
their stocks of grains. However, at their conclusions, these rural dramas ultimately also reprised some
ideological aspects of the FYP films where the peasant-dacoit was evicted (often by being killed) from
the modern 'present' of the nation and the FYP hero inherited the village as the site for a technological
transformation into modernity. The eviction of the peasant-dacoit also disqualified a non-elite and non-
technocratic but territorially-rooted political consciousness. It eliminated the possibility of violent
agrarian mobilization and instead enshrined a conscientious and reformist, metropolitan and
technocratic orientation toward the rural as the appropriate mode of patriotic agency.
In the national cop, we see the continued developmental mandate for an educated and qualified middle
class hero as a figure of reason and national transformation who transcends the suffering (familial
trauma) as well as pleasures of the self (consumerism). Moreover, like his predecessor the FYP hero, he
continues to work by marginalizing non-elite and non-metropolitan experiences and knowledges of the
postcolonial state. However, even as the national cop retains the ethical and political mandate of the
technocratic FYP hero, he is also marked by a thorough disillusionment with the developmental state
itself. This aspect of his subjectivity derives in no small measure from his other predecessor, the angry
young man of the moment of 'disaggregation'.
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The Inheritances from the Angry Young Man
The patriotic cop has been repeatedly positioned in film narratives as a rich ethical figure who through
his disaggregation from the red-tape and corruption of institutions of governance and law, initiates both
critiques of the functioning of the institutions, explores external challenges to the law and the nation
and models the ideal workings of the same. This section of the chapter demonstrates how the figure of
the specifically 'national' cop whose ethical concern and jurisdictional domain is not merely Bombay
(the setting of most city-based cop-films) but the nation as a whole, emerges at the turn of the twenty-
first century from the fusion of the institutional and meritorious mandate of the the Five-year Plan hero
and the oppositional energies of the Angry Young Man of the 1970s.
As Prasad has cogently demonstrated, the Angry Young Man of the 1970s [henceforth AYM] emerged
from 'the disaggregation' of the national mandate for the Indian National Congress (which had
spearheaded the nationalist movement for Indian independence) and its Nehruvian goal of planned
industrial development oriented toward socialist goals. The decade was marked by protest movements
by working class youths and students against industrial policies and widespread unemployment. Played
to great acclaim by star-actor Amitabh Bachchan, the AYM was an 'industrial hero' in twin respects – as
an urban (frequently orphan) working class figure in various blue collar jobs (construction-worker,
dock-worker, shoe-shine boy); and as a commercial venture that allowed the Bombay film-making
industry to absorb the political disaffection of the period into the figure of this star who with his
distinctive taut and dark corporeality, understated emoting, deep voice and smoldering eyes, conveyed
a deeply-festering rage. The AYM's close association with footpath-dwellers, religious minorities and
vulnerable women also 'nominated [him] morally'. In the two most iconic renditions of this figure –
Deewar/The Wall (1975) and Shakti/Strength (1982) the AYM undergoes a meteoric rise in the world of
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crime and is pitted against the figure of an ideal, duty-bound cop who is his younger brother in the first
and his father in the second.
89
In Deewar, the brother/cop's growth into a gainfully employed patriotic
youth is materially enabled by the AYM's early sacrifices to support the family, and the cop's own
moral dilemma lies in his implementation of the law by bringing his brother/son to book by
overlooking his personal debt to the AYM. The latter's conspicuous consumption, his increasing
alienation from the parent or sibling (an ideal self-abnegating citizen) as well as the law, and his
eventual violent death, played up through the use of lengthy frontal soliloquies and prolonged death-
sequences, signaled political protest and martyrdom through a masochistic fantasy resulting from an
Oedipal-familial loss.
90
However, in particular variations of the AYM films, he is fused with the ideal citizen. In
Zanjeer/Chains (1973), the AYM as a cop confronts a prominent criminal who had also killed his
parents and hurt several poor people living on the street. The New Cinema movement offered a more
significant fusion of the AYM and cop, as well as a reversal within the figure of AYM in the protagonist
of Ardh Satya/Half-Truth (1983) - Anant Velankar, a lower middle class idealist cop who rages against
the expansive influence of gangsters and criminal-politicians such Rama Shetty rising from the ranks of
the lumpen-proletariat, as well as his emasculation by 'the system' (police institution and its rampant
favoritism). Exemplifying the emphases of New Cinema, the film offered a more 'realistic' (rather than
mythic) AYM-cop with a more modest physicality (played by the more petite Om Puri than the
towering Bachchan). Velankar's rage is shown in the final scenes of the film to turn murderous (leading
89 Trishul/Trident (1978) also has a similar plot, in this AYM Vijay confronts his illegitimate and business tycoon
father who had abandoned his mother in penury.
90 Madhava Prasad has argued that the mother of the AYM who is awarded by the state at the end of the film, is also the
bearer of a subterranean masochistic memory that 'interrupts the triumphal march of the patriarchal order' represented
by the nation-state and the cop. However, Prasad is also critical of how the genre resolves conflicts of the nation-state
through a masochistic fantasy of the AYM and the star-text of Bachchan rather than through the narrative (The Ideology
of the Hindi Film, 150).
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him to kill a detainee and thereafter Rama Shetty) when it is prevented through political and
institutional interference from being socially transformative. The film reoriented the figure of the AYM
– who previously had been a figure of exclusion from the institutions of bourgeois citizenship (schools,
professions), by casting him as a lower middle class, institutional agent who is positioned contra the
realms of working class politics. As such, Velankar views Shetty and his men as the perversions of
electoral democracy, who vitiate the civic space of the city.
Several contemporary and retrospective reviews of Sarfarosh as well as other cop-films demonstrate
how on-screen 'men in khaki' [the police-uniform in India] have become synonymous with 'angry
young men' since the 1970s following Ardh Satya.
91
The on-screen rage of the urban working class
youth that arose out of the moment of disaggregation in the 1970s, was routed by the late 1990s
through the figure of the national cop, into intra-institutional critiques of policing, violent reform of
corrupt and criminal elements in legislative politics and bureaucracies.
92
In the cop film, the
protagonist's personal trauma is sublimated into a socio-political battle where the fate of the nation
itself is at stake.
93
Newer iterations of the genre further solidify Ardh Satya's appropriation of the AYM
91 See the discussion of actor Aamir Khan (who plays lead-cop ACP Rathore in Sarfarosh) by Suman Bhattacharjee in
“An enigma called Aamir”, The Hindu. January 3, 2009. Available at:
http://www.hindu.com/mp/2009/01/03/stories/2009010350400100.htm. Also see article on the return of the angry young
men in cop-films in “Hot Khaki men”, The Hindustan Times. January 3, 2009; available at:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/photos-news/Photos-Entertainment/hotkhadimen/Article4.aspx. For a review that
discusses the use of landscape in Khakee and views it as an homage of Zanjeer, see Kamath, Sudhish. “Khakee”. The
Hindu. Feb 6, 2004; available at: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/fr/2004/02/06/stories/2004020601230302.htm.
92 A close cousin and precursor of the national cop, was the action-hero of 1990s (played by actors Akshay Kumar
and Ajay Devgan), who was firmly middle class and marked indelibly by the trauma of having been orphaned as a
young boy by a villain who usually headed an international network of arms-smuggling and conducted acts of
terror. Propelled by anger and the need to assuage his loss, the action-hero took up cudgels against this criminal
enemy [Vijaypath/The Path to Victory (1994), Mohra/Pawn (1994), Main Khiladi Tu Anari/I'm Cool, You're a
Chump (1994)].
93 For instance, in Ashutosh Gowariker's Baazi/Wager (1995) Amar Damjee [played by Aamir Khan] is a commando
who leads a single-man mission appointed by the Chief Minister of the state to bring to justice another corrupt
minister who received kickbacks for an international weapons-deal and is using mercenary terrorists to obstruct
the investigation. The guilty minister also happens to be the powerful contractor who had killed his father (also a
policeman) and mother.
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and his rage into the figure of the middle class and meritocratic police-commissioner who now leads
elite teams of law-enforcement (Mumbai Special Branch, Mumbai Crime Branch, Special Task Force)
dedicated to the elimination of particular kinds of criminal and/or terrorist networks. His vision of
correction centers around the separation of executive and law-enforcement functions from legislatures
and the judiciary – a logic exemplified in the practice of the 'encounter'.
There are pointed mentions in Sarfarosh, Shool, Gangaajal and Sehar of the protagonist cop's high
rank in the Indian Police Services entrance exam and his graduating with distinction from the police
academy. In the world of the genre, the cop's educational distinctions underpin his status (and by
implication, a revitalized law-enforcement) as the rightful and capable agent of national welfare, even
as his middle class identity enables him to speak for and as 'the common man' – disavowing his
systemic privileges and institutional power. In a significant scene in Sarfarosh, ACP Ajay Rathore
defends himself against Saleem – a Muslim colleague and subordinate, on the charge of his class
privilege and the inherent privilege of being a Hindu in contemporary India by emphasizing his hard-
earned admission into the Indian Police Services and his forfeiture of a possible career as a civil servant
which would have meant a cushy life with plentiful kickbacks from clients. Instead he chose to work
for national welfare in the capacity of an Assistant or Deputy Commissioner of Police. While evincing
great disillusionment with the state's politicians and bureaucracy, the cop does not venture into any
class-based critique of its functioning and retains a fundamental faith in the bourgeois citizen's ability
to speak for the nation's masses and to foresee their welfare. In combining disaffiliation from the
developmental state and electoral democracy, with a bourgeois citizenship anchored in education, and
'wayfarer' sensibility oriented toward 'national welfare', the cop reveals himself as a complex legatee of
both the FYP and the AYM.
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The alienation of subaltern critiques of postcolonial institutions of governance as well as inequities of
class through the solidification of the genre is evident in the nature of its 'villains' who are shown most
frequently to be mercenary terrorists often hired by corrupt politicians. In this regard Govind Nihalani's
Droh Kaal/Times of Betrayal (1994) (his reprisal of the angry cop eleven years after Ardh Satya), was
rare in its depiction of a terrorist mastermind as an ideologue. Commander Bhadra justifies his terrorist
project with the following claim: “A violent anti-people state not only perpetrates violence, it also
generates counter-violence.”
94
While Bhadra appears to be pointing to a larger experience of
postcolonial disillusionment with the promises of electoral democracy, the terrorist enterprise unfolds
through the film as a study in Bhadra's paranoia and malevolence rather than a conscious politics. Rural
men recruited by the terror-outfit, such as the debt-ridden peasant and expert RPG (rocket-propelled
grenade) launcher Kishan Ganu, are shown as pitiable middlemen caught in the game between the cops
and the anarchic terrorist, rather than motivated by a deliberate political program of resistance.
Terrorism here becomes an external manipulation of Ganu and his family's poverty, foreclosing any
consideration of its larger socio-political and geographical landscape. This foreclosure is also mirrored
by the film's narrowing spatial scope, shrinking from the 'vulnerable' city-limits and civic-spaces of
Bombay to the homes of the protagonist-cops where a domestic hostage-drama unfolds. The following
section considers the larger socio-political landscape that animates the expanded spatial and thematic
concerns of the national cop film.
94 The film revolves around protagonists Deputy Commissioners of Police (Bombay) Abhay Singh's [played by Om
Puri who had played Anant Velankar in Ardh Satya] and Abbas Lodhi's [Naseeruddin Shah] efforts to derive
intelligence about terror-operations from two undercover agents who have infiltrated a sophisticated terror-cell.
By the end, both are killed in their efforts to preserve the 'mission' and identities of the agents – one of whom
succeeds in becoming a leader of the outfit.
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The New Worlds of the National Cop
The national cop film that emerges as a specific sub-genre with Sarfarosh and persists with Khakee is
distinct from the action-hero films as well as the previous cop-dramas in two primary ways – in the
spatial expanse of its drama and its accentuation of particular aspects of the protagonist-cop's social
identity. No longer content with using the metropolis as synecdochal of the nation, the genre establishes
its national scope by traveling out of the metropolis to the small-town, the countryside, the border-town
in the desert and to forestlands, to encounter a range of 'patriotic' and 'seditious' motivations and
histories. The national cop is repeatedly characterized as meritorious, and 'selfless' in his choice of
profession and motivation to bring change.
Madhavi Murty has read the national cop's aggression as well as spirit of 'renunciate celibacy' (toward
monetary gain, familial standard of living, embracing the dangers of the job) in the light of the rise of
Hindutva that revitalized nineteenth century discourses of aggressive Hindu masculinity advocated by
spiritual and social reformers like Vivekananda, Dayanand Saraswati and V .D. Savarkar (Murty 272).
However, the national cop's deployment of the discourse of merit, 'political disinterestedness', pointed
disaffiliation from the developmental ideology, and support for aggressive law-enforcement – at this
specific point in time (the late 1990s and onward), necessitates a consideration of the genre not merely
in the light of Hindutva, but also within the broader historical conjuncture of communal violence
following the demolition of the Babri Mosque, economic and political Liberalization, and the
democratization of caste in the realm of electoral politics (culminating in the Mandal Commission
reforms).
While popular narratives position the onset of economic Liberalization as a dramatic moment
announced by Finance Minister Manmohan Singh of the Congress-led government in 1991, economic
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histories have traced the beginnings of the shift to a neoliberal political economy to the 1980s under the
leadership of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (for instance, see Kohli 2006). It became clear by the mid-
1990s that a reversal of values had come about in the political economy of India, where the
protectionist model of the Nehruvian 'License-economy' with its controls on economic sectors was no
longer seen as a vital means of developing the country's political and economic autonomy, but rather as
having stifled its economic potential. The goals and nature of good governance came to be redefined as
the facilitation of the free market, the denationalization and privatization of vital sectors (like iron,
steel, heavy machinery, energy, oil, mining), increased efficiency, and a stronger national defense in
order to protect economic growth.
In this process of neoliberal transformation, the infrastructural and empirical grids of the technocratic
developmental state (discussed by Prakash) have given way to the interlocked grids of resource-
marketization on the one hand, and that of national sovereignty – which 'set upon' geographical spaces
different but mutually-supportive ways. The vectors of market-oriented resource-utilization calibrate
the value of inhabited or uninhabited land and natural resources according to the principle of immediate
industrial utility, converting agricultural lands, forests, urban peripheries into 'spaces' for 'special
economic zones' for global exports, or into mines for sustaining and expanding high energy-consuming
urban infrastructures, real estate and lifestyles. A range of social agencies have contested the
elaboration of this grid – some have protested their historical exclusion from benefits and life-
opportunities by utilizing the avenues of electoral democracy, while others have contested its
fundamental assumptions by adopting 'non-parliamentary' methods.
95
Since the late 1960s, backward
castes have gradually formed into assertive political blocs to push for various forms of affirmative
95 These include the militant Maoist resistance to private mining in central India, farmer suicides across the country, a
recent 'jal satyagraha' or 'fight for truth in water' by agricultural workers against the expansion of dams or building of
nuclear plants. (See: Lall 2013, HT correspondent 2012).
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action. This mobilization came to a head in 1990 when the Mandal Commission's recommendations for
the reservation of 27% seats for the Other Backward Classes in elected legislatures, public sector
employment and educational institutions, were implemented by the central government headed by
Prime Minister V . P. Singh.
96
A qualitatively different critique of marketization has been mounted by
the indigenous communities of central India who have opposed the fundamentals of this vision of
development and the extensive mining of their forestlands it necessitates by revitalizing the militant
Maoist 'Naxal' campaign against state-deputed paramilitary forces in the region. Such oppositional
agencies are apprehended through the material and discursive vectors of the second grid of national
sovereignty. This second grid designates spaces as borders, metropolitan centers and hinterlands, while
oppositional forces 'occupying' them, unaffected by the self-evident desirability of marketization are
identified as 'threats' whose removal by means of law-enforcement or the military shall pave the way
for continued resource-utilization. The Naxal campaign was designated the 'greatest internal threat' by
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2009 so as to justify the deployment of state police as well as a
massive arsenal of paramilitary forces in the region (Gaikwad 2009).
Another manifestation of the grid of national sovereignty has been Hindutva or the ideology of Hindu
nationhood popularized by a conglomerate of Hindu right-wing parties including the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its sister organization and national-level political party Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Shiv Sena, the Bajrang Dal. Coming to the
forefront in the early 1990s, Hindutva has offered a vision of India as being on the brink of becoming a
global superpower through neoliberal development and a strong and 'unashamed' Hindu identity. By
revitalizing the Ramjanmabhoomi (Lord Ram's birthplace) and Mandir (temple) campaigns that led to
96 There has also been a 'devolution' of democracy to grassroots level in urban and rural India (by the 73
rd
and 74
th
constitutional amendments) with the recognition of Panchayati Raj as a constitutional tier of political
representation and resource-allocation.
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the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and several spells of communal violence in various Indian
cities, it sought to counter structural changes such as caste-based mobilizations by middle and lower
castes by seeking to bring all Hindus into its fold.
97
Bhatt et al have argued that in this period of neoliberal transformation, the nation has been marked by
the 'spatio-temporal paradox' of the need to denationalize sovereignty, to arrive on the global stage of
modernity, and to stay wedded to some reterritorialized conception of historical continuity', and the
function of 'stitching together' this paradox has been performed by the political construct of the middle
class subject who acquires two primary avatars – as a neoliberal consumer-subject, and as a national-
political subject, in the arenas of policy-making, news-media, cinematic, televisual representations and
advertising (Bhatt et al, 2010:128). Kanishka Choudhury has shown how 'the establishment of an
intensified commodity economy [has] change[d] notions of citizenship' (The New India 65) where this
middle class subject realizes itself as a global citizen through modes of consumption.
98
As a national-
97 The RSS, VHP and BJP began a drive for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya based on a murky claim
that it had allegedly been built by the 16
th
century Mughal emperor Babar after destroying the temple that had
stood on the birthplace of Lord Ram (worshiped by northern Indian Hindus). They demanded the construction of a
temple on the same site. In their campaigns, 'Mandir' (temple) was aimed at undoing the divisive effects of
'Mandal'. For this, see Rajagopal 2009. Also, Basu. Tapan. Khaki shorts , saffron flags : A critique of the Hindu right.
New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993; and Bhushan, Ranjit. 'Mandir feeds on Mandal.' Outlook. 16 February 1998.
www.outlookindia.com/article/Mandir-Feeds-On-Mandal/205087. Accessed 31 July 2014.
On December 6, 1992, a very large crowd of 'karsevaks' or volunteers arrived in Ayodhya from different parts of
the country and entirely demolished the medieval mosque as television crews relayed the event live. This seismic
event and subsequent efforts by karsevaks to build a temple on the spot, set in motion a chain of retaliatory
violence by various homegrown terrorist outfits with successive bomb-blasts in many Indian cities. In 1998
multiple bomb-blasts were orchestrated in Mumbai by Dubai-based gangster Dawood Ibrahim and his Mumbai-
based subordinate Tiger Memon. The burning of the Sabarmati Express carrying Hindu pilgrims back from
Ayodhya in Godhra in 2002 was followed by the reactionary pogrom of Muslims in various cities in Gujarat
(which are believed to have caused more than 2000 casualties), and repeated spells of bomb blasts in Bombay (in
2003, 2006, 2008 and 2011), also in Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Varanasi, Malegaon and Jaipur. This has been
accompanied by massive incarceration of Muslim youths around the country.
98 Regarded until the late 1980s as 'brain-drain' of highly-qualified labor to the West, the Indian diaspora now came
to embody this subject and was wooed pointedly by new economic policies as well as forms of citizenship that
incentivized the re-investment of NRI earnings in India. This upper-class diasporic subject was heavily
represented in popular film genres such as the spectacular 'NRI' romance, the romantic-comedy, the male
friendship film; as well as in advertising, radio and social media.
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political subject, the middle class subject positions itself as the bulwark of the transformation of the
nation from a developing country to an emergent superpower – touting projected national GDPs,
demanding an aggressive foreign policy toward historical rival Pakistan, stronger defense, sterner
policies toward 'internal terrorist threats' and the acquisition of nuclear power.
Within this mediatized arena, the new urbanisms and corporate economies of the metropolis figure as
the realization of the new freedoms and luxuries of economic Liberalization. By contrast, the
demolition of the Mosque, communalization of everyday life and the push for Mandal reforms by
political leaders from middle and lower castes, are projected as provincial phenomena where
populations continue to self-identify on the basis of the pre-modern social affiliations of religion and
caste. Following the implementation of the Mandal reforms, violent protests and self-immolations were
conducted across many cities by upper-caste and middle class youths who saw it as an infringement of
their historical monopolies over salaried jobs, elite educational institutions and legislatures.
99
These
protests were characterized in media-reports as the righteous outburst of progressive youths who sought
a system of education, employment and political representation based on 'merit' and 'equality'. What
remained unacknowledged in these discussions were the ways in which caste continues to overlap with
class in determining access to life-opportunities in urban and rural India. The violence and vandalism
around Ram Temple campaign was also deflected on to mobs of provincial lumpen youths while the
private-corporatized mediasphere continued to support of the 'development' agenda of the BJP
(continued by subsequent leaderships). The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was voted into
power from 1998 to 2004.
100
The anti-Muslim riots that occurred in Gujarat in the long aftermath of
99 For news-reports of these protests see: Kumar, Anu. “Mandal Memories”. The Hindu. September 29, 2012. Available at:
http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/mandal-memories/article3948854.ece, and Singh, Dalip. “Burnout
in obscurity - Forgotten anti-mandal face fades.” The Telegraph. February 24, 2004. Available at:
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040225/asp/frontpage/story_2934985.asp.
100Arvind Rajagopal has demonstrated how the English-speaking metropolitan mediasphere and civil society –
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Babri in which around 2000 Muslims were killed, were condemned in corporate corridors for the
economic loss they caused to the state (Rupees 600 crores) and the impact this would have on
'consumer and investment sentiment'.
101
A significant absence in the dominant cultural memory of the
Gujarat carnage has been the non-recognition of the strategic ways in which violent mobs specifically
targeted Muslim homes and localities (based on voter-lists), the deliberate inaction of the state-police
under the command of Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his ministers, and the subsequent
miscarriage of justice as fact-finding missions and legal trials failed to bring them to justice.
102
If in post-Partition India, secularism (influenced by the thought of Gandhi and Nehru) had signified 'a
valorized structure of feeling' that meant the tolerance and equal respect of all religions by the state and
its 'protection' of the rights of religious minorities, to prevent its antithesis - 'communalism' or the
'condition of suspicion, fear and hostility between members of different religious communities' (Pandey
quoted in Kumar 15); the ideology of Hindutva has marked a shift to a newer model of secularism.
103
which are the provenance of the metropolitan middle classes, were thoroughly disconnected from the dynamic
cultural ethos and the vernacular publicsphere in which the drive for the demolition of the Babri Mosque and the
construction of the Ram temple, by BJP, the RSS and the VHP gained momentum. The metropolitan media
condemned the demolition and subsequent riots in Gujarat as the work of blindly fanatic provincial lumpen youths
and mobs, while continuing to politically align with the BJP for its 'pro-growth' commitments to the new
economic policy. Rajagopal has argued that over a period of time, this disconnect between the metropolitan and
vernacular publicspheres allowed the Ramjanmabhoomi movement to acquire precisely the character that had
been projected on to it.
101Comment by Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro at a convocation ceremony at the Indian Institute for Management
quoted in “Blood Money” [Editorial]. The Gujarat Carnage. Ed. Asghar Ali Engineer. Hyderabad: Orient
Longman, 2002, pp. 200.
102Several post-facto journalistic and scholarly analyses of the Gujarat riots have amply demonstrated these facts,
some of them are: Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy by Siddharth Vardarajan (Penguin, 2002), The Clash Within:
Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha Nussbaum (Harvard University Press, 2008), The
Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra by Manoj Mitta (Harper Collins, 2014).
103As Priya Kumar explains, secularism in its European genealogy (from the English Reformation, through the
European Enlightenment to the present) has implied the separation of religion from all 'worldly' aspects of life
along the binary domains of the private and the public, and this notion was 'globalized' across the world through
Western colonialism. However, in many multicultural and multi-religious postcolonies like India it emerged in the
experience of decolonization, to acquire others meanings. The moment of Independence had been marred by the
trauma of the riots that had marked the Partition of the country into a Hindu-majority by constitutionally 'secular'
India, and the Islamic states of West and East Pakistan (which was later liberated as Bangladesh) in 1947 – this
had necessitated secularism as a vital ethical value. Scholars like Priya Kumar, Gyanendra Pandey and Nivedita
Menon have written extensively about the paternalistic nature of this model of protection and tolerance extended
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This newer model openly avows Hindu majoritarianism and is no longer willing to 'appease' minorities.
The Hindu Right cites the principle of equal consideration to all religions to protest the exclusion of
Hindu symbols from electoral politics and social life; and it invokes the principle of equality to protest
preferential treatment extended by the state to designated religious minorities in the shape of funding
and subsidies (Kumar 34).
104
The new middle class has been an important addressee of neoliberal policy-making as well as an agent
in the normalization of the new grids of neoliberal transformation. While it has condemned the Hindu
Right's exhortations to violent assertions of Hindu pride as 'communal', it has also responded
enthusiastically to the latter's boisterous assertions of national identity, neoliberal redefinitions of
'national development' through private-corporate capitalism, and its refusal to 'pander' to caste and
religious minorities. This class is conjoined in a new consensus that projects neoliberal transformations
anchored around expanded private and foreign capital-investment in core economic sectors (including
education, health-care provision, public health and sanitation, telecommunications, transportation,
energy); and reduction in development expenditures, as panacea to these inequalities. This is despite
much evidence to show that these transformations by integrating vital sectors of the Indian economy
with the global market, have tremendously aggravated income-inequality (Krishna 2011), reduced the
availability of health-care (Jeffery & Jeffery 2011), worsened the food crisis despite increase in
production (Chandrashekhar 2012, Shiva 2008), and the urbanization, monetization and destruction of
forests and agricultural lands (Sundar 2011, Roy 2010).
to religious minorities. While there were many subsequent episodes of communal violence such as Operation Blue
Star in 1984, and anti-Sikh riots of 1984 to name a few, they were seen in public opinion as regrettable violations
of India's secular ethos.
104Revisionist histories in school textbooks recast Indian history as structured by 'golden ages' for arts and sciences
under Hindu dynasties and others marked by Muslim 'invasions'.
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This new consensus opposes any politicization of religion, caste, gender and class as systemic
structures of inequality in the realm of electoral politics or welfare policy-making (even as its
proponents themselves partake of these systemic privileges in public life; and participate in these
hierarchies in the private realm of religious practices, marital practices, domestic distribution of labor).
Instead, caste and gender inequality find social recognition from the middle class through the
framework of 'atrocity' which is oriented toward seeking legal redress rather than dialogic and political
solutions from within society (how this translates in film is discussed in chapters 3 and 4). A similar
politics of recognition-as-neutralization is evident in, what Bhaskar Sarkar refers to as, the veritable
'Partition industry' that emerged in the 1990s as a profusion of war films and partition films which
sought to work through and resolve the complex trauma of Partition by locating it firmly in the past.
105
This politics of 'recognition' has allowed the middle class to project itself as a liberal and secular
vanguard despite its oppositions to the actual democratization of electoral politics, education,
employment; as well as its tacit support of many fundamental aspects of Hindutva.
While this new consensus maps and neutralizes social tensions of the present and the past in influential
ways, it is constantly faced with electoral, legal as well as extra-legal challenges in a democratizing
society whose alternate interpretive frameworks must be repeatedly invalidated. Cinema provides an
avenue where encounters with such oppositional agencies may be conceived, rehearsed and resolved.
The national cop film engages the theme of terrorism (as a threat to state authority, the rule of law and
civic life) on a national-geographical scale. Scholarship on contemporary Indian cop films has
105In his cross-decade study of the treatment of the trauma of Partition in Indian cinema and television, Bhaskar
Sarkar argues that the changed engagement with Partition from post-Independence decades to the 1990s,
demonstrates the various stages of the Freudian paradigm of mourning, where the loss is recognized and
investment in it is gradually withdrawn with a move from the affective to the cognitive, till the retention of the
loss is sublated (Sarkar 263). If in the post-Independence decades, Partition appears to be latent in film and
television representations as 'a structure marked by deferral, gaps, uncertainty, providing no guarantee of the
eventual assimilation of the experience within coherent history, or of therapeutic closure' (Sarkar 30), it appears in
the 1990s as an industry.
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demonstrated how the genre reflects the dominant rationalities of a neoliberal security-state where the
law is 'established' in the 'ground zero' of the metropolis through its suspension (see Anustup Basu).
However, considering the national cop-film against the broader historical conjuncture discussed here,
necessitates critical scrutiny of not merely how contrarian 'terrorist' agencies are depicted in the
'national drama', but how all socio-political agencies are positioned within what is now fiercely
designated as 'national' space.
Within the conceived spaces of statist and industrial grids of governance, production and commerce,
spaces are linked as (gathering, consuming) 'centers', productive zones of 'hinterlands' and 'peripheries'
by material, bureaucratic and informational flows. Agricultural and artistic produce (handicrafts, art
and music) are supposed to move from fringes to the metropolitan center, while policy-making, law-
enforcement and information is supposed to move outwards from the metropolitan center to the
provincial and rural hinterlands. These directional flows are perverted in the national cop film when
arms are transported in the disguise of agricultural produce to the metropolis, or when the metropolitan
political leadership disseminates incorrect information to manipulate civic communities in small-towns.
The films' movements across these designated spaces precipitate encounters with a range of presences
and agencies (non-secular collectivities, aliens, entrepreneurs), over whom the national cop bids for
hermeneutic sovereignty as the bourgeois-citizen par excellence. By 'hermeneutic sovereignty' I mean
the elaboration, sanctioning and naturalization of a particular interpretive assessment of the ethical
legitimacy of 'hostile' motivations, as transparent truth. As I shall demonstrate, this interpretation also
sanctions as 'truth' a particular understanding of the nation's colonial and postcolonial pasts and their
bearing upon the present. The national cop's sovereign interpretation is aligned with the new consensus
that has emerged at the conjuncture of Liberalization, Mandir and Mandal, and which preserves the
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preeminence of the bourgeois citizen as a secular, economic and political subject. Attending to the ways
in which these encounters are staged in space, and space is harnessed to the hermeneutic sovereignty of
the protagonist provides a critical methodology for reading these films – opening up the political
subjectivity of the national cop and the architectonics of this new consensus to scrutiny. The following
discussions of Sarfarosh and Khakee shall emphasize two aspects of the hermeneutic prerogative
expressed in these journey-sequences, firstly, the differing relationship it articulates between the
national and the local; and secondly, the bifurcation of the domains of the political on the one hand, and
the civic and the aesthetic on the other.
Border, Homeland, Hinterland: Spatial Transactions in Sarfarosh
Retrospective fan-reviews of Sarfarosh commend its 'the excellent cinematography and art direction'
and observe that while the 'dhaaba (a toned-down version of a plaza off an expressway, if you may)...
and the [city] street looked very real …. The desert-scapes and splendor of Rajasthan were beautifully
captured'.
106
Sarfarosh went on to win the Filmfare Critics Awards for Best Movie, Best Dialog,
Editing and Screenplay. Taran Adarsh's review of Khakee commends it for 'scor[ing] points at almost
all levels... From the acidic comments on corruption in the system, to the tense and fast-paced action
sequences, to the twists and turns in the story (the pre-climax will catch you unaware), it delivers what
it promises.' He singles out 'The journey from Chandangadh to Mumbai, which has several thrilling
moments. One of them being the action sequence in a village fair, amidst hundreds of cattle' – as one of
the most memorable sequences of the film. These responses indicate the multiple registers at which
these films operate and are evaluated including overt political commentary, finesse of performance,
visual spectacle, degree of success in achieving verisimilitude, and the pacing of the plot amongst
106 These reviews can be found at: http://thebollywoodfan.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarfarosh-1999.html,
http://www.mouthshut.com/review/Khakee-Movie-review-slrntntoum
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others. These responses also signal the subtle differences between the two films which operate at
slightly different registers even as they are classified as 'action-thrillers'. While Sarfarosh presents the
theme of the nation in crisis, and its specific border-towns and metropolitan settings within a
'researched' factual register, the journey through the countryside in Khakee stages multiple and more
abstract cinematic uses of non-metropolitan landscapes.
Sarfarosh follows an investigation by the Mumbai Crime Branch led by the protagonist - Assistant
Commissioner of Police Ajay Singh Rathore, into the massacre of an entire wedding party traveling
through the forestlands near Chandarpur located at the border between the states of Maharashtra and
Karnataka. The sophisticated AK-47 rifles used in the massacre are traced by the police-team from the
seamy underbelly of Mumbai's nightclubs to the rural outpost and palatial ruins in Bahid in Rajasthan
where arms are being smuggled across the border from Pakistan. We also flashback in the first half of
the film to Ajay's youth spent in Delhi where he had attended college. During this period his father had
sought to testify in court against a terrorist outfit which led to a retaliatory attack by the outfit in which
he is himself rendered mute by torture and Ajay's brother is killed. The film concludes with the various
middlemen involved in the smuggling either being killed by the crime branch or being cornered in a
palace in Bahid, where the famous Pakistani ghazal-singer and cultural ambassador Gulfam Hasan
(also a Partition-refugee from India) is exposed as being one of the criminal masterminds of the whole
terrorist enterprise. After a passionate ethical debate between Hasan and Rathore on the relevance of
Partition-trauma to the present, Rathore tricks Hasan into murdering a Pakistani diplomat, in effect
rendering him 'homeless' all over again, which forces Hasan to commit suicide. Thereafter, the police-
team arrives victoriously at the Bombay airport, only to leave for another investigation.
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The film's elaborate, visually spectacular and captivating opening credit sequence lays out the
geographical and logistical through-line of the arms-traffic that links India's remote borders on the west
with Pakistan, to the seamy nightlife of Bombay, its city-limits at Khedanaka, and the remote and lush
forests of Chandarpur. In the first frame, a bird takes flight from a set of sand-dunes, thereafter, the
wind etches out the film's title on the sand, and an anonymous poetic-narratorial voice announces the
patriotic framing of the film with a couplet:
Where every grain holds the zeal of the courageous
of this very soil are born patriots.
107
Thereafter we observe a sequence of actions: a herd of camels run across the desert bringing in cargo
into a village, workers transfer the cargo of AK-47s and revolvers on to vans, a silent overseer leads the
retinue of vans as they drive through vacant desert-roads at twilight. The vans arrive at a haveli in the
remote town of Bahid, another set of workers with impassive faces stuff the guns into bags of chilies,
stitch them up and then load them on to trucks with 'MH' number-plates (vehicles registered with the
state of Maharashtra). A mustachioed and turbaned man framed by a prominently displayed Hindu
astrological symbol, overlooks the loading and dispatching of the trucks to Bombay via Ahmedabad. At
every new location, along with the cargo, a gun is passed on from overseer to overseer – and the frame
freezes on the exchange and the opening credits appear. After Bahid, the trucks halt at a nondescript
roadside eatery at the city-limits of Bombay called Khedanaka where two middle men talk casually
while the cargo is transferred by laborers into another set of vans and trucks. One of these men is
handed a new gun as he another dark-skinned and bearded overseer – his corporeality is intended to
signify that he is southern Indian, takes control of the retinue. Thereafter, a panoramic night-shot of
traffic flowing along the sparkling skyline of Bombay's Marine Drive signals the arrival of the cargo in
107 The original couplet in Urdu goes as follows: “Zarre-zarre mein chhupa hai hoslewalon ka josh, payda hote hain isi
mitti se sarfarosh.”
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the city. The bearded man halts at a shop labeled “Haji Travels” to join two other men who are shown
jovially packing narcotic drugs. An aerial shot of the room, also reveals gold jewelry, stacks of cash and
a long hand-held gun on the table. Thereafter, we cut to the final arrival of the trucks in a verdant forest
further south, where a group of bare-bodied tribal men and their grim-looking leader wait. The
sequence ends with the middle man passing on the new gun as a gift to the leader of the tribal men,
who fires a shot into the sky.
The sequence presents a set of onward movements across a range of spaces that are designated as
borderland, desert-outpost, city-limits, metropolis, urban underbelly and tribal forestland. The different
locations (desert, Bahid, Khedanaka, Bombay, forests) are sutured like links within a visual chain, with
the periodic freeze-frames where the visual narrative pauses and resumes. The nation emerges as an
agglomeration of these discrete spaces of rurality, provinciality and metropolis. Here, the spectator
looking through the camera, exerts the visual and hermeneutic sovereignty offered by the 'national'
scale of the genre over these spaces and social worlds. Film theorist Martin Lefebvre has described
setting as 'the place where the action or events occur' while insisting that 'setting cannot... be reduced
exclusively to what is seen on screen' and could include inferences by spectators. These inferences
depend on 'the uses that we make of the film, [that make locations] expand and contract, fitting inside
one another like Russian nested dolls' (Landscape in Film, 21-22). The opening shots of the herd of
camels running through the desert, together with the initial sounds of the sarangi associated with
Rajasthani folk music invoke the desert as a pristine frontier-space, possibly a space of imaginative
reverie.
108
While the frontier and Bahid are visually rendered through familiar markers of remoteness,
timelessness, cattle-rearing, religiosity, picturesqueness and the absence of 'modernity' – these
108 The sarangi is a string instrument associated heavily with the folk music of Rajasthan. This film-score uses the
instrument deliberately to evoke this association.
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associations are complicated by the presence of the sophisticated and explosive cargo (guns stuffed in
sacks of chillies). Similarly, the dense and fecund forest of Chandarpur populated by men with bare
torsos carrying lances – revealing them to be a forest-dwelling, 'tribal' and thus non-technological
people, is also the end-point of the arms-trade. The interpretive framework of 'nation under threat'
presents these border, rural and forest settings as rebutting spectatorial expectations of the proverbial
simplicity and artlessness of the bucolic set up by a long visual and literary history of representations of
deserts and forests (in national integration messages on public broadcasting, in advertising for tourism,
and in films based in Rajasthan).
Nevertheless, the harnessing of spaces and spatial presences to the dominant film-narrative of 'national
threat' as well as against the grain of prior representational histories of the frontier-rural, remains
precarious and unstable. Lefebvre has argued that as opposed to setting, 'landscape' is 'space freed from
eventhood' which emerges when the narrative mode is interrupted and the scene arrested for
contemplation (Lefebvre, 2011: 63). As the camels arrive at the inhabited space of the border-town of
Bahid where men in local garb unload the cargo, this landscape seems open to, what Lefebvre calls an
'anthropological' exploration, as a subjective and lived space. The purposive but inexpressive postures
and actions of the working men pull away from the onward drive of the sequence, allowing the events
the fleeting potential of an autonomous facticity and thereness. The impassivity of the workers,
fleetingly shown in this sequence, suggests their embeddedness in other immediate material needs and
concerns to which the 'national' appears to be irrelevant. This centrifugal potential of these spatial
agencies is negated quickly by the transformation of the landscape back into a setting with the rising
tempo of the playback song, and by the plot-line where the sequence is followed by a massacre by the
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tribal men of a wedding-party traveling through the forest by bus. The song's aural narrative subsumes
the local action by effecting vital spatial and temporal sutures.
The refrain of the song goes as follows: “Zindagi maut na ban jaye sambhalo yaaron, kho raha
chainon aman, mushkilon mein hai watan/My fellows, beware of how quickly life may become death,
losing its peace and harmony, our nation is in trouble” (my own translation from Hindu-Urdu into
English). Sung by Sonu Nigam and Roop Kumar Rathod, and composed by Javed Akhtar, the song
places the nation in crisis-time, overshadowed by the imminent threat of betrayal, terror, chaos,
conflagrations and death. It addresses viewers as 'yaaron' or a homosocial collectivity of male friends
who are sought to be transformed through the song into comrades, if necessary, 'martyrs' [sarfarosh].
Composed as a qawwali, the male chorus through its repetition of key lyrics, both places emphasis (on
yaaron, and on - “kho raha chainon aman”/ “Peace and harmony are being lost”) and responds
affirmatively to the words of the vocalists – rehearsing the viewer/listener's patriotic response to the
thunderous call for solidarity and action. The viewer is positioned as a participant of this lyrically and
aurally invoked community as he/she looks in with hermeneutic sovereignty at the goings-on in the
nation.
The desert as a bucolic world is overlaid with the imaginative topos of the nation ('watan') imagined as
a garden ('chaman' or 'gulshan') or a tapestry of varied civic spaces like slums, localities ('bastiyan') and
agricultural fields ('khet'). The nature of the lyrics instantiate the kind of secularism espoused by the
film through its heavy use of a Hindi-Urdu lexicon that refers to the nation as 'watan' rather than rather
than its comparable terms in Hindi such as 'dharti' (earth) or the more Sanskritized 'matribhoomi'
(motherland), deliberately avoiding the iconography of Hindu nationhood. In the crescendo of the song,
the singer implores the spectator that, “Sarfaroshon ne jise lahoo de ke seencha hai, aise gulshan ko
Paul 88
ujarne se bachalo yaaron”/ “This garden which was nourished with the blood of the martyrs, Let it not
be destroyed, my comrades!” Following upon the work of scholars like Benedict Anderson, it can be
argued that in making a collective exhortation to fellowmen to recognize the crisis and to assuage the
sacrifices of martyrs of the past – the song actually constitutes the nation as an 'affective community'
with a secular past. The Hindi film industry has been one of the vital repositories of Hindu-Urdu
language and culture (and the creative ethos of a number of artists who had migrated from Lahore or
were members of the Indian Progressive Writer's Association) in the post-Partition age while other
cultural avenues like education and national television have displayed sustained Sanskritization of
Hindi and have sided with the Hindu Right in its purist Hindu re-imaginations of Indian identity (Mir,
2008). This song could be read on the surface as an assertion of this composite culture, however, when
seen in the light of the film's larger concerns – which is to resolve the 'problem' of India's Muslim
minorities and their disaffections with the Indian state and nation, the precise nature of its secularism
becomes clear. Here, the lyrics of the song do not evoke Partition, but the Hindu-Muslim patriots and
martyrs who had waged the anti-colonial struggle. Their sacrifices must be honored by the protection of
the nation against the 'buraayi' (evil), 'jurm' (crime), 'zulm' (atrocity), 'dhokha' (betrayal), 'gaddari'
(treachery) of 'buzdils' (cowards) – the lexicon of Hindi-Urdu is here mobilized against multiple forms
of sedition and militancy – especially the militancy of Muslim ex-refugees, mercenary dealers and
Pakistan – where these devious agencies are seen as betraying their own composite secular heritage.
While the borderlands are shown as violating their normative place within the topos of the nation, the
metropolis is mapped and designated as the locus of the nation's productive modernity. It is the urban
middle class' space of residence, work, leisure, mobility, romance and conspicuous consumption. These
aspects are represented through the personal story of the protagonist ACP Rathore. His youth presented
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through a flashback, is set in New Delhi where he lived in a joint family, attended college and fell in
love with a fellow-student. This world marked by the plenitude of domesticity and youth is destroyed
one morning when Ajay's father leaves from home with Ajay and his elder brother, to testify against the
terrorist outfit in court. The trio are shown driving through Lutyens' Delhi with the iconic structure of
the British Viceroy's House which was rechristened Rashtrapati Bhavan (or the President's House) in
independent India, in the backdrop. A van carrying armed terrorists pulls up and kidnaps Ajay's father
and the attack causes the scooter to skid off the road, killing his brother. Crucially, this 'act of terror' is
shown as being directed toward the middle class 'ordinary man' after he has just driven through
Lutyens' Delhi. The presence of this monumental architectural space as a backdrop frames the terrorist
act as undermining the hard-earned national sovereignty of 1947. Conversely, the monument also
figures 'independence' as an existing and factual state-of-being that devolves naturally upon the middle
class-ordinary citizen – so that the violation of one is the violation of the other.
Ajay's metropolitan home also designates the normative relationship this citizen mediates between the
metropolis and rural hinterland, and the separation this implies between the political and the cultural. In
the present, Ajay lives in Bombay where his family now runs the Rajasthan Emporium 'Rajri' located
behind the Taj Hotel, and he leads the Crime Branch. In his leisure-time he is shown enjoying ghazal-
concerts by a renowned Pakistani singer Gulfam Hasan, and enjoying romantic dates in different parts
of the city with his love-interest Seema, whose brother owns the record-label with an exclusive contract
to record Hasan's songs. It is also significant that Ajay strikes a deep friendship with Hasan when he
gives the latter the only known copy of one of his first concerts where he sang in the presence of his
Ustad (honorific title in Urdu and Persian for an accomplished teacher) and a royal patron. Ajay's
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retrieval of a lost fragment of Hasan's past goes further to establish him as a secular protagonist, and
designates the proper valence of art and culture – as divorced from the domain of the political.
These sequences articulate the parameters of bourgeois citizenship as inhabited and enjoyed in the
metropolis. The 'terrorist' violation of the bourgeois family establishes this citizen as both the
threatened civic entity in the name of whom a violent defense of the nation must be effected, and the
patriotic defender himself. Once an Assistant Commissioner of Police, Ajay explains his commitment
to his job to a disaffected Muslim colleague, as not merely a revenge for his own family's suffering but
the suffering of the entire nation because it is his family. The nation is imagined as a larger (Hindu,
bourgeois) family (which together with his lover Seema's family) whose vocation is linked to material
and aesthetic industries that render various kinds of provincial productivity for cosmopolitan cultural
consumption in the metropolis and international markets. The emporium named “Rajri” that Ajay's
family runs, sells handicrafts from Rajasthan to international tourists as well as the domestic
connoisseurs of folk-art who frequent the adjoining and luxurious Taj Hotel. The emporium as a state-
granted franchise facilitates a 'fair' trade between remote artisans of the state and international markets,
where the colorful and aesthetic productions of these remote rural artisans represent the rich heritage of
India – and can be counterposed to the illegal arms-trade shown in the opening sequence of the film.
This casual figuration of rural artistic/commercial productions within Ajay's familial space reflects a
normative understanding of the relations between the rural, the metropolis and the nation – where the
rural remains a largely faceless presence and source of labor while its beautiful productions (colorful
Rajasthani puppets, bedsheets, wall-hangings) circulate in domestic and international markets
signifying 'national culture'. Moreover, the metropolis mediates the rural's interface with these markets.
This figuration of the rural as a displaced producer who presumably 'gets his/her due' from the
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commercial structures of international tourism and statist ventures for the 'preservation' of regional
handicrafts (manned by the conscientious metropolitan middle class), constitutes one modes of the
emplacement of the rural in the national cop-film. Here 'emplacement' connotes the circumscription of
the consciousness and socio-political agency of the rural within the logic of the absolute legitimacy of
the nation.
The conception of the cultural aspects of social being is also crucial to the film's foregrounding of its
own model of secularism. Ajay's enjoyment of Gulfam Hasan's music expresses a cultural sensibility
that the film shows to be categorically distinct from his political being and consciousness. Here, Ajay
as a cultural consumer-citizen displays his cosmopolitan secularism that surmounts the religious
identity of an artist, and in doing so absolves him of any Hindu 'communal' spirit. However, in so far as
Hasan's artistry with ghazals is also the film's acknowledgement of the subcontinent's Muslim cultural
heritage (absolving itself of sympathy with Hindutva), it also instantiates the modes in which the
positive 'contributions' of Muslim minorities as well as the Muslim non-national can be recognized.
109
The ghazal Hasan sings: “Hoshwalon ko khabar kya bekhudi ka cheez hai?”/ “What do the sane know
of the raptures of love?” lures the viewer into a flashback to Ajay's rapturous love for Seema during his
college-days. The viewer inhabits the delirious loss of self-awareness in the grip of love, and the
poetic-philosophical potentialities of a ghazal – as an interval out of the 'crisis-time' of the nation which
prevails in the rest of the film, a more delicate poetic consciousness away from the homosocial
violence of policing and crime.
In allowing the viewer a visual-aural inhabitation of the delicate and rapturous dimensions of the
musical performance, the film offers a limited and problematic antidote to communal representations of
109 An Urdu art-form, a ghazal is a lyrical poem written in couplets, mostly on the theme of love or loss, and set to
music.
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Muslims in a post-Hindutva mediasphere, in the form of a depoliticized 'recognition' of Muslim social
being as productive of high art and culture (harnessed to the development of a bourgeois romance).
This conversely indicates an impoverished conception of the aesthetic and the cultural as divorced from
the realm of the political – reflected most often in the workings and lexicon of international diplomacy
(which is the context of Hasan's concerts in the film), where frequently cultural performances are set up
to dissipate the overtly political goals and charge of meetings between diplomats. Muslim ex-nationals
like Hasan can receive the respect of the Indian cultural literati by embodying the aesthetic as a
forsaking of the political. In the filmic flow of these sequences, the cinematic experience of the
transient plenitude of Ajay's youth and love that the song offers, is destroyed immediately by the
intrusion of political Islam when the terrorists kidnap his father and cause his brother's death. As is
revealed later, it is precisely this demarcation of the aesthetic and the political that the Mumbai Branch
discovers Hasan has violated as the secret mastermind of the arms-smuggling.
If these sequences set in the metropolis convey key aspects of the political imagination of the national
cop film – namely, the normative emplacement of the rural with respect to the metropolis and the
national, structured by a dichotomized conception of the cultural and the political; the film's crime-
drama demonstrates the ways in which this imagination perceives these spatial agencies as violating
these normative emplacements. The chain of smuggling aligns Pakistan's ISI (in a proxy war with
India) with the undercover criminal mastermind Hasan (coordinating the relay of weapons to various
Indian clients), and overseers and brokers like Mirchi Seth, Bala Thakur, Haji, Sultan, and Veeran (a
client). The genre's secular-objective diagnosis of terrorism shows each of the links in 'the chain of
terror' as either mercenary – as in the case of all the middlemen (Seth, Thakur, Haji and Sultan), or
unjustifiably/pathologically purposive (Hasan and Veeran). Seth, Thakur and Haji are shown to be
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pious while being completely indifferent to the effects of the arms-smuggling – demonstrating a narrow
and ritual-based religious practice divorced from ethics. While Veeran's militarization of his men
appears to hint at 'a cause' (or political motivation), he elicits the same dismissive response from both
the Pakistani ISI as well as the Mumbai Crime Branch. When asked what Veeran's 'complaint' is, Major
Baig of the ISI replies, “None whatsoever, we created one” with “free money and weapons”. A
symmetrical indifference is evident in the Mumbai Crime Branch's purely logistical approach toward
Veeran when Ajay explains to his team that, “Veeran is not important, we need to catch the Seth
controlling the trade.”
Veeran, Seth and Haji are repeatedly framed in their respective 'territories' as occupying aerial positions
(over hills, surveying maps, on terraces, temple on top of a hill) signifying control and manipulation –
rather than as being anchored in a social collectivity and experience. This mode of spatial positioning
reflects the film's agreement with the rationality of the security-state which predicts that blocking the
supply of resources would automatically asphyxiate any resistant movements that an enemy-country
'creates'. These centripetal drives of spatial positioning and psychological exploration – that designate
the normative and the deviant, express the impetuses of the proliferating grids of resource-
marketization and national sovereignty and the particular ways in which they seek to delineate space,
assign 'use', spatial subjectivity and socio-political agency.
While a violent mobilization in a southern forestland is bracketed off as the product of a foreign 'proxy
war' (rather than resulting from the constitutive violence of postcolonial and neoliberal 'nation-
building'), the film tellingly dignifies two Muslim characters as worthy ethical interlocutors of Ajay:
the disaffected Inspector Saleem and Gulfam Hasan, the Muslim ex-refugee artist and overseer of the
'proxy war' – who nurtures a desire to avenge his violent expulsion by India during Partition. This
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management of the two different national 'threats' (tribal mobilizations in forestlands, and terror
attacks) mirrors the ways in which the forging of a Hindu national identity through the war against
Islamic terror has sought to subsume other 'domestic' conflicts and social transformations. When Sultan
eludes Inspector Saleem despite the latter's best efforts, rumors surface in the police-department of his
partiality toward Muslim suspects, and Saleem is removed from the investigation. Prior to this he is
established as a very able policeman who has reconciled his religious faith with his patriotism. In a
telling scene, he points out to Haji (another middleman of the arms-smuggling) that his faith leads him
to be loyal to his country, and rejects any notions of a 'qaum' (religious community) that asks him to be
disloyal to the country that is home to him. However, in successive debates that occur between Saleem
and Ajay, which center on questions of religious prejudice as well as systemic disadvantages Saleem
has experienced as a Muslim man in contemporary India, Ajay pointedly contradicts the charge of
systemic privilege Saleem levels against him – citing his familial traumas, their middle class status and
his own hard work in achieving whatever he has (the scene is crucially set outside Ajay's home). Ajay's
vehement rebuttal of the charge of systemic privilege locates the film in post-Mandal India where
middle and upper caste/class elites oppose 'reservations' (of seats in education, employment and
legislatures) for the mitigation of inequality with the assertion of 'merit', disavowing the institutional,
material and social conditions where merit is cultivated in the first place. It is precisely through
historical privilege (as a descendant of the educated, bourgeois salariat and technocracy) that the
national cop is able to speak on behalf of the nation and arbitrate over its encounters with its Others,
while justifying his prerogative through his 'merit'. He protests Saleem's dismissal from the
investigation by his superior not by confronting the institution's overt prejudice against him, but on the
grounds that Saleem is very able and has efficient local intelligence networks.
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With Saleem recuperated as a patriotic citizen, Gulfam Hasan is positioned as the arch-interlocutor of
the national-cop. This antagonism is lent further weight by their prior friendship, as well as by the
distinctive structure of revelation the film adopts toward Hasan and his motivations. While the
intentions of all the other participants in the arms-trade are shown transparently from the beginning,
Hasan's ruthlessness is exposed in a sequence that builds toward shock and marks the film's
intermission – a goat-kid disrupts Hasan's riyaaz by running wildly through his room, toppling over
delicate glass lamps. Hasan punishes it by slicing off its ears.
110
During the act the camera fixates on the
bloodthirsty rage on his face accompanied by the tearing shriek of the kid. Even as the film proceeds to
provide a historical reason for Hasan's destructive mission for India, this act of goat-mutilation riles up
negative majoritarian associations of Muslims with goat-sacrifice (during the festival of Bakrid) as
evidence of their innate ruthlessness.
The final climax returns to the frontier shown in the opening sequence of Sarfarosh, and sets up a
complex showdown between Hasan, Ajay and Major Baig (Pakistani ambassador and ISI general) in
Hasan's ancestral haveli in Bahid. Intent on arresting Hasan despite the lack of concrete evidence and
unwilling to eliminate him by an extra-legal killing (or an 'encounter'), Ajay orchestrates an elaborate
charade where he hands Major Baig a gun and compels him to shoot Hasan 'the traitor' in exchange for
safe passage. Anxious to protect himself, Baig reviles Hasan as a 'mere singer and a muhajir'
(immigrant, alien) – demonstrating to Hasan, Saleem and Haji (also witnessing the scene) Pakistani
duplicity and the insincerity of appeals to 'qaum'. Baig fires but the gun turns out to be empty, at which
point, Ajay throws a loaded gun to Hasan who in instinctive self-defense shoots Baig dead, only to
realize a moment too late that he has been conned into violating the laws of both nations by killing a
Pakistani diplomat on Indian soil and thereby, been left without a refuge. Ajay contends that while
110 Riyaaz refers to the daily and rigorous practice of classical music.
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Baig's is the only murder Hasan may have committed by his own hand, the others he has committed 'by
proxy' are no less heinous. Thereafter, a passionate debate ensues between Ajay and Hasan on the ethics
of militancy and the legacy of the Partition which goes as follows:
Hasan: “The land you are standing on was my forefathers' kingdom, we used to rule here, and then
one day for no fault of ours we were driven out of here like a herd of sheep... to render someone
homeless and orphan overnight, that is a sin. What happened to us 50 years ago was a sin!”
Ajay: “Yes it was. But what happened to you was because of Partition. And it happened with
thousands of people. But what is regrettable is that some people want to recreate the same
circumstances again.... and open old wounds. But we will not let them succeed no matter which
faith they belong to. Partition was not a happy day for us either, we remember it painfully. But
whenever we attempt to emerge from it, people like you try to create a new problem.”
Hasan: “Yes we will! Our wounds are very deep and won't heal so easily. We want that you and our
future generations continue to remember the cruelty that was inflicted upon us and our community.”
Ajay: “What nonsense! What qaum can someone like you have? If by qaum you mean Muslims,
then there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. And bullets don't pick victims by religion.
Your weapons kill Muslims as well, and get defamed. People like you belong to no qaum, you are
enemies of humanity.”
In the lurid denouement of this scene, the most ghastly comeuppance is reserved for Hasan – the
exposed and expelled refugee-artist who is unhoused all over again, and forced to commit the sin of
suicide by impaling himself upon a bayonet and writhing to death.
It is important to consider not merely the terms of the debate between Ajay and Hasan (with Saleem,
Haji, Seth as auditors), but also to engage with the visual and spatial rendering of this moment of
confrontation in relation to the repressed memory of Partition. The scene plays out in the broad square
of Hasan's ancestral haveli. Prior to the arrival of the police-force, we are privy to a performance of
folksy 'item-number' at the square where Hasan and Major Baig are positioned, reclining as chief
patrons. After the arrival of the police-team and the disruption of the musical performance, Ajay and
Saleem are positioned close to the frame, with Hasan, Baig and Seth occupying the foreground. These
three figures are framed by the structures the syncretic Rajput-Islamic architecture such as domes with
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slender pillars and intricate arches, ensconces and latticed screens – which have transformed from the
setting for a visual spectacle to a monumental space. Bereft of any civic habitation and life, this
monumental space acquires the aspect of a palimpsest that retains the impress of multiple pasts - of
prosperity and plenitude, as well as loss and exodus. In this stand-off between primarily, Ajay and
Hasan, both figures perform the genre's drive to hermeneutic sovereignty by strategic remembering and
forgetting of the past. When Hasan speaks of ancestors who had ruled on this land – he evokes a
colonial and pre-national history of an Islamicate northern India where many princely kingdoms
enjoyed a nominal autonomy under the British and continued to function as literary and cultural
centers. The political and cultural pre-eminence of these elites was truncated by Independence (as a
liberal democracy) and Partition, which turned all Muslims into either persecuted refugees or domestic
'minorities' toward whom the state and the majority would extend 'tolerance'. These resonances evoked
by space emphasize the fact that those who were expelled were not innately 'alien' but natives who
were dislodged from their homelands.
Hasan's evocation of his forcible and unexplained banishment and orphaning on the eve of Indian
Independence, is given a ghostly density by this monumental space of the frontier-town Bahid. As
spectators we are invited to inhabit this landscape of loss before a resolution is effected by Ajay's
overpowering rhetoric. Entering this haveli at the climax of the film becomes a journey into the site of
an unassimilated historical trauma, the epicenter of a past-holocaust. Set in this space, the dialog
between Ajay and Hasan appears to redress the historical wound as well as to reckon with the
repercussions of the long history of Hindu majoritarianism, however, it performs crucial erasures that
reconstruct history in ways that only nominally confront the new narratives of the contemporary
'Hindu' nation. Hasan's narrative of self and memory slips rather seamlessly from his experience of the
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loss of territorial control over his 'home' to the experience of his 'qaum' (all Muslims) – illustrating the
ways in which internally diverse religious minorities have come to be posited as unitary formations by
logics that mimic the unitary conception of the majoritarian nation. Thus through his narrative Hasan
claims to express the historical experience of his qaum and in doing so becomes the imagined
'communal' minority-interlocutor of the secular citizen.
Ajay both recognizes and dismisses Hasan's trauma as an 'effect' of Partition – which is reconstructed
as a non-agential event that happened to both Hindus and Muslims and must therefore not be
remembered as a mass-atrocity against Muslims specifically. Within this sovereign interpretation of the
past, trauma is attributed to a parochial 'misinterpretation' of a large event that affected all
indiscriminately. It is a voluntary burden taken on by the militant-refugee who retards the healing and
progress of the nation. The exchange also locates Partition as an originary moment of national trauma,
of which subsequent communal tensions and pogroms become mere ripples. Identifying one as a
central 'event' and others as 'echoes', this narrative evacuates significant aspects of the intervening
history of India in which narratives of national identity have shifted more resolutely toward Hindu
nationalism and aggravated the 'minoritization' of various communities.
Even as the film 'exposes' Hasan's deviousness, it refuses to characterize all Indian Muslims with the
intent to commit vengeful violence – avoiding a prominent and recurrent trope of Hindutva and its
revisionist histories. Instead it evokes the older Nehruvian model of secularism as 'tolerance' that seeks
to recuperate all religions as essentially non-political formations that are equally deserving of respect.
The film contends that anti-national militancy only occurs 'in the name of religion' – preserving the
fictive binaries of the religious/political, private/public that structure secularism as a modern formation,
wherein religion is seen to be unimbricated in other aspects of socio-political being. Arising from
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purely mercenary motives or a parochial, 'inaccurate' internalization of a 'general' historical trauma, the
film argues that militancy only results in the murder of 'innocents'. This model of tolerance disavows
the socio-economic and political inequalities that structure the lives and consciousnesses of 'minorities',
how the secular demarcation between religious and political, private and public, are continually
breached in the operations of statist power, as well as in the ebb and flow of social life.
The genre's drive to provide an authoritative reading of the nation's present by exerting its hermeneutic
sovereignty over the past, necessarily extinguishes other ways in which the monumentalized space of
the haveli and Hasan's 'complaint' could speak to the viewer. In fact, one might ask what sort of
provincial and parochial histories could also have emerged from such a spatialized narrative? Hasan's
memories conjure a very specific ethos of aristocratic living, feudal proprietorship over large properties
and tracts of land, cultures of patronage of art – which suggest other kinds of ruptures that were
effected in some regions of India by Independence in the shape of a drastic transformation from the
pyramidal, feudal, hereditary and exploitative structures of Nawabdom – the upper echelons of which
monopolized land, power and capital extracting heavy revenues from the agricultural and mercantile
class.
111
Hasan's is an elite nostalgia for lost power and eminence generated by the violence of Partition
but also by the establishment of a liberal-democracy where all political, economic and executive
powers came to be vested in the state as a representative of 'the people' as a whole. The institution of
this new political system and philosophy was over the decades going to generate newer arenas of class-
reproduction and consolidation such as the expansive state-bureaucracy, salariat, new capital-intensive
agriculture. In time, the entrenchment of the same philosophies and institutions would generate newer
111 Nawabs were the deputies appointed by the Mughal emperors who ruled much of South Asia (including northern India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh) from the 16
th
to the 18
th
century. Besides the honorific title, Nawabs had large land-holdings
and were primarily in charge of revenue-collection on behalf of the ruling emperor. They often held large courts and
gave their patronage to distinguished artists and intellectuals. The British continued with the practice of appointing
Nawabs in some parts of India.
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waves and forms of democratization amongst subordinate sections excluded from access to these
arenas. Seen in this light, this spatialized memory of Hasan's haveli could potentially restore to the past
its radical plurality, breaking the film's unitary understanding of Partition and Independence, drawing
attention to the many ways in which (class, gender, power and history inflected) homelands were
destroyed or rapidly transformed, and the many kinds of resentful or mournful muhajirs that were born.
The national cop film forecloses these musings and conjectures as its resolves the past with a dissolve
from the dead Hasan's blood-streaked face as he lies in the now-silent courtyard of Bahid, to a benignly
smiling stock-photo of him appearing on a TV screen at the Bombay airport – the space of the
contemporary nation. The Special Branch led by Ajay, continues its onward directional movement into
the nation's future as the frame freezes with them walking toward the camera – we are told, on their
way to Delhi, where according to a tip-off Veeran has been spotted.
The Terrorist at Large in the Countryside
Rajkumar Santoshi's cop action-thriller Khakee (2004) as the year's fifth highest grosser at the box
office, received positive reviews for its action sequences, tight plot and Amitabh Bachchan's
performance as the aging Deputy Commisioner of Police (DCP) Anant Srivastava. The film unfolds as
a flashback in the memory of sub-inspector Ashwin Gupte. It opens in 'crisis-time' with a high-octane
action sequence where either valiant policemen are shown to perish to an armed attack as they seek to
prevent the escape of the under-trial, suspected terrorist and ISI agent Iqbal Ansari, during his transfer
from small-town Chandangarh to Mumbai for trial. Thereafter, the film follows the journey of a special
police team led by DCP Srivastava to escort Ansari to Bombay, which traverses provincial towns, rural
countrysides, forests and mountainous terrains, in the course of which it is repeatedly ambushed and
attacked. Through its interactions with Ansari, the team realizes that it is being hounded not by a
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terrorist outfit wanting to free an ex-member, but rather by a criminal outfit led by an ex-cop named
Yeshwant Angre, who has been hired by the Home Minister of the state, Deodhar to kill Ansari. The
team learns that as a doctor and forensic specialist Ansari had refused to deliberately misidentify three
individuals murdered by poisoning as riot-victims. He had learned from a freelance journalist (who is
subsequently murdered) that Deodhar had killed those individuals because they had accumulated
evidence about his crimes. The team realizes that Ansari is being framed as an Islamic terrorist by the
state and made the target of public outrage. Motivated by the DCP's unflinching commitment to the
mission, the motley team comes together to get Ansari his day in court even as it is under Angre's
continuous surveillance and superior firepower. Ansari dies a maligned traitor just as they reach
Mumbai, but the fast-dwindling team is able to gather evidence against Deodhar and he is convicted by
the court along with Commissioner Shinde and Angre. We return to the present where the hitherto
idealistic and law-abiding sub-inspector Gupte is escorting Angre to jail. En route Angre makes a final
attempt to escape, this time Gupte shoots him point-blank and the film ends as he calls DCP Srivastava
to tell him that he shot Angre in 'self-defense'.
Unlike Sarfarosh, the film does not explicate the issue of communal tensions and violence in relation to
the past and Partition, but rather in relation to the slow degeneration of the country's political culture
into a class of power-hungry individuals. In a significant difference from Sarfarosh, the special team
(constituted of honest policemen) is shown to be entirely lacking in the spatial sovereignty enjoyed by
the protagonists of the former. Hedged in and under constant surveillance, the team's mobility and
safety is constantly undermined by the repeated attacks of the criminal-political combine. However,
this lack of spatial sovereignty enhances the sense of national crisis and strengthens the hermeneutic
sovereignty of the national cop who is here concerned about the production of truths within a
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mediatized publicsphere where the citizenry is all too easily manipulated by a corrupt political class
into administering mob-justice to individuals (who are frequently Muslims) branded as 'traitors'.
The vulnerability of the national cop is further emphasized by the characterization of DCP Srivastava
(played by a sexagenarian Amitabh Bachchan) as an aging, asthmatic policeman approaching
retirement, who reflects on his career and financial prosperity as evidence of the relentless
neutralization of law-enforcement as the executive organ of the state by the 'political' wing of the
legislature. Anytime a riot or a bomb-blast occurred he was promptly transferred by the ruling
politician to a more 'peaceful' region before he could take any action. Eventually he was made faculty
at the police academy to teach the profession in 'theoretical' ways. Much like ACP Ajay Rathore in
Sarfarosh, Srivastava evinces a deep disaffection from the world of electoral and legislative politics.
His academic position disaggregates him from the institution of policing but his seniority and
reputation as a meritorious cop also keeps him close to the corridors of power as he is often called upon
to advise in matters of law and order. The film projects Srivastava's distant-familiarity with state-
functioning as a vantage of objectivity that makes him capable of seeing the truth behind the interlinked
misfunctioning of legislatures, law-enforcement, media and the society at large. He articulates
Khakee's instrumentalist explanation of communal violence as caused by the manipulation of the
uncritical media and national public by political leaders.
In the course of the film, two freelance-journalists are killed by the politician and the terrorist squad,
and squad's members masquerade as social-workers or documentary filmmakers – establishing civil
society agencies as either toothless or suspect. In this ethos of disaffection, the various encounters
between the national cop and members of the public, position him as the figure who is capable of
renewing the national consensus around the Indian state which is imagined here as a security-state. The
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widow of one member of the team validates her husband's 'sacrifice' by claiming that, “People in this
neighborhood sleep easy because there is a man in uniform ['khaki'] patrolling the street at night”. Thus
in the film's neoliberal reassessment of the developmental state, the revitalization of the political sphere
and social life lies in the hands of individual and conscientious policemen (or 'national cops') rather
than in any public institution accountable to an electorate. Inspector Shekhar (one of the prominent
members of the police-team) also expresses the cop's clear-sighted calibration of political realities with
his casual references to the effectiveness of custodial torture of terror-suspects.
There is however a crucial difference of tone in Khakee from Sarfarosh, which partly arises from the
emergence of the cop-film as a profuse genre by 2004 with its conventional mode of melodramatic
commentary on the state of the nation. Khakee offers all the pleasures of the genre's conventions from
sophisticated and stylized action-sequences, dramatic speeches, moving performances, while balancing
these elements with a sense of humor that reflects on not just the issues at hand but also the cinematic
representation of the national cop as a heroic masculinity. Much of this function is served by the figure
of Inspector Shekhar (played by Akshay Kumar) who indulges in a little corruption to wear his
expensive watches, and tries to wheedle his way out of suicidal missions. With his sense of humor that
combines the bombastic with the laconic, he keeps count of the thunderous and didactic dialogs spewed
by DCP Srivastava and Inspector Gupte, and provides the mandatory 'romance-track' of the film.
The film's reflexivity on the worldview of the genre is also evident in its dualistic use of space as it
journeys from Chandangarh to Mumbai, across a range of spaces including a small-town, an expansive
countryside, teeming rural cattle-fair and forest. Most sequences constituting this filmic journey (the
chase-on-foot, the dramatic obstruction, laying siege) involve a dramatic-realist use of visual strategies
(incorporating music, lighting, setting and performative style) with respect to diverse spaces and their
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occupants to relay contemporary political 'reality' through the ideological lens of the genre. However,
interspersing these are sequences that involve a more visible and playful use of cinematic strategies to
frame space that provoke reflection on the genre's approach toward space. In this late film, these
sequences signify the genre's self-awareness about its own strategic recruitment of spaces and spatial
presences to enable cinematic experiences of imaginative travel (and tourism), romantic reverie as well
as dramatic action. Interspersed with the dramatic-realist sequences, they provide interludes that seek to
present not an indexical reality but rather open up for consideration, the subjectivity of the national cop
as a bourgeois citizen, as well as his desire for sovereignty over 'national' space.
The more realist use of space that subordinates scenic elements to the goals of the central drama is
evident in an early scene in the film where upon its arrival in Chandangarh, the police-team responds to
a tip-off from a young social-worker named Mahalaxmi (played by Aishwarya Rai) about a group of
terrorists having leased the top-floor of a special-education school. She reveals that the group had
earlier claimed to be making a documentary 'about the riots' – suggesting the town's recent history of
communal violence, and the desire of some of its residents to document this history. While the dense
nature of the locality deepens the significance of the terrorist threat to the civic space, the locality itself
is shown in very fleeting and sanitized ways where communal riots seem peculiarly distant from what
appears to be its essential social character. This is driven home by the comic encounter with a local
woman who mistakes the police to be technicians who have arrived to repair her television so that her
impatient children can watch a game of cricket. As the team ascends to the top-floor to capture the
terrorist group, the building despite its location in a dense locality, is visually and aurally isolated in
subsequent frames, and diegetic sounds of the neighborhood quickly give way to a suspenseful score. It
transforms seamlessly from a 'lived' social setting presented with realism to a dramatic space where
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mind-games between the team and the terrorist mastermind unfold. The sequence renders terrorist
agency and subjectivity through traces left in an evacuated residential space. The team finds the dead
body of a member of the outfit (killed because as an injured member he was a liability for the outfit)
shot in the face to obliterate his identity. The ringing phone in the empty hideout turns out to be a
bomb. The terrorists' terms of occupation and departure from the hideout in the school cast them not
only as an unconscionable and lethal agency (not sparing even school-children and seeking to capitalize
on the town's recent communal violence), but also as a rootless foreign presence in the locality rather
than a homegrown political formation anchored in the social experience of a disaffected minority-
community.
Aspects of dramatized spatial presence, anchoring, degrees of embeddedness are thus crucial to how
the various social agencies of the small-town locality, the terrorist outfit, and the police-team as 'agents
of law' with jurisdiction, are 'apprehended' – in its double implication as terms of understanding, as
well as punitive action. 'Ordinary townsfolk' established here as a civic presence with no connection to
terror, appear prominently in a later sequence where Srivastava confronts a large mob that has been
persuaded by Minister Deodhar's false claims in the media that the police-team has gone rogue and
joined hands with the Pakistani ISI to shield Ansari. The mob surrounds the public hospital in small-
town Nairoli where Ansari is being treated for a gun-wound. Its motley composition with some men
dressed in plain shirts and trousers (signaling urban, proletariat), others in kurta-pyjama or traditional
north Indian men's clothing and wearing turbans, still others wearing khadi or handloom garments and
Nehru caps – give it a 'national' rather than regional or class-specific character. While the handloom
garments reminiscent of Gandhi and Nehru create associations with the Indian Independence
movement, others wearing saffron-colored turbans and carrying swords call up broadcast images of the
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mobs that had led the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Here sartorial markers of the old secularism mix
with those of contemporary Hindutva.
When Srivastava (in his blood-soaked uniform) decides to confront the mob rather than escape with
Ansari through the back of the hospital, a sword-brandishing muscular man exhorts the others to “kill
the traitor”. Pulling the man out of the crowd, Srivastava challenges him to strike, calling the attackers
“cowardly jackals who hunt only in packs”. When another man in a Nehruvian cap asserts that being a
betrayer Ansari deserves to be punished, Srivastava asserts that the judiciary alone has the power to do
so after he is produced by the police in court. The same man questions the allegiances of the police, to
which Srivastava retorts -
I really pity people like you. So easily misled and used. Made to burn your homes with your own
hands while others enjoy the warmth from the fire... Clueless about the truth, you grab your swords
and bay for blood. We know the truth, because we have shed our own blood for it.
The emotional force of Srivastava's speech – which uses the signature rhetorical style of actor
Bachchan (familiar from his AYM films), is heightened by a deft interplay of sound wherein the
patriotic background score recedes at strategic junctures to make audible the sound of the flames that
are consuming a vandalized bus in the background. Silenced, the mob allows the team and Ansari to
walk through safely.
In Khakee's presentist and instrumentalist exploration of terrorism and communal violence, where
political leaderships manipulate the citizenry into committing acts of mass-violence, ordinary Muslims
are shown to be apolitical and trusting members of the national public. In the flashback through which
Ansari relates his story to the police-team, a terror-attack in the city makes his family fear an outbreak
of riots. Ansari reassures them by saying, “People are good, it's the politicians who manipulate us.” But
when he is falsely implicated as a terror-suspect, a local mob vandalizes his home and his family-
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members go missing or are killed. This sets up Srivastava's collision with the national public-as-a-mob.
The representational gestures structuring this encounter map the socio-political landscape of India in
particular ways. The gathered mob is represented as a visual meld of multiple kinds of affective
collectivities – evoking the secular but passionate patriotism of the freedom-fighters, their methods of
resisting such as picketing, the pacifism of Gandhi and Nehru as well as the violent accouterments of
the communal mobs, the film recasts communal mobs as being motivated by an essentially patriotic
drive – wherein the debate comes to center on whether or not Ansari is a 'traitor' and whether or not the
public is correctly informed. Attributing communal violence to misinformation and depicting terrorists
as merely mercenary functionaries, the film precludes a consideration of terrorism as a socio-political
project and a gesture of resistance arising out of a deep and continuing history of structural inequalities
within the country's body-politic and state-functioning. Here, Srivastava as well as the film whitewash
and invalidate the national public at the same time. As Srivastava challenges the violent mob and
vouches to protect Ansari, the film appears to work against the vilification of Muslims by the ideology
of Hindutva.
112
However, in so far as it recasts the national public as an essentially patriotic and unitary
social formation, it also advances a primary postulate of Hindutva which absolves 'Indian society' of
quotidian and extraordinary forms of social violence and oppression, eliding the ways in which
mainstream conceptions of Indian history, national identity and citizenship have shifted considerably to
the right over the past two decades with the Hindu Right's ideas finding substantial purchase amongst
wide electorates.
Yet, even as the national public is whitewashed, the national cop is positioned as the voice that speaks
for both – the democratic state in its ideality as well as the agent of truth and reform in the dystopic
112 Subsequently, when Ansari is killed, the police-team arrives at his home to give him a ritual burial after his locality
excommunicates him and his family for being a 'traitor'.
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present. As such he effects a 'return' to the constitutional delegation and division of the power of law-
enforcement amongst the state-police and the judiciary in a liberal democracy. However, this is a return
with a difference, where the non-elected institutions of law-enforcement and the judiciary are
reaffirmed as organs of democracy but elected legislatures which may be more directly reflective of the
political will of the nation's publics are shown up as entirely suspect. This section has examined these
dramatic realist sequences in Khakee to demonstrate how the national cop film's representation of
terrorist agency, as well as its rehearsal of 'dialog' on its core concerns, hinge upon its depiction of
various civic spaces and presences. Moreover, the section has sought to foreground how this depiction
propels the film's and the genre's overt but limited critique of, and a more fundamental complicity with
dominant ideologies of neoliberal governance, citizenship and secularism.
Khakee's Metacommentary on the National Cop and Space
While the sequences discussed in the previous section make a dramatic-realist use of space that
dovetails closely with the overt ideological goals of the national cop film, this section examines two
sequences in which Khakee displays a more self-reflexive approach to the depiction of space. In doing
so, it reveals the national cop's close affinity with the bourgeois citizen, primarily through their shared
propensity for sovereignty over social spaces and agencies. The sequences discussed here open up for
consideration the nature of this desire itself and how it is enabled by the cinematic apparatus. They
make apparent the subordination, even repression of the inherent autonomy of places and people in
order to facilitate the projection of the protagonist's subjectivity and agential centrality. The first
amongst these, is a song-and-dance sequence that is presented as the romantic reverie of Inspector
Shekhar. While providing a humorous interlude in an otherwise serious drama, the sequence also brings
into view affective dimensions of the national cop's subjectivity which relate to his desired relationship
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with space. The second is an action-sequence set in a cattle-fair where the desire for spatial mastery is
executed but where the idiom of the action-thriller foregrounding the centrality of action is pushed to
its extreme to make apparent its willful subordination of other social presences. Interspersed with the
dramatic-realist sections of the film, these self-reflexive and sequences mark Khakee as a late
instantiation of the genre – where the film tries to anticipate and recuperate spectatorial awareness of,
and perhaps skepticism toward the tropes and excesses of the genre.
As the two-vehicle police-entourage begins its journey to Mumbai, aware of a constant but invisible
presence monitoring its movements, Shekhar is distracted by a film crew location-shooting a dance-
sequence as troops of male and female dancers flit across the screen with clouds of yellow and red
exploding behind them. Shekhar muses aloud about how wonderful life would be if it were like a film,
in which one does things with great ardor, one sings and serenades. Mahalaxmi's amused look launches
Shekhar into a “reverie” in which he woos her in a song-and-dance sequence. Playing to the tropes of
such a number, the male lover (Shekhar) describes the effects of his female beloved's (Mahalaxmi)
charms upon him, “Dil dooba, neeli ankhon mein yeh del dooba/I have lost myself in your blue eyes...”
and seeks to convince her about the depth of his love and devotion for her. In response, the beloved
rebuffs him flirtatiously. However, unlike the ways in which romantic reverie is typically used in Hindi
cinema, this one does not seek to 'transport' the spectator into an abstract romantic paradise where the
lead stars exude glamor across a breathtaking landscape (employing some form of global tourism).
Instead, the sequence mimics such a dance number as the women in elaborate flamenco-inspired
costumes and men in baggy 'pirate' shirts, tight trousers and colored bandannas, perform filmi
movements in a deliberately silly way. In the extreme foreground of the frames we see cinematic
apparatus with elaborate lighting and camera equipment perched on cranes. Farther and encircling the
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dancers is a periphery of reflective mirrors which bathe the dancers in an 'unnatural' and enhanced
light, giving them glowing outlines. During the sequence, we see spot-boys hold up outlandish props,
others topple from their perches. Shekhar's reverie expresses a desire to perform a 'filmi' romance
surrounded by the paraphernalia of the cinematic apparatus.
Romantic song-and-dance sequences set in idyllic landscapes, have traditionally been the space for the
virtual realization of ineffable poetic and erotic potentialities of the bourgeois romance in popular
Hindi cinema. Scholarship on 'song-and-dance' sequences in Indian cinemas has theorized them as an
instance of a 'cinema of interruptions', where erotic and romantic possibilities foreclosed by the social
universe of the narrative-plot are allowed expression in stylized ways effecting both the deferral of
consummation as well as the elaboration of other libidinal pleasures.
113
Crucially, these potentialities
are realized through occupation, framing and projection of spaces as picturesque and affective
landscapes – which moved from domestic tourist locations (most prominently Kashmir) in the 1990s,
to foreign locations (most prominently Switzerland) in the 2000s.
114
In a close reading of a song-and-
dance sequence shot for the South Indian film Malaikottai in Switzerland, Anand Pandian describes the
ways in which 'The joy of these lovers is conveyed, that is, not only by their smiling faces and the
harmonious agreement of their bodies in motion but also by their resonance with an immersive
landscape of expression' (Pandian: 2011, 63).
115
Pandian underscores a crucial aspect of what a song-
113 Various scholars including Lalitha Gopalan, Sangita Gopal, Sujata Moorti and Ranjani Majumdar have theorized
Hindi cinema as 'a cinema of interruptions' with the song-and-dance sequences being one of the primary forms of
interruption. They also see this interruption as one which provides an opportunity for erotic self-expression,
performance of female sexuality but also to function as 'electronic catalogs' for the display of conspicuous forms
of brand-consumption enabled by globalization.
114 See Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, eds., Global Bollywood: Transnational Travels of the Song-Dance Sequence
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
115 Pandian's is an ethnographic study of the particular, dynamic and contingent encounters with spaces that the
location-shooting of song-and-dance sequences entails in Indian cinemas – through his observation of the
shooting for such sequences for two films including Malaikottai.
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and-dance sequence seeks to convey – namely, an alignment of the protagonist's being-in-love as an
ontological state with a landscape that agrees to function as 'an immersive landscape of expression'.
If such a union with an agreeable landscape is one of the primary functions of the location-based
romantic song-and-dance, then the interruptive effect of 'Dooba, dil dooba' in Khakee is significant
because it interrupts a drama about the national cop's (as the patriotic subject par excellence) loss of
spatial control, mobility and sovereignty, with a reverie about unselfconscious being-in-space where the
landscape echoes and gives play to his desire. In other words, it offers a transient and virtual realization
of what has been denied the police-team thus far: its desire for mobility and control over space, that
owing to his genealogy in the dynamic bourgeois FYP hero, the national cop regards as a congenital
entitlement. The status of “Dooba dooba” as a 'reverie' that is followed by a cut back to 'reality' signals
within the framework of the film's plot, how the national cop's desire for a landscape that harmonizes
with his own sensations, has been rendered impossible in the nation's crisis-time of the film. However,
working contrapuntally, the 'reverie' as a dramatized visual narrative also illuminates a fundamental
aspect of precisely this subjectivity that seeks to relate to 'the world' through a poetic self-projection
that is at once a hermeneutic appropriation and colonization of diverse spaces. The presence of the
cinematic apparatus within the frame also underscores how this poetic self-realization is also
implicated in newer grids of consumption, tourism and resource-calibration that (drawing on Henri
Lefebvre and Gyan Prakash) have come to 'enframe' land as resources and settings.
While the previous sequence explores 'inviable' spatial desires, the following sequence elaborates the
nature of spatial control desired by the national cop over an inhabited social space – when shortly after
the dance-sequence, the police entourage is stalled by a rural cattle fair. An aerial shot reveals a large
congregation of men in folk attire and colorful turbans herding cattle. Srivastava decides to manually
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push bodies out of the way of his jeep when he gets a phone-call from Angre that alerts him to the
latter's presence in the surrounding crowd. Srivastava succeeds in spotting Angre in the crowd and a
chase begins in which angular shots of the running men are intercut with close-ups of 'ordinary'
menfolk staring impassively or pointing curiously at the camera. In order to create more obstructions
for Srivastava, Angre shoots bullets at a herd of cows and triggers a stampede. He escapes leaving a
frustrated and heavily panting Srivastava, while the entire gathering of the fair is shown to have fled
away. The sequence renders the dramatic action in a way that heightens and thereby draws attention to
the absolute instrumentalization of peripheral space, figures and objects as props within the genre. As
Angre runs with Srivastava in hot pursuit, men and animals make up a blur of fleeing, gouged and
falling bodies over which the two men keep leaping. Shekhar exerts another kind of territorial mastery
by climbing to the roof of the truck and scanning the scene. From this aerial position he guides the
driver of the truck and looks out for potential snipers. This posture places Shekhar in a more distant,
'military' relationship with the crowd that looks through and past the blur of bodies in the crowd as it
searches impatiently for the hidden enemy. It avoids a tactile immersion or collision with the crowd and
seeks a position of isolation and visual advantage. The sequence reveals the hermeneutic centrality
granted to the cop within the genre's vision of terror and correction to be achieved by violently and
visibly displacing the critical role and nature of the civic.
The logic of dramatic action in a cop-thriller requires peripheral social presences to function as
authenticating settings and plausible catalysts for action. Positioned as an obstruction to the police-
entourage, the crowd is shown to be initially oblivious to the unfolding drama and is then recruited as
an unwitting foe (camouflaging the culprit, and as is later revealed, stalling the entourage long enough
for a bomb to be attached to one of the police-vehicles) and eventually as victim (of a triggered
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stampede). However, the sequence pushes this centripetal logic of subordination to central action to its
logical extreme by using bodies explicitly as mere props. Simultaneously, the sequence sets in play a
centrifugal force – when Srivastava scans the crowd to locate Angre, the non-actors in the crowd cast
'unschooled' and awkward return-glances into the camera and directly at the spectator. Defying their
incorporation as intra-diegetic gazes through the technique of shot-reverse-shot, these looks introduce
an element of recalcitrance and disrupt their function as an authenticating setting for the dramatic
action. In these moments, these rural presences vacillate between the straitjacket of a setting and the
potentialities of a landscape resisting an imposed eventhood.
The self-reflexive treatments of space in the above-discussed sequences explore the architectonics of
the cop's desire for spatial (and thereby hermeneutic) sovereignty. They also heighten the tensions that
structure and are sought to be suppressed by the cinematic execution and realization of this desire. At
the same time, these sequences also delineate the limits of the genre's self-critique which must stop
short of a substantive exploration of the complex and critical ways in which other life-worlds interact
with the hermeneutic consensus as well as material grids of neoliberal and democratic transformations
the genre emerges from.
Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to read the political and ethical mandate claimed by the figure of the
national cop in the longer history of the grids of technocratic planning set in place by the colonial and
the postcolonial state, as well as the contemporary ideological horizon shaped by economic
Liberalization, the Mandal commission reforms and the emergence of Hindutva as a mainstream
ideology of national identity. Thereafter, it has sought to read this figure's desire for hermeneutic
sovereignty, and the genre's mapping of metropolitan and non-metropolitan spaces in the national-cop's
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encounters with a range of non-secular interlocutors – in relation to the new consensus that has
emerged at this historical conjuncture on development, national identity, communal violence and caste.
Within this dissertation, the national cop film explores a national-metropolitan cinematic vantage on
'provincial' participation in cross-border arms-traffic, militancy, terrorism as well as reactionary
communal violence. As such, the chapter offers a vital counterpoint to the genres that will be discussed
in the following chapters of the dissertation – namely, the provincial cop film, the provincial youth film
and the new rural film, which variously explore the disavowed, provincial trajectories of the
postcolonial Indian planning regime, the unfinished 'passive revolution' in caste/class by the bourgeois-
nationalist state, and the on-going democratization of electoral cultures – as disruptions of the narrative
of the national, and challenges to the hermeneutic sovereignty of the larger ideological dispensation
represented by the national cop.
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Chapter Two
The Everyday and the Climactic: The Temporalities of Jungle-Raj in the
Provincial Cop Film
At the conclusion of Kumar Mangat's 2010 cop-thriller Aakrosh or “Fury”, the camera tilts up to
provide an aerial wide shot of a train departing from the railway station of Jhanjhar, a small-town in the
central-eastern Indian state of Bihar. Protagonist Pratap Kumar, a CBI officer who is aboard the leaving
train, now observes in an omniscient voice-over,
“Even today in free India lovers like Dinu are sacrificed in the name of honor. Every day
people are divided in the name of religion into pure and untouchable. Even after so many
years since Independence, is India really free?”
Such patriotic inquiries frequently animate the sub-genre of, what I call in this chapter, the 'provincial
cop-film' which travels to and dwells in the provincial region of the state of Bihar in eastern India.
Since the early 1990s, the state of Bihar (sometimes coupled with the neighboring state of Uttar
Pradesh) with its new leadership drawn from the backward classes, has become synonymous with caste
politics, crime and lawlessness that in metropolitan journalistic parlance was described as 'Jungle Raj'
(meaning 'the reign of the lawless Jungle').
116
In cinema, this state has emerged as a dystopic provincial
116 In colonial India, 'Backward Classes' was an ascriptive category for castes, tribes and religious groups, which
designated all non-Brahmins, which was nearly 96% of the population. However, post-Independence the category has
three components: Scheduled Castes (also called 'Untouchables', or 'Harijans' or now, most commonly 'dalits'),
Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes. The 'Scheduled Castes' refers to the legal designation deriving from the
schedule drawn in 1935 listing the lowest-ranking Hindu castes. This schedule was appended to the Government of
India Act and it rendered the listed castes eligible for statutory benefits pertaining to government programs and political
representation. A similar schedule was drawn for Scheduled Tribes. These categories have survived within the
nomenclature of the modern Indian state and convey the post-independence state's overt commitment to the welfare of
backward classes through various forms of positive discrimination (for more information, see Lelah Dushkin's study of
colonial and postcolonial history of the backward classes). Before the drawing of these schedules, the same groups had
been known as Depressed Classes, or the Untouchables. The term 'Untouchable' referred to both the polluted status that
Paul 116
hinterland to India's purported global modernity. The three provincial cop-films this chapter will
explore, are structured around the educative journeys of honest metropolitan police-officers when they
are posted in small-towns in Bihar where they are faced with corrupt and violent political regimes. In
Eeshwar Niwas' Shool the local MLA (member of legislative assembly) terrorizes a small-town in
Bihar and summons all his clout to squelch the protagonist, an honest Police Inspector Samar Pratap
Singh. Prakash Jha's Gangaajal or “Holy Water” (2004) re-situates the infamous Bhagalpur blindings
of 1980 (in which thirty under-trials in custody were blinded by the local police) in Bihar of the 2000s,
while Kumar Mangat's Aakrosh follows a CBI an investigation of the alleged honor-killings of three
Delhi youths, weaved in with the issue of upper-caste militias in Bihar.
117
In all three films, the
protagonist metropolitan-cop attempts to mobilize the 'threatened' ordinary folks against the prevailing
political order. While the effort is unsuccessful in Shool, in the other two films, the mobilized local
police and ordinary folks engage in forms of vigilantism in order to, paradoxically, restore the rule of
law.
Within the diversified marketplace of New Bollywood, the provincial cop-film marked the beginnings
of the 'provincializing' of settings and stories in the early 2000s which claimed to relieve the
spectatorial ennui of a decade of spectacular, big-budget 'NRI romances'.
118
Sangita Gopal has argued
persons born within the lowest caste were believed to possess, as well as the set of discriminatory social practices the
rest of the society adopted to avoid being polluted by them. The term 'Harijan' or 'Children of God' was coined by
Gandhi to challenge the ideological and moral valence of the nomenclature 'untouchable' itself. Since the 1980s, the
term 'dalit' meaning 'oppressed' or 'downtrodden' (coined first in the 19th century by social reformer Jyotiba Phule) has
been used in conjunction with 'bahujan' or 'the majority' to 'connote a political and discursive front of lower castes, ex-
untouchables, peasants and women that purports to challenge the majoritarian claims of an aggressive Hindu
nationalism' (Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity, 132).
117 Kumar Mangat has claimed that the film is inspired by an article published in The Times of India in 1995. While a
disturbing trend of honor-killings had also emerged in the national capital region prior to the making of the film,
Aakrosh addressed the issue in the context of distant rural Bihar.“Aakrosh is about wrong-doings of Ranveer Sena,”
September 7, 2010. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/aakrosh-is-about-wrongdoings-of-ranvir-sena-
producer/678437/0
118 Sangita Gopal (2011) uses the term 'New Bollywood' to signify the composite world of corporatized financing,
multiplex-exhibition, rise of multiplex exhibition, a narrowed audience-address 'aimed at a transnational, urban, middle
class' and the global branding and domestic recognition of Mumbai film-making as an industry.
Paul 117
that the popular heuristic of 'KJo'/'Hat-ke' used in industry and fan discussions – pitting director Karan
Johar's (thus 'KJo') films set in the affluent Indian diaspora in the West, against a range of 'off-center'
genre-films about urban and provincial India, should be seen as 'two different approaches towards the
transformation of popular Hindi cinema and its publics' (Gopal 2010: 17). While the 'KJo' films address
the nostalgic affluent Indian diaspora in the West; the 'off-center', realistic and acclaimed indie-ish
'Hatke' films appear to address the domestic cosmopolitan. Akshaya Kumar has theorized the recent
trend of 'provincializing Bollywood' evident in multiple 'hatke' genres as a product of the experiences
of 'time warfare', spatial segregation and 'aesthetic repression' by recent migrants from small-towns in
north India to metropolises. Kumar argues that these experiences of living in the fraught metropolis
together with the erosion of the northern Indian small-town within the larger social imaginary,
generates nostalgia for the latter which the cinematic small-town addresses with the performative
excess of its dialect, social idioms, exaggerated performative styles and textured settings. Conversely,
the 'encounter film' is one of the prominent metropolitan genres within hatke cinema which as Anustup
Basu has argued, expresses through the aesthetic of disenchanted realism and the trope of the extra-
legal 'encounter' or killing (of gangsters, criminals and terror-suspects) a metropolitan desire for
sovereignty that arises from within a metropolis 'that perversely mixes the works of capital or
technology with new medievalisms' (Basu 184). The cinematic city in the genre is 'the degree zero of
metropolitan order—that nebulous zone where an abstract metropolitan diagram of value as capital
meets an unending reservoir of historical antagonisms' (ibid.).
Kumar and Basu read the very different generic settings and thrusts of the provincial films as well as
the encounter film in the context of desires and repressions generated from within the embattled
metropolis. However, the complex dystopia of the provincial cop-film, with its simultaneous emphasis
Paul 118
on the survivable and the unbearable, answers rather insufficiently to the heuristic of metropolitan
nostalgia for the small-town, or that of metropolitan desire for political sovereignty over an embattled
urban space. The performative excess of the genre lies primarily in its depiction of the dystopic socio-
political mythology of Bihar's 'Jungle-Raj' or a regime of criminalized and corrupt politicians, that
emerged in the national media through the 1990s and the 2000s as a new political leadership from
backward classes and the ex-untouchables was elected to power in the state. Within the national
imagination informed by the metropolitan media, these new leaderships were identified with not only
crime and corruption but also the retrogressive force of caste-based politics. Gangaajal received
glowing reviews for its 'utmost realism [in] successfully creating an unrefined environment with the
crude behavior and aggressive lifestyle of the characters' (Malani 2003), while Eeshwar Niwas' Shool
was seen to depict 'the strong-arm tactics that govern everyday life in Bihar... [in] a palpably raw and
realistic ambiance... All the players, major and minor, deliver rough-and-ready, lifelike performances...'
The films were seen to authentically render the performative excess of rustic and belligerent political
masculinities (mostly Yadavs) already made familiar as such in metropolitan political reportage of
politics and misgovernance in Bihar. The performances of political ineptitude and criminality received
both fan-appreciation (in the form of popular excerpted postings and commentary on YouTube) and the
institutional recognition of a National Award for Sayaji Shinde's performance of the infantile yet
villainous MLA Bachcha Yadav in Shool. Shool and Gangaajal also won National Awards as Best
Feature Film in Hindi and Best Film on Other Social Issues respectively, as well as top honors for their
lead-actors Manoj Bajpai and Ajay Devgan. Gangaajal has become a shorthand, and in the words of its
director Prakash Jha, 'a brand' for meaningful cinema within contemporary Bollywood, seeking to
represent the urgent socio-political realities beyond the narrow confines of south Bombay.
119
119 Gangaajal's depiction of Bihar's political dystopia was ironically reconfirmed when theaters were vandalized prior to
the release of Gangaajal by the supporters of the infamous Sadhu Yadav, brother-in-law of ex-Chief Minister Laloo
Paul 119
These critical and lay reviews suggest the bidirectional pleasures the films offer – with scathing
critiques of contemporary political dystopia as well as delicious performances of moral and political
ambivalence. The pronounced visibility of the provincial cop film and its frequent use as a shorthand
for socially-committed cinema necessitates an examination of its appeal and critical force within the
contemporary configuration of neoliberal ideologies of citizenship, state and governance. This chapter
will discuss how the widely-circulating mythology of 'Jungle-Raj' creates a particular interface between
the metropolitan public and contemporary provincial political cultures over the terrain of governance,
the electoral state and the condition of civic life. It also shows how this mythology develops in the
wake of the occurrence of a prior and more foundational interpretive and epistemological split between
metropolitan and provincial cultural imaginaries in postcolonial India. This chapter examines three
articulations of the provincial cop film – Eeshwar Niwas' Shool, Prakash Jha's Gangaajal and
Priyadarshan's Aakrosh, to explore how they engage and complicate this mythology. It considers the
complex ambivalences the genre invests the cinematic provincial with through its dramatization of the
twin temporalities of the everyday and the climactic. I argue that while the temporality of the everyday
re-situates 'corruption' as an everyday practice of 'survival' within the larger and skewed terrains of a
patronage-democracy, the 'climactic sections' which depict a mobilized provincial public adopting
vigilantist modes of political action, evoke a different ambivalence that reflects at once, neoliberal
anxieties about a 'failing' developmental state and electoral democracy, as well as suspicion of mass
political action.
120
This bifurcated cinematic exploration of Jungle-Raj reveals the ways in which the
Prasad Yadav, on the grounds that the film maligned their leader by naming its villain after him. Jha resolved the issue
by arranging for a private screening for Laloo and his wife CM Rabri Devi and seeking their approval News-reports
claimed that this incident caused audiences to flock to theaters to see the portrayal of the villain (TNN 2003).
120 Kanchan Chandra defines a 'patronage-democracy' as 'a democracy in which the state monopolizes access to jobs and
services, and in which elected officials have individualized discretion in the implementation of policy distributing these
jobs and services' (Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India, 49). Chandra goes on to
claims that this discretion allows the officials innumerable opportunities to collect illegal rents in the distribution of the
services.
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genre negotiates the simultaneous pulls of a dominant neoliberal horizon as well as the contested
domain of national and regional politics. If the national cop film discussed in chapter 1 expressed a
drive toward hermeneutic sovereignty deriving from the expanding grids of resource-marketization and
national soovereignty, this chapter explores one prominent cinematic articulation of the provincial as
multiple even if partial interruptions of this hermeneutic drive.
The Social Text of 'Jungle-Raj'
Before I commence a discussion of the selected films, I would like to contextualize the social text of
'Jungle-Raj' (or “the reign of the lawless jungle”) as it has emerged as within mainstream political
journalism and social commentary in India over the past two decades. In these commentaries, Jungle-
Raj constitutes a cultural narrative that like any other narrative, has dominant and subordinate narrative
strands and is replete with similes, tropes and hyperboles. It seeks to both render realities as well as
furnish interpretive frames to make sense of them. Jungle-Raj came to figure as a much-used and vivid
synecdoche for the socio-political realities of Bihar during the chief ministerial tenures of Lalu Prasad
Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi of the Rashtriya Janata Dal through the 1990s till the mid-2000s
(Talwar 1997, Swami 1998, Johnson 2005). The trope of an 'absent state' emerged in relation to the
newly aggravated threat to life and property of citizens, specifically, middle and upper class families of
businessmen and professionals posed by a 'kidnapping industry' run by gangs that were in turn widely
known to be controlled by a new class of criminal-politicians.
Kidnappings of members of the qualified professional class (in particular doctors and surgeons) as well
as businessmen (or their families) for ransom were reported and statistically tabulated with regularity
by the local, national and international media, accompanied by lurid details of abductions, threats,
ransom-negotiations being conducted at the residences of ministers. Ordinary citizens including parents
Paul 121
were frequently quoted in news-reports expressing their fears about the safety of their daughters
outdoors, their inability to go out their homes after dark – which were corroborated with statistics of the
increasing occurrence of rapes in the state. To read these emphases as the tropes of a social text is not to
deny the prevalence of these forms of violence, but to allow us to grasp the ways in which these were
mediated, received and comprehended within emerging ideological assemblages and how 'solutions' are
conceived and mobilized – in particular because during this period crime-rates of Bihar remained
comparable to those of other states and metropolises.
121
Bihar's Jungle-Raj was seen to suppress and
endanger the energies of a social class that was everywhere else in India seen to be driving the engines
of liberalization with its merit, entrepreneurship, commerce, consumption and secular ideals. The
kidnapping of two engineers of the National Hydro Power Corporation in 2004 who had arrived in the
state to execute a Rs. 19,000 crore rural road construction project under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin
Sadak Yojna (Prime Minister's Rural Road Project), illustrated the ways in which the kidnapping
industry was not only coercing professionals but also impeding the work of the developmental state
that would otherwise bolster development in the region. The chairman and managing director of NHPC
commented on the kidnappings as follows:
We had come here to construct best quality of roads not to pay money to abductors... If this trend
continues not a single central agency would dare to take up any kind of development work in Bihar.
I had brought top class engineers - T Mandal and K K Singh - to head the rural roads projects in
Bihar. Singh was heading the civil contract unit of the NHPC in New Delhi while Mandal was
likely to take up projects worth Rs 5,000 crore in the North East. (Chaudhury, TNN, 2004)
This fairly cursory news-report deploys the familiar vision and rhetoric of the developmental state
where the will to change, merit, transformational expertise, as well as developmental resources flow
121 See Nichenametla, Prasad. 'Statistics prove Raj wrong, Bihar ranks low in crime against women.' Hindustan Times.
New Delhi, January 07, 2013. http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/newdelhi/statistics-prove-raj-wrong-bihar-
ranks-low-in-crime-against-women/article1-986384.aspx. Accessed 31 July 2014. Also see Tiwary, Deeptimaan. 'Kerala
is country's most crime-prone state NCRB statistics show'. 24 June, 2012.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Kerala-is-countrys-most-crime-prone-state-NCRB-statistics-
show/articleshow/14364473.cms. Accessed 31 July 2014. Both articles quote from the National Crime Records Bureau.
Paul 122
from the metropolitan 'capital' and to the underdeveloped rural – of which road-construction – enabling
mobility and commerce, is the most apt symbol. The contrary agency of Bihar's Jungle-Raj, either
obstructs these flows (of finance but also technical knowhow) through crime or siphons them off
through elaborate scams involving entire civil administrations and elected officials. Several scams were
exposed by central law-enforcement agencies and the media – where funds allocated for animal
husbandry (the notorious Fodder Scam), bitumen, housing, medicine supply, fertilizer subsidy and
railways; had been pocketed by successive administrations.
The revelations of scams together with the crime-reportage generated a veritable mythology of dystopia
around Bihar. Within this, civic actions relating to issues of governance, law-order, civic frustration
made provincial civic residents as well as state-officials, made this dystopic world more relatable. In
1980, in the town of Bhagalpur in Bihar, 33 under-trials who were in police custody were blinded by
policemen with the use of spokes and acid. The 'Bhagalpur blindings' created history as the first legal
case in India where compensation was granted by the central government on the basis of the violation
of human rights. While the incident was widely condemned, it was seen as an act of impatient justice
administered by the police against individuals believed to have been guilty of committing various
crimes. Only three police personnel were convicted for blinding one man (TNN 2004). Several news-
reports over the past three decades have revealed how unsuspecting and innocent individuals had been
nabbed by the police, taken to the police-station and blinded in the name of justice (Faizan, TNN,
2010). Since this incident, several cases of blindings and violent mob and police vigilantism have
occurred in the same region – each time the incident is reported as an 'echo' of the Bhagalpur blindings
where an alleged perpetrator has been nabbed by the public and brought to justice independent of the
courts which are seen to be ineffective. Frequently, the perpetrator/victim is an individual who was
Paul 123
spotted near a school and was suspected of child-lifting. Most of the incidents result in the death or
grievous injury of the same. On many occasions, the victims are elderly, or women, and are often
isolated and poor individuals – accused of petty thefts like chain-snatching. In one case, a youth
suspected of chain-snatching was tied to a motorcycle by a policeman and dragged around publicly – a
video of the act went viral.
122
Here, the civic residents of towns in Bihar appear unwilling to remain passive and are increasingly
distrustful of the political regime. The police in turn, appear to be eager to break free from the criminal-
politician nexus and to win back the trust of the people, as it were. In these reported incidents, the
affective energies of the police appear to blend with those of the public that consists of family and
property-owning individuals (primarily men). While these collective acts are seen to reflect a
widespread civic apathy with the local state; the isolation, poverty and economic desperation of their
particular targets and victims remain unremarked. The prevailing view of Bihar as 'lawless' positioned
law enforcement as the only means of revitalizing the state and civic life. Thus, the change-initiatives
of figures like the Additional Director General of Police Abhay Anand who wished to target the
politician-criminal nexus specifically, were given free reign by the government led by Nitish Kumar
who became the Chief Minister of the state after Rabri Devi. One of the strategies Anand developed
was to aim at charging and convicting suspected criminals under the Arms Act for relatively minor
charges of illegal arms-possession rather than pursuing murder charges which were more difficult to get
convictions for.
123
The act also allowed the policemen themselves to act as witnesses, precluding the
problem of external witnesses turning hostile. The Bihar police also started taking a more proactive role
122 Yadav, J.P. “Bhagalpur: Bandho saale ko/Tie up the scoundrel!” The Indian Express. August 29
th
, 2007. See at:
http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/213215/
123 Kumar, Raksha. “Once Derided, Bihar’s Police Become Model for Other States ”. NYT, 16
th
April, 2013 & see,
Chakrabarti, Rajesh. “Unpacking the Bihar Story”. The Financial Express. October 3
rd
, 2013. Available at:
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/unpacking-the-bihar-story/1177809/0
Paul 124
in prosecution of guilty parties and pushing for speedy trials and adopting more 'scientific' methods of
detection by setting up forensic labs. As many as 10,000 individuals from various politically-connected
families were convicted. A policy-note on Bihar's recent turnaround, researched and published under
the aegis of Princeton University's “Innovations for Successful Societies” also concludes that CM
Kumar changed the fate of Bihar by first accepting that 'there can be no development without the rule
of law'.
124
An article published in the New York Times on the subject of this turnaround goes as follows:
For decades the sprawling state of Bihar, ... was something between a punch line and a cautionary
tale... The name captured everything that was wrong with the old India — a combustible mix of
crime, corruption and caste politics in a state crucible that stifled economic growth.... Lalu Prasad, a
wily populist politician whose party peddles a message of lower caste empowerment, ran the state
for 15 years from beneath a banyan tree. Under Mr. Prasad’s watch, criminal syndicates kidnapped,
extorted and robbed with impunity, protected by political leaders, or in some cases led by
politicians....
But [despite the current turnaround] Gulab Chand Ram, a landless Dalit farmer in Pawna, said the
government had done little to tackle the problems of the very poorest, those with nowhere to go on
the new roads and nothing to steal...
Mr. Gupta [of the Asian Development Research Institute] said. “Identity politics is strong,” he said.
“We hope that voters will choose development over caste. But in Bihar one never knows.”
(“Turnaround of Indian State Could Serve as a Model” By Lydia Polgreen, NYT, April, 10, 2010)
The author offers a weighty binary as an interpretive template for Bihar that counterposes caste,
identity-politics, poverty, crime, corruption against the secular thrust of development, law enforcement
and economic growth. Bihar is in this view, both synecdochic of India's past and exceptional in its
continued adherence to practices of caste – which, it is suggested, thrives on poverty and stagnation due
to lack of growth.
This binary points to the simultaneity of two kinds of transformations – the democratization of electoral
politics in India (in particular, UP and Bihar), as well as the 'structural reform' of the Indian state and
124 Mukherjee, Rohan. “Clearing the Jungle Raj: Bihar State, India, 2005-2009”.
http://www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties/policynotes/view.xml?id=130
Paul 125
economy – in short, “Liberalization”.
125
The latter has meant the emergence of new neoliberal
rationalities of governance and economic policy-making wherein the proper role of the state is to
facilitate the growth of a market-economy through the eradication of crime, de-regulation of industry,
the privatization of previously state-controlled economic sectors (telecommunications, information-
technology, transport and media), the allowance greater foreign equity, manufacturing, outsourcing and
marketing in India (especially consumer goods). The ascendancy of these rationalities created a
distinctly critical gaze toward the inefficient “Bimaru” (literally, 'sickly') states – especially Bihar and
its 'populist' regime – which was seen to be running flagrantly counter to the demands of fiscal
transparency (necessary for the growth of private industry), efficiency, capitalization.
126
The
metropolitan middle and upper classes that benefited disproportionately from Liberalization - as
employees in the flourishing corporate economies and as the courted consumers of new lifestyle-
industries - viewed these provincial regimes' pandering to caste issues as retrogressive. Gupta, the
representative of the Asian Development Research Institute quoted in the article excerpted above, is
expressing these rationalities. The mobilization of caste experience and identities in the state's politics
is characterized here as insincere ('peddling', 'wily'), divisive and self-evidently pre-modern ('from
under a banyan tree') – unlikely to actually help a rural and poor dalit like Gulab Chand. In continuing
to 'choose caste' the citizenry of Bihar betrays to the metropolitan mediasphere, its exceptional
125 These structural reforms were initiated formally in 1991 at the behest of the international Bretton-Woods institutions –
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (as with several other 'developing countries') where loans for
meeting the national debt were furnished on the condition of removing protections within the Indian economy and
opening it up to foreign equity, manufacturing as well as consumer goods. It also included structural reforms in the state
by downsizing and privatizing large parts of the public sector and bringing in greater efficiency and competition.
126 The term 'bimaru' was coined by Professor Ashish Bose of the Institute of Economic Growth in the 1980s to denote the
lack of economic development in the four Indian states: UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, in his report to
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. While many economic experts have argued for the removal of Bihar from this list based
on its high growth-rate (higher than the national average) in the past few years, Bose disagrees with the linking of
development with GDP growth-rates. “GDP growth is not enough”, The Times of India, November 28, 2010.
(http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-11-28/special-report/28213076_1_bimaru-states-gdp-growth-growth-
rate). May 14, 2012.
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recalcitrance to prevailing national and global socio-economic rationalities (exemplified here by the
Asian Development Research Institute) that newer mobilities of capital and labor facilitated by
Liberalization, as natural and inevitable antidotes to social structures like caste. As much scholarship
has pointed out, these neoliberal rationalities are unable or are unwilling to perceive the ways in which
different modes of capitalistic development have found structures of caste and caste-based distribution
of means of production as well as divisions of labor to be instrumental.
127
It is precisely the exploitative
intermeshing of the new neoliberal order with the prevailing socio-economic structures of caste and
class that have in turn granted a transformative potential to the realm of 'identity-politics' where these
systems may be politicized and contested.
As the product of a distant gaze upon a disavowed object (Bihar, caste as a socio-economic institution),
Jungle-Raj points to the multiple and mediated publics that exist in contemporary India, including –
metropolitan and diverse regional ones. Postcolonial thinkers like Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta
Kaviraj attributed the separation of these publics to the fundamental cleft informing India's passive
revolution, between the liberal-educated, upper-caste nationalist bourgeoisie and its 'unschooled' rural
masses. However, as media analyst and historian Arvind Rajagopal has demonstrated, this cleft is
exacerbated by a split between the metropolitan, English-language mediasphere and regional media
(most notably, in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar) that became evident through the 1990s over
Mandalization and the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign (or the right-wing Hindu-nationalist campaign for
staking claim over the birthplace of Lord Ram). Both these events were seen by the metropolitan
sphere as the heightening of regional and provincial practices of caste and religion. Prior to this, a rapid
127 For more on this aspect, see: Sukhdeo Thorat and Katherine Newman, eds., Blocked by Caste: Economic
Discrimination in Modern India ( New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2010); Ashwini Deshpande, The Grammar of
Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India ( New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2011); Debi Chatterjee,
Ideas and Movements Against Caste in India ( Delhi : Abhijeet Publications, 2010; Satish Deshpande, Contemporary
India : A Sociological View ( New Delhi : Penguin, 2004).
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proliferation of print media has occurred in northern India - with national newspapers penetrating
regional markets and instituting regional offices and editions; as well as upper caste-owned regional
business-houses expanding into print media by bringing out newspapers (Ninan 2007). With every few
districts having their own edition, in this expanded market, content came to be 'localized' and
readerships became discrete and insulated. Even as the national newspapers filtered out regional news
from its metropolitan editions, they were more likely to report incidents of caste-atrocities and
violence. The regional newspapers dominated by members from upper-caste elites negotiated the
prevailing political regimes in the states more carefully based on their caste-compositions, and would
gloss over atrocities against lower-castes while being hostile to the Mandal reforms (The Hoot Reader
6). Here, the Bharatiya Janata Party's Ramjanmabhoomi campaign gained traction as a move to unify
'the Hindu vote' after the divisiveness of Mandal.
Rajagopal examines the differential coverage of the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign in the metropolitan
English press and the regional Hindi press to underscore the crisis of interpretation that occurred
wherein the former 'conferred [a near-absolute] unintelligibility' upon the 'atavistic' campaign and
blamed the latter for fanning popular sentiments. With its emphasis on 'truth-based', 'objective'
reportage of events in the distant provincial hinterland in the 'master-language of English' (disavowing
its long legacy as an instrument of the colonial and thereafter the technocratic elites), the English media
displayed a naïve understanding of the relationship between narrative, truth and power. Entrapped by
its belief in its own secular modernity, it remained divorced from the cultural symbols and discourses
of the movement, isolating the neoliberal-nationalist and economic face of the BJP from its political
one and embracing the former. By contrast, the Hindi news-reports were written very differently – 'in
fluent and racy prose' (Rajagopal 222), approaching the events in a familiar way, employing religious
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forms of expression to convey 'its inner modes and meanings' (ibid.). These aspects enabled the media
as well as its readers to remain aware of the function of the narrative, and of power-relations between
the state, political parties, newspapers and their readers. Rajagopal argues that the mutual separation of
these mediated publics and the persistent non-engagement of the metropolitan sphere with the
heterogeneous movement 'created the movement as it would become – closed, implacable, and
impervious to reason' (226), leading to the eventual demolition of the Mosque at Ram's alleged
'birthplace' and the subsequent waves of communal violence. Crucially, in Bihar, the rath-yatra
(ceremonial national drive for popular support) led by the BJP leader, L.K. Advani was checked by the
reigning Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav who had risen to power with the mandate of the lower
castes and poor Muslims – instantiating the conflict between this new religious imaginary and the
groundswell of the lower castes. These complex dimensions of regional politics were not engaged by
the reportage on Yadav's political leadership and the practice of caste-politics of Bihar in the
metropolitan sphere, which wholly dismissed Yadav's complex legacy when President's rule was
imposed in the state in 2005.
The social text of Jungle-Raj built upon a growing metropolitan and elite distrust of electoral processes,
and foregrounded crime as the primary aspect of the regimes elected to power from the 1990s till the
mid-2000s in Bihar. It also constructed as Bihar's public as a collective of private citizens whose
families, property and hard-earned professional success and growth was being jeopardized by these
regimes. Moreover, presented the socio-political realities of the state as a stand-off between this unitary
public, corrupt state administration and politicians, and law-enforcement. The perception of a complex
political scene through this lens yielded a great degree of self-evidence to the new rationalities of
governance. While not wholly inaccurate, they foreclosed the recognition of other aspects of the same
Paul 129
political scene within which electoral processes as well as civil administrations had been the site for
significant social contests over access to social and political power. In the next section I would like to
briefly outline some of the ways in which postcolonial scholarship across the social sciences has
reframed the Bihar within colonial and postcolonial history of caste, power and the state – overcoming
the tendency of Jungle-Raj to disaggregate caste-based electoral politics (or 'identity-politics') from the
changing historical contingencies of socio-political power in India.
Reframing Bihar: Obscured Genealogies of the Present
Even as the 'passive revolution' in post-Independence India severely curtailed the nationalist
bourgeoisie's agenda (led by the Congress Party) of redistributing land and wealth, middle classes
emerged from the backward and lower castes through the decades. However, the temporal lag between
their emergence in south India (where it began during the late colonial era) and north India (as late as
the 1980s in Bihar) shows how the politicization of caste occurred differently across the nation.
128
And
this is also the genealogy of Lalu Yadav. His rise was preceded by a now-obscured history of
considerable and often violent mobilization of the lower caste and the landless rural poor since the
1960s by socialist and communist organizations. Maoist Naxalites waged the violent 'Spring Thunder'
campaign in rural Bihar and Bengal from 1967-1972, during which they attacked affluent upper-caste
landowners, demanded the redistribution of land, provision of minimum wage to laborers (who were
also lower-caste) and asserted their right to dignity. Redistribution of land was adopted as a goal by the
reformist-socialist Janata Party led by individuals like J.P. Narayan and Karpoori Thakur – who
initiated the non-violent 'Land-grab movement' led. Lalu Yadav emerged as a charismatic youth leader
128Steven Wilkinson has shown how while backward and ex-untouchable castes had begun to politically mobilize
themselves as an increasingly influential anti-Brahman political bloc in the Madras Presidency in south India at
the beginning of the twentieth century by petitioning the colonial government for reservation of seats in
educational institutions, higher and lower level administrative jobs.
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who was affiliated with Thakur. As Arvind Sinha points out, land-reforms that the central leadership of
Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party (which had enjoyed the patronage of the upper-castes) enacted at
the time in the name of “Garibi Hatao”/ “Remove Poverty”, were not elite gifts to the downtrodden, but
necessitated by these political mobilizations and were intended as a tactical strategy of placation and
co-option (Sinha 1996). This led the upper-caste elite to diversify their investments in avenues besides
land in order to maintain their social, economic and political influence.
However, over a period of time the Naxal movement weakened in Bihar while the socialist agitators got
absorbed into electoral politics – so that the issue of land reforms was dropped in favor of seeking
reservation of seats for backward castes and ex-untouchables in government jobs and legislatures.
Karpoori Thakur's government that was in power from 1977-1980, implemented the recommendations
of the Mungeri Lal Commission and introduced large-scale reservations for backward castes (OBCs) in
the state (Ninan 2007). This increasingly influential bloc of OBCs had mobilized 25-30% of the
electorate by the late 1980s. Lalu Yadav made this bloc even more viable by bringing in the support of
the Muslim minorities who were disillusioned by the Congress's failure to protect them during the
Bhagalpur communal riots of 1989. Yadav also displayed surprising success in preventing communal
violence after the controversial demolition of the Babri Masjid by the Hindu-nationalist BJP supporters
in 1992, and even halted BJP leader L.K. Advani's rath-yatra (a nation-wide procession to whip up
right-wing sentiments prior to the general election) by arresting him, even as violence exploded all over
the country. Social scientist Yogendra Yadav has called the emergence of this viable non-Congress
political formtion consisting of middle castes of the state, a 'second wave of democratisation' in India.
Since then, others have observed the emergence of a 'Third wave of democratization' with the rise in
the neighboring states of Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Jharkhand of parties like the Bahujan Samaj
Paul 131
Party who have sought the mandate of the ex-untouchables, landless peasantry, tribals and women in
the name of the 'bahujan samaj' or 'a broad coalition of plebeians'. The constitution of these new
political blocs by non-elite groups received a further fillip with the institution of electoral democracy as
well as reservations at the grassroots-level of village administrations. The appeals to caste-identity and
experience within the realm of electoral politics has been described by scholars like Lucia Michelutti
and Kanchan Chandra as the 'vernacularization' of the Western liberal norms of democracy.
Yogendra Yadav has argued that this emergence of new political blocs 'should not be seen either simply
as a radicalisation of democracy or a plain degeneration' (Yadav 1996) because even though a veritable
'second wave' of democratization may have occurred with electoral politics and the politicization of
backwardness spreading to 'the peripheries both spatial and social' – to rural Bihar and the ex-
untouchables; there has been a simultaneous shrinking of all forms of political participation to electoral
participation with many new but few transformative possibilities and an erosion of trust in all political
parties. Arvind Sinha argues that an apex-bottom power equation in the state has been replaced with an
apex-middle-bottom equation, where power and the stream of 'development funds' has been
appropriated by a new class consisting of: contractors, government officials, professionals,
functionaries of the new ruling class parties that are composed of upwardly-mobile middle castes. A
new mode of exploitation has been built over the old one, which Sinha describes as 'bureaucratic
feudalism'. The resulting collapse of institutions of education, health, electricity, housing and other
state-run civic amenities has necessitated the rise of privatized sectors of the same which can be
accessed to different degrees by the affluent and the middle classes.
Recently, anthropologists have looked at the workings of the everyday state – or the local institutions
and individuals through which ordinary people encounter the state. This interface between people and
Paul 132
the everyday state includes encounters in the precincts of local administrations and police stations
where individuals go with petitions for access to state-given entitlements, health services or judicial
redress. It also includes their negotiation of elected and aspiring-to-be elected figures for tangible social
or economic benefits. In Chandra and Michelutti's analyses of electoral practices surrounding parties
such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in UP, and in Gupta's analyses of discourses
of corruption around national housing-programs for Scheduled Caste and below-income individuals,
we see individuals from such backgrounds negotiate electoral candidates, political parties, hostile local
administrations as well as higher bureaucracies, strategically and astutely, often being partially
successful in claiming the promised benefits.
129
Craig Jeffrey and Jens Lerche argue that these
leaderships have demonstrated that while '[there are a] range of ways in which rural elites may co-opt
and colonize the state... SCs [or scheduled caste persons] in the areas in which [they] have worked have
come to believe: that the state can and must be made to work in the interests of the rural poor' (Jeffrey
& Lerche 109). These scholarly interventions into the dynamic history of caste and class-based social
contestation have brought forth the essentially ambivalent and multidimensional nature of recent
transformations in the practice of electoral politics in Bihar as well as the emergence of newer caste
elites. It is precisely the duplicitous nature of these changes, the repertoire of creative tactics of survival
that range from mutual appeasement, hard bargaining to partial complicity, that are denied by the
mythology of Jungle Raj.
The World through the Provincial Cop-film
The provincial cop-film engages the social text of Jungle-Raj and elaborates it into a cinematic terrain
upon which a series of encounters occur between the metropolitan cop, the provincial political elite,
129 Gupta specifically examines the implementation of the Indira Awaas Yojana or the 'Indira Housing Program' directed at
landless harijans/dalits, and the Nirbal Varg Awaas Yojana or the 'Weaker Sections Housing Program' directed for
individuals below a certain level of income.
Paul 133
corrupt local state and the provincial public. The three films discussed here – Shool, Gangaajal and
Aakrosh, present the provincial small-town as a social landscape that is remote from the metropolitan
and is contiguous to, but distinct from the rural. This distinction from a rural agricultural presence – we
see no peasants in the first two films – is crucial to the construction of the provincial public in them. In
Aakrosh, by contrast, it is precisely the presence of landless and impoverished dalit agricultural
laborers that foregrounds the violent maintenance of caste/class hierarchies and makes the notion of a
unitary provincial public untenable. The genre locates these encounters across two different
temporalities – which I term as 'the everyday' and 'the climactic'. The 'temporality of the everyday'
prevails typically in the first half of the films where everyday life and survival under coercive political
regimes of the provincial small-town are shown. These sections render in great detail how corrupt and
criminal elites have penetrated and determined the working of provincial local law-enforcement, civil
administration, local industry as well as public life. As I demonstrate subsequently, they also dramatize
tense encounters between normative ideas of modernity, state and governance - as represented by the
constitution-abiding metropolitan cop on the one hand, and the creative and adaptive lived practices of
the local state-officials as well as some ordinary residents of the small-town. Frequently the 'everyday'
sequences illuminate practices of 'corruption' and bribery as amiable and pragmatic practices of
survival, even as acts of consideration – where there is a mutual awareness of the other's interests,
constraints and compulsions. By contrast, 'temporality of the climactic' that takes over in the second
half of the films, tackles the question of how a provincial public and the local law-enforcement may
disaggregate themselves from the prevailing political regime to self-mobilize. It explores legal and
extra-legal possibilities of social change. The three films discussed in this chapter, answer this question
in different ways – in each case, offering a lived experience of oppression, rage as well as vision of
change. I argue that through these distinct temporalities, the provincial cop-film offers a double vision
Paul 134
of the perceived realities of Jungle-Raj as well as the prevailing rationalities of change and this vision
troubles our certainties about both. In the field of optometry, double vision refers to an optical 'fault'
that causes one to see two objects instead of one. I use this term to describe a similar visual/interpretive
effect that is at work in the provincial cop-film where we perceive Jungle-Raj, its agencies and socio-
political practices through multiple and often irreconcilable images, as well as multiple and
crisscrossing gazes. Instead of being a 'fault', this effect allows the genre to both work as an influential
cinematic and cultural heuristic for contemporary Bihar and to pluralize its perceptions where center-
to-periphery norms about politics, society, ethics and governance are set in counterpoint against the
embedded and more contingent experience of subsistence, rage and protest.
This visual and interpretive effect of the genre offers a crucial point of contrast with previous
representations of Bihar in cinema, in particular the Indian New Wave cinema, which have tended to be
indexical in their realism rather than dramatic-realist. The director of Gangaajal, Prakash Jha has made
numerous films including documentaries and feature films set in Bihar and the Hindi heartland at large.
However, his subsequent filmography has shown a shift in his representational approach toward Bihar
– where he has moved away from making films that have worked with the realism and
developmentalist aesthetic of the New Indian cinema, and toward the more dramatic idiom and mass-
address of political dramas like: Apaharan/Kidnapping (2005) which tackles the issue of educated-
unemployed youths in the state turning to crime), Chakravyuh/Labyrinth (2012) which deals with the
Maoist Naxal movement in central India, and Aarakshan/Reservations (2011) which tackles conflicts
between students over the reservation of seats for backward classes in educational institutions. These
films approach the dystopic provincial through conscientious middle class protagonists set in
contemporary Bihar in films. Gangaajal represents the beginning of this changed treatment of Bihar in
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Jha's films and its double vision of provincial political cultures contrasts heavily with the indexical
thrust of his first feature film – Daamul/Bonded until Death (1985) that had explored the condition of
lower caste agricultural labor in the state and won great critical acclaim.
130
Daamul was set in rural
Bihar and it showed the plight of landless agricultural laborers who faced economic exploitation as
well as the inability to migrate to other states in search of better livelihood. The film depicted rural
Bihar with unforgiving realism as a hermetic universe with its stark poverty, violence of the upper-caste
landlords as well as the lack of judicial redress for its lower caste protagonists. Its representational
approach conveyed a singular vision of the unrelentingly exploitative nature of historical structures of
caste, power and wealth; and the violent ways in which challenges to these structures have been
squelched by the reigning elites. Provincial Bihar when seen later through the double vision of the
provincial cop-film emerges as more multi-faceted in its everyday practices of corruption and in the
vignettes of both civic passivity as well as vigilantism.
In some ways, this representational shift from stark realism about structural issues of caste, land
distribution and oppression, to a dramatic realism about the ethically ambivalent terrain of everyday
dealings between the local state and ordinary folks within a patronage democracy, reflects the shift that
Yogendra Yadav and Arvind Sinha discuss – from a broader form of socio-political action demanding
fundamental redistribution of land and overhaul of caste-practices, to a narrower focus since the 1980s
on the legislative politics of reservations to redress caste inequality and accessing developmental funds
from the state. In Shool and Gangaajal, the ordinary folks are not identified specifically by caste, and
the one exception is used as an example for invalidating caste as a basis for political mobilization by
historically subordinated sections of society. Class-divides are also erased as the ordinary folks appear
to represent a provincial middle class – that is frequently framed in marketplaces and residential
130 While both films won National Awards, Daamul does not have the same cultural recognition as Gangaajal.
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localities – that are civic spaces as well as spaces of consumption, commerce and leisure. If the rural
society of Bihar in Daamul was constituted of a small violent, land and produce monopolizing elite and
a large class of impoverished and landless laborers, the shift to the provincial small-town in the
provincial cop-film substitutes this social dyad with the triangulated schema of the local state,
metropolitan cop and the ordinary folks/provincial middle class. Caste appears here solely and
significantly in the shape of the new and corrupt political elite of the 'Yadavs'. As this genre erases the
structural divides thematized in the earlier films, it also opens up a cinematic terrain that can explore
the murkier daily practices of making-do as well as subterranean desires for violent change. However,
as I demonstrate later, Aakrosh complicates the formation of this provincial public by thematizing the
condition of dalits in a provincial cinematic space that has is contiguous to the rural. In exploring the
survival and rage of provincial society in ways that make them 'familiar' the genre attempts to bridge
the cleft between metropolitan and regional spheres discussed by Arvind Rajagopal.
The Temporality of the Everyday: From Shool to Gangaajal
Eshwar Nivas' Shool opens with a night-sequence in which Bachchu Yadav, the local MLA of Motihari
– a small-town in Bihar, is tipped off about his party giving the ticket to contest the forthcoming
election to a rival candidate. At dawn, Yadav intrudes into the house of the rival and unable to persuade
him to withdraw from the election, Bachchu stabs him to death brutally and with infantile glee. In the
next scene, a meritorious and honest police-inspector by the name of Samar Pratap Singh arrives in
Motihari with his young wife and daughter. He is immediately alienated by its casually-committed
crimes, corruption and lax police who placate gangs of politically-connected youths – giving them free
reign over Motihari. Samar confronts one such gang as they harass a woman at the local market.
Meanwhile, Yadav returns to Motihari having won the election despite his ineptitude and sexual
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predations. Very quickly Samar gets on the wrong side of him when he interrupts one of his loud
parties and rebuffs the Director General of the Police (DGP) who is one of Yadav's guests. Different
false assault and murder charges are pinned on him by the Yadav-DGP combine, and an encounter with
Yadav's men in the marketplace leaves his daughter dead. Samar and his wife are forced to flee from
their home. Samar refuses to be quelled even as his wife commits suicide out of grief. In the film's final
climax, an exasperated and isolated Samar goes to the police-station to get a weapon, then he shoots his
corrupt colleague Hussain. Thereafter, he goes to the legislative assembly where he unleashes an angry
tirade on the frustration of the common man with the political system. And as a final gesture, he shoots
Yadav dead and shouts, “Jai Hind!”
The film's narrative of relentless crisis, fear, loss, rage and impotence, is punctuated with short intervals
wherein plays out the temporality of everyday life in Motihari. In these intervals we glimpse the
particular kind of equilibrium ordinary folks of the town have struck with the local law-enforcement
and politicians. These intervals also dramatize the social being of these three entities through the use of
humor, folk entertainment, song and music. Upon his arrival in Motihari, Samar gets into an argument
with a porter at the train-station when the latter tries to overcharge, and the policeman-in-charge who is
unaware of Samar's position, sides with the porter from whom he presumably gets a weekly
commission. Later, as Samar relates the incident to his colleague Tiwari, and justifies the suspension of
the policeman, Tiwari laughs and says, “Let it go. You should have told him that you are a cop. Let him
go, he's going to retire in five years, has four daughters to marry off. Do show some humdardi
(empathy).” While Samar insists that who he was should in no way have determined the outcome of the
incident, Tiwari rubbishes the notional equality of all individuals in the paradigm of liberal law. On the
plain of actual social existence, who you are or are not determines your social experience. Tiwari
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suggests that even the perpetrator and his offense must be seen in their embeddedness within a set of
(patriarchal) social relations, obligations and compulsions, and as such have claims upon our sympathy.
In a subsequent scene crowds gather at the train-station to welcome Yadav after his election-victory.
They pay him obeisance and offer their infants to be blessed and named by him, while he eyes the
women in the crowd. Ordinary folks, depicted in these post-election scenes with their strategic silence,
capitulation or pandering are seen to go to great lengths to cultivate the patronage of the ruling
politician. Significantly, the film takes us from the use of lethal force during the declaration of party
candidates pre-election, to the post-election reality of Yadav's unchallenged reign. The ordinary folks
are never shown as voters who negotiate campaigning and elections strategically, and this remains a
structural elision within the genre, marking the limits of its exploration of provincial political worlds.
Even as the genre is explicitly located in the historical and political horizon of the democratization of
caste in electoral politics (emphasizing the terror of the Yadavs in Bihar), it also resists the complex
shifts within the regional polity and its electorates that this necessarily implies. Instead, by showing the
terrain of provincial politics to be wholly determined by violence and crime, Shool foregrounds an
'activist' law-enforcement as the sole mode for revitalizing 'governance'.
In Shool, these intervals that depict a precarious equilibrium between the powerful and the lay-person
are fleeting and are altogether overwhelmed by the depiction of Yadav's regime of terror. At the end of
his lone and ultimately self-destructive fight, Samar calls for those at the apex of the state legislature to
heed the plight of the 'common man' – a generic individual who belongs to an undifferentiated civic
body. Gangaajal further elongates both the temporalities – of the everyday and the climactic, to trigger
different kinds of ambivalences through them. To relate the plot of the film briefly, the film begins with
the assignation of Amit Kumar, a meritorious and morally-upright superintendent of police, to Tejpur,
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which we are told is a notoriously 'jungli' district of Bihar. Much like Samar in Shool, Amit undergoes
an educative experience in Tejpur where he finds the entire policing apparatus to be in the tutelage of
the unofficial 'kings' of Tejpur – the father and son duo of Sadhu Yadav and Sundar Yadav. The Yadavs
run extortion-rackets through dacoits, throttle local industry by forcibly seizing lucrative tenders from
the local administration, also help allied industrialists with labor conflicts, and most egregiously, they
pose a sexual threat (like Bachchu Yadav in Shool) to the town's women. Amit takes a dark view of the
police-inspectors in Tejpur who despite being capable, avoid pursuing the criminal cases of kidnapping,
murder, embezzlement registered against the Yadavs. The Yadavs and the policemen attempt to win
over Amit by throwing false achievements his way but he refuses to be compromised.
Gradually Amit begins to revive the police-inspectors' sense of pride in their duty, as well as the towns-
folk's belief in the police as he puts up a resolute opposition to the Yadavs and their henchmen. Kumar
prompts the grief-stricken widowed mother of a young woman (named Apurva) whom Sundar has
abducted to pursue legal action. But Sundar frees Apurva to make her appear in court at the last minute.
Relieved to get back her daughter and unwilling to antagonize Sundar, the mother withdraws her
charge. The Yadavs' goons try to punish the townsfolk for supporting legal action against Sundar by
shutting down the market and destroying property but Amit single-handedly resists them and takes
them into custody. Disenchanted with due process, he tells his inspectors to not register the arrests and
decides to take the night to think over his options. That fateful night, in Amit's absence, a fight breaks
out between the policemen and the goons at the police-station as the latter taunt them about being
disloyal to their true masters (the Yadavs). Galvanized by Amit's courage, the inspectors attack the
detainees, and in a re-enactment of the Bhagalpur blindings, gouge out their eyes with spokes and pour
car-acid into them – claiming to cleanse Tejpur with this 'holy water'. Subsequently, when a group of
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youths verbally harass some college-going women in public, crowds gather to chase down the youths
and blind them in a similar manner. In another incident a gathering of dissatisfied men from the town
turns into a mob and raids the neighboring police-station, meting out 'justice' to other detainees who
they believe will not be punished by the courts. The incidents provoke outrage in the local and
metropolitan media, a legal committee is instituted by the state government to inquire into the blindings
that are framed as human rights violations, while the Tejpur public begins to unite around this
consensual mode of justice that it claims is 'appropriate for Tejpur'. Even though the people see Amit as
a hero who has transformed Tejpur, he is conflicted about the blindings and takes responsibility for
them before the committee and prepares for a punitive transfer out of Tejpur. He conducts his own
independent inquiry during which ordinary men and women explain the need for extreme justice in the
town. In the final climax of the film, Sundar interrupts Apurva's wedding and shoots her mother and
groom. Determined to thwart him, Apurva stabs herself and with her death the stunned crowd
transmutes into a bloodthirsty mob that chases Sundar and Sadhu through the streets. Amit tries to
prevent the duo from escaping while protecting them from the crowd, but in a bid to flee the duo
impale themselves lethally.
Gangaajal elaborates the temporality of the everyday through a more prolonged arrival sequence than
in Shool, in which we see Amit travel in plainclothes from Bihar's capital Patna to his new outpost,
Tejpur, using various modes of transport. If the road from the city to the village has figured repeatedly
as a chronotope in postcolonial Indian cinema, depicting the metropolitan subject or the Five Year Plan
hero (discussed in Chapter 1) as the harbinger of modernity, technology and development, the journey
through/to the provincial as a distinctive cinematic space, reorients the conception of this journey,
undermining its teleology and assumptions. Amit's journey is riddled with interruptions and unpleasant
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encounters with various individuals who constitute unholy alliances between local law-enforcement,
politicians and industrialists. While the interruptions confirm the provincial as a place lacking in the
efficiency of modern infrastructure and amenities, they also reframe this 'lack' within the particular
contingencies of the places traversed during this journey. Aboard his train, Amit encounters two co-
passengers who are industrialists based in Tejpur. Evincing a casual curiosity, the men ask him how
much he paid for the 'prized' posting of Tejpur with its steady stream of 'commissions' and bribes. As he
takes charge, Amit is alienated by his corrupt superior, the Assistant Director-General (or ADG) of
Police who boasts about his extensive police, political and social network. The ADG recommends the
skills of Tejpur's deputy inspector Bhurelal who knows 'how to keep everybody happy'. When Amit's
car breaks down en route to Tejpur, Amit uses the opportunity to conduct a surprise-check on the local
Shikarpur police-station. Here, the sense of an alternate aural universe is developed through the use of a
folk-song in dialect which plays as Amit's car pulls up. At this station, Amit is dismayed to find the
station-in-charge Pura Chowdhury receiving a massage from two of his subordinates, while others are
seen bathing or cooking in the station's courtyard. Seeing Amit, the mustachioed Bhurelal jumps up in
his underwear, his corpulent body glistening with oil, and salutes his superior. A flummoxed Amit asks
him, “You're in this condition, what if some dacoits had attacked the station to steal your weapons?”
Bhurelal's ingenuous reply, “Why would they attack us when they have better weapons than we do?”
generates spectatorial mirth even as Amit remains stern. He discovers that the station has run out of
stationery as well as its diesel-funds to run its official jeep. Bhurelal assures him that these scarcities do
not straiten the functioning of the station, since he notes down all FIRs on a rough scrap of paper in his
pocket, and borrows vehicles from local business-owners to patrol areas.
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The local businessmen appear soon after to offer Amit a reception too luxurious for the decrepit station.
A visibly upset Amit leaves the station on a public bus but this is not the end of his woes. The bus-
conductor refuses to charge Amit for a ticket since he is a 'bade saheb' (senior official) and committing
such a mistake would invite a beating from his boss. As the bus approaches a security check-point, the
conductor is confident of speeding through since the 'saheb' is on-board. Amit insists the bus be halted
in obedience of the law, but when the security-check is conducted without any explanation to the
passengers, Amit walks up to the officer-in-charge, sub-inspector Mangni Ram to inquire about the
reason. Lounging back with his legs up, Ram does not answer Amit's question and instead asks the
“pant-suit” (classifying him as an outsider who is unaware of the social protocols of the place) where
he is from and where he is going. Amit finds Ram's questions to be 'irrelevant' and repeats his own
query. Enraged, Ram insults him and tells him that his rank gives him the power to ask questions and
does not require him to answer any. Order is restored when Amit's official driver arrives on the scene
and reveals Amit's true identity. The sequence ends with Ram begging for forgiveness at Amit's feet,
while the latter coolly orders him to submit a written statement of his actions – a gesture that would in
effect make Ram lose his job.
Gangaajal presents the 'problem of the provincial' through a dramatic ethnography of a mutual
encounter between two polarized modes of socio-political being – the constitution-abiding
metropolitan-cop in Amit, and local figures of law-enforcement, such as Deputy Bhurelal and Inspector
Ram, who represent, in Sudipta Kaviraj's terms the 'vernacularization' or the 'reinterpretation beyond
recognition' of the constitutional at the lowest ends of an elaborate bureaucracy owing to vital
contingencies (Rethinking 91). The double vision of the sequence lies in its depiction of Amit's
trenchant disapproval of the station's state of decrepitude and impropriety (“You are laying here like
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this?”), as well as its recognition of the adaptive survival of its individual employees within local
patronage networks. In Amit's view, the police-station is simultaneously a space characterized by the
lack of needed resources and rules governing the proper use of official time and space, as well as a
space of excess of comfort for the senior officers, patronage and interference from the local elites. But
the dramatic charge of the scene derives from the pitting of Amit's view against that of the placatory,
good-natured yet ingenuous Chowdhury. In the interplay of these two modes of social being lies the
film's double vision upon the contemporary provincial. Chowdhury illuminates the spatial and social
practices at the station - of cultivating patronage with the business-class, bribery and strategic
ingratiation with local politicians as adaptive, skilled and resourceful competencies that enable in their
functioning within the paucities and political contingencies of a patronage-democracy (“I maintain a
good relationship with everyone so that we face no problems!”). Moreover, they allow individuals like
him to access the security and status of public employment, to supplement negligible legal earnings and
to pay off older debts. Or, as in the case of the bus-conductor, these strategic gestures simply help them
retain their jobs. As visual narratives, these sequences convey these two modes of being as contrasting
sets of bodily idioms of postures, attitudes, dialect. A lounging Mangni Ram with his feet up behind the
road-blockade and berating the new 'pant-suit' in town, Bhurelal responding to Amit's tirade affably,
creates a vital and vibrant interplay with Amit's more straitlaced social presence and outlook, the
repeated stiffening of his jaw and his silent glares.
After his suspension, the rest of the police department surreptitiously provides financial support to
Mangni Ram. Subsequently we learn that Ram is from a Scheduled Caste and was able to get his job by
appealing to the patronage of Sadhu Yadav and paying a huge bribe which he must now pay off by
extracting small bribes through the (ab)use of his job. Presumably 'emboldened' by Mandalization, Ram
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complains that he is being targeted by Amit because of his caste, but the charge is dismissed by Amit as
well as other characters unfounded. Through this episode, the question of caste disparities and
affirmative action is raised only to be immediately neutralized as being irrelevant to the problem of
'Jungle-Raj' except as a manipulative and false charge. Yet, Ram does briefly open up a consideration
of the structural disparities that chronically-poor, landless lower-caste individuals experience when
trying to leverage with potential patrons and access the benefits of salaried employment in the public
sector. Amit's notions about the anonymous citizen's rights irrespective of his/her caste, class, gender
and rank, as well as the impersonality of official roles and actions, are defamiliarized within the
political hierarchies, contingencies and scarcities of Tejpur.
The terrain of everyday subsistence in Motihari and Tejpur is presented in these sequences through
figures who occupy the lowest rung of the provincial police such as Mangni Ram and Pura Chowdhury,
as well as by figures who must deal with them everyday, like the bus-conductor or porter. These figures
represent, what the film posits as, the fuzzy boundary between the local state and the provincial public.
The temporality of the everyday explores the contexts for their abuse of power and maintains them as
recuperable to processes of correction and social change. In Gangaajal, Chowdhury and Ram go on to
participate visibly in collective vigilantism. However, this representation of 'ordinary folks' and the
everyday state remains structured by the blindnesses that also structure the larger split between
metropolitan and provincial publics. The cinematic exploration of the complex embeddedness of these
individuals within the multi-tiered structure of the local state and related elites of the town, stops short
of exploring their complex electoral agency in the ascendancy of this political elite in the first place.
This erasure is related to the genre's and Jungle-Raj's larger denial of how caste-class operate as
structural vectors in Indian socio-political life and as vital axes for mobilization. The denial of how the
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provincial public may consist of conflicting caste-blocs emerging from a longer history of caste
dominance and contestations, enables its the subsequent coalescence and mobilization as a unitary
social formation in the climactic sequences.
The Provincial Public in the Temporality of Crisis
In the temporality of crisis and climax the emphasis shifts from everyday modes of survival within
Jungle-Raj to detailing the most egregious aspect of the prevailing political regime – the physical and
sexual threat to the women of the provincial town. In Shool, the roving eye of MLA Bachcha Yadav is
established early on, together with his complete ineptness for his job – in a scene he reveals his lack of
understanding of how electricity is generated in a parliamentary debate on the building of a
hydroelectric dam. While sexual predation, illiteracy, greed and corruption become linked as
interrelated aspects of Yadav's rule, it is specifically an act of sexual harassment against a woman in the
marketplace by a group of politically-connected men that elicits Samar's response of stringent law-
enforcement. Similarly, in Gangaajal, Sundar Yadav and his men commit several different offenses
including violently assaulting a civil servant to seize a construction-tender, orchestrate a bomb-blast
next to a school, vandalize a market; but the violent mobilization of the local police as well as public
occurs around the Yadavs' derailment of the legal trial of Sundar on the charge of abducting Apurva.
Subsequent blindings are provoked by incidents of 'eve-teasing' and retribution from prior unpunished
rapes.
This narrowing focus on actual or anticipated sexual violence propels the film firmly into the
temporality of crisis and pushes toward a spectacular climax. It is in this distinctive temporality that the
genre explores the town's legal and extra-legal 'solutions' to Jungle-Raj. In Shool, Samar's incrimination
in false charges and the decimation of his family render impossible any recourse to law-enforcement or
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the courts of law. The lack of these avenues and an absent civic body as a counter-force is underscored
in a crucial sequence where Samar and Manjari are forced by Yadav's men to flee from home, through
the empty and dark alleys of Motihari, chased by the shadows of the goons. Samar's public execution of
Bachcha Yadav in the state legislature is set up by the film as his only alternative. By contrast,
Gangaajal dramatizes the 'awakening' of the local police and the provincial public as they go through
the long and unpredictable process of appealing to legal redress. The several moves and counter-moves
by the corrupt political elite (the Yadavs) and the police (mobilized by Amit), initiates the public on a
complex moral and political trajectory. This pronounced and unpredictable political trajectory is crucial
to the film's mobilization of critical ambivalence toward both, the 'toothless' inadequacy of
constitutional concerns and structures of redress; as well as forms of populist disaffection.
The push for the devising of extra-legal modes of change is generated in Gangaajal when the judiciary
repeatedly proves to be inefficacious. In the first instance, Sundar and his allies in the police terrorize a
civil engineer he assaults for a government tender and prevent him from filing a complaint. Similarly
Sunday's trial for the abduction of Apurva is derailed through a forced appearance of Apurva herself
and the coercion of her mother to drop the criminal lawsuit. When the case is dismissed by the court,
Sundar's followers chant his praises outside the court. This neutralization of the courts and the public
re-assertion of dominance by the Yadavs creates the momentum for Amit's violent handling of Sundar's
goons, and repeated episodes of blindings of alleged criminals and detainees by police officials and
civilian mobs who feel 'neutered' by the Yadavs. When Sundar retaliates against the custodial blinding
of his men by killing sub-inspector Bachcha Yadav (the primary participant in the blinding), and the
Tejpur police begins a massive hunt for him and his men, capturing and publicly beating several of
them. As the take Sundar into custody before he can get anticipatory bail, the gathered Tejpur public
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chants praises for Amit and the police. The facility of anticipatory bail is representative of a judicial
system that is full of manipulable loop-holes – which the public considers the police to have rightly
circumvented. Popular support for Amit and the Tejpur police grows further when the prosecution gets
Sundar remanded to ten more days in custody during which his custodial torture continues. Upon
release, Sundar interrupts Apurva's wedding provoking her to committing suicide as a final act of
protest. This galvanizes the stunned crowd which chases Sundar and Sadhu, despite Amit's plea for
humaneness, to their deaths.
The metropolitan media and civil society with their concerns about the violation of the human rights of
the tortured detainees, are shown to offer an inadequate interpretive horizon for the events in Tejpur.
The inquiry-committee set up by the Home Minister in response to these concerns, works with
'universal' discourses of human rights and upholds the liberal-democratic norm of the state's
constitutional monopoly over legitimate violence. With these approaches, the state appears to be
thoroughly disconnected from the 'ground realities' of Tejpur, its co-opted local state and the town's
experience of lawlessness and oppression. Through the shifting ethical valences of these sequences, the
provincial small-town emerges as an exceptional space to which the normative modes of a democratic
nation-state are inadequate. But precisely through the dramatization of its exceptional conditions
(complete lawlessness), in the temporality of the climactic, this cinematic provincial is shown to
represent the particular 'excesses and horrors' of Indian democracy (its susceptibility to criminal
muscle-power). This elaboration of the provincial as exceptional as well as representative of what are
positioned as germane aspects of the Indian polity, mobilizes ambivalences with respect to both, extra-
legal civic forms of violence and vigilantism as well as the notions of 'impartial' law (enforcement and
judiciary) upon which the modern nation-state is founded. The former elide the hierarchies of social
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and political power that structure the nation's riven body-politic upon which they are instituted. The
extra-legal and violent forms of civic protest on the other hand, lay bare the perverse excesses that a
mobilized mass protest can be susceptible to.
The inadequacies of institutions in addressing this socio-political terrain are emphasized when Amit's
independent inquiry in the blindings leads him to the homes and localities of the victims. There he
encounters aggrieved families as well as other residents who support the blindings. While the wife of
one of the victims wails at the sight of her blinded and bandaged husband, another woman directs Amit
to her barely sensible daughter – who had been attacked on her wedding night by the blinded man, her
groom was killed and she was raped. The woman and others assert the justness of the blindings and
refuse to cooperate with Amit's inquiry, insisting that Tejpur 'has finally awakened'. The unsteady walk
of the injured, blinded and shaken men, and the equally bodily testimony of the alleged rape-victim
present the double vision of the film's temporality of crisis – wherein the vigilantist action appears at
once as 'awakening' and 'degeneration' – and presents an interpretive challenge to the viewer by
simultaneously evoking revulsion from and emotional identification with the angry public.
Amit is increasingly unmoored from the certainty of his naïve pronouncement in the opening scene of
the film: “Kayde se chalnewale ko koi taqleef nahi hoti”/“If one follows the rules, one has nothing to
worry about”). He is both repulsed by the barbarity of the blindings, but also acknowledges the
affective energies of frustration driving the officers and mobs to punish criminals who would otherwise
go scot-free. This ambivalence is deepened by the film's construction of the provincial public as a
multifarious entity. When Sundar is captured, the people express their support for Amit and the Tejpur
Police by gathering on either sides of the streets with folded hands expressing their gratitude. Here they
demonstrate their desire and capacity for public order, offering their loyalties to the state and
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embodying productive citizenship as children don police-caps and pledge to become policemen when
they grow up.
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When it appears certain that Amit will be dealt a punitive transfer from Tejpur by the
investigative committee, the Tejpur townsfolk emerge as a robust counter-public willing to question the
decisions of a distant metropolitan state by keeping a nightly candle-light vigil proclaiming “We have
awakened!”, and if necessary use methods of civil disobedience (chakka jam or obstructing all traffic).
The gathering's reference to these methods recalls the mass character and methods of civil disobedience
adopted by the anti-colonial Indian nationalist movement.
Other subterranean languages of agency and resistance emerge during the actual incidents of
vigilantism against the local state which are less amenable to the agential possibilities that lay within
the frameworks of the secular-modern and its categories of atrocity, injury and redressal. If Amit and
his encounters represent the day-lit, rational-discursive, post-facto work of narration and redressal,
these subterranean sequences constitute the irrational, erotic, intimate and nocturnal underside of the
same. Barring the final climax, the blindings occur in Amit's absence, and they constitute the viewer's
intimate experience of Tejpur's hermetic, nocturnal universe. During the custodial blindings, which
constitutes the riveting core of the film, the camera intercuts between close-ups of the incensed faces of
the goons and the cops, their interlocked glares across the bars of the jail before they assuage their
'emasculation' with penetrative and rituals acts of violence upon the bodies of the goons. When Sundar
is captured by Amit and his men, the men from the town gather on the banks of the river to celebrate
the success by imagining in song how “Saheb (Amit) will now give Sundar his comeuppance/ he will
shred Sundar to bits and let him rot in jail!” and dancing with abandon. Following this we see Sundar
undergo prolonged custodial torture. By asserting police-custody rather than the court or prison as the
131The public's appearance in this scene as a humane an virtuous national community is underscored aurally by a
well-known Mukesh number from Raj Kapoor's Anari.
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site for extracting justice, and torture rather than mere incarceration as 'justice', they verbalize the
homosocial economy of violence within which law-enforcement and due-process as gendered
institutions often operate, enacting their vengeful power upon the body of the disempowered detainee.
The visual iconography of the mob that chases Sadhu and Sundar with swords and acid to the banks of
the river in the final climax of the film, eager to 'cleanse the soil of Tejpur once and for all', recalls the
Hindu nationalist communal mobs associated with the demolition of the Babri Mosque, the Bombay
riots of 1993 as well as the Godhra riots of 2002. Tejpur's 'Gangaajal' recalls the 'fire' wielded by these
mobs which as Thomas Blom Hansen points out, is a dense Hindu cultural metaphor which is at once
'ontologically empty', a condition of transformation (from impure to pure, bare life to nothing) and
when ignited appears as agent and 'pure effect – an event without a clear cause'. The 'holy water' (car-
acid) in Gangaajal works in similarly upon doused bodies. And the mob appears to experience the
same 'visceral economy' of a 'momentary sense of bodily authenticity, certainty and exhilaration' in its
fleeting coherence and unity as it proclaims, “Now on this is what will happen in Tejpur, whosoever
harasses a sister of ours will get only one answer, Gangaajal!” As the Yadavs impale themselves
lethally in the eyes in their bid to escape, the film ends with a panoramic shot of crowds continuing to
pour into the river-bank, which to Amit represents the spectacular 'degeneration of men into beasts'.
The double vision of the film shows the provincial public in the moment of crisis and climax as an
irreconcilably multifarious social presence – that articulates its socio-political experience, agency and
resistance in multiple rational and affective languages – each offering a different epistemology of the
nature of texisting political realities and appropriate modes of political action.
The dystopic provincial dramatized through this temporality compels spectatorial reckoning with the
ambivalent terrains of social and political formation, being and actions. Once positioned by the genre to
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be experienced by the viewer as 'familiar' and 'reasonable', the inhabitation of the social and emotive
logics of these worlds challenge the epistemological claims of neoliberal developmentalism, reform
and correction as they construct and direct themselves to the provincial. Yet it is important to think
through the terms on which this double vision of intimacy and alienation is achieved in these dramatic
sequences. The narrowing focus on sexual threat to women which serves to polarize the town's political
elite and public, the latter's experience of judicial failure as 'emasculation', and its modes of dealing
retribution – through the act of blinding which is penetrative of its victim and extinguishes his violating
gaze – are structured by the same erotics of power. In the provincial cop-film, a heterosocial and sexual
understanding of Jungle-Raj as threat to women is propelled and transformed by the temporality of
crisis into a homosocial and sexual logic of retributive violence. Further, this logic of political
subjectivity and action is shown to be at once, familiar and understandable to the postcolonial subject-
viewer, and alienating.
This particular cinematic-experiential rehearsal of provincial realities is significant not merely for the
internal logics it presents as 'familiar' but also for the specific terms on which it renders contemporary
political horizons – in particular the contestatory domain of electoral politics and the nature of the
provincial civic public. While Shool jumps from Bachchu Yadav killing his rival electoral nominee to
his post-victory aplomb and impunity; Gangaajal ignores elections altogether as irrelevant owing to the
near-absolute power of the reigning elite. While the town's civic public is evoked in varied and
complex ways, it emerges as a progressively cohering social body rather than a deeply hierarchical
society constituted of voters and citizens of varying degrees of legitimacy and privilege who are
compelled to mobilize electoral opportunities, affirmative action, existing patronage-economies as well
as the remaining avenues of the shrinking developmental state, to either consolidate or challenge
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entrenched privilege, power and dominance. While caste figures prominently in the depiction of the
corrupt politicians (all of whom are Yadavs or Thakurs), it does not enable an understanding of the
historical emergence of the 'provincial' scene of contemporary politics. The lone lower-caste figure of
Mangni Ram is converted from a nagging complainant ('playing the caste card' to cover up his
corruption) to an ideal citizen who takes the bullet to oppose the criminal-politician. He demonstrates
how in its rendering of a unified civic public uniformly oppressed by the blunt force and rapacity of a
political-criminal class, the genre does not ignore, but rather it effectively remaps the complex electoral
and non-electoral caste-based dominance and contestations of power that have animated the Indian
polity since the 1960s.
While violence against women (especially Apurva and Basuria in Gangaajal) is shown to motivate the
coherence and violent mobilization of the public and the police, the intra- and cross-caste dimensions
of this initial and retaliatory violence (to defend 'our' women) is denied. This is particularly relevant in
the light of not merely incessant upper-caste violence against lower-caste or dalit women, but also a
sustained history in cities and small-towns of Bihar (much like in metropolitan centers such as Delhi
and Bombay) of violent mass-political action by upper and middle caste Hindu medical and
engineering students, often taking the form of self-immolations (in another deployment of fire) to
protest the extension of reservations in educational institutions to dalit youths (PTI 2006, TNN 2006).
In these renditions of political crisis, diagnosis and action that the genre demonstrates its duplicitous
critical-political potential for reimagining the contemporary provincial and through it, the pasts and
presents of the Indian polity.
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The Fractured Public in Aakrosh
If Shool and Gangaajal present the crisis of contemporary Bihar through a criminal-political elite's
oppression of a provincial society as a whole, Aakrosh displays an important turn within the genre by
foregrounding the contentious fault-lines of caste, class and gender running through the part-rural and
part-small-town society of Jhanjhar. This is owed to the intent of the film's director Priyadarshan and
producer Kumar Mangat to make a film on the subject of caste-based honor-killings after reading a
disturbing report on the same in India's leading national daily Times of India.
132
In the film, the middle-
class mainstream of Jhanjhar consisting of caste-Hindus, are shown to be largely in support of the
Brahmin-Kshatriya oligarchy of political-enforcers like Omkar Sukul and the local police ruling
Jhanjhar. Many members of this political combine are also members of the secretive and much-feared
caste-militia called the Shool Sena which keeps Jhanjhar's impoverished dalit community in check.
Operating in the mode of a social thriller, the film follows the investigation of the suspected honor-
killings in Jhanjhar of three medical-students from Delhi. Student agitations in Delhi following the
reports of the killings, force the central government to dispatch two special-officers of the CBI,
Siddharth Chaturvedi and Pratap Kumar (who is also a dalit from a village in Bihar), to investigate the
disappearance of the three youths. They learn that one of the three ill-fated youths, Dinu Bhowri was a
dalit and had incurred the wrath of the Sena when he returned to Jhanjhar to help his upper-caste
girlfriend Roshni - also Sukul's daughter, elope with him.
The film renders multiple publics in contrastive ways – metropolitan Delhi (with an active civil society
and media) watches the horror of Jhanjhar's patriarchy, casteism, criminality and violence as the
progress of the investigation and interviews of 'ordinary' folks of Jhanjhar (who vehemently justify
132 See Iyer, Meena. 'No Honour in Honour Killings.' The Times of India. August 31, 2010. Available at:
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-08-31/news-interviews/28309747_1_honour-killings-aakrosh-
mainstream-format. Accessed on October 31, 2014.
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caste-barriers) are relayed to it by the news-media. Our own entry into Jhanjhar along with Chaturvedi
and Kumar is framed by the discursive screen of crime-statistics which peg its kidnapping, booth-
capturing, rape and murder rates at three times that of Delhi. These sequences instantiate Arvind
Rajagopal's claim about the gaping epistemological split separating metropolitan and vernacular
publics with the former locating Jhanjhar at the lower-end of a civilizational scale of the secular-
modern. The ordinary folks of Jhanjhar in turn watch the play and paraphernalia of modern
investigative technologies – cranes, forensic data-collection and trained divers, and the progress of the
investigation with a mixture of amusement and wonder. On the night of the murders they are shown to
have been riveted by the 'time-worn', mythological fare of a Ram Leela as the elopement and capture
took place. The dalit community of Jhanjhar on the other hand, aloof from both the metropolitan media
and Jhanjhar's mainstream society is shown primarily through Dinu's family. The community performs
menial and physical labor and tries to elude the inquiries of the CBI cops in order to avoid any further
retributive violence from the Sena.
Aakrosh endeavors to transform the conversation about the provincial within the genre of the provincial
cop-film, by showing how the divides of caste-class are structural and relate to the ownership of
capital, distribution of labor, access to civic amenities and opportunities for upward mobilities. With
this acknowledgement it renders the conception of a unified and resistant public impossible. However,
as the subsequent section demonstrates, this acknowledgement is intended to generate metropolitan
spectatorial recognition of the continued and oppressive salience of caste in distant, rural-provincial
India (epitomized by Bihar), through a sensationalized depiction of a regime of totalized oppression of
dalits by a local state co-opted by upper-castes. The aural and visual rendition of this regime of fear and
atrocity enables a fusion of the genre's bifurcated temporalities of the everyday and the climactic. This
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fusion is necessitated by the film's intent to emphasize the unchanging history of caste-violence and the
'failing' trajectory of dalit resistance in order to elicit metropolitan spectatorial sympathy for the dalit
predicament. However, this singular goal evacuates the film's political landscape of post-Mandal
transformations, the emergence of the coalition of the bahujan within electoral politics as well as the
political and ideological impress of Maoist-leftist Naxal resistance (which have over time precipitated
reactionary formations such as caste-militias). In doing so, the film inadvertently betrays the ways in
which the interpretive templates for caste in mainstream Hindi cinema (much like in mainstream
journalism) can allow for social 'justice' only by presenting it as a social practice divorced from a
dynamic history of resistant politicization both within and beyond the parameters of electoral politics.
The segregated quotidian existence of dalits in Jhanjhar – evident in the organization of their amenities,
habitation and work, is established early in Aakrosh as an unchanging reality, through pithy vignettes.
For instance, when Chaturvedi and Kumar approach a group of people bathing and washing clothes
near a well, hoping to trace Dinu's brother-in-law Rukum Lal Nishad (another title signifying dalit
status), they are warned that the well is 'impure' since it is used by 'untouchables'. The setting is rural
but lacks any of its proverbial idyllic fecundity. Instead it is a parched clearing with a sparse horizon of
trees - conveying Jhanjhar's insularity and remoteness. At the dam construction site, Rukum Lal, a
dark-skinned and emaciated man in a tattered vest, stands with folded hands before the cops. Other
laborers dressed like him squat on the side of the road while engineers and contractors stand near cars
and shout instructions. Subsequently, we see the interiors of Lal's bare home plunged in darkness, an
ailing grandfather and a family that lost its only educated member when Dinu was killed. These sepia-
toned vignettes register Jhanjhar as a hinterland where the post-independence abolition of
untouchability has had no effect. Conversely, the vignettes also constitute the universe of the film's
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metropolitan audiences as far more egalitarian, as one where upward mobility through education and
cross-caste friendships are possible – and to which Dinu and his friends were unable to return.
Further more, the sense of imminent violence in each of these scenes underscores how the structural
disparities of caste-class (in work, habitation and amenities) are buttressed by a regime of fear (or
“khauff”) and violence by the upper-caste oligarchy and its militia. At the well, the mention of Rukum
Lal by the cops prompts the group to fall silent and walk away. The palpable lull is heightened by the
shrill cry of an eagle which signals a predatory presence looming above and outside the frame - an
aural rendition of the oppressive universe of Jhanjhar. At the dam, Lal is aware of the watchful eyes of
the engineers and contractors – implying that they do more than just oversee work. Soon after we see
Lal's home, it is raided by the Sena. Lal's flight through the narrow alleys and tenements of the
settlement before being knocked down and abducted, emphasize its fragility and vulnerability. Thus,
Aakrosh modifies the provincial cop-film's division into the temporalities of the everyday (where
ordinary folks craft an adaptive and resourceful subsistence) and that of crisis (where legal and extra-
legal modes of change are explored). Instead, the film fuses the two temporalities to render a more
univalent vision of everyday life for dalits in Jhanjhar, than the ones that prevail in Shool and
Gangaajal. As a result, there is a shrinkage in filmic time and space for the exploration of the more
ambivalent as well as contestatory planes of social being, survival and subsistence for Jhanjhar's
ordinary folks. In the following sections, the chapter will consider the implications this has for the
mode and limits of recognition the film is able to grant to practices of caste, caste-politics as well as
dalit agency.
Special Officer Kumar (who is a native of Jhanjhar) explains the prevailing regime of fear and despair,
to the Delhi-based Officer Chaturvedi, as deep-seated and ancient. He relates how his own father had
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poisoned his entire family when their short-lived prosperity acquired through sheer hardwork had been
burnt down by a thakur. This explication of the despair of resident dalits suggests a long history of
unchallenged upper-caste domination by force, which (it implies) can be displaced only through an
external intervention that uses greater force. The displacement of the prevailing regime is the necessary
precondition for change. This argument gathers force in the subsequent spiral of violence the dalit
community of Jhanjhar is caught in. Lal's abduction and the initial findings of the investigation (the
drowned car in which Dinu and his friends had tried to escape) push the aging leader of the community,
an emaciated and bespectacled old man to rally the community with the following call to action, “Many
died … We saw the grief of their families, but could never muster up the courage to feel it... But today
we have to come together for the sake of our children, for the sake of Dinu. We have to protest...”
Presented as the moment of dalit self-empowerment without precedent, a silent and non-violent
procession of dalits walks down a public street of Jhanjhar. They hold aloft photographs of Dinu and
banners demanding “Justis” and announcing that, “We shall raise our voices till Delhi hears us, the
truth must be revealed!” The local police clamps down on the march, tearing away the banners and
beating protesters with batons, overpowering attempts to push back and drag the bloodied protesters
into police-trucks. The camera lingers over their hastily-dropped slippers on the now-vacant street,
silent testimonies to the disproportionate force unleashed by the state.
The Sena replies to the affront of the dalit march with a virtual genocide against the settlement by
torching homes in the middle of the night, cutting down fleeing residents. Lal and Juni are hanged from
trees as Lal's wife Jamuniya watches traumatized. When she tries to testify to the CBI cops about the
raid, she is abducted by the militia and her tongue chopped off. Even after the CBI solves the murders
and successfully gains convictions for all the prime-accused, the cathartic potential of the court-
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judgment is stymied when the convicted figures (including the MLA, the local politico and the chief-
cop) walk out impenitently, scoffing at their imminent 'short sojourn' in jail and are garlanded by their
boisterous followers. Recovering from his disappointment, Chaturvedi covertly passes his gun to a
stoic Jamuniya who shoots all four convicted. In what is presented as the real catharsis of the film,
Jamuniya begins to howl irrepressibly over the heaped dead bodies and a female playback rises to a
crescendo. Walking away from the commotion, Chaturvedi wryly tells a puzzled Kumar, “After all you
taught me how to play with fire.” The final stance of resistance and vigilantist justice is enacted by a
metropolitan cop-rural dalit combine where the former authors the act and the latter executes it.
Departing from the trope of representing the small-town through the binary of the local state and the
public in the previous two films, Aakrosh emphasizes the cleavage within the public between the
provincial mainstream – consisting of a middle class of caste-Hindus; and the subordinate dalits. This
cleavage is shown to be structured by radically disparate experiences of social life in Jhanjhar including
labor, livelihood, access to the state, education and status. With this is coupled the cleft between the
metropolitan and regional social spheres. These clefts are emphasized through a crisscrossing network
of gazes, with Jhanjhar's middle class mainstream watching the progress of the investigation as dalit
men are taken away by the CBI to testify against the Sena (caste-militia). The dalit residents futilely
seek to hold the metropolitan media and CBI investigators at bay so as to placate the town's violent
police and politicians. Amidst the film's tightly-paced thriller-mode tracking of the investigation, an
interlude is created where the metropolitan media is shown to engage with town's middle class
residents. In the following exchanges, this social mainstream acquires a particular kind of social
presence as it is asked by the media to explicitly address the question of caste within its everyday life.
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We look through the cameras of metropolitan journalists as they interview local men in the town. In
one case, the camera pans from a medium close-up of a driver in a car to the couple seated at the
backseat, presumably the owners of the car. While the driver quietly looks at the road ahead, the male
owner of the car claims with unreflecting condescension to have 'always treated him [gesturing toward
his lower-caste driver] and his father before him who had served before him, as members of the family'.
The woman sitting next to him, and the driver of the adjoining car look at him silently as he speaks,
while the first driver remains out of view but within earshot. The camera framing the shot underscores
the organization of gazes and voice within this social scene – of which the speaker/car-owner remains
oblivious even as he is dominates it as the sole and authoritative speaker. In the next shot, a man seated
on a bike outside a local eatery declares, “Tomorrow if my son gets carried away and marries a dalit, I
will happily join the rest of my community in sacrificing him.” Behind him, on the left, a couple
continue talking casually, as do to men on the left. This interlude illuminates the workings of caste in
Jhanjhar in a way that is outside of but contiguous to the framework of spectacular atrocity. The
interlude reveals the ways in which caste-hierarchies and oppression structure the 'peaceful everyday'
of employment and livelihood, the social and generational ties between employer and employee as well
as ways of occupying social space. The silence of the drivers of both cars in the frame is palpable and
highlight the power operative within the social space. The second vignette demonstrates how the
potential for atrocity, tacit support for caste-militias, even filicide reside within the quotidian social and
familial life of the small-town (thereby fusing the everyday and the climactic), and this potential is
activated when the etiquettes of these structured cross and same-caste relations are ruptured by
individuals 'getting carried away'.
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However, these vignettes of the social mainstream are presented through the objectified ethnographic
gaze of the metropolitan media – indicated by the edges of the camera-lens providing a second frame
for the shots. This intervening frame presents these statements of the local men as the spectacle of
Jhanjhar's primitive caste-ridden being - a representational gesture that also shores up the metropolis as
the site of a global liberal modernity that has transcended caste consciousness and where individuals
may love whomever they like. The secondary (inner) frame, in other words, prevents any slippage of
signification from the caste-practices of the provincial into the metropolitan. It is also significant that
the vignettes do not include any dramatized interviews of the town's dalits – in other words, its
rendition of the social realities of Jhanjhar hinge on revealing the unthinkingly inegalitarian attitudes of
the dominant provincial public.
The film quickly shifts from this fleeting interlude in the everyday to the spectacular exposition of the
nocturnal violence of Jhanjhar's political elite - which solidifies the film's framework of atrocity as the
proper heuristic for caste. Before the media, the reigning MLA of Jhanjhar dismisses the CBI
investigation as “their [the center's] conspiracy, the day we rule at the center, we shall show them!”,
while at the nightly convention of the Sena he challenges his fellows in the name of the hoary heritage
of the caste-system flings bangles at them – to provoke and motivate them for the genocide of the dalits
and then anoints them for 'battle'. These ideological postures, harking back to 'tradition' and calls-to-
action are not presented as the strategic endeavors of an entrenched upper-caste elite facing various
forms of electoral, symbolic as well as militant 'dalit challenges' within a dynamic provincial socio-
political landscape, with the notable rise in recent decades of a veritable bahujan-samaj (or a collective
of the previously downtrodden). Instead, this strategic reactionary formation in the film is revealed as
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one of the unchanging social essences embodied by a provincial society and manipulated by its
political elite.
This simplified conception of caste-oppression and contestation is mirrored in the film's depiction of
the 'birth' and subsequent inviability of dalit consciousness and resistance. This obfuscates not only the
histories of dalit politicization in the region but also how caste has been implicated in the uneven yet
significant evolution of the Indian developmental state and how the poor dalit's encounter with the
everyday state in postcolonial northern India has transformed in the past two decades. Officer Kumar
narrates of the story of his family as illustrative of the unmoving history of casteism in postcolonial
rural India – where the newfound prosperity and social ambitions of the family are punished violently
by an affronted landowner. The story does not account for how the family may have come to acquire
land, access to credit as well as education in the first place. The short-lived prosperity of the family is
attributed to hard work alone with no acknowledgment of how such access has been enabled by
multiple modes of dalit politicization including affirmative-action policies in public education,
employment and representation; militant resistance by Naxals in the '70s and '80s against land
monopoly as well as atrocities by rural landowners – which, are either occluded or vilified in 'textbook'
national histories of India, and would have forced the viewer to engage with the more ambivalent yet
structural aspects of the postcolonial afterlives of caste and power.
133
In the denouement of Kumar's
story, the murder-suicide of the family by the father, and a young Kumar being rescued and raised by
an enlightened upper-caste school-teacher – dalit experience in postcolonial India remains
circumscribed within the tropes of victimhood, despair and the largess of enlightened caste-superiors.
133 Ashwini Kumar has argued that the rise of caste-militias can be understood only in the context of such transformation,
in particular the rise of highly-organized Maoist cadres challenging upper-caste landlordism, forcibly redistributing
land, demanding higher wage-rates for laborers and instituting 'people's courts' to redress acts of violence. The militias
often modeled themselves on the structures and methods of operation of these cadres.
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While violence against dalits continues in myriad guises and forms today in rural as well as urban
India, the film enacts a crucial effacement in dramatizing anti-dalit violence as 'atrocity' – a conceptual
category that disaggregates the upper-caste violence from a dynamic social scene where dalits through
multiple socio-political strategies of mobilization and resistance, have significantly shifted the balance
of symbolic, political and material power over the decades. In the film, by contrast, dalit agency -
including the meritorious Dinu who truly loved Roshni, Kumar's properly aspirational but ill-fated
family, the mobilized dalit community of Jhanjhar - appears as physically inviable and abject, ethically-
unexceptionable in its non-violence to merit metropolitan intervention as the proper subject of 'human
rights' demanding 'justis' and 'truth', as well as the beneficiary of vigilantist law-enforcement.
In the film's final shot the camera pulls out of Jhanjhar as Kumar's train departs. The stance of visual
authority in this long-shot of Jhanjhar corresponds with the historical authority of Kumar's voice-over
as he evokes the long and uninterrupted history of caste distinctions and violence in India within which
Dinu's case offers “a crucial distinction... After ages, upper-caste youths had taken bullets in their
chests for the sake of their friendship with a poor dalit. My heart rises in the hope that soon a man will
be known in this country not by his caste but as an Indian...” In this recapitulation, Dinu becomes the
beneficiary of the upper-caste friendship and self-sacrifice of his metropolitan upper-caste friends –
who in turn self-realize as modern citizens through this transcendence of the pre-modern identities,
barriers and affects of caste. As a meritorious dalit who has escaped Jhanjhar and proven himself a
worthy embodiment of modern citizenship, Kumar remains oblivious of the irony of his paean to
'radical' friendship that granted equality to Dinu.
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Conclusion
After delineating the contours of the prevailing socio-political mythology of Bihar as 'Jungle-Raj' in the
context of significant tectonic shifts underway within the Indian polity (ascendant ideologies of
economic and political Liberalization, the sustained democratization of caste, and the aggravation of
the epistemological gulf between metropolitan and vernacular/regional public spheres); this chapter has
attempted to explore the particular productivities as well as limitations of the provincial cop film as an
influential film-genre and cultural lens. In its distension of 'Jungle Raj' through the twin temporalities
of the everyday and the climactic, the genre continues to focalize the provincial as the site for the
unraveling of the epistemological certainties of prevailing postcolonial as well as neoliberal
metropolitan, 'developmentalist' ideologies. As the analyses of two instances of this genre, Shool and
Gangaajal demonstrate, this unraveling is enabled by an ambivalent and disaggregated cinematic
exploration of both – everyday cultures of 'corruption' under the provincial local state, as well as the
psychologies of oppression and resistance. If earlier cinematic explorations of rural caste practices,
crime and corruption such as Shyam Benegal's rural films operating within the 'developmental
aesthetic' distanced these practices to the nation's colonial-feudal past to yield pleasures of voyeurism
(Prasad 1998), the provincial cop film's presents the cinematic provincial as thoroughly contemporary
and familiar in its socio-psychological logics to the contemporary viewer. In this familiarity, the
provincial becomes the site where vital forms of sociality, political awareness and action that are
antithetical to liberal-democratic, constitutional norms of the distant state at the 'center', persist and
thrive. This cinematic provincial is where these dimensions of everyday social life and subsistence can
be inhabited on their own terms. However, the pleasures of these 'familiar' modes of being is
complicated by a deep sense of ambivalence evoked by the depiction of individual or collective forms
of vigilantist resistance to the local state, in the genre's subsequent temporality of crisis and climax.
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The chapter goes on to examine the terms on which this influential genre rehearses this familiarity and
ambivalence, but also the conception of the provincial public itself from whose everyday practice
questions of caste and gender are crucially expunged or seen to be irrelevant. Thereafter, the chapter
considers the way in which Aakrosh as a third iteration of the genre, marks a note of difference with its
overt acknowledgment of caste as a structural aspect of Indian society. It demonstrates how the
acknowledgment of caste as spectacular 'atrocity' in the film reprises the notion of caste as an
essentially static and pre-modern practice surviving in the present. This interpretive framework
subsumes the significance of recent contestations of entrenched power and inequities by lower-caste
mobilizations, and instead re-renders provincial 'realities' in ways that position the bourgeois-
nationalist subject (represented by the metropolitan cop and his addressees) as the active interpretive-
pedagogic subject as well as beneficiary of the genre's lessons about the nation's present and the past.
The following chapters of this dissertation will explore other points of entry into and inhabitation of the
provincial that the contemporary post-Liberalization landscape of Bombay cinema offers so as to
render other interpretive templates for more critical and pluralized conceptions of provincial
modernities.
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Chapter Three
"They point guns for money, we run the country!": Other Modernities
in the Provincial Youth-Film
As the title song of Farhan Akhtar's hugely popular Hindi film Dil Chahta Hai or “What the Heart
Wants” (2001) begins, we speed down a long road in an open convertible. One young man dozes at the
back while two others sit in front, sharing an easy camaraderie. They pause on the side of an open
highway, stretch their limbs and resume the drive to Goa. The song goes:
The heart wishes may these golden days never end
the heart wishes may we never be without our buddies
spending the day in our banters
the evenings dance and the nights sing
may these vistas always dance in joy
and may we find these joys at every turn ...
134
The film conveyed the new affective horizons of post-liberalization metropolitan Indian youth through
the lives of the three young college-graduates – Akash, Sameer and Sid as they experience
estrangement, love, adulthood and the search for inspiration in Goa, Bombay and Sydney. Their
romantic and existentialist adventures unfold in the soft golden light of 'capitalist decadence and the
rise of a commodified transgenerational and pronational youth culture’ (Anjaria & Anjaria 2008: 132).
We watch their journeys in the comfort of the knowledge that their lives will not scrape the crudities
and inconveniences of poverty or unemployment – they struggle with finding motivation. No markers
of caste or region besmirch their sense of self. Their status as affluent urbanites remains unremarked in
134 Translation my own.
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the film and does not seem to hinder its claim to address a new generational experience of youth
(Mazumdar 2007: 142).
By contrast, the gritty provincial cop-film (discussed in Chapter 2) dwells with relish in the caste, crime
and corruption-marked world of provincial Bihar. The young and idealistic metropolitan cop confronts
not merely criminal-politicians running political regimes, but also local youths allied with such
regimes. An early scene in Eeshwar Niwas' much-feted Shool or “Lance” (1999) reveals everyday life
in the 'Jungle-Raj' through a violent encounter at Motihari's local market between the newly-appointed
police inspector Samar Pratap Singh and a group of idle young men harassing a woman. When pulled
up, the three youths reveal that they are college-students, one of them is a thakur (upper-caste) and
brother of the student-president from the ruling party. Unlike the congenial and playful protagonists of
DCH who enjoy legitimate mobility, these provincial youths are, in their idleness, a dangerous and
predatory social presence that has monopolized the town's market. In a similar scene in Prakash Jha's
Gangaajal (2003), the harassment of a woman on the streets of Tejpur propels a vigilantist mob to
'cleanse' Tejpur by chasing down the youths and blinding them with car-acid. In both films, idle
provincial youth demonstrate the true nature of Bihar's Jungle Raj as the removal of the middle class
from public space by predatory, politically-connected youths. In both, violent reclamation of public
space emerges as the fantastic and deeply-desired solution to the middle class' anxiety about the loss of
spatial control.
The new youth film as well as the provincial cop-film offer mutually-consistent notions of modernity.
In the first, metropolitan space (Bombay and Sydney) is the site of India's new global modernity where
the new bourgeois citizen un-moored from caste, class or regionality, realizes himself amidst the
affective possibilities unleashed by the free-market. Here, the state is neither a literal nor a symbolic
Paul 167
presence. Creating a world whose ideological configurations are harmonious with that of the youth-
film, the provincial cop film offers the provincial small-town as the hinterland of India's global
modernity. Here, the pre-modern vestiges of caste have morphed into violent structures – a violent
cleansing of which must precede the return to democracy and the establishment of a free-market. Even
as the cop-film seeks to 'tell truth' to a nation too rapidly caught in its own celebratory narrative of
global modernity, both genres reprise a polarized understanding of the metropolis and the provincial, of
modernity and its pre-modern Other ridden by caste-politics and corruption.
A well-loved scene in Tigmanshu Dhulia's now cult film, Haasil, takes a different tack toward
provincial youths. We see a ragtag gang of men watch the violent climax of a Hindi action-potboiler in
a dark and empty theater in Allahabad. Slightly older than usual college-going youths, they occupy the
theater with a sense of entitlement which, we learn, comes from their affiliation with an aspiring thakur
student-politician. Clutching their home-brand pistols, the men gape at the screen as the villains get
their comeuppance with explosions flinging cars into the air. One of them observes how “Everything is
modern there [meaning the mafia-scape of Bombay and Dubai], their English-type guns can flip cars in
the air. Do you think our guns can ever do that?” Another asks eagerly, “Shall we go there?” The other
replies sternly, “Have you no self-respect? Or did you spend it all on the movie-ticket? Those goons
point guns for money, we do this for the gaddi! We run the country!”
135
The exchange conveys the
men's simultaneously felt desire for as well as prideful rejection of their on-screen counterparts – the
glamorous villains of Bombay and Dubai.
The scene conveys the film's more ambivalent depiction of provincial political youths – who are shown
as being not outside of the modern as much as in an oblique relationship with it. Critical of the good
135 Gaddi literally signifies the throne, and by implication, the seat of power.
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life of the on-screen gangsters of Bombay and Dubai, they assert the importance of 'running the
country'. This assertion of gun-toting politics as 'running the country' is at once comic, heroic and
poignant. Besides its bombastic nature, it conveys their structural exclusion from avenues of material
prosperity and productive citizenship. It also designates the avenues they have crafted desperately and
resourcefully to play a part in the nation-building. Haasil gained cult status for these memorable
depictions of student netas and their badmaash henchmen.
136
Similarly, Sehar received accolades from
viewers for its 'mature minus any flamboyance' rendition of the spectacular rise of a provincial gang
consisting primarily of disaffected students of Lucknow University (Rohwit 2009).
This chapter considers the genre of the provincial youth film as an intervention into the polarized
conception of metropolitan modernity and provincial backwardness. Through an ambivalent
exploration of the figure of the provincial youth, his occupation of the space of the university and the
provincial city at large, the genre reveals other non-metropolitan trajectories of postcolonial and
neoliberal modernity. These trajectories may be called 'provincial modernities' in which are intertwined
the obscured histories of the developmental state, the postcolonial afterlives of caste and political
power, the gradual 'democratization' of caste, and the new neoliberal notions of selfhood and
governmentality that emerge from them. In subsequent sections, the chapter discusses the socio-
political contexts the films evoke, the particular interventions they make into the history of
representation of masculine rage in Bombay cinema which links with the particular kind of
appreciation they have received as hatke cinema in promotional, reception and retrospective
discussions. Thereafter, the chapter considers three films: Tigmanshu Dhulia's Haasil (2003), Kabeer
136 Interestingly the men in the scene discussed above, identify themselves as well as those in the film they are watching, as
'badmaash' which is a more euphemistic term for mischief and trouble-making rather than the violent 'goonda'. It is
precisely the humorous yet poignant exploration of these deviant political masculinities and their own notion of self-in-
the-world that distinguishes these films from the provincial cop-films.
Paul 169
Kaushik's Sehar (2005), and Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal (2009) to explore the different ways in which
they expand and recuperate a cinematic understanding of provincial modernities.
Unraveling/deepening democracy
Akshaya Kumar has read the recent spate of films set in small-town India in the context of the 'time
warfare' and 'architectural indifference' experienced by the large number of migrants who have moved
from smaller towns to the segregated and corporatizing spatial economies of the metropolis (Kumar
2013). Kumar argues that the concerted efforts in urbanization to transform into 'world class'
metropolises and hostility toward migrants from established metropolitan natives – expressed through
segregated residential zones in the metropolis (thus architectural indifference), causes the northern
migrant to experience a time warfare where he/she is caught between the temporal impulse to
modernize as well as the temporal impulse to hold on to a vernacular cultural essence of the self. Out of
this, it is argued, is born a nostalgia that is fed by the small-town simulacra of these films as they revel
in a performative excess as well as an ethos of unlawfulness – both of which are repressed by the
aesthetic surveillance of the metropolis. Kumar is interested in the potentialities these films develop out
of the loose link between real small-towns and imagined ones, foregrounding cinema's penchant for the
latter.
Kumar's account seeks to explain the emergence of 'provincial' stories in Bollywood entirely through
the transformations occurring in the metropolis, I would argue that this emergence needs to be seen
within multiple cultural traffics – not merely in terms of what the metropolis banishes and creates a
hankering for, but also what 'provincial India' is at the time pressing upon the national-metropolitan
consciousness through newer and provocative kinds of political presence which interact unevenly with
the experience of cultural Liberalization. Since the late-1990s, with fragmentation of the cross-
Paul 170
caste/class electoral mandate of the Congress Party (members of which had constituted most of the
nationalist leadership during Independence); and the rise of parties such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal
(RJD), the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the 'Hindi heartland' states of
UP and Bihar; state and national governments have been constituted and overturned numerous times by
coalitions between numerous political parties. Lucknow and Patna gained notoriety as the new
'provincial' centers to which the arithmetics of the national Parliament were now beholden.
In their strategic enactments of personas of colorful rusticity before the newly-privatized metropolitan
media, the leaders of these emergent parties – Lalu Prasad Yadav (of the RJD), Mulayam Singh (of the
SP) and Mayawati (of the BSP), deployed a distinct political and corporeal grammar in which they
positioned themselves as leaders of the bahujan samaj, explicitly raising questions of caste-inequality,
lower caste pride and mobilizing against the traditional anti-upper caste elites.
137
The metropolitan
public sphere responded in dual ways to this new ambitious, provincial leadership. Within the rational
politics discussions, this transformation was seen to be alarming since local interests and 'provincial'
political contingencies were seen to determine national leaderships and policy-making. At the moment
when a liberalizing India and its aspiring middle classes were looking to position themselves as global
citizens on the international stage, there was much embarrassment at the idea of an unsophisticated,
dialect-spewing individual like Mulayam Singh, Mayawati or Laloo Prasad Yadav, might represent
India abroad as the Defense Minister or the Minister of External Affairs.
Besides disapproval these figures also elicited fascination from the metropolitan public. Laloo, for
instance, became famous for his one-liners that were transmitted instantaneously by the new media and
137 The terms 'Bahujan samaj' are derived originally from Buddhist literature which refer to the bahujan as the 'majority of
people'. In contemporary politics the term signifies a coalition of lower caste, women and impoverished sections of
society.
Paul 171
generated much mirth. “Jab tak rahega samose mein alu, Bihar mein rahega Lalu”/ “As long as
samosas will have alu (potatoes)/Bihar will have Lalu” - remains a classic in this regard. Even as
rational appraisals dismissed these figures for pandering to illiterate and economically-desperate
provincial and rural electorates, Lalu's belligerent humor (positioning himself as a cowherd) or
Mayawati's 'obscene' display of jewelry, wealth and power as the long-awaited moment of arrival of a
'dalit ki beti' or 'the daughter of a dalit' who can now become 'behenji'/elder sister to all bahujans – also
became moments for the metropolitan recognition of a new political presence that was now calling out
the ways in which the post-Independence national and state regimes had consolidated caste/class
inequalities and in doing so also effected the creation and mobilization of a bahujan samaj within and
beyond the realm of electoral politics. Moreover, they were exposing the obfuscation of these realities
by the normative discourse of parliamentary politics.
Subaltern Studies historian and postcolonial studies scholar Partha Chatterjee has argued that the
practice of democracy in post-colonial nations like India is animated by two distinct and conflicting
spheres, which he has called 'civil society' and 'political society' (Chatterjee 2004: 39-40). While civil
society consisting of voluntary organizations of upper-middle caste bourgeois, educated and rights-
bearing citizens has grown increasingly distrustful of democratic political processes, taking refuge in
exclusionary habitats of work, residence and recreation (see Harriss 2006, Fernandes 2006); political
society, constituted of individuals from lower and working classes in urban and rural areas, have had to
negotiate political structures in informal and illegal ways, casting their vote instrumentally to claim
welfare-benefits and thwart forms of modernization and urbanization antithetical to their interests. In
this vein it has been argued the post-Liberalization Indian state is a result not merely of economic
policy, but also of the 'deepening of democracy' with the institution of Panchayati Raj at the grassroot
Paul 172
levels (or the rule by local and elected community representatives) and the rise of middle and lower-
caste constituencies as distinct and assertive political blocs (Gupta & Sivaramakrishnan 2010: 8).
While the elites see the emergence of separate blocs based on caste as a frittering away of the post-
Independence national consensus, and a return to pre-modern ways of being, considerable scholarship
has proposed that in fact these processes imply a deepening and 'vernacularization' of liberal
democracy (Michelutti 2008: 15).
Political society of middle and lower caste-groups has mastered 'the politics of din' which with its
emphasis on caste-solidarity, belligerent demands for self-respect and scant regard for parliamentary
decorum often offends the 'bourgeois priviligensia' (Alam 2004: 123). Javeed Alam has argued that it is
precisely through these 'untidy' modes of politics that dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), poorer
Muslims are tabling their structural lack of access to resources, and transcribing in Indian politics
'substantive values such as the equal worth of all, concern for everyone, effective share in decisions
impacting one's life, and other such standards...' (ibid. p.112). Nevertheless, particular groups such as
the Jats of the OBC constituency of North-Western UP have extracted more benefits in the shape of
agricultural subsidies, reservation of 27-49% of government jobs and seats in educational institutions
through the implementation of the Mandal Commission Reforms in 1991 and 2008; than dalits seeking
change in structural inequalities in land-ownership, access to education and redress for atrocities (Gill
2003, 2006). The new provincial political leadership drove home precisely these clefts within the
Indian body-politic and provided a counter-imagination of 'people's politics'.
One result of the visibility of this new political leadership from the Hindi heartland was the
displacement of the perceived salience of caste-class within Indian socio-political reality onto the
provincial, the rural and their co-opted state machineries, while the metropolis continued to be seen as
Paul 173
the space where the rational and secular structures of modernity prevailed. The provincial cop-films
discussed in the previous chapter explored the new cultural mythology of 'Jungle Raj' that came to be
associated with Bihar and UP. By contrast, the emergent brigade of film-makers from various
'provincial' northern Indian small-towns adopted a more interstitial point of entry into provincial
modernities through the space of the university (and its contiguous spaces) rather than formal
legislative politics, to offer more ambivalent explorations of how caste-class was reproduced as well as
contested in quotidian practices of sociality, pursuit of upward mobility, romance, recreation.
Educational institutions have been at the heart of reactionary protests by elites deploying the discourse
of 'merit' while middle and lower caste-blocs militating for reservations have critiqued their functioning
as apparatuses for the reproduction of social inequalities. As Nandini Chandra has noted, frequently
these critiques focus on gaining entry to the institutions rather than questioning the fundamental
ideological assumptions of the liberal project of education, its valorization of (political) 'neutrality', and
conception of 'quality' as antithetical to inclusive social justice. Thinking about how these assumptions
are reinforced and contested in spatial practices, Craig Jeffrey draws on Pierre Bourdieu's theorization
of the social production of space, to argue for 'a theory of class formation that foregrounds ... social and
cultural dimensions of power, and attends to the spatial representation of dominance' (Jeffrey 2010:
10). In his ethnography on educated-unemployment of youths heightened by the shrinking of public
employment (owing to the structural adjustment of the developmental state) at two higher educational
institutions in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, Jeffrey finds the prevalence of the homosocial cultural practice of
'waiting' and 'timepass' at the roadside cafes, campus, street-corners (Jeffrey 2010: 72). 'Waiting' gives
rise to both, a sense of masculine disempowerment as well as various kinds of political activity. He
discusses the range of political animators that emerge from this practice and how they develop different
Paul 174
notions of politics, leadership and masculinity based on how they cultivate and leverage their caste-
class identities.
138
Emerging from the broadened generic and commercial possibilities of post-multiplex Indian cinema,
the provincial youth film develops the cinematic university in a way that offers a spatial understanding
of how vectors of caste-class, gender, power and capital inflect one's social presence, movement and
animate mundane battles for selfhood. The cinematic provincial university becomes the space of the
'fraught mundane' where civil and political societies exist in an uneasy contiguity in the segregated
worlds of day-scholars, hostelers, cultural societies and political youths – each receiving and using its
'education' differently. While the middle class, upper caste protagonists of both films - Anirudh and
Niharika in Haasil and Senior Superintendent of Lucknow Police Ajay Kumar in Sehar are framed
within familial settings, histories and romantic plots; political youths like Rannvijay Singh (a poor rural
thakur youth) and Gajraj Singh (also a thakur) are not, instead they are anchored in and propelled by a
more generalized social angst arising from longer colonial, postcolonial and now neoliberal histories of
socio-economic inequalities.
139
Rannvijay uses his experience of poverty and sense of thakur
masculinity to challenge the incumbent Brahman student-president of Allahabad University with deep
pockets - Gaurishankar Pandey, raising the banner of 'backwards'. Gajraj's criminal gang consists of
disaffected youths of Lucknow University which begins to monopolize different sectors of Uttar
Pradesh's economy. These figures bring into view the complex postcolonial and neoliberal lives of
caste and caste-politics in India – exploring their varied productivities. Moreover, it brings a
138 Jeffrey develops a taxonomy of these young male political animators that includes: middle-caste 'anti- political' samaj-
sudharaks or social-reformers, middle-caste netas or politicians ('with a feel for the game'), Dalit and Muslim 'total-
politics' social reformers (who also act as mentors and lobbyists), upper and middle- caste 'advisors' (Jeffrey 2010:109).
139 Thakurs are an upper-caste community of northern India, that has historically owned much agricultural land. They are
associated in the cinematic and cultural imagination with power and militant masculinity.
Paul 175
recognition of how beyond being purely material or strategic, caste infuses social being, vision, desire
and fantasy.
Newer Narrative Frames for Masculine Rage
The provincial youth film emerged from the institutional, commercial and discursive possibilities of
Bombay cinema in the mid-2000s. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how the corporatization of
Bombay film-making and multiplexization of cinema-going over the past two decades has had multiple
and often unpredictable effects. While the panoramic interiors and artificial skylines of family films
erased and remade contested urban spaces (Mazumdar 2007:120), rural audiences and themes were de-
emphasized with urban middle classes patronizing multiplexes, and film-makers no longer felt
compelled to make 'feudal dramas that would appeal to villages in Bihar' (Ganti 2012:109). However,
the multi-screen malltiplex as a commercial model also enabled the emergence of diverse film-genres
amongst which many have provided important counter-narratives to the aestheticized city while others
have depicted 'the unpredictable, unstable, and often, outlandish process of vernacular modernization'
(Sen 2011:4). Within this diversified cultural marketplace there has also emerged since the mid-2000s,
what may be described as a veritable 'provincial brigade' with figures like Anurag Kashyap, Tigmanshu
Dhulia, Vishal Bharadwaj, Kabeer Kaushik and Abhishek Chaubey who have positioned their small-
town origins in north India, experience in theater and television production as a new kind of creative
capital that is well-poised to relieve the spectatorial jadedness with the 'South Bombay' mode of film-
making and its aestheticized 'foreign locations and costly sets.' (PTI 2003).
This brigade has mobilized the binary of 'KJo' versus 'hatke' cinema (Gopal 2011:15), projecting
themselves as faces of the latter with its emphasis on realism, formal innovation and 'risky' themes.
140
140 As Sangita Gopal explains, the 'KJo films' denote the films of influential director Karan Johar who pioneered the multi-
starrer, big-budget films of the 1990s and 2000s which were typically set in affluent Indian diaspora residing in the UK,
Paul 176
They owe this success to the dramatic proliferation of film promotion and reception platforms across
print, television and social media over the past decade, especially the blog-sphere which has
consolidated a particular kind of appreciative gaze toward the provincial youth-film and hatke cinema.
In post-Liberalization cinema, the space of the metropolitan college or university has been represented
as the space for upper class heterosexual romance in an aestheticized setting – examples of which
would be Farhan Akhtar's Dil Chahta Hai (discussed in the chapter's opening) or its predecessor, Karan
Johar's Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Given that over the decade prior to their release, higher education had
come to be the site for an inflammatory debate and policy changes over reservations of seats based on
the Mandal Commission Report, wherein Delhi and other cities, their schools and colleges became sites
for violent reactionary riots by upper and middle caste/middle class youths invoking merit over
identitarian politics, these films also mark an erasure of these battles and experiences in the cinematic
and cultural understanding of metropolitan modernity, which is instead identified with new
entrepreneurial horizons unleashed by the free market and growth of private capital. In this context, the
provincial youth film provides another cinematic mode of navigating the post-Mandal and post-
Liberalization landscape of education and politics. Specifically, the genre focuses on the thematics of
masculine rage and dystopia through the figure of the provincial youth.
Akshaya Kumar has noted the ways in which filmic space in Haasil is textured visually as well as
aurally with the use of dialect – and argues that these elements circulate as cultural fragments that
dislocated provincial migrants in the metropolis latch on to. However, I would argue, that the pleasure
of this textured filmic space is not merely one of rendering fragments of a simulacra that appeal to a
US, Canada and Australia. Appearing to be 'an aspirational neverland', they are high on glamor and the use of lavish
sets. This was an aesthetic that was taken up by many other filmmakers. 'Hatke' by contrast, means 'off-center' or
'slightly different' cinema that is used to denote a spate of films that have resolutely returned to the 'real' metropolis or
small-town as a gritty setting for less sanguine and celebratory stories of urban alienation or provincial angst.
Paul 177
nostalgia for the small-town, but rather are acknowledgments of dimensions of social life that are
denied or effaced in our understanding of modernity and the metropolis. This texturing of the spaces of
Allahabad and Lucknow universities in the genre is not merely indexical – a point that Kumar also
makes, but also yield an embedded experience of these fraught social spaces. It conveys how the
impress of colonial and postcolonial processes of 'provincialization', as well as the force of more recent
socio-political transformations is immanent in the quotidian, visual and corporeal dimensions of the
gesture, posture, mood and gaze.
Pankaj Mishra, a novelist and alumnus of Allahabad University describes his experience of watching
Haasil as follows:
The film's characters and settings conveyed accurately the violence and cynicism through which
most people at the [Allahabad] university picked their way. Its lively dialogue employed well the
Hindi dialect of the region. It seemed to me more like a hat ke film than any I had previously seen.
(Mishra, 2006: 134).
These observations about the film's rendering of the youth cultures of machismo, is experienced as
both, 'performative excess' as well as verisimilitude. While, as Kumar argues, this performative vitality
of Allahabad University's student-politicians was pleasurable against the aesthetic repressions of the
cinematic and lived metropolis, it was also seen to 'accurately convey' an 'ethos of violence and
cynicism' as life-worlds. Blogs on the film isolate particular kinds of moments from the film for
appreciation, such as – the scene in which Rannvijay speaks of being feared or avoided by women,
another YouTube excerpt shows a stuttering and diffident student-politician bumbling through his
campaign speech to the amusement of two English-speaking female students of the college. The first
blogger, mentions scenes where a middle class father orders his son to steer clear of the lumpen-
politicians, or where a father in a thakur family warns his daughter against engaging in any romantic
relationships. These scenes bring into focus the inequalities as well as social segregations (of gendered
Paul 178
surveillance, or the mutual suspicion of civil and political societies) that structure the space of
education as well as social life at large, often leading to charged encounters between individuals.
141
Bloggers and critical commentators appear to find a sense of verisimilitude as well as affirmation in
these encounters for the mundane yet fraught battles for selfhood they themselves may have waged
within such social spaces, grasping in ineffable ways how inequalities of opportunity, financial or
cultural capital structure the social, the romantic and the erotic. The genre revels in rendering how
social segregations manifest in spatial practice. This interest relates to the genre's mode of exploring
provincial modernity – namely, by setting in tension twin axes of movement – one, the 'vertical'
temporal axis of inter-generational familial history or the history of the Indian postcolonial state, caste
and power; and second, the 'horizontal' axis that upon which occur mundane contests and
improvisations, and which the viewer inhabits as an ambivalent insider.
Provincial youth-films have garnered praise from viewers and commentators as 'hatke cinema' for
deflecting Bombay cinema's mythic Oedipal-familial melodrama for the expression of masculine rage
by adopting more rational and secular modes of character construction, verisimilitude, psychological
realism in the mode of articulation and agency – which are seen as the hallmarks of Euro-American
cinema. It is through the exercise of spotting these affiliations and disaffiliations in cinema that
commentators fashion themselves as critical cultural citizens and consumers. For instance, while some
bloggers appreciated how both characters in Sehar – the cop and the provincial 'gangster' were played
141 One blogger details the appeal of the film as follows -
This is one of my all time favorite and I have been watching it every year since my last year in college and
every time I find it refreshing, more so because environ around us in big colleges and metro is so out of
place or cut off from real India. What I like : 1.Opening sequence how the vice chancellor is helpless 2.
conversation of minister and student leader signify how the link between college politics and real politics
run 3. Heroine's and Hero's father play their part well and in real life people are like that... 5. More
importantly movie builds on Indian idea of politics being a means of granting favors... 6. Indian middle
class, father -son tension, husband dominating over wife and a desire to remain away from politics and
goons... In fact I would suggest [it] to someone who wants to study small town India watch this movie
instead of reading tons of books. (Tikakaar 2008)
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'maturely minus any flamboyance' (Rohwit 2009), others have offered close analyses of Gulaal's
director Anurag Kashyap's oeuvre to justify his status as an auteur. Yet others have compared him with
Kubrick and Lynch, 'seamlessly combin[ing] madcap elements of popular Bollywood with the gritty
realism and silence of ’70s Hollywood, with the stream-of-consciousness imagery of Godard' – touches
'that are going to be lost on Indian audiences' (Singh 2009, Soni 2009). Thus, while the genres of the
global family romance (also called the 'NRI romance') and the new (metropolitan) youth-film had
reflected the new political, cultural and moral horizons of a liberalizing India in more transparent ways
(through the use of foreign locations, conspicuous placement of global brands, the depiction of affluent
non-resident Indians settled in the West as protagonists); hatke cinema played to similar aspirations for
global recognition of India's cultural and artistic sophistication in more indirect ways. Critical
recognition within this blogsphere has led to a cult status and retrospective popularity for the provincial
brigade leading intra-industry surveys to emphasize 'new niche content genres' and 'regionalization' of
content through use of local language as the top trends in the entertainment sector today (FICCI-KPMG
2011: 13).
A nodal point of this fan-critical commentary is the figure of the angry youth-entrepreneur who
animates the genre's terrain of despair and contestation. As a type of angry cinematic masculinity, he
provokes comparisons with his predecessors in the historical landscape of popular Hindi cinema, and
offers significant points of contrast. Noir films and Westerns constitute a long tradition of angry
masculinity in Euro-American cinema which as various scholars including Paul Willeman, Laura
Mulvey, Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik have argued, are structured around a contradiction between
'between narcissism and the [Oedipal] law', (cited in Gopalan 95) where sadomasochistic action
Paul 180
sequences manifest a desire to thwart the patriarchal cultural order and the moral of the Oedipal
narrative, often with devastating consequences. Lalitha Gopalan has argued that these contradictions
need to be thought through in non-Hollywood contexts and films, in relation to issues of postcolonial
modernity such as the limits and failures of the state, the entrenched structures of caste and feudalism.
In this regard the Angry Man films of the 1970s represent an important body of films within Indian
cinema. In Deewar (which is considered the clearest articulation of this type) the proletarian hero rises
through the Bombay underworld to become a leading smuggler. Flashbacks are used repeatedly to
convey the hero and his family's traumatic past of loss, deprivation and homelessness as poor migrants
in the metropolis (see Mazumdar & Gopalan). Madhava Prasad has examined how the film was 'an
allegorization of the history of the nation-state itself through masochistic fantasy... [deployed] as a
mechanism of provisional counter-identification' with the proletarian hero (Prasad 150). Within this
fantasy, the Father is the law of the state while the Mother is elevated to signify all the rival formations
that the state has not been able to accommodate including community, the traditional family, the sacred;
and the hero desires in death to be reunited with this Mother. As Prasad has demonstrated, the ethicality
of the Angry Man is maintained through the traumatic past in which we see other marginal figures –
like the Muslim minority, dockworkers, construction workers 'nominate' him as their representative, as
well as the depiction of his traumatized interiority and rage which obfuscates the fact that his
smuggling is no socialist enterprise. These aspects of him prevent a reckoning with the larger social
terrain of poverty, exploitation and coercion, and enable to film to provide the pleasure of counter-
idenfication within the realm of the masochistic fantasy, without undermining the supremacy of the
law.
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A similar transaction occurs the 'psychotic hero films' of the 1990s (played by Shahrukh Khan from
Baazigar to Anjaam) which Ranjani Mazumdar has argued, refigures masculine rage within the ethos
of estrangement and suspicion in the post-riot city of the 1990s. He too is haunted by the trauma of his
familial past which is explored through flashbacks. But while the angry man of the 1970s was rooted in
the collective experience of deprivation and homelessness, Ajay, the psychotic hero of Baazigar is
socially-withdrawn, moves as an unsuspected stranger through the city and seeks an intensely personal
revenge (to wreak violent revenge upon the family-friend who took control over the family-business
and destroyed his family). The universe of the provincial youth-film by contrast, is a more desacralized
one within which the state, family and community are no longer rendered legible as the gendered
structure of a familial psychic fantasy - which had provided mythic dimensions to the angry man's fate
in the films of the 1970s and the 1990s. While the provincial youth-film grounds the masochistic
impulse of the angry man within a terrain of provincial despair, it refuses to explore this terrain through
psychic-symbolic structures, but rather does so on sociological terms. This masochism is born from the
experience of the inequitable functioning of vital formal and informal social institutions. For instance,
the educational apparatus is shown to feed directly into the consolidation of a patronage-democracy as
well as the structures of caste/class. Here, life-opportunities (of professionalization, emotional and
sexual adulthood, participation in commerce etc.) that are essential to achieving productive citizenship,
continue to be apportioned according to the social backgrounds of students. The practice of student-
politics is shown to be embedded in this social landscape, across the divides of civil and political
society. While student-politics may be irrelevant to those from well-to-do families, it offers many
youths a vital conduit into formal party-politics and the prospect of power. Dominated by upper-caste
youth-leaders from political families and with better resources, it is also a site of contestation by
emergent middle and lower caste youths.
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The provincial youth-entrepreneur is anchored in this arena, and the question of his 'nomination' by
different social sections is literalized in the domain of electoral politics that seeks to address the
fractured student body-politic of the university. He negotiates this arena with belligerence and
improvisation – seeking to build his own following as a 'fixer'. He remains rather opaque in terms of
the traditional character-construction of the angry man, significantly, the anti-hero provincial-youths of
Haasil as well as Sehar – Rannvijay Singh and Gajraj Singh are not given a familial context. We
glimpse the family and village Rannvijay hails from only in a scene of post-retributive carnage. Their
masochism is shown to arise not from a past of familial trauma but from a socio-structural experience
of deprivation and despair that is experienced collectively. It propels them to strain against entrenched
monopolies - of landed upper-caste elites over the avenues for crony-capitalism around the
developmental state, over political representation, as well as the stranglehold of the middle classes over
the 'salariat' or respectable public employment in bureaucracies and administrations. Rannvijay seeks to
defeat the Brahmin student-leaders who have dominated the university's student union in successive
elections; and he also tries to court Niharika - a female-student from a well-to-do thakur family. Singh's
unconventional friendship and subsequent romantic rivalry with Anirudh – a youth from a 'respectable'
middle class family who resembles the conventional lead for a romance, enables the film to link
together the fields of politics and erotics. In Sehar, the anti-hero and criminal-entrepreneur Gajraj
Singh is driven by the desire to decimate the existing structure of crony-capitalism and to birth a new
centralized system of criminal-entrepreneurship with his gang of disaffected students. Politics, erotics,
business and crime are the arenas for the battles of selfhood in post-Mandal and post-Liberalization
provincial India – in which the likes of Rannvijay and Gajraj must strive with belligerence and
innovation, even as this striving is clearly doomed to lead to self-destruction.
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In Haasil, Rannvijay's death is followed by the union of the lovers (Niharika and Anirudh) and
Anirudh's return to family and society; while Gajraj Singh's psychic double in Sehar, the protagonist-
cop Ajay Kumar assuages with his own heroic death the filial trauma of his father's suicide and is
honored by the media, state and History. Gajraj's death remains absent from 'the story of the STF'. Yet,
the youth-entrepreneur's non-imbrication in family and his doubling of the bourgeois-hero creates an
excess in the narratives which end ostensibly with bourgeois self-realization – through the
consummation of the romance or the assuaging of familial loss and trauma. Both films build and
preserve this palpable sense of excess to underscore the inadequacy of the available narrative structures
in rendering structural experiences of deprivation, the lack of futurity and access to productive
citizenship they entail.
As I expand below, the critical exploration of available narrative structures within the genre of the
provincial youth-film is taken in a new direction by Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal (2009). The film is set in
an imaginary small-town in Rajasthan and revolves around (upper-caste) Rajput youths who get
variously embroiled in the student-politics of its law college. While Haasil and Sehar resist the
framework of familial trauma and instead develop a 'lateral' exploration of provincial modernity and
masculine anger, Gulaal returns to the framework of familial melodrama and sadomasochism for its
explication of the motivations of contemporary Rajput masculinities. Moreover, it recuperates their
anger into the vertical axis of a long historical critique of modernity as degeneration – a move that, I
argue, neutralizes the tension that the two earlier films had set up between these axes.
Haasil or Provincial Modernity's Mundane Battles
Set in Allahabad University in Uttar Pradesh, Haasil follows the stories of an aspiring student-
politician Rannvijay Singh (who is a thakur and hails from a small village) as he contests elections to
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the university student union against the candidate fielded by the incumbent Brahmin university-
president Gaurishankar Pandey. When Pandey and his men put pressure on Singh to withdraw, he
shoots one of Pandey's men which sets in motion a long chain of retributory killings on both sides –
leading to the deaths of Pandey, and at the film's conclusion, the deaths of his candidate (Badrinarayan
Pandey), Singh himself and most of the members of both the gangs. Two middle class students of the
university and lovers – Anirudh and Niharika, get embroiled in this political game when Singh also
falls in love with Niharika, and Anirudh who is ignorant of this fact, agrees to campaign for Singh in
exchange for being given a weapon to avenge the sexual harassment of the mother of his close-friend.
The revenge goes awry and Anirudh has to leave Allahabad to flee from the police. Singh exposes his
relationship with Niharika to her parents and offers to marry her to spare them the social
embarrassment. However, Anirudh returns in time and helps Niharika elope. Pandey's men offer them
temporary shelter to frustrate Singh who is desperately looking for her. In a final climax, the two gangs
decimate each other as the lovers are taken into custody by the police. They are set free when a state-
minister is moved by their moral tirade about how the common man is forced to take matters into his
own hands when the gundas and netas having monopolized the state and the street, breached his last
refuge - his home.
Even though during the film's promotion director Tigmanshu Dhulia had explained his intent behind
the film as the need to use films “to show the true face of society rather than fantasies or melodrama...
Haasil is the story of an escapist ordinary boy who accidentally becomes the victim of politics,” (PTI
2003) the surprising cult-appeal of the film's lively depiction of the university's homosocial cultures of
machismo and violent politics led him to move away from his previous pedagogical framing of the
film. More recently he has talked about his own indulgence in the student-culture of 'bakaiti' [idle talk]
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where '[their] love for street brawls was matched by [their] love for culture' (Kumar 2012).
142
Most
viewer reviews and blogs on the film have been on the following lines:
The so-called protagonists of the film, Jimmy Shergill and Hrishita Bhatt, are mere
sidekicks. Dialect-based dialogues and witty one-liners are [its] special highlights. Minor
characters like Gaurishankar Pandey... leave their own imprints on this fabric. Most of all,
the film will be remembered by a power-packed performance from Irfan Khan [as
Rannvijay Singh]'.
143
Two contrasting views of Allahabad University and its contemporary state-of-affairs are set in play in
Haasil's pithy opening-sequence. The camera tilts downward from a high dome, tracing the intricately-
tiered arches and windows and finally revealing an oblong-shaped student-assembly. We are looking at
the grand and hybrid French Gothic and Indo-Saracenic colonial architecture of this erstwhile center of
learning. Below, a new Vice-Chancellor for the university is giving his commencement speech,
expressing his regret at not having studied at the renowned institution. The speech fades out as an
omniscient voice-over begins - “Family gives birth to a child, the school nurtures him into a human
being with learning.” The murmur of the speech is interrupted by the loud entry of a young student
neta accompanied by his posse.
144
He introduces himself as Gaurishankar Pandey (the name tells us he
is a Brahmin) 'a humble servant of the university, president of the student-body and final-year student
of law'. Played by the inimitable Ashutosh Rana, Pandey is greeted by cheerful whistles from the
audience whom he silences with a casual gesture of his hand. The voice-over resumes, “But when the
school becomes a wrestler's rink where the emphasis is on violence and politics rather than knowledge,
then human beings are no longer produced. This has been happening in my country for many years.”
142 In a more recent interview, Irfan Khan says that Haasil should be released once again. Crediting the film for having
propelled Khan's film-career, Tigmanshu Dhulia adds, 'had there been no Haasil, there would not have been a Maqbool
or a Paan Singh Tomar' (Sen 2012).
143 This excerpt is from the following blog-entry: http://nishitd.blogspot.com/2009/12/5-films-we-did-not-talk-about-in-
decade.html
144 The term 'neta' or 'netagiri' denotes political work and leadership and is also associated in common parlance with
'goondaism' or activities like violent demonstrations, picketing, open displays of muscle-power that are intended to
disrupt civic life.
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This downward vertical tilt of the camera from the ornate arches of the auditorium to Gaurishankar's
disruptive entrance can be seen as a movement across colonial and postcolonial history of Allahabad
and its university, down to the present. Together with the omniscient voice-over, the tilt establishes a
narrative about the degeneration of a hallowed space for disinterested learning, cultivation and
civilization, to 'a wrestling rink' with the entry of Pandey. This narrative evokes the ideological
topography of the cop-films where idling and politically-connected youths monopolize the civic space
of a remote small-town. However, this vertical and linear narrative of degeneration is immediately set
in play with a more ambivalent, horizontal and circuitous one. We cut away to another college-student
(whose kurta-jeans signals he is also another chhatra-neta) who is leading a group of 'goondas' on a
chase through long corridors and winding staircases of the university. The chase continues across the
silhouette of minarets, clock-towers and domes of the colonial architecture, now covered with a veneer
of moss and decay. The fleeing man runs into a young female student and one of the protagonists of the
film – Niharika, who is stunned by his bloody appearance and recoils. He removes the ribbon from her
hair and smells it as she walks away. He is shot at and the pursuers follow the trail of blood he leaves.
He hastily assembles an explosive with a tin-can, a chemical powder and some string, which blows an
ear off one of his chasers. When captured, he says defiantly, “You must finish me off because if I
escape I will kill all of you.” They assure him that they will finish him off, and the banter continues
through their awkward scuffles using brooms and buckets. Pandey arrives to end the beating, assures
the student that his death has been postponed till after the elections. We learn that the fleeing student is
Pandey's new political rival - Rannvijay Singh. Pandey orders Singh to practice his netagiri elsewhere
and forbids him from raising the banner of 'backwards' (backward castes) on campus again.
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In this sequence we are brought to see rather intimately those who have precipitated the regrettable
politicization and criminalization of educational institutions. Close-ups position us to note the garish
attire of the men, that they are past the usual college age, their less-than-fit physiques, the wiry frame
of a sweat-soaked, dark and lean Rannvijay. Dressed in crisp white clothes, Pandey by contrast, as the
incumbent office-holder, carries himself with great assurance, scolding and coddling his men with
abandon. These figures are decidedly non-heroic, yet magnetic in their belligerence as well as
resourcefulness. Their skirmishes are both comic in their profusion of threats and casually violent. As
we enjoy these episodes that revel in the depiction of embodied forms of social being, bonding and
violence – we are brought to appreciate the film's ethnographic eye for rendering its provincial world.
The same gaze presents several vignettes that reveal how the space of the university-hostel is structured
by quotidian performances of caste-dominance. Brahmin students seated at a separate table at the
hostel-mess insist on commencing every meal by chanting mantras loudly. Pandey circulates sacred
thalis (or plates) upon which hostelers are made to pledge their votes to him. Himself an impoverished
thakur, Rannvijay seeks to insert himself into the electoral arena by speaking up for the 'backwards' –
while Pandey wants to prevent him from fragmenting his voting constituency by playing 'the caste-
card'. If caste-dominance structures these spaces, it is also contested violently and often at great risk.
When Rannvijay shoots one of Pandey's aides to express his defiance, Pandey decimates his family
living in their native village.
Yet, for figures like the vice-chancellor, the university continues to hold meaning as an apolitical space
for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, culture and civilization – which is disrupted when the likes
of Pandey and Singh venture into the classroom to appeal for votes. This philosophy of disinterested
education is undercut repeatedly through the film's dramatization of various encounters. As Rannvijay
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tries to rally support for his election-bid, a student who has narrowly failed his English exam, pleads
with him for help. The student explains that failing the exam means he will not be able to graduate,
which would upset his family greatly and severely hamper his chances of getting married. One of
Singh's aides rebukes the student for choosing to study English (despite his underprivileged
background) to which an aggravated Singh rejoins, “But why shouldn't he? Is English someone's
private property?” The inclusion of such exchanges reveals how the discourse of merit as well as its
systems of calibration enshrined in formal education also reproduce class and caste hierarchies, where
individuals like this failed student have no chance of learning English meaningfully and thus accessing
the upward mobility and successful masculinity it can bring. It is within these systemic inequities that
the student-politician like Rannvijay positions himself as a 'fixer' who can use his influence to possibly
modify marksheets, pressurize professors to allot grace-marks and thereby make available a modicum
of the benefits of a formal degree to the aggrieved student.
However, Singh's acts of fixing remain ambiguous in their intent and effect – they aim to redistribute
the benefits of education through the use of informal channels but they are also intended to recuperate
threatened masculinities. This aspect of his fixing is further emphasized when Anirudh approaches him
for help after a close friend's mother is sexually harassed in a marketplace by a couple of idle youths.
Singh's men cut off the perpetrator's nose at the busy market next morning and in return Anirudh agrees
to campaign for Singh with the 'hi-bye' crowd – meaning the sophisticated English-speaking,
'westernized' students and women. Once again, he helps the decent and non-violent men assuage their
sense of masculine honor. However, even as he aids them he is disdainful of the student who was
unable to protect his mother and 'fixing' the matter confirms his sense of martial thakur
hypermasculinity. The film presents Singh's anger and political fixing as an irresolvable contradiction
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since his caste-anchored subjectivity and his sense of thakur masculinity remain inseparable from his
resistance to inequity of power and dignity. Also, his interventions are at once idealistic in challenging
tacit hierarchies of power, status and resources, and at the same time instrumentalist in building an
economy of patronage and mutual favors which will ultimately further his political ambitions.
As the various fan responses and reviews repeatedly point out, the appeal of Rannvijay's character is
also his simultaneous sense of inadequacy which emerges most clearly in his dealings with Anirudh
and Niharika. The romance between the latter unfolds within a larger ethos of prohibition on
interactions between the sexes that is shown to prevail in the town. As a result the university becomes a
space of charged proximity and possible intimacy for the two within an otherwise segregated ethos.
Both are members of the college dramatics society where they perform Hamlet in chaste and
Sanskritized Hindi. Yet the likes of Rannvijay are excluded from these spaces of interaction and
possibilities of intimacy evidently by their lack of decency, polish and confidence to talk to urban
women from respectable families. It appears that any communication between these 'uncouth' netas and
female-students can only take the form of harassment of the latter or the public humiliation of the
former. A 'comic' instance of this is when Pandey's younger brother Badrinarayan requests Niharika for
her vote in his flawed English diction – this scene was selected by some fans on YouTube as one of the
best scenes of the film. Just as we see Niharika recoil instinctively from Rannvijay in the opening
scene, she is later upset to see Anirudh campaign on his behalf.
In a scene that exemplifies the film's complex exploration of the subjectivity of provincial political
youth, upset by Niharika's walk out, Singh asks Anirudh why women recoil from him. He muses,
“They see something bad in me which is why they keep away. Perhaps I am not all good.” When
Anirudh describes his own loving gaze toward Niharika as entirely honorable (and non-sexual), Singh
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replies, “It's all a game of the gaze (in the original, the Hindi-Urdu term 'nazar'). I have no wrong
intentions either but curse this face [slapping his own face], what can I do if god has given me such
bulging eyes?” While feminist film theory has demonstrated how within the visual economy of
Hollywood (like that of much Western artistic practice), the gaze that the on-screen image of the
woman elicits is implicitly a male one, for the pleasure and desire of which (voyeurism and
scopophilia) is presented the body of the woman. 'The gaze' within the romantic framework of
contemporary Hindi cinema combines these aspects of gendered looking and consumption, with other
phenomenologies and iconographies of looking and loving deriving from a multiple lineages of
religious philosophy,poetry and theories of art amongst which Sufi poetry and religious practice has
had a heavy influence. In this vein, the giver of the look is very often a woman and the look infects its
male object with desire, even as at other times she may present her own beauty to his gaze. While this
iconography of gaze and desire dominates the oral and visual representation of romantic love, these
optic flows are also tightly structured by the proscriptions and prohibitions of gender, caste and class.
Singh's mention of his 'bulging eyes' verbalizes all that his (and actor Irfan Khan's) dark and wiry
corporeal presence signifies in Niharika's gaze - his lack of social etiquette and polish (and by
implication 'decency') owing to his rural roots and his imbrication in political society. With this lament
and Singh's later plea that Niharika look at him, the film calls out the structural mandates of the
seemingly secular, caste and class-blind consensual on-screen bourgeois romance; and registers Singh's
resentment.
The second half of the film depicts Singh's single-minded and ultimately self-destructive pursuit of
Niharika. As he repeatedly fails to overcome her dislike or to engage her in conversation, he takes a
coercive route by appealing to her father's sense of caste-honor and positioning himself as an
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appropriate thakur groom for her. When the couple evades him, he leads a final pursuit across the
renowned Kumbh Mela, that ends in the decimation of his gang and his own death. Here, his desire for
Niharika exceeds erotic desire for her per se, and she becomes symbolic of all the accouterments of
civil respectability that political power alone cannot fetch him. And even as Singh is himself violently
ejected from the domain of the bourgeois romance and the final credits roll on an image of Anirudh and
Niharika emerging out of a dark tunnel holding hands - the film implicates the viewer in an ambivalent
exploration of Singh's self-destructive desire and resentment. It implicates the viewer in a pleasure that
derives from the film's exploration of how larger social rifts inhere as the contentious, climactic and the
impossible within mundane encounters - aspects that get obscured by the narratives of provincial
political degeneration, by the normative discourses of education and merit, as well as by the structures
of bourgeois romance. These pleasurable dramatizations not only force a recognition of provincial
political youths as subjectivities emerging from a long colonial and postcolonial history of caste-power
and contestation, they also explore the more paradoxical dimensions of these transformations where
gestures toward redistribution also become reifications of caste-masculinities. Moreover, these
transformations are shown to structure not only material tussles for power, access and life-
opportunities, but also the more ineffable domain of desire and erotics.
Sehar: the Criminal-entrepreneur and New Imaginations of Modernity
Consistent with its promotion as a cop-film, the narrator of Sehar – Tiwari, a septuagenarian professor
of telecommunications at Lucknow University, captions the film at the beginning and conclusion as the
remarkable story of Lucknow's Senior Superintendent of Police Ajay Kumar and his Special Task Force
as they seek to expunge the gangster Gajraj Singh and organized crime from Uttar Pradesh. These
characters are depicted as heroic in the face of a thoroughly corrupt political system where politicians
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and criminals are hand-in-glove and the police has been reduced to providing personal security to the
families of politicians. In the final shootout between the STF and Gajraj's gang, the former is
decimated, leaving Professor Tiwari – the putative 'common man' with an aversion to guns and blood,
to pick up the gun and shoot Gajraj dead. In an interview, both director Kaushik and Arun Kumar
explained that the conclusion was supposed to emphasize the fact that the common man must join a
revived police in restoring the rule of law (Siddiqui 2005). However, as the subsequent discussion will
demonstrate, the film repeatedly exceeds these descriptions and categorizations through its ambivalent
exploration of Gajraj's gang as a kind of provincial criminal entrepreneurship emerging from the
inequitable processes of post-colonial and post-Liberalization development. If Haasil explored the
psychologies of the gundas and netas overrunning the hallowed corridors of Allahabad University,
Sehar demonstrates the surprising productivity of disaffection, perverse ambitions and violent crime
that explode out of Lucknow University, the new kinds of entrepreneurship they enable in a liberalizing
economy, and ultimately the paradigm-shifts in the rationality of governance they precipitate.
In an interview Arun Kumar who had headed the actual task-force, had described the emergence of
Shukla as follows -
Lucknow till then was not particularly known for violent crimes. But now in 1997, all of a sudden,
there was an eruption of violent crime. This particular gang led by Sriprakash Shukla had built up a
liaison with the Bihar mafia and the railway headquarters in Gorakhpur. People were being killed in
the middle of the city, in the midst of the police. (Grover 2005)
In this recapitulation, Shukla emerges 'all of a sudden' in an otherwise quiescent Lucknow. Sehar's
explanation for the emergence of Gajraj Singh is a more complex one. His rise is shown to be
inextricable from the history of colonial as well as postcolonial development-planning, industrial
expansion and commerce. The issue of the distribution of state-issued railway contracts at the
headquarters of the North-eastern railways in Gorakhpur is one of the material ways in which
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seemingly 'provincial' towns like Gorakhpur and Lucknow functioned as important nodes of industrial
expansion but also where crony-capitalism proliferated in the post-Independence decades. In the 1990s,
Lucknow becomes one of the cities where the institution of cellular communications once again
transforms temporal and spatial coordinates of commerce, crime as well as law-enforcement. Thus,
even at the beginning of Tiwari's saga, the reigning mafia-leader Tarkeshwari Singh refuses to share
contracts with an upstart Gajraj Singh, citing the 'long and violent struggle' through which his
monopoly over contracts had been settled and which Gajraj must not presume to change. The whole
edifice of postcolonial development-planning and industrialization, is also at once a violent
consolidation of structures of caste and class. Much like mechanized dams, trains have also served in
the Indian socio-political imagination as a metaphor of the technological modernity brought about by
the Nehruvian developmental state. In Sehar, the running locomotive with its endlessly grinding wheels
works as a dark metaphor for the unstoppable juggernaut of the nation itself running, as it were toward
an unknown destination. Its project of planned development has been violently co-opted by traditional
elites and used to consolidate existing disparities in power and access. Those who have been kept
“waiting” on the sides, seek to board the train violently in order to assume control over the flows of
statist as well as market capitalism.
Much like Rannvijay Singh, Gajraj is also not given a personal or familial history, instead he is
associated with Lucknow University which he illuminates as a space of endless waiting for educated
and unemployed youths. This experience of the university contrasts starkly with the ways in which
Anamika and Tiwari inhabit the university as professors, together with their English-speaking middle
and upper class students (a large number of whom are women) who study economics or computer
science – assured of avenues to join the newly liberalized economy legitimately. The other worlds also
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housed within the university come to the attention of the Lucknow police when three youths are shot
dead prior to university-elections with sophisticated semi-automatic weapons, further investigation
reveals that Gajraj's gang which was involved recruits heavily from amongst students. When the
Assistant Director General of Police muses, “What must these criminals be telling an educated mind
that it decides to join forces with them?” In reply, we are transported to the scene of recruitment at the
men's hostel of the university where Gajraj is grimly sizing up a bespectacled and timid-looking male
student (identified later as Sridhar Pundit, son of a primary schoolteacher) while other members of his
gang look on. Gajraj asks the student tauntingly -
So this is what you have managed to make of yourself after all this show of an education?... Ever
wondered why you weren't given an opportunities? Because you are weak and cowardly. These
guys [pointing to the others in the room] were also not given opportunities, what's new in that? This
is what has always happened, will continue to happen. But these men decided they will not remain
weak and humiliated forever, if need be they will repay a slight with a bullet.
He describes the experience of 'waiting' as an emasculating deferral of productive masculine
citizenship. The undertones of bitterness and self-flagellation in this impassively delivered speech
shows how Gajraj uses the logic of merit as an interpretive framework for this experience – so that
failure in a competitive arena arises from the inherent deficiency of the self who is therefore deserving
of being overlooked. By thinking about 'deficiency' as inherent rather than cultivated, he redefines the
problem of inequitable access to life-opportunities as contingent upon the ability of the self that is
seeking it. At a meeting with the other mafia-syndicates, Gajraj declares with quiet provocation that he
shall not abide by any division of territories and agreements of honor between them. He elaborates his
vision here as follows, “This is the problem. Everyone has power and no restraints. This needs to
change. In the new vyavastha [system or organization] only one shall prevail – none his equal, none
above him, he will be supreme ['us ka hi varchasva hoga'].” This is power that can neither be given nor
shared, but seized through a violent battle for absolute power - 'varchasva ki ladai'.
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Gajraj's deliberate use of the term 'vyavastha' or 'organization' evokes two fields - the market as well as
the prevailing political system and in this sense his vision is a politico-economic fantasy that emerges
from the twin realities of caste-upheaval and new neoliberal rationalities. In the market, absolute
monopoly can be 'seized' only by the ideal entrepreneurial subject - for whom 'the trade' and the need to
'maintain one's position in the market' (or 'credit') overrides all else, even the word of honor. However,
the 'chaos' of shared power also evokes the culture of multi-party coalition politics that the film depicts
– where the executive branch of the state including the bureaucrats and law-enforcement are shown to
be preoccupied with playing horse-trading king-makers in the legislature where no single party has a
political mandate. What is obfuscated in this view is the fact that coalition politics have also been
coterminous with the dissipation of the electoral mandate of the Congress party and its predominantly
upper-caste politicians; and the emergence of multiple middle and lower caste-based political blocs.
While questions relating to caste-experience and identities are not explicitly stated in the film, the real
and perceived indignities Gajraj speaks of and manages to strike a chord with, the upper caste titles of
his gang-members (Singh, Pundit, Chaudhary) and their shared sense of entitlement and injured merit
provoke a reading of this political vision in the light of the gradual democratization of caste in electoral
politics since the late 1960s. Gajraj's rejection of the instabilities and impasses of coalition politics in
favor of a fascistic centralization of power based on merit can be seen as the reactionary fantasy of a
generation of impoverished upper-caste youths who believe they have been denied their due monopoly
of public education, employment and representation by two decades of 'Mandalization'.
While Rannvijay Singh's experience of 'waiting' in Haasil is productive of a resistant mode of politics
and 'fixing', Gajraj's gang improvises a form of neoliberal criminal entrepreneurship. It establishes its
'credit' in the market by systematically killing off all existing figures of the railway-mafia. Using
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sophisticated weapons smuggled from Nepal, it conducts kidnappings of industrialists, builders and
contractors in order to infiltrate new sectors of the liberalizing economy, namely, real-estate,
construction and metrolink development. As the gang's operations are traced by the police, the film
deploys a new cinematic language for Lucknow where wide pan-shots of the palimpsest-like cityscape,
its still fecund outskirts and burgeoning high-rises are described by Tiwari's voice-over as 'being
nourished by the black money of organized crime.' The gang makes ingenious use of the cellular
communications newly-installed in the city to coordinate operations that cut across the jurisdictional
zones of the Lucknow Police. It uses informers in local police-stations to get prior intelligence about
planned police-raids. The intensification of these flows of intelligence is rendered in the film through
the superimposition of an aural sensorium of ringing cellphones and the babble of multiple voices over
a visual cityscape marked by newly-erected cellular-network towers. The success of the gang
necessitates the formation of the Special Task Force of the Lucknow Police. Free from all political and
bureaucratic 'interference', delinked from the local police, with no civic duties, the STF is an efficient
and mobile cell with unrestrained jurisdiction over the entire state and all its cellular communications.
With the single mandate to 'expunge' all organized crime from UP, it represents the rationality of a
distinctively neoliberal security-state. The now expanded geographical scope of the skirmishes between
the STF and the gang, allows the film to represent UP as a set of heterogeneous and porous spaces
including cities, small-towns, rural districts and border-spaces (listed by Tiwari's voice-over:
Malihabad, Sitapur, Gonda, Azamgarh, Ghazipur, Bellia, Meerut, Chhapna) now sutured by new
mobilities, surveillance networks and crucially, technologies of killing.
The potentially exhilarating aspects of these neoliberal technological, market-oriented modernities
transforming the provincial, are undermined by an abiding sense of fatalism. With spiraling body-
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counts for the gang as well as the STF, both Gajraj and Ajay appear to be increasingly overcome by
exhaustion. Both are framed in dark and bare rooms facing windows, their bodies bathed in the pale
light of dusk or a dim dawn. These frames create a sense of psychic equivalence between both figures,
as both appear to be propelled by desperate desires emanating from the burdens of the past. While Ajay
desires to erase the familial trauma of his court-marshaled father's suicide with his own act of courage,
Gajraj's chooses to preserve his 'position in the market' at the risk of being hunted than lay low evade
the STF. In his case, the past is the memory of death-like 'eternal waiting' – the ringside experience of
postcolonial modernity to which all risky enterprises are preferable and necessary. Moreover, for many
like Gajraj, these enterprises are necessarily risky if they have to be attempted.
As the train hurtles on carrying their dead bodies, a sense of total loss militates against any optimism
about neoliberal entrepreneurialism and any sense of justice delivered with 'common man' Tiwari
killing Gajraj. If neoliberal masculinities are being represented in other popular genres of Hindi cinema
as either the groomed, sculpted, commodity and technology-driven, transnationally-mobile
metrosexuals (Gehlawat 2012: 17), or the new urban lumpen masculinity that is ordinary but
accomplishes upward mobility successfully (J Kapur 2011: 201); the provincial youth-film represents
hatke cinema's attempt to represent a neoliberal caste-masculinity whose competences belong to the
realm of provincial political society. He is unheroic and often fails to achieve or meaningfully enjoy
upward mobility, yet his desires unveil the peculiar contradictions of contemporary Indian modernity.
Gulaal: Mustached Nihilism and Secessionist Dreams
Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal is set in Rajpur, a fictional small-town in Rajasthan, where a decadent Rajput
aristocracy holds considerable power and prestige after five decades of electoral democracy. It follows
primarily the story of Dileep, a youth from a 'decent' middle-class Rajput family, who comes to take his
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second post-graduate degree at the law-college and encounters campus-life, elections and the workings
of a secessionist Rajput aristocracy. Unlike the dynamic even if ultimately self-destructive trajectories
of the youths in Haasil and Sehar, Gulaal is unleavened by any dynamism. Its moody frames are
heavily drenched in gloom and a sense of futility.
As the innumerable media-reviews as well as aficionado-blogs about the film reflect, Gulaal garnered
great interest and acclaim for it evocation of provincial dystopia through a range of startling and new
characters, realist and mythical style as well as performances. One of the many fan-blogs about the film
quite aptly described the inseparable caste and gender underpinnings of the dystopia of the film's leads
as 'mustached nihilism' (AEIOU 2009). Owing to its much talked about and belated release, Gulaal
arrived in 2009 with a halo of politically 'grittiness' after numerous deletions were demanded by the
Censor Board before it was released with an 'Adult' certificate (cementing Kashyap's already-existing
mythology as a hard-hitting filmmaker) as well as on warrants of artistic merit after being screened at
the Venice International and London Film Festivals (Shah 2009). These events and narratives furnished
an interpretative frame that elicited particular kinds of spectatorial attention, scrutiny and pleasure
toward and from the film – in particular appreciation of the political intent of the film – it's anger as
well as lament at 'the state of the nation and its youth'. Stories about the film's conception, the fact that
Raj Singh Chaudhary who plays the protagonist Dileep, had co-developed the script with Kashyap
from his own experience of violent ragging at college, also contributed to the film's perceived realism.
Here's a brief summary of the film's complex plot. It opens with the youth, Dileep, being brought into a
large courtyard to glimpse Rajputana, an underground militant movement by the Rajput leaders of the
region to secede from the Indian nation and form their own state. Hereafter, the film unfolds as a
flashback – beginning with Dileep's arrival in Rajpur to study law. He takes temporary accommodation
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in an abandoned bar occupied by a young man named Rannanjay who is the dissipated son of an
erstwhile Rajput prince. When Dileep tries to find a vacancy in the men's hostel of the college, he is
brutally hazed by the college-honcho Jadhwal and his gang and then locked up in a dark room with
another young and traumatized female faculty named Anuja. Later, he is dumped naked and
unconscious on the street. Rannanjay and Dileep attempt to avenge the insult but both are given another
humiliating 'brainwash', stripped and thrown out by Jadhwal and his boys.
145
Thereafter they approach
Dukey Bana for help who is the respected but largely titular prince of Rajpur, and is building a loyal
army of youths for his campaign for Rajputana. Dukey makes a retaliatory attack on Jadhwal and in
exchange asks Rannanjay to contest the elections for the college student-union – aiming to channelize
union funds into the campaign for Rajputana. In a swift turn of events, Rannanjay's illegitimate 'half-
caste' brother Karan, eager to establish himself as a Rajput, kills Rannanjay so that his sister (who is
also the rival candidate) Kiran can win the election. Dukey fields Dileep as his candidate and stage-
manages his victory through a deliberate miscounting of votes. On Karan's direction, Kiran approaches
Dileep with seeming humility and gets him to appoint her the cultural secretary of the student union.
She initiates a romantic relationship with Dileep and eggs him to protest against Dukey when he
misappropriates funds collected by her for the college-festival. When Dukey threatens Dileep, he
resigns from the union in protest, just as Kiran discovers she is pregnant and decides to get an abortion.
Once Dileep is alienated from Dukey, on Karan's direction Kiran ingratiates herself with Dukey with
another strategic performance of vulnerable femininity. Dukey's tremendous political hold is revealed
as his men kill Jadhwal, as well as the cop investigating the latter's disappearance. Emotionally
unhinged by Kiran's repeated refusals to meet him, convinced that she is being manipulated by Dukey
and Karan, and seething under his repeated 'emasculations' Dileep sets off on a violent rampage. He
145 A particularly humiliating mode of hazing where the victim is held upside down and his face is inserted into a lavatory
and it is flushed.
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kills Dukey, several of his as well as Karan's men but is unable to shoot Kiran even when she
unapologetically states that she had used him for her own purposes. After Karan's aides shoot him,
Dileep painfully crawls back to the decrepit bar to die. In its final frame, the film returns to another
congregation for Rajputana as Karan is anointed the new leader while standing amongst the other foot-
soldiers, Kiran looks on. Her gulaal-smeared face is streaked with inscrutable tears and it remains
unclear whether her tears are of pride, joy for her brother or pain at what she may see as her own
repeated sacrifices.
Gulaal represents the state of provincial youth through an exploration of the psyches and postures of a
set of Rajput men, which range from militant secession, paralyzing existential angst, middle class
'cowardice' to cosmopolitan-pacifism. The film further extends the diffusive multi-perspectival
representational strategy of the provincial youth-film by also depicting a range of interlocutors who
witness and comment upon the actions of these men. However, I demonstrate the ways in which this
representational strategy when harnessed to the film's long historical and 'nostalgic' vantage, offers a
different understanding of provincial youth and the nature of provincial modernity than the other two
films considered in this chapter. The latter end with a genuine ambivalence at the heart of their
narrative closures – forcing us to reckon with the complex agency of political youths in the context of
the inequitable histories of state, caste and power. By contrast, the diffusive representational strategy of
Gulaal, I argue, enables it to develop a representation of provincial disaffection that is only nominally
democratized and pluralistic, and in fact strives to recuperate multiple perspectives into a singular
historical critique that hinges on a comparison of contemporary Rajput masculinities and politics with a
literary-cultural frisson at the dawn of Indian independence. A critical exploration of Gulaal is
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necessary to acknowledge the potential of the provincial youth-film to also foreclose its own capacity
for pluralistic recognitions of the nature of provincial modernity.
Gulaal presents a provincial experience of postcolonial modernity through the psychological worlds of
three Rajput men and their experiences of the transition from caste-based kingship to secular electoral
democracy. In the opening sequence of the film, the camera dwells on Dukey's face as he quivers with a
sense of outrage while addressing an audience of turbaned Rajput men with faces smeared with gulaal.
A flag bearing the symbol of Rajputana (a stylized sun) frames him as he narrates the history of
Rajputs in post-Independence India as a string of betrayals ever since they voluntarily ceded their
territories to the new democracy. Even as the Rajputana battalions made the ultimate sacrifices in
successive Indo-Pak wars, their hard-won military posts were given away to Pakistan. Then threatened
by the continued loyalty of people to their erstwhile princes, the Congress-led Indian government
abolished the 'Privy Purses' of the premiers of the erstwhile princely states in 1971.
146
He contrasts the
near filial attachment of the king with his praja [subjects] under the organically-evolved sacral
framework of dharma, with the artificially-imposed one of democracy where no single party has been
able to get a majority mandate in successive national elections. That the invocation of an 'organic
tradition' is an ideological sleight-of-hand by Dukey to erase the power and coercion with which the
Rajputs retained power through centuries, is quickly revealed in the very next scene when a local man
points out to Dileep a spot in Rajpur's arid and desolate landscape where his grandfather, a Muslim man
had been killed and buried in a salt-pond for falling in love with the King's daughter.
146 Here Dukey is referring to the 26th Amendment to the Indian Constitution which was passed in the Parliament under
the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and which abolished the Privy Purses or designated allowances to the
erstwhile royalty of the princely states. Director Kashyap has mentioned on his blog how reading the Patiala Report
which made recommendations for rescinding the 'privy purses' gave him a political context for co-writing the film with
Raj Chaudhry who also plays Dileep in the film (see http://anuragkashyap.tumbhi.com/uncategorized/gulaal-79).
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Yet, even as peripheral figures undermine Dukey's claims, the film derives intensity by focalizing and
presenting 'from within' as it were, his sense of being 'unhoused' within a transforming postcolonial
landscape where the residual social eminence of his position is no longer matched by proportionate
political power. It is a generational trauma born of the childhood memory of his father donning his
regal turban before committing suicide – as the radio cackles with news of a spate of suicides by other
former princes after their privileges were revoked. Here, the provincial youth film returns to an
economy of Oedipal desire, where survival under the Indian state with its lack of a political mandate is
tantamount to castration. Conversely, the dream of Rajputana is a means of recompensing the father's
loss – a moment to which Dukey returns in his dying moments. However, this return to a filial-psychic
trauma departs from the figuration of the same in earlier articulations of angry masculinity, since the
desire to assuage loss is pointedly attributed to a specific social experience – namely, the loss of Rajput
preeminence. The caste-name, 'Rajput' literally means 'royal scion' or more generally, the caste of rulers
and warriors, and derives from a cosmology of divine-mandated kingship. Inserted into the landscape
of competitive electoral democracy, it undergoes 'desacralization' or the loss of a Sacred and Symbolic
order. While compellingly and tragically presented, Dukey is prevented from acquiring heroic
overtones – by being juxtaposed with the trajectories of other Rajput youths, as well as through the
depiction of Dukey's more pitiful attempts to maintain the trappings of royalty. Dukey's haunting by his
father's 'humiliation' and delirious desire for a restored Rajputana is shown as not the intractable
essence of pre-modern social structures, but rather a counter-modern desire produced from within
provincial disillusionment with the postcolonial national-state and the emergent 'democratized' political
landscape. It is through these juxtapositions that the Oedipal psychic structure is granted a historical
and sociological explanation and a socio-psychic specificity.
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Rannanjay illustrates another aspect of the contemporary Rajput experience – one of disaffiliation,
nihilism and paralysis. The surreal and cheeky mis en scene of the dimly-lit colonial-era bar where he
lives, with its posters of Black jazz and soul artists, bottles of whiskey named “Democracy” and
“Republic”, conveys his intellectual and political trajectory. It is also a spatial metaphor for the
contradictions of his consciousness – which repudiates his father's pathetic attempts to preserve a
semblance of royalty by converting his palace into a heritage hotels where they 'serve white ladies tea',
but is unable to develop a more purposive sense of self or the world. Thus the lurid neon signs of the
bar flash “Hell here” instead of “Hello there.” Rannanjay decides to contest elections for Dukey's party
but not to realize Rajputana, but out of a desire to be as corrupt as the next person. Conceived as a
figure of unresolvable contradictions, Rannanjay repudiates his father's 'aristocracy' and yet displays
caste-pride when he taunts his step-brother Karan mercilessly about his 'illegitimate' lineage and then
faces a hail of bullets with the unflinching stoicism befitting a 'true' Rajput. Abhimanyu Singh's
performance of the character combines bluster and bravado with self-lacerating, foul-mouthed dark
humor and a sense of inner vacuum and exile. With his cosmopolitan education having irrevocably
eroded the moral and philosophical certainties of both, hereditary caste-based kingship as well as
modern electoral democracy, Rannanjay appears to be 'un-housed' in a different way within his own
world while at the same time being entrapped and atrophied within it.
Dileep, by contrast, does not suffer from the loss of social eminence that Dukey and Rannanjay grapple
with as scions of the older ruling class. Rather, he is constricted by what the film presents as the
cultivated 'cowardice' of the middle class that survives by staying out of trouble with alcohol, politics
or 'bad company'; and negotiates the paucity of employment by collecting educational degrees. With
this finiteness of aspiration, agency and stakes, he offers a detached and rationalistic critique of
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Rajputana or any form of organized politics for that matter (“this isn't revolution but madness”). Raj
Singh Chaudhury plays this character as physically timid and vulnerable but also well-meaning and
tender toward the film's women - Kiran and Anuja, and skeptical of Dukey's political vision. We view
the violent, homosocial and compulsively macho culture of the men's hostel through his experience of
brutal hazing. The presentation of these events from Dileep's point of view (based on the director and
script-writer's own experiences of similar incidents at school and college), forecloses any exploration
or understanding of the worlds and motivations of other non-Rajput youths like Jadhwal and his gang
who animate the interstitial rungs of Rajpur's political society. Rather these peripheral men exert their
presence by provoking with their repeated acts of humiliation, the final unhinging of Dileep. Having
found his tenderness, non-violence, aversion to politics ultimately unviable and open to manipulation,
he asks at the end of the film, “Why am I such a coward?”
Through Dukey, Rannanjay and Dileep, the film extends the diffusive and multi-perspectival strategy
of the provincial youth film to depict the social and psychic worlds of Rajput youths in the imagined
provincial universe of Rajpur. There is a network of critical mutual gazes between the three men
(Rannanjay and Dileep see Dukey's vision as misguided, while Dukey considers Rannanjay undone by
a western liberal education and Dileep as cowardly and inhibited in his action by too much thinking).
We also see a range of peripheral characters reflect critically on the postures of these men. However,
while these multiple gazes provide the illusion of representational comprehensiveness, they work to
neutralize each other within the horizontal, synchronic axis of the film as it were, with neither in itself
bearing more ethical weight than the other. Rather they are harnessed to a larger diachronic, historical
critique advanced by the film through the use of various textual and extra-textual devices. I shall
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elaborate on this point about the subordination of the synchronic axis to the diachronic, historical one
after a brief consideration on the nature of this historical critique.
The dedication at the opening of the film alerts viewers to the historical vantage of the film and the
evaluation of postcolonial India that emerges from it:
The film is a work of fiction
dedicated to all those poets of pre-independent India
who wrote songs of freedom and had a vision of
free India, which we could not put together.
During the film's promotion, Kashyap had claimed that the film was inspired by poet and lyricist, Sahir
Ludhianvi's famous lyrics “Yeh mehelon, yeh takhton, ye tajon ki duniya, yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye
toh kya hai?” (or “This world of crowns and glory, what is it worth?”) used in a famous sequence from
Guru Dutt's Pyaasa where a modern poet articulates his existential crisis as he walks through the false
glitter of a red-light district, where great socio-economic disparities undermine the modern nation's
claims to progress and social reconstruction. These textual and extra-textual elements frame the events
of Gulaal in a temporal narrative of failure – to bring to fruition the visions of poets such as Ludhianvi,
Ram Prasad 'Bismil' and Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' – Hindi-Urdu poets who had been a part of the
Indian People's Theater Association or 'IPTA' in the 1940s.
Piyush Mishra, who plays Prithvi bana – Dukey's eccentric, England-educated, Lennon-loving elder
brother and poet, is also the lyricist, music composer and lead playback-singer for the film's many
passionate political songs. The shared vocal register between character and singer, elevates Prithvi to
the status of a sutradhar in the film – a figure derived from ancient Indian, 'pre-proscenium' theatrical
traditions – who both commentates upon dramatic events within a play (addressing the audience
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directly) and ties the drama together. Prithvi's eviscerations of Dukey and Rajputana with irreverent yet
poignant rehashes of famous poems by Bismil and Dinkar (such as “Sarfaroshi ki tamanna”/“Our
Desire to Sacrifice” and “Krishna ki chetavani”/“Krishna's Warning”) consist of the film's explicit
intra-diegetic political critique. This, as I discuss subsequently, has repercussions for the film's
exploration of Rajpur's provincial modernity.
Shaped by a cosmopolitan education abroad, Prithvi speaks of the peculiar madness of 'all those men
with round-rimmed glasses' like Gandhi and John Lennon who dreamed of 'a world without nations and
borders'. His constant companion is an unnamed and silent surreal figure, dressed in the garb of the
androgynous 'ardhanareshwar' (or the mythic half-man and half-woman) who creeps in and out of
frames. Prithvi, this anonymous figure and Madhuri constitute a choral presence in the film who
witness and comment in word, gesture or song. After one of Dukey's impassioned speeches, Prithvi
throws him a Nazi salute and in a subsequent nautanki-style duet with Madhuri, likens Dukey's rage to
planes thrusting themselves into towers in other lands, and Uncle Sam barging into Iraq. These
analogies with the Jewish Holocaust and the global war on terror, imply a logic of recurrence between
these collective masculinist enterprises, owing to their failure to imagine other modes of social being in
the world. The pulsating song “Aarambh hai prachanda...” (or “A tremendous beginning”) sung by
Mishra that plays during Rannanjay's election campaign for the student union, describes a tremendous
mass-mobilization of youth, but begins to satirically mime the motivations animating these 'herds of
heads' [“mastakon ke jhund”] that doggedly believe that -
Those who give their lives as they please, and take lives as they please
they alone are omnipotent.
The universe cries aloud, the scriptures tell us-
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war alone is the proof of heroism!
147
The song then exhorts 'the horde' to revile 'the poet who imagined life, as a song of love'.
148
Through
these scores, the film diagnoses the nation's failure to self-realize as a failure to imagine alternative
masculinities akin to the gentle, poetic and dreamy masculinity of the poets – rendered memorably by
Guru Dutt in his on-screen rendition of the sensitive artist in Pyaasa/Thirsty (1957) and Kaagaz ke
Phool/Paper Flowers (1959). The film's diachronic historical critique invokes the poets of IPTA to
critically distance the Rajput subjectivities being explored. However, this critique becomes its own
form of privileging these subjectivities as the prime-movers of this embattled socio-political landscape,
who appear to have single-handedly brought about its degeneration. The interpretive framework of
imaginative and ethical failure as well as historical degeneration would apply much more ambivalently
to a figure such as a dalit student or Rannvijay Singh of Haasil – affected by structural barriers to
accessing education, employment, representation, capital and the other social-emotional accouterments
of productive masculinity, and who as a result have more desperate investments in the avenues opened
up by electoral democracy, affirmative action in education, jobs and legislative bodies, or the 'entry-
point' of student politics.
While Kiran and Karan's trajectory through the film is related to the question of caste, their battle for
dignity and recognition is shown to be anchored in a familial history of inter-caste 'miscegenation'
where they seek to be recognized as 'Rajputs' and 'his Highness' children', rather than in a larger social
terrain of structural caste-based deprivation, exploitation and contestation. Jadhwal, a significant figure
even in his peripherality is shown repeatedly with his gang as idle. His electoral alliance with Karan
suggests a shared resentment of Dukey's entrenched power but the motivations of this alliance are not
147 The original lyrics of the song in Hindi are as follows: “Mann kare so praan de, jo mann kare so praan le/wahi toh ek
sarvshaktimaan hai/vishv ki pukaar hai yeh bhaagwat ka saar hai/ki yuddh hi veer ka pramaan hai.”
148 The original lyrics of the song are as follow: “Jis kavi ki kalpana mein jindagi ho prem geet/us kavi ko aaj tum nakaar do.”
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explored to any degree. When it appears that Kiran might win the election against his candidate Dileep,
Dukey simply rigs the elections by miscounting votes. Not only is the popular political terrain
contained at the level of plot within a top-down and coercive model of power, it is contained at the
level of the film's narrative when the election-speeches by Dileep, Kiran, Rannanjay are drowned out
by Piyush Mishra's scathing scores about the unrestrained play of warrior-masculinity and the fierce
rejection of the dreamer-poet. The content of these speeches are shown to be 'irrelevant' even as power-
backed candidates appear to be thwarted by the electorate.
The interpretive framework of national degeneration remains fixated on the failure of the Rajput youths
to self-transform. The imaginative-affective entrapment of Dukey, the ethical paralysis of Rannanjay
and the capitulation of Dileep, as well as their eventual deaths are framed by the responses of the
peripheral characters as devastating losses. The significance of Rannanjay's murder is amplified by the
song, “Jis raat gagan se khoon ki baarish aayi re” (or “The night the sky rained blood...”) and similarly,
Dukey's and Dileep's deaths are framed with the lament “O re duniya” (or “What a world...”) which
builds to a crescendo with Ludhianvi's famous lyrics from Pyaasa, “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye toh
kya hai?/Even if I get all the world, what of it?” The songs present these events as indicative of not
merely youth's existential crisis but also as the nation's aborted futurity, a closure of the pre-
Independence imaginative possibilities suggested by the poets of IPTA, rather than a history of
contestation. This use of musical commentary has been hailed by fans as the strongest appeal of the
film, several of whom nostalgically quote the references to nationalist poems and songs they had read
while in school. They also note how the film uses a tragic-historical rather than morally condemnatory
approach to these youths through the music. One fairly representative blog observes:
The most notable performance came from the stage veteran, Piyush Mishra, who essays a deranged
“sutradhaar” of the otherwise megalomaniacal plot... Unlike most politically strewn movies that
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delve into the decaying moral fabric of our society and impinge on how corruption and greed
remain to be only dualities, Gulaal makes no such attempts. Its plot is devoid of any moral
judgment, it is more of a reflection....
149
The film is seen to take a distinctly 'non-judgmental' or non-pedagogic approach where the Rajput men
are shown in their hermetic intensity and self-destructiveness.
Given that the film elicits engagement by viewers, fans and critics in ways that enables them to position
themselves as critical and learned consumers of art (who compare its mis-en-scene with the work of
auteurs of international cinema as well as Indian history and art), as well as critical and engaged
citizens, it is important to critically assess the ideological effectivity of precisely this approach of
intimacy without judgment especially in relation to the understanding it enables of provincial dystopia
and the failure of the nationalist project. While the poets of IPTA had fueled revolutionary imaginations
of a far-reaching and structural regeneration of independent India, this literary and poetic frisson of the
1940s is invoked to throw into relief the spectacular unraveling of the film's foregrounded Rajput
masculinities. This diachronic historical critique throws out of focus contiguous events such as the
democratization of caste and notions of citizenship within the secular framework of an electoral
democracy, the subsequent rise of middle and lower caste-blocs, the increased presence of women. The
effect of these 'peripheral' and synchronic events which may also have provoked elite responses of
belligerence or ethical paralysis, are effaced from this long historical narrative. This problem is most
visible in the novelist Amitava Kumar's observation about the film:
If the film is marred by its weirdly nostalgic, rather exhausted notion of angry politics, it is also
rescued by something else that carries a burden of the nostalgic past. The revolutionary poetry of
Sahir. Actor, lyricist, music director Piyush Mishra provides through his songs a real political
backbone to this film.
150
149 The complete blog-entry can be found here: http://balajiiyer.blogspot.com/2009/09/gulaal-afterthought.html
150 The longer piece by Kumar is available at: http://www.amitavakumar.com/?p=2324.
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In other words, the evacuation of the terrain of politics in the film is compensated by its mobilization of
nostalgia.
Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated the ways in which the provincial youth-film as an emergent genre has
been responsive to multiple cultural traffics that have animated the second decade of Indian
Liberalization as well as an on-going and complex process of democratization. It has sought to show
how the genre has troubled the epistemology of modernity, development and caste by distending
available narrative frameworks for the representation of productive youth, masculine anger and
provinciality; and by setting up a counter-point between the vertical axis of historical time and the
horizontal one of movement through space – through the figure of the provincial political youth and his
complex productivity. In the heterogeneous conception of postcolonial modernity that the films enable,
caste emerges not as a vestige of pre-modern modes of being that are fundamentally antithetical to the
practice of liberal democracy and modern capitalism, but rather as constitutive of them and (together
with inter-meshing practices of class, gender and locality) is also a basis for the apportioning of life-
opportunities, desires and competences. As such it has also been the basis for the contestation of power.
Nevertheless, as the discussion of Gulaal reflects, the genre retains dual possibilities for the scope of
this re-conception – where the push to pluralize and spatialize our understanding of contemporary
modernity and provinciality may also be recuperated in order to mobilize more hegemonic
understandings of nation, change and history.
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Chapter Four
“We thought, let's take Bollywood there!”: The New Rural Film and its
Cinematic Interventions
Small-town India is where the real stories are. `Ishqiya’ blends place and people in a way only those
who’ve lived that life know how, and gives us a film with desirous flesh and pulsating blood.
(Shubhra Gupta, The Indian Express)
...the picture of innocence portrayed in Hindi cinema rang completely false to me. Rural India has huge
set of problems, issues, lots of violence, [yet we think] wahan ke log seedhe saadhe pyare log hain
[those people are so simple and innocent], can't be a bigger bullshit than that. They are very aware of
what is going on in the world, and they are very aware of what's going on in their world... About the
femme fatale, I also think the character is a bit filmy, it's hyper-reality, it's not really real as such... I
wanted to take the rural femme fatale from noir fiction and set it in rural India... In fact her character
came from many women I saw [in Uttar Pradesh], even the way she speaks.
(Director Abhishek Chaubey on his debut film Ishqiya to “Cinema & Me”)
After nearly two decades of the dominance of stories set in domestic and diasporic metropoles, post-
Liberalization Hindi cinema has come to revisit the rural through the genre of the New Rural Film.
Film-review circuits have responded to this trend with pronounced relief and encouragement as evinced
in Shubhra Gupta's review of the film Ishqiya/Romantic excerpted above. This chapter explores two
films that have elaborated this genre: one, director Vishal Bharadwaj's 'provincial' indigenization of
Shakespeare's tragedy Othello in the film Omkara (2006), and second, his protégé Abhishek Chaubey's
debut film about a rural femme fatale - Ishqiya (2010) – the title being a neologism, translates roughly
as “Romantic” or “Erotic”.
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The second excerpt quoted above from an interview of Chaubey is in response to the following
question posed by film scholar Shaunak Sen:
Very often the village has been seen as the site of innocence and has been pitted against a larger
evil, malevolent city. There how do you straddle questions of morality? I say this especially with
respect to the femme fatale figure. I see this as a very conscious choice [to locate this figure in rural
India] especially within this larger universe of Hindi cinema womanhood. (Cinema & Me,
“Abhishek Chaubey”)
151
The question reveals the kind of spectatorial and critical gaze that the new rural film has invited –
which identifies Ishqiya as a riposte to a longer history of cinematic representations of the village and
rural femininity. Veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah who plays a seasoned and corrupt politician in
Omkara and a petty thief in Ishqiya opined at the time of release, “... It [Omkara] is topical, it's today,
and it's in a language that we all speak. I think it is a very wicked kind of a film. And at the same time it
is a depiction of a slice of society that we normally don't see being depicted in Hindi movies or if we
do, we see caricatures of it.”
152
In the same promotional film, Bharadwaj explained that he set the film
in Meerut in Western Uttar Pradesh since, “The north has such a unique flavor in its culture and its
language in its expressions, which has not been used in our films.”A prominent forum of film
aficionados chimed in with the following observation about Ishqiya:
... its the badlands of UP [or Uttar Pradesh – one of the largest states in the northern Hindi-speaking
heartland], with crime, love, lust, deceit, gang war and conspiracies making a delicious rustic mix.
Taste it. Except few filmmakers, Bollywood rarely explores the rustic charm and the desi flavours
in the era of multiplexes, suave urban heroes and NRI
153
money!
154
In these discursive exercises, filmmakers, actors and commentators assert the genre's novelty in
themes, settings and treatment which combines a certain realism ('slice of society', 'real stories') with
151 These interviews are carried by the news magazine Tehelka, and numerous film forums such as Tanqeed.com.
152 'The Making of Omkara' (Promotional film). Available at:
http://erosnow.com/#!/movie/watch/1000458/omkara/6102533/omkara---the-making. Accessed 4 November 2014.
153 “NRI” denotes 'non-resident Indian' – and in common parlance is used to refer to affluent Indian diaspora living in the
West.
154 “Ishqiya Review – Meet the hottest duo of the year & welcome the new graduate from Bhardwaj School!” Available at:
(http://moifightclub.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/ishqiya-review-meet-the-hottest-duo-of-the-year-welcome-the-new-
graduate-from-bhardwaj-school/). Accessed on May 30, 2014.
Paul 213
stylization ('wicked', 'delicious rustic mix'). The 'slice of society' that these films claim to depict is the
rural and provincial hinterland of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (henceforth UP), which
over the past two decades has been identified in the Indian metropolitan imagination with structural
poverty, overhauling of caste-hierarchies, the emergence of middle and lower castes as distinct political
blocs, caste-violence, rampant political corruption and the criminalization of politics. These discursive
claims generated and consolidated the provocative visibility and spectatorial pleasure of the films – in
turn allowing the filmmakers to position their provincial backgrounds as well as stories as
commercially-viable creative capital within the new Indian media marketplace.
The reversal of recent thematic trends in the industry and cinematic representations of the rural in the
history of Hindi cinema was seen to occur in two prominent aspects of the films – through the
provision of an immersive experience of provincial political cultures, and the depiction of a new rural
femininity. This chapter examines the mutual relationship of these two interventions by the two
selected films. It begins by recapitulating briefly the salience of the rural within the Indian colonial,
postcolonial and now neoliberal imagination. Thereafter, it critically considers the particular historical
gaze this 'new provincial brigade' of filmmakers casts upon the history of the representation of the rural
and rural femininity in post-Independence Hindi cinema. In this section, the chapter considers three
specific genres: the 'Five Year plan rural melodrama', the New Wave rural films and the Transnational
rural film to trace the particular ways in which the figure of the poverty-stricken rural woman is
embedded within a socio-political universe structured by caste-based hierarchies of labor, status,
ownership of land, access to judicial redress, education etcetera. Thereafter, the chapter segues into a
closer consideration of the two selected new rural films through an intermediary discussion that
contextualizes the genre within – first, the ideological assemblage of Liberalization and the emergence
Paul 214
of the new middle class; and second, the commercial and representational possibilities of a liberalized
film-industry. In its close examination of the two films, the chapter focuses specifically on the rendition
of contemporary Northern Indian rural socio-political universes as well as the particular ways in which
the upper-caste rural woman's erotic desire within the familial, the marital and the post-marital is
explored within it.
If, as Madhava Prasad has argued, the Hindi film project displays the use of differing representational
modes (of melodrama and realism) to achieve 'the production (and reproduction) of new subjectivities
compatible with generalized capitalist development' (The Ideology of the Hindi Film, 54), this chapter
asks, in what ways does the new rural film emerge from and intervene into the production of
subjectivities in the current stage of Liberalization of state, economy and the polity, of Mandalization
and of Hindutva? On what terms does the rural woman protagonist elicit and direct spectatorial
identification, pleasure and sympathy? Conversely, how does this protagonist as well as other
characters of this genre interrogate the self-definition of the spectator as a secular and modern citizen-
subject of a globalizing nation-state? And finally, what are the parameters of this interrogation?
Caste and the Rural in Postcolonial India
In the age of industrial modernity and urbanization, the term 'rural' is frequently counter-posed against
the urban, and is sometimes used interchangeably with 'countryside'. Identified with the geographical
presence of natural resources and the potential for agricultural and industrial productivity, the rural
figures within the modern nation's expansive and systematized grids of administration, trade, revenue-
collection - as the point of origin for flows of people, goods and capital – which are seen to converge at
the city or town. Other flows such as technology, mechanization and governance are seen to emanate
from the city to the rural outpost. These normative flows were suggested visually through the
Paul 215
movement of agricultural produce and sophisticated weaponry in the opening sequence of Sarfarosh,
and in the movements of the Mumbai Crime Branch subsequently in the film (discussed in Chapter 1
on the national cop film). Within the iconography of the nation, the rural figures as the locus of a
natural and relatively homogeneous social community, while the city or the metropolis becomes the site
for a different notion of 'cultivated' and cosmopolitan culture arising from the agglomeration of diverse
migrant-populations. In the same opening sequence of Sarfarosh, the qawwali score evokes this
iconography of the nation as lush fields, and Delhi and Bombay emerge in the drama as the home of
civic habitation, productivity, recreation and culture. Thus, in addition to administrative classifications,
the rural and the urban also exist on civilizational and social scales, the hierarchies of which can prove
to be slippery and reversible. While in discourses of statist and/or technological development, the rural
is identified as a space of lack and the target of correction and enlightened outreach, in times of cultural
change, the rural resurfaces in national imaginations as suffused with the plenitude of traditional values
and cultural heritage. The refurbishing of the rural as the site of traditional national culture is
heightened by the anxieties aggravated by the globalization of capital, communications and information
in colonial and neoliberal contexts – wherein the rural becomes materially available as another
untapped market and/or source of resources (land, mines, wood, water, grains). Set upon in these ways,
it also becomes the site for the imagination of radical, ecological counter-modernities that are
incommensurable with the terms on which it is sought to be recruited as a timeless cultural entity by the
national imagination as a bulwark against the homogenization/deracination of culture observed in the
metropolis. The reactionary strengthening of particular social practices such as the proscription of
same-gotra (wherein the clan/bloodline is equated with all families residing in a village) marriages,
amidst the diffusion of other discourses of subjectivity, have particular implications for subordinated
subjects like women and lower-castes.
Paul 216
The rural is approached in this chapter as a geographical and material-social presence which also
becomes a discursive site on to which are projected varied and changing cultural and social essences.
At the same time, the rural is and has always been, even in its 'removal' from the metropolis, the site for
the fashioning of other critical-philosophical imaginaries that stand somewhat askew of the
metropolitan-modern and from that vantage retain the potential to contradict the orthodoxies of
reigning rationalities about governance, commerce, growth and development. It is with these
intertwined geographical, cultural, governmental, material, cultural and philosophical valences that the
term 'rural' is deployed in this chapter. Besides 'rural', I also use the term 'provincial' to designate the
cinematic spatial hybridity of the genre of the new rural film within which the rural and the small-town
border on and spill into each other, as caste-based social-residential segregations continue to aggravate
alongside newly-unfolding commercial-aspirational geographies (of mushrooming gated communities,
malls, multiplexes). In fact this deliberate cinematic contiguity and spillage between the rural, the
provincial urban and the metropolitan, between the 'waves of democratization' and Liberalization,
enables the delineation of what I have previously called 'provincial modernities' or the understanding of
the provincial as another site for the impact as well as generation of contemporary modernity –
including flows of capital, modes of politics, notions of subjectivity and social being. The New Rural
film extends this cinematic exploration into the intimate and erotic dimensions of contemporary rural
feminine social being within the domains of the familial, the marital and the conjugal.
In the remainder of this section, I shall try to suggest some of the ways in which caste-practice which
has been constructed as one of the primary attributes of the rural has changed over time in its
interaction with colonial and postcolonial governmentalities, and in its links with land, capital and
labor, has also become the basis of multiple forms of constitutional and extra-constitutional
Paul 217
contestations. In the agrarian society of early eighteenth century India, caste was one of the many axes
of an individual's social identity – others being village, region, kinship. However, as one of the
dominant axes – intertwined with gender and class, it determined the form of labor attributed to an
individual, his/her relation to land (on a scale of ownership to landless hired labor), relative access to
vital resources like water, education, his/her social status of relative purity and pollution. The radical
historiography of the Subaltern Studies Collective has unearthed within the archive of peasant counter-
insurgency by the emergent colonial state, histories that reveal the combined functioning of caste, class
and political power in the repeated agrarian revolts by peasants, not against British colonial power, but
the native and upper-caste landed elites. Thus, as Partha Chatterjee has argued in his 'immanent critique
of caste' – far from being a stable social structure based on one universal ideality, its practice was
always underpinned by the contingencies of power (Chatterjee 1993: 181).
As various historians of colonial India have pointed out, caste was selected and constructed by the
administrators and ethnographers of British colonial regime over the 18th and 19th centuries as the
essence of Indian religious and cultural identity.
155
Despite being a widely varying form of social
practice, caste was projected in this growing colonial ethnographic archive on India, as a highly-
regulated social structure that was evidence of 'the inherent incapacity of Indian society to acquire the
virtues of modernity and nationhood' and to legitimate colonial rule and its enlightening aspects. What
this overt posturing and rhetoric concealed was the ways in which colonial forms of governmentality
actively intervened in the invention and systematization of caste as we understand it today, through
endeavors such as instituting separate electorates in legislatures and administration for economically-
155 Nicholas Dirks demonstrates this thesis through an examination of the enormous corpus of colonial treatises, censuses
spanning from Abbe Dubois to James Mill, Herbert Risley, Hegel, Weber, down to twentieth century sociologist Louis
Dumont in his Homo Hierarchicus. By the time of Dumont, the caste-system had come to serve very different purposes
in Western scholarship – in this case it was part of a Tocquevillean critique of individualism as seen in the West.
Paul 218
depressed 'backward' and under-represented castes, and drawing up of successive censuses that
identified individuals based on Brahmanical notions of caste to grant them access to these benefits –
thereby privileging only one vector of what had been until then complex social identities. These
governmentalities over a few decades both simplified and congealed caste identities and hierarchies.
The nationalist elite that emerged from the upper-caste landed elite and had received a Western liberal
education, was faced with the task of instituting a modern liberal electoral democracy without the prior
achievement of bourgeois hegemony – a crucial difference from the process by which liberal modernity
had been established in Western nations. In the absence of this hegemony, the elite had to achieve a
'passive revolution' (a Gramscian concept redeployed by Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj) by
building alliances with the reigning landed elites, even as it remained committed to the ideals of
equality and social justice. In 1950, it sought to correct existing structural inequalities by instituting
'reservations' or positive discrimination in the Indian Constitution for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes
(based on 'Schedules' drawn up by colonial administrators) in the allocation of jobs and access to
higher education, even as it sought to remove these hierarchies by abolishing the social practice of
untouchability in the same year. While the bourgeois nationalist elite had predicted and hoped that with
the institution of these laws, electoral democracy, equal citizenship and the initiation of industrial
development the structures of caste would automatically dissipate, caste continued to persist with
surprising tenacity in the social, political and economic lives in India. Given the half-hearted execution
of land reforms (curtailed severely by the state's reliance on the traditional elites), caste continued to
determine ownership of land, access to credit, basic amenities and political representation. These
realities also gave the lie to constitutional initiatives such as the Abolition of Bonded Labor System in
1976. As a result, in the cinema of the post-Independence decades, the rural figured as a cultural, moral
Paul 219
and political locus from which to measure the performance and failures of the postcolonial state – the
ineffectiveness of its technocratic developmental 'Five Year Plans', the co-option of law-enforcement
and judicial apparatus by local elites. Depictions of crushing agricultural debts, the lack of irrigation
facilities, the extortionist revenues levied by landlords, sexual exploitation of poor lower-caste women
by upper-caste were recurrent tropes. The impoverished rural woman was an important presence who
threw light on the intersectional workings of multiples structures of land monopoly, caste, sexual
exploitation, reproduction of poverty and the apathy of the state.
Agrarian revolts against caste-based monopoly over land and agricultural resources as well as caste-
based exploitation of landless labor, continued with the emergence of the Maoist-Naxal movement in
Bihar, Bengal, Andhra Pradesh where exploitative landowners were violently targeted. The same
movement has now branched into the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand to oppose newer efforts to
monetize forestlands for big multinational mining companies. Caste as politicized identity also came to
be recuperated into the folds of electoral democracy. As an effect of the partial redistribution of land-
holdings in the post-Independence decades, a sizable middle class emerged from the middle castes by
the late 1960s, which then formed into a distinct political bloc and agricultural lobby. It subsequently
pushed through the recommendations of the Mandal Commission in 1990 resulting in the reservation of
27% of seats in public employment, education and legislatures for the OBC category. By the 1990s, in
a 'second democratic upsurge' of the backward or the ex-untouchable castes redeployed the term 'dalit'
(which literally means 'downtrodden') to also position themselves as a distinctive political bloc,
constituency and leadership.
156
These political transformations have been bolstered by another 'silent
revolution' initiated by the 73
rd
and 74
th
constitutional amendments – which brought grassroot
156 'The second democratic upsurge' is a phrase used by political scientist Yogendra Yadav to describe this on-going
political transformation.
Paul 220
administrations and representative bodies like rural panchayats and urban municipalities under the
ambit of the constitution, recognizing them as institutions of self-governance that reserve 1/3rd seats
for women, as well as SC and ST. They now had the powers to hold periodic free and fair elections,
funds for development administration, and to decide how those funds were used (Baviskar: 2005, 331).
Baviskar shows how contrary to the popular view, women have entered these governing bodies in large
numbers with various candidates competing for each seat and going on the run the institutions
efficiently. Other recent ethnographies have shown how poor and lower-caste groups have become
more aware of their entitlements to state-resources and have found multiple ways of accessing them
despite encountering resistance from dominant caste-groups that still seek to maintain a stronghold
over local administrations.
157
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(MGNREGA) enacted in 2005 guaranteed 100 days of annual employment to all rural households –
was also sought to be administered by the Panchayat Raj institutions.
158
This phase in the politicization of caste has overlapped with the Liberalization of the Indian state and
economy and new media industries – where increasing levels of foreign direct investment (or FDI), de-
regulation of the economy, the shrinking of the large (and often unwieldy) developmental state,
consumption-oriented forms of citizenship – were positioned as the path to growth. The media and
entertainment sectors were direct beneficiaries of de-regulation where FDI was now allowed from 25%
to 100%. This metropolitan mediasphere has remained hostile and at best suspicious of the devolution
of democracy through these newer modes of 'belligerent caste-based politics' at the regional and
grassroot levels (identified with the northern and central states of UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya
Pradesh) – seeing them as being antithetical to the democratic and liberal values of equality and equal
157 See Gupta, Akhil. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State ”.
American Ethnologist. V ol. 22, No. 2, May, 1995. (pp. 375-402)
158 Details of the act are available here: http://www.prsindia.org/theprsblog/?p=3013. Accessed on May 30, 2014.
Paul 221
opportunity. While in the 1990s, the upper-caste youth-mobs protesting violently against the Mandal
reforms (most visibly through self-immolation) were seen as 'extreme' elements, more recently, parties
such as Youth For Equality have received widespread and sympathetic attention in this mediasphere for
their protest against the institution of reservations for OBCs in institutions for higher education
159
Partha Chatterjee has described this as contemporary India's peculiar 'paradox' where elite caste groups
deploy the rhetoric of equal opportunity and merit to shore up their monopoly and easier access to still-
prestigious state administrations and educational institutions, while disadvantaged groups utilize the
rhetoric of positive discrimination and reservations.
Even though the metropolitan mediasphere sees the expansion of the welfare state through rural
schemes to be 'wasteful' and antithetical to the economic growth potentials opened up by
Liberalization, economists Jayati Ghosh and C.P. Chandrashekhar have shown how these have been
made necessary and at the same time increasingly inviable and uncertain by the kinds of marketization
and fiscal risk introduced into the financial system by Liberalization itself. Ghosh has argued that the
systematic dismantling of post-Independence financial structures that had facilitated the growth of
agriculture and small-scale industry by channeling capital investment, is aggravating rural distress. The
increasing inviability of cultivation and a worsening food crisis is causing alarming rates of peasant
suicides. Feminist globalization studies have also foregrounded the ways in which neoliberal
transformations hurt women in particular – whose work (most often relegated to the informal sector) is
often seen as supplementary income and is not measured financially and socially in the ways in which
mens work is valued and remunerated. Domestic labor performed overwhelmingly by women is also
left out of financial and social calibrations. Additionally, as the welfare state has been shrinking,
159 See Nandini Chandra's “Young Protest: The Idea of Merit in Commercial Hindi Cinema”, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East, V olume 30, Number 1, 2010, pp. 119-132.
Paul 222
international bodies have taken up the role of governance wherein they extend micro-credit options to
underprivileged rural women. These schemes shift welfare responsibilities out of the purview of the
state and economy to the women themselves by seeking to instill in them neoliberal work-ethics of
fiscal and sexual responsibility.
The complex imbrication of the rural in the multiple transformations underway, namely that of – the
continued democratization of caste, decentralization and devolution of political and administrative
powers, the marketization of key financial institutions, the greater penetration of international financial
institutions – is refracted in interesting ways in the new rural film. Nevertheless, the novelty of the
particular visual presence of the rural and rural femininity in the genre must also be evaluated in the
context of previous engagements with issues of caste, gender, power and the state in Hindi cinema – a
history that the genre evokes in its particular defiances.
Evaluating the Cinematic History of the Rural
During various promotional as well as retrospective interviews, the directors of the new rural film –
Vishal Bharadwaj and Abhishek Chaubey have described the novelty of their treatment of rural worlds
to lay in representing them as not simple, innocent, and a subject fit for only serious cinema. Chaubey
has also taken issue with the 'routine' depiction of rural women as abject. These claims of 'no longer
abject' serve to both invoke and dispute with a cinematic history, as well as to construct a particular
appreciative gaze toward particular elements in their own films. In this section, I consider the Five-year
Plan melodrama, the New Wave rural film and the transnational rural film. I attempt to indicate the
ways in which we are encouraged by the provincial brigade to re-evaluate this cinematic history in
order to throw its representational interventions into relief. I also draw attention to the particular
dimensions of these iconic representations may get flattened out by this revisionist gaze.
Paul 223
As we look back at the history of the rural in Indian cinema, we must linger over the iconic image from
Mehboob Khan's magnum opus Mother India (1957) in which female protagonist Radha (played by
Nargis) is pulling the heavy plow strapped to her shoulders to till the ravaged fields (see Figure 1). Her
two young sons push the plow from behind. Prior to this, Radha's husband unable to provide for his
family after his arms get maimed trying to lift a heavy rock, has disappeared. Radha has had to fend off
a rape-attempt by the upper-caste money-lender to whom the family owes a large debt. Thereafter, a
flood has carried away one of her children, destroyed standing crops as well as cattle so that now she
herself has to take the place of the beast of burden to pull the plow. The brutal weight of the plough that
rests on her shoulders here also signifies the weight of the life that she is leading. She sings -
Since we have been given this life, we must live it
if life is a bowl of poison, we must drink it.
160
She sings of the necessity of continuing to live, even when living becomes akin to drinking poison.
Many years later, one of her sons named Birju will become a dacoit who burns the ledgers in which
money-lenders and landlords have recorded the generational debts of landless, bonded laborers. In the
climax of the film, Radha will shoot Birju dead after he has abducted the daughter of the local money-
lender which is a moral crime she will not abide by. The morality of her filicide is then recognized in
the final scene of the film when an elected minister asks Radha to inaugurate the dam that the Indian
state has built for the amelioration of the condition of Indian peasants. In bestowing its recognition
upon Radha, the state gets recuperated as a socialist agent bringing technological modernity to the
village through the execution of the Nehruvian “Five Year Plans” and the construction of dam, bridges
and other marvels of engineering.
160 These are my translation of the original lyrics of the Hindi song which are as follows: “Duniya mein
jab aaye hain toh jeena hi padega/ zindagi agar zeher hai toh peena hi padega.”
Paul 224
Filmmakers like Chaubey (heading 'new provincial brigade') and their allied audiences have interpreted
this iconic representation of rural India and rural femininity in the history of Hindi cinema as one
which renders both abject, 'innocent', and morally-righteous in her abdication of all sexuality and desire
in the absence of her husband. However, scholars have argued for a more nuanced reading of Radha's
belligerence. For instance, in the potential-rape scene Radha questions the existence of the Sacred as a
symbolic and moral order when the feminine deity she worships fails to come to her rescue and
ponders on the possibilities of a thoroughly secular universe (till the Sacred is recuperated through a
'miracle' that saves her).
161
Far from being wholly abject and passive, Radha as a figure (as 'Mother
India') has great ideological effectivity: she presents an eco-critical, pro-labor stance but also effects the
routing of these critical impulses to statist ends at the film's conclusion. Her stubborn refusal to leave
the village or to resign to fate – rejects possibilities of urban migration for survival, but also posits her
own labor as the vital force that transforms the ravaged land into bountiful crops. Even as her
predicament draws attention to the inequities of caste, caste's correlation with class and gendered
exploitation, in killing her son, she also effects an agricultural community that forsakes any modes of
vigilantist protest and violence. At the film's conclusion, by inaugurating the dam, she melds this
community with 'nation', bequeathing it to the developmental nation-state, legitimizing the latter, its
secular authority and technological interventions. Her varying passivity and belligerence (killing the
son) serve crucial ideological functions for this melodrama in the age of the 'Five Year Plans'. Thus,
Chaubey's reading of Mother India flattens the complex nature and implications of its rural feminine
agency.
161 See Nandini Bhattacharya's “Imagined Subjects: Law, Gender and Citizenship in Indian Cinema” in Bollywood
and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, edited by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari
V . Pindharipande, pp. 129-144.
Paul 225
The New Wave or New Cinema that prevailed from the late 1960s to mid 1980s, as part of a state-
instituted project for socially-aware cinema - wrestled more visibly with the possibilities and
impossibilities of vigilantism as well as collective agrarian mobilization. In this corpus of films, we see
a firm move away from categories of the Sacred, there is instead a Marxist-sociological approach
toward issues of caste, class and gender. While the actors and directors of this wave (emerging from the
Film Institute) were influenced by leftist student's movements and agrarian movements occurring in
central and southern India and used realism to map the nation and its inegalitarian structures of land
and caste for its audiences, its ideological project was also curtailed by state patronage provided by the
Film Finance Corporation. Madhava Prasad locates New Cinema as the state's response to the
'disaggregation' of the national consensus from the late 1960s – around the efficacy of the leadership of
the Indian National Congress given the continued prevalence of socio-economic inequalities as well as
caste-based access to land, capital and education. The most visible instances of this disaggregation
were communist agrarian mobilizations by peasants in the eastern and southern Indian countrysides
which were often led by disaffected urban middle-class students.
Distancing Gramscian and Althusserian approaches to the realist cinema, Ira Bhaskar has evoked
Lukacs' critical realism as a more appropriate theoretical framework to understand the 'missionary zeal'
animating the varied cinematic practices that constituted the Indian New Wave Cinema – especially in
the rural films which threw in to stark relief the fact that the project of national transformation failed
because it has failed to dislodge the traditional and exploitative elites (Bhaskar 19).
162
The scathing
thematization of caste and gender-based exploitation in these films contrasted with the more humanistic
treatment of the same in the Art Cinema of the same period.
163
But despite this generous recognition of
162 Bhaskar, Ira. 'The Indian New Wave.' Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinema. Eds. K. Moti Gokulsing & Wimal
Dissanayake. Oxon: Routledge, 2013, pp. 19-33.
163 For a discussion of the contrasting treatment of rural famine in Art cinema in relation to the New Wave, see
Paul 226
the 'intent' of the New Wave, questions remain about how and the extent to which political critiques are
mobilized in the realist rural films, and how the spectator is positioned as the hermeneutic agent
receiving these critiques. And these continue to trouble efforts to read these films and how they render
rural universes.
Director Shyam Benegal's first film Ankur or “Seedling” (1974) ends with a young boy throwing a
stone at the house of an upper-caste landlord who has just rebuffed the poor and lower-caste woman he
has had an affair with and who is now pregnant. His second film, Nishant or “Night's End” (1975) ends
with the terrible spectacle of a rebellious village-mob running through the house of feudal landlords,
indiscriminately killing innocent women including the one whose abduction by the feudal lords it had
intended to protest.
164
Both films locate the spectacle of caste and feudalism in the colonial past, and
end with unplanned acts of rebellion – stopping short of depicting the organized mass-mobilization. As
Madhava Prasad argues that this curtailment occurs in Benegal's developmental aesthetic because it
seeks to interpellate the viewer as a citizen located in a social contract with the sovereign postcolonial
state. Here, the acknowledgment of exploitative practices of caste by landed elites would reveal the
incomplete sovereignty of the nation-state and thereby the moral authority of the citizen as an
interpretive subject. However, while projecting this exploitation on to the colonial past, Benegal's films
explore ambivalent erotic relationships between the upper-caste landlord and the lower-caste woman.
Here, the woman is presented in a voyeuristic way to the viewer, but as the exploitative dimensions of
the relationship emerge, the viewer is allowed to switch and consolidate loyalties with a young lower-
Dharmasena Pathiraja and David Hanan's comparison of Satyajit Ray's Ashani Sanket/Distant Thunder (1973) and
Mrinal Sen's Akaler Sandhaney/In Search of Famine (1980) in 'Center, Periphery, and Famine in Distant Thunder and
In Search of Famine' in Catherine Fowler & Gillian Helfield eds. Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in
Films about the Land. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006, pp. 104-118.
164 The film won the National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi in 1977. In the previous year it had been nominated for
the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Golden Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival. It
was also invited to the London and Melbourne film festivals.
Paul 227
caste boy who in the final scene of the film, throws a stone at the landlord's house in protest of his
abandonment of the pregnant woman. Benegal's subsequent films like Manthan which are based in the
postcolonial present, show an energized state-bureaucracy to ultimately take up the process of national-
social transformation by setting up rural co-operative farms. However, in these later films, the
possibility of an erotic but potentially exploitative relationship between the urban technocrat-social
reformer and the lower-caste rural woman are foreclosed in order to maintain the morality of his social-
developmental mission.
Prakash Jha's Daamul or “Bonded until Death” (1985) is novel as a late New Cinema film in its
location of caste-exploitation in the postcolonial present – wherein the figure of the bourgeois social-
reformer – in this case a schoolteacher and not a state-sanctioned technocrat, is shown to be ineffective.
The film concludes rather dramatically with the devastation of a married couple who were lower-caste
bonded laborers for a landlord in rural Bihar. After the husband is served a death sentence for a murder
he did not commit, the wife attacks the landlord with a butcher's knife and hysterically screams to her
absent husband, “If you had to die, why did you not kill him first?” As the closing credits play out over
granulated images of this horrific denouement as the landlord writhes in pain on the ground while the
woman is restrained by other men. The sequence transfixes this moment of dalit clarity and rebellion
but the instant is framed as a momentary individual outburst after much meek stoicism on the part of
the lower-caste figures in the film. It locates the possibility of an organized dalit resistance in an
unexplored and unrepresented futurity. The rural woman was crucial to the socio-political effectiveness
as well as limitations of the New Cinema. While sustaining spectatorial voyeurism, her exploitation
established both, the necessity as well as seeming impossibility (Aakrosh), undesirability (Nishant) or
deferral of lower-caste revolt (Daamul). In Daamul, her violent rebellion at the end stands in for an
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organized caste-rebellion. The figure of the rural woman thus both mobilizes and reins in New
Cinema's critiques of colonial and postcolonial structures of caste, land and power structures.
A crucial exception within the New Wave corpus to this ideological schema is Ketan Mehta's Mirch
Masala or “Spices” (1987) set in a village in Rajasthan of the colonial period - where a colonial
subedar (or tax-collector) played by Naseeruddin Shah, oppresses drought-stricken farmers and
sexually exploits women of the village. He comes to fixate on Sonbai – a lower-class worker in the
local chili factory and wife to a migrant laborer. Sonbai's refusal to oblige him draws a cleft between
her and the villagers who are afraid the subedar will become even more ruthless. In the film's famous
climax, Sonbai takes refuge in the factory inside a fort as the subedar and his armed police-battalion
surround it. As they break in, the other women-workers in an act of solidarity and resistance, repeatedly
douse the subedar with mounds of chili powder. The film concludes with multiple dissolves and close-
ups of the subedar screaming in pain, as Sonbai glares back at him and the camera holding a sickle
determinedly. Ranjani Mazumdar appreciates how the film's explication of the women's issues avoids
the idea of an essentialized gender-war but rather shows the subordination of women in the context of
the primitive accumulation of a colonial economy and the particular dispensability of the women as the
men of the village negotiate this colonial power. As the women go through different stages of fear,
defeat, division and solidarity – the film undermines the notions of a homogeneous female subject even
as it imagines collective revolt. Mazumdar points out that the film is able to achieve this complex
explication by avoiding the uncritical realism of other New Wave films and their eliciting of a
simplistic identification with the individual-protagonist, and constantly underscoring the
representational and mediated nature of the visual narrative.
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Even so, the idiom of realism is an important inheritance that the 'transnational rural film' takes from
the New Cinema as a prominent cinematic lens on the northern Indian rural heartland in the 1990s.
Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994) and Jagmohan Mundhra's Bawandar (2000) can be classified as
'transnational rural films' not merely because of the transnational status of their directors (Mundhra
lived in California while Kapur is based primarily in London) - who have explicitly wanted to make
'cross-over films', but also the transnational critical circuits in which they circulated including the
Cannes and Toronto film festivals. Both films adapt the life-stories of two rural Indian women who
garnered visibility in national and international media because of their experience of caste-based sexual
violence.
165
The Bandit Queen performs a linear and objective narration of the life-story of Phoolan
Devi – a lower-caste woman from rural Uttar Pradesh who survived multiple rapes to later head a
dreaded gang of dacoits conducting several massacres of upper-caste landlords in the region before
surrendering to the state and eventually entering formal politics. The film sought to expose the violence
normalized within institutions of family, pre-pubertal marriage, and in the spatial organization of the
village through graphic sequences where Phoolan is subjected to marital rape, custodial rape, statutory
rape and caste atrocities (paraded naked). However, through the film, the vantage of objectivity itself
remains unremarked, and the truth of the representation is posited as self-evident. This leads
Priyamvada Gopal to argue, that 'in the film the rural itself emerges as the problem' (P Gopal 313).
In its adaptation of the story of Bhanwari Devi - a lower-caste rural development-worker from a village
in Rajasthan who was gang-raped by upper-caste men of her village for protesting against the practice
165 Bandit Queen was banned in India by the Central Board of Film Certification (or the statutory censor board) for 'serious
pornographic content' but it also received the National Award for Best Film in Hindi. The Censor Board gave Bawandar
an adult certificate after demanding five crucial cuts which objected to explicit representations of rape and
masturbation, while it won awards at film-festivals in Bermuda, Zanzibar, the US. This simultaneous prohibition and
appreciation indicates how there was both – institutional and critical recognition of the films' intent to represent certain
social realities as well as suspicion of their visual and erotic economies. Abroad, the films lead to much discussion in
the print media about the prevalence in India of state-censorship of film and art more generally – which to Western
sensibilities seemed to parallel the repressive rural institutions and practices depicted within the films.
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of child-marriage, Bawandar significantly modifies the transnational rural film. In its pre-credit and
opening credit sequences, the film cites the dominant optics that have historically-framed the Indian
rural and its social practices – a distanced anthropological lens on pre-pubertal marriages – which goes
to the heart of metropolitan and diasporic horror of hoary rural traditionalism, and has its origins in
colonial knowledge-making enterprises directed toward the colonies. During credits, it cites the optic of
exotic tourism frequently adopted in public broadcasting messages on 'national integration' - where soft
evening light bathes the silhouettes of folk-dancers, camels and undulating sand-dunes – fetishizing
Rajasthan as a bucolic frontier of India. Drawing attention to the erasures and excesses of these optics,
the main narrative provides its own more conscientious, multi-perspectival reconstruction of the story
of Sanwari Devi (the fictionalized character based on Bhanwari) mediated by the narrator Amy – a US-
based author of Indian origin who with her college-friend and translator Ravi, interviews the different
figures involved in the story. Sanwri's rape by the Gujjar men is revealed to have occurred in the
context of her development work, her protest against child-marriage in the village and her success in
preserving her family despite the punitive boycott imposed by the panchayat – while in the larger
political landscape the power of the Gujjar is being challenged by other castes, and the developmental
state is seeking to recruit and empower local women.
The transnational rural film advances the realism of the New Wave films into the interpretive
framework of universal women's rights through which experiences of women like Sanwri and Phoolan
are made legible. Here the viewer conceives of himself/herself as a citizen within a global secular order
of universal rights – which makes possible the critical depiction of the caste-class and gender
hierarchies prevailing in the regional state as well as community. The genre instantiates the geopolitical
juncture of the birth of a neoliberal global order where international agencies such as the United
Paul 231
Nations and its affiliates, came to be arbiters of the condition of women and other social minorities in
second and third world countries based on certain universal social indices established by new
frameworks of human rights and women's rights. This perspective is provided by the invisible
narratorial position in Bandit Queen and by Amy in Bawandar. However, the films are unable to
explore the particular investment and ambivalent imbrications their rural subjects may have within their
social worlds – as well as the unfamiliar ways in which they may exert agency and resistance. As a
result, there is little critical reflexivity on the emancipatory epistemologies undergirding the framework
universal rights as employed in an unequal global order. In a significant scene Sanwri experiences the
particular terms of her grief and loss to her pained husband as follows: “I came to this house as a young
bride, this is where sindur sparkled on my forehead” [this idiomatic phrase could translate as - “this is
where I felt marital bliss as a woman”]. She continues: “Here, I conceived and bore my children. But
now it's all sullied.”
166
Piercing the facile universalisms of her emancipators from Delhi, convey a
different epistemology of selfhood, dignity and violation - defined not merely by the rape, but in the
context of the world she had built for herself amidst prevalent social practices, through her growing
attachment to a new place that became her marital home, where she had found marriage and
motherhood despite her early betrothal to be enabling and fulfilling. And this world that is not entirely
structured by brutality and oppression, had in turn built her. The film fails to explore the critical
potential of this scene to interrogate the epistemological certainties of Amy as a privileged diasporic
woman and traveler unmarked by caste and attachments to a place – whose story-gathering subsumes
the scene without engagement with its import. In the light of Sanwri's words, her decision to continue
working in the village as a Saathin can be seen as an effort to rebuild and reclaim her sullied world.
166 Her exact words are, “Sab maili ho gayi.”
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It is in the light of these existing generic templates and tropes that the new provincial brigade seeks to
impart a different presence to the rural. It resents what it sees as the mandatory seriousness of cinematic
depictions of the rural, and the rural woman's easy cinematic legibility as vulnerable and abject. Its
greatest impatience is with how the totalized oppression overshadows her sexuality and erotic being.
The new rural woman developed in their films, is rid of this overdetermination by the fact that she is
not a lower-caste/dalit rural woman – who has been overwritten in cinematic representations over the
decades by oppression, brutality and dependence on the enlightened values of the welfare state. Instead,
she is now an upper-caste woman affiliated with a provincial political elite. This changed social
location allows her to be explored through the more ambivalent tenors of buddy-caper, femme fatale
and gangster films wherein her sexual subjecthood is depicted alongside her complex embeddedness as
a complicit and rebellious agent within the prevailing practices of caste and patriarchy. In turn this
ambivalently-rendered rural universe also interpellates the spectator as a multiply embedded subject
rather than as a distant, objective, enlightened observer. The following sections develop this line of my
argument.
New Commercial and Ideological Horizons for the New Rural film
The genres discussed in the previous sections signal not merely the longer representational history of
rurality and rural femininity in postcolonial Indian cinema, but also the changing relationship of the
Bombay film industry with the Indian state and its reigning ideologies. If Mother India as a Five-year
plan melodrama expresses popular cinema's closer relationship and belief in the socialist goals of the
postcolonial state in its early decades, the New Cinema of the 1960s-80s signals the 'moment of
disaggregation' from the Congress' leadership – and the state's attempts to inaugurate a new national
aesthetic-political 'art' cinema and a statist realism. Its attempt to furnish the New Cinema with new
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production as well as international exhibition avenues was meant to snub the popular film industry
while levying it with heavy entertainment taxes (Prasad 1998). As the 1990s marked a visible
reorientation of the Indian state from an overtly socialist-protectionist model of economy and state-
policy to a neoliberal one – there was a corresponding change in the hitherto hostile relationship
between the Indian state and the Bombay film industry.
167
Both came to specifically target the affluent
Indian diaspora in the West (NRIs) as well as the growing aspirations of domestic middle classes for
global lifestyles. The new genres of the global family romance were mostly if not entirely set in the
West where rural India appeared rarely and as a site for diasporic nostalgia and anxiety about the loss
of cultural identity. And the newer modes of address deployed in dominant post-Liberalization genres
of films, their integration with newer and exclusionary urbanisms (such as the malltiplex), and
emergent models for revenue-generation – have had implications for the ways in which different
audiences are valued. They also have implications for how national, sub-national, metropolitan and
non-metropolitan imaginaries have been consolidated or erased. This in turn has dictated the ways in
which processes of Liberalization have been represented, narrativized and comprehended.
The new commercial models of film production, marketing and exhibition have, as acknowledged by
filmmakers themselves, undermined the necessity for a film to have a long run in single-screen theaters
across the country – which had up till the 1990s, made the rural 'interiors' as important an audience as
the metropolitan one. Producers and directors within the industry have pontificated in elitist terms
about multiplexization being a release from the earlier compulsion of having to make 'rural films' about
farmers and landlords in order to appeal to audiences in rural Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (Ganti: 2012,
167 The granting of official industry-status to Bombay film-making in 1998 allowed for the corporatization,
professionalization and globalization of the industry, and its greater integration with the expanding sectors of television,
radio, internet, advertising and new consumption-lifestyle modes of the malltiplex (Punathambekar 2013). The ancillary
industries of Bombay cinema - lifestyle, fashion, music and dance industries came to be positioned by 2000 as
'Bollywood' – India's greatest cultural export to the world. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has termed this as the
'Bollywoodization' of the industry.
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323). The return of the urban middle classes to movie-theaters in the 1990s (as opposed to the putative
hordes of catcalling working class men) is seen to have facilitated the improvement of cinematic
content in the 1990s (Ibid., 295). It is in this context that the transnational rural film sought to restore a
sharp visibility to the rural.
Even as the multiplex meant the disproportionate valuation of middle-upper class urban audiences in
the media-marketplace, in time it also, as has been mentioned, came to provide exhibition space to
'niche' and 'hatke' (or literally, 'off-center' or distinctive) films which, as Sangita Gopal has argued,
catered to the domestic cosmopolitan class (“Sentimental Symptoms” 15). While claiming to thwart the
dominant genres that told stories about affluent Indian diaspora living in opulent homes, most hatke
films continued to tell metropolitan stories, reprising the understanding of Liberalization, globalization
and modernity as fundamentally metropolitan phenomena to which the rural has remained an
untouched and backward hinterland of traditionalism. This is even as newer modes of heightened and
expansive urbanization rapidly convert rural agricultural farmlands existing on the fringes of cities into
large housing complexes, commercial hubs for corporations and industrial zones. Similarly, in central
and eastern India, forestlands are being threatened by expansive mining projects ratified by states that
share the same consensus on 'development' being predicated on capitalist expansion and acquisition of
natural resources, which if necessary must be secured with the use of the Special Forces. The resulting
mass-dislocation of agricultural and tribal communities, widespread environmental damage, an
aggravating food crisis, and stagnant levels of consumption in the lower class and those below the
poverty-line are explained as the necessary costs of development. The perception of Liberalization as
an inevitable and wholly desirable transformation prevails in the new urban media sensorium, even as
these effects of 'structural adjustment' have become apparent.
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Amy Bhatt, Madhavi Murty, and Priti Ramamurthy have argued that the prevalence of this consensus
on the nature of recent neoliberal transformations has to do with the emergence of the new middle class
not merely as a large demographic and a potent economic presence, but also as a political construct. As
such, they argue, it -
… simultaneously depends on the articulation and disarticulation of the subaltern woman, who
belongs to the “lower” castes and classes and is typically rural. Specifically, her gendered body
serves to affirm development, progress, justice, and agency, rendering the new middle class
inclusive and aspirational. But she also produces unease and comes to mark the limits of the new
middle class at this historical conjuncture. (Bhatt et al, 2010: 130)
Examining neoliberalism as an 'event' that is constituted post-facto in specific ways by a range of
popular representations, icons, images and discourses – they demonstrate how the political economy of
its national-universal address works through an inclusion into the appropriate structures of feeling and
modes of governmentality (which support privatized fiscal and sexual responsibility, citizenship
through consumption); while excluding others. It has been argued elsewhere, that the female consumer
is the neoliberal subject par excellence who negotiates agency, selfhood and desire through modes of
conspicuous consumption – wherein branding ultimately becomes a mode of self-making.
168
This has
been evident in Hindi cinema with the refiguration of on-screen metropolitan femininities in the 1990-
onwards, where the figure of the virgin merged with that of the vamp (a polarization that had held up
until the late 1980s). This new female protagonist - frequently middle to upper class and unmarked by
caste, has come to function in song and dance sequences across genres such as the urban thriller,
family-romance, as a mobile catalog and spectacle of global brands, fashions and mobility; and
simultaneously as a sexual presence. It has been argued that in various instances, she is not merely a
spectacle that is looked at but also looks back in ways that reveal her own desire and betray her
performance of the visual conventions of cinema and male pleasure as parodic.
169
A bifurcated and
168 See Sarah Banet-Weiser's Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012).
169 See Purna Chowdhury's “Bollywood Babes: Body and Female Desire in the Bombay Films Since the Nineties...: A
Paul 236
polarized conception of modernity and rurality emerges across the representational schema of urban
and rural genres where questions of feminine subjectivity, sexuality and agency are explored within the
parameters of an urban marketized, commodified universe – designated as the sphere of modernity
proper. While the structural vectors of caste and class are erased, an urban, consumption-driven
feminine subjectivity becomes an important index of modernity who selectively appropriates aspects
and values of global modernity but also rejects others to allay cultural anxieties about the threatened
overhaul of institutions of family and conjugality.
In this bifurcated representational schema that includes genres such as the transnational rural film, the
impoverished and lower-caste rural woman delineates through her own exploitation and violation, the
obverse of modernity, where the caste-system flourishes uninterrupted. She is bereft of the
accouterments, competencies and mobilities of modernity as well as, it appears, the kind of sexual
subjectivity and intelligence associated with the same. While this bifurcated schema has its origins in
colonial discourses of discovery and governance, it has survived decolonization and has been bolstered
by the neoliberal ideological assemblage. Bhatt et al., argue that there are specific ways in which the
rural woman can be offered inclusion into the neoliberal ideological assemblage. Namely, as an
aspirational subject – an upwardly-mobile learner of modernity, cosmopolitanism and progress –
possibly emancipated by the offer of micro-credit by a global development agency. However, the rural
woman can also, in her particular kinds of 'stubbornness' and improper attachments, call attention to the
terms of admission into this assemblage. One instance of this is provided by the iconic figure of
Mayawati. A prominent politician hailing from the state of Uttar Pradesh and leader of the Bahujan
Samaj Party, Mayawati has received contradictory responses from prominent figures of India's newly-
Tropic Discourse” in Bollywood and Globalization; and Ranjini Mazumdar's chapter on “Desiring Women” in Bombay
Cinema for this specific discussion.
Paul 237
privatized and corporatized, English-speaking national media. While her recent political alliances with
Brahmin-politicians and constituencies has been seen as a desirable transformation of her 'narrow
identity-politics', her repeated posturing of herself and her prominent show of wealth, jewelry and
property as a defiant 'dalit ki beti' (or the daughter of a dalit – emphasizing the gender and caste
dimensions of her social experience) have fallen afoul of the new middle class' self-posturing as
modern, secular, post-caste. This self-posturing persists despite the fact that the same influential class
has resisted the institution of affirmative action for lower castes, and is supportive of the aggressive
pan-Hindu identity asserted by the new Hindu Right.
Lower-caste subjects, especially women are also granted recognition, attention and sympathy within
the neoliberal assemblage as victims of atrocities. In her recent analysis of the 1963 Sirasgaon case
where four dalit women were stripped naked and paraded in their village by upper-caste men, Anupama
Rao argues that the juridical reason applied to the case, had displayed a rather impoverished
understanding of untouchability and upper-caste being – assuming both to be regrettable but static
social structures of stigma and purity, divorced from politics. The same assumptions were reprised in
The Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocity) Act of 1989 which framed a range
of acts of discrimination and violence as atrocities when committed by non-SC & non-St persons
against SC and ST persons – where, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs, even if not the 'vivid
motive', caste is the core consideration. Rao emphasizes the need to contextualize 'atrocity' (as an
instance of such 'recognition' by the assemblage) within a deeper understanding of the complexity of
everyday life where caste is acquired, regulated and contested in myriad ways. As a visual-narrative
medium, cinema has addressed this need in different ways.
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The following section will explore how the new rural film re-frames questions of gender and caste, and
in doing so challenges prevalent conceptions of secular modernity. Krishna - the rural femme fatale of
Ishqiya who seeks to avenge her abandonment by her politico-husband, and Omkara's Dolly, who
secures her inter-caste love from within new caste-leaderships and dominant political alliances –
present provocative screen-femininities that are prominently 'rural' or 'provincial' (in attire, dialect,
idiom, humor) as well as 'modern' (in their notion of self and subjectivity, discourse of self-assertion,
and in their technological competencies). Their desire for the political masculine figure reveals the
correspondences as well as disparateness between the workings of caste in the intimate world of
erotics, desire, familial bonds and conjugality on the one hand, and its workings in the post-Mandal
'public' world of formal and informal politics, the everyday state and crony capitalism, on the other.
Through the woman's emplacement in these disparate but connected private and public worlds, the new
rural film explores how caste has inhered in contradictory, contentious and seamless ways within the
different and gendered domains of life in postcolonial and neoliberal modernity.
This mode of exploration challenges prior cinematic representations that showed caste to operate in
primarily two ways. As either an uncritical religious and faith-based practice of gender and class-
appropriate modes of moral behavior by subordinate groups and individuals (Mother India – where
landless peasants must not violently appropriate their due, or poor women must not trade their virtue
for survival), or within a utilitarian Marxist critique – as a social structure that is primarily economic in
nature and is reproduced more through coercion of dominant classes than by the willing participation of
subaltern groups (New Wave films). The new rural film also challenges post-Mandal dominant and
elite conceptions of caste as a manipulable category used instrumentally to secure entitlements – an
alarming trend that goes against the grain of the putative equality and (social, ethnic) anonymity of all
Paul 239
citizens within the social contract that governs a liberal electoral democracy. Instead, as the following
analyses of the two selected films of the genre will demonstrate, it seeks to interpellate the viewer as a
subject who is multiply embedded in the myriad social worlds presented in the films – each with their
discrete and gendered cultures and lexicons of conceiving and expressing the self as well as relating to
others. Even in their performative excess, these represented worlds appear to the viewer as 'familiar' –
who is invited to identify with not merely multiple figures, but multiple modes of relating to them (the
patriarchal-familial of the caste-Hindu, the carnivalesque homosocial, the heterosexual erotic amidst
caste and sex segregation, the conjugal), and in the process is affirmed as a subject who inhabits
heterogeneous epistemologies that inhere within the contemporary postcolonial modern. In this
embedded cinematic experience of multiple and irreconcilable social worlds, the new rural woman
offers an exploration of counter-hegemonic desires and visions that are born from within her
experience as a particular gender and caste subject. The chapter goes on to probe the limits of this
'embedded' approach which moves most visibly through the force of the upper-caste women-
protagonist's individual erotic desire and love – precluding other structural aspects of caste such as
issues of land, labor, industry and access to other life-opportunities and social dignity, that were
foregrounded in the New Wave films.
Omkara and its Multiply-interpellated Viewer
Set in a political world of provincial UP, Omkara closely follows the plot of Shakespeare's play. A
popular political-fixer, Omkara elopes with Dolly - the daughter of one of his Brahmin patrons, lawyer
Mishra on the day of her wedding – which alienates Dolly from her father. When Omkara is promoted
as the chief lieutenant of the local MLA - Bhaisaab Tiwari, he nominates a relatively inexperienced lad
by the name Kesu over his long-time aide Langda Tyagi. An indignant Langda hatches a devious plot to
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manipulate Omkara's latent insecurity about Dolly's emotional independence and fidelity, leading to the
film's bloody climax where Omkara kills Dolly on their wedding night, and after realizing his error,
kills himself.
The film opens in media res as a bride-groom's party passing through a valley is held up by a gang of
armed men. The coordinator of the gang, Langda tells Dolly's unlucky groom that the 'half-caste'
Omkara has run off with his bride. As Langda fires the first shot, we look down through his legs, over
the edge of a cliff as mayhem spreads through the small wedding party gathered in the valley below.
This shot recalls the iconic point-of-view shot framed through the legs of the dacoit Gabbar Singh as he
looks down from his hilly den at hapless villagers passing through the ravines of the dreaded Chambal
valley in Ramesh Sippy's spaghetti-western Sholay. This meta-cinematic citation and the dark and
pulsating score marks the world of Omkara as a dramatic and stylized one. Its alterity, sense of
disorientation and looming crisis is given to us to be experienced immersively and viscerally rather
than in the mode of objective realism. We inhabit this world with all the aspects of our social being that
are in excess of and in tension with our secular modern citizen-selves.
It is important to note the ways in which the rural as a socio-political terrain is rendered in the Omkara
in contra-distinction to a transnational rural film like Bawandar. The welfare-administering
developmental state which has been positioned as the source of technological and social transformation
of the rural in cinema until now, has no presence in Omkara. Neither do individuals who depend on it
and its welfare-provisions. While the setting appears to be 'rural' because of the visual expanses of
agricultural lands, canals, brick kilns, unpopulated arid stretches and hills, we do not see any
agricultural or industrial labor. Instead in MLA Tiwari and Dolly's father Mishra, we encounter a
corrupt and criminalized elected state the upper echelons of which continue to be monopolized by the
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upper-castes even as they depend upon muscled youth-leaders and half-caste scions like Omkara to
secure their electoral and commercial fortunes. The upwardly-mobile Omkara is a complex political
figure who as an 'addha baman' (or half-brahmin) is both scion of the older caste-order and symbolizes
the rise of the bahujans. Omkara appoints the popular Kesu with his youth votebanks over the
hardworking Tyagi, as the new bahubali (or prime-mobilizer of the political party) for the upcoming
elections. He performs the 'dirty' work of political fixing and channels the popular support to the
political fortunes of the likes of MLA Tiwari.
The primary thrusts of the New Cinema and the transnational rural film had been to use Marxist-
sociological approaches to demonstrate how caste structures overlapped with class which made the
economic and political interests of different caste-blocs antithetical to each other. As a result, in the
course of the films, lower caste protagonists became aware of their own interests and detached
themselves from upper-caste tutelage to mobilize against their overlords. The new rural film rejects this
approach, instead here we see more ambivalent, even paradoxical political alliances based on the
pragmatics of local politics. Moreover, the vertical consolidation of these alliances from the lowest
echelons of voting publics to the highest upper-caste elected representatives is shown to occur by logics
that exceed and remain opaque to purely secular and utilitarian notions of class 'interests'. Rather these
logics are offered to be experienced in more immersive ways.
The titular song of the film - “Omkara” is set to a fight-sequence in which we, looking through the
camera, are caught in the crossfire as Langda tries to shoot Kichlu – the key-witness against Tiwari and
Mishra, while Omkara and Kesu are wrestle with him and his men. Tyagi manages to shoot Kichlu and
ends the fight. The camera now stabilizes to frame Omkara frontally as he emerges from the pit of a
Paul 242
brick-kiln. Here, the male chorus of the soundtrack rises to the crescendo of a folk-ballad about his
heroism in the battleground. The lyrics of the song go as follows:
Drums beat out the biggest fighter in the land!
Omkara, Omkara!
….
Big brother Omkara!
Eyes like sharp lances, his tongue is the hiss of a snake.
The flash of his sword is like the fall of lightening.
….
Through every street echo cries for Omkara...
When enemies try to trick him, they are freed from the earth.
170
This choral gaze flows inward to the center of the frame that positions Omkara as the cynosure of our
homosocial gaze of desire and adulation. Omkara is apotheosized through the iconography of Shiva –
the god of destruction and creation who is a part of the Hindu trinity of gods. Oriented toward him, his
dark and sinewy visage, his god-like rage and prowess in this way, we are placed within and invited to
revel in non-secular epistemologies of social being that combine the folk with the mythic and the
mythological – and that persist despite their disavowal within contemporary modernity. A figure of
lower-caste masculinity is rid of his putative abjection not through a recourse to liberal discourse of
equality, but through existing social modes of relationality that we are brought to inhabit wherein
Omkara is not a representative in the sense of a stand-in for a large group of equals, but a leader who
represents by dint of his qualitative and 'god-like' superiority to others. These relationalities are
masculinist and enact particular kinds of symbolic homosocial as well as homophobic violence – which
also evoke histories of caste-based dominance and emasculation. Accused by Mishra of forcefully
abducting Dolly, Omkara retorts in his distinctive crass yet poetic style, “O cruel one, you have so
170 My own translation of stanzas from the title song “Omkara” written by Gulzar, composed by Vishal Bharadwaj and
sung by Sukhwinder Singh.
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excellently judged my caste but couldn't read your own daughter's heart... abductions are the job of
eunuchs. If Dolly says it was an abduction, then Omkara shall slice off his tongue...”
This immersive rendering of non-secular modes of social-political relationality is a critical strategy
deployed by the film in order to grant a presence to the rural that defies secular and Marxist historical
narratives of caste identities, history and politics. This strategy or critical impulse is analogous to the
call by Subaltern studies scholars like Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee for 'immanent critiques' of
caste which approach peasant consciousness, caste, revolt and counter-insurgency in colonial India not
through the categories of bourgeois consciousness, 'looking for a rational peasant' – where individual
entities form into a community by virtue of a social contract. Instead, they argue, there is need for
grappling with other notions of community where 'individual entities are themselves derived from
membership in a community' (The Nation and its Fragments 163) that is constituted through a dynamic
and dialectical history of power and contestation between the peasants and their dominators. In his
recapitulation of what Guha had listed as the 'elementary aspects' of insurgent peasant consciousness in
colonial India, Chatterjee lays emphasis on the 'inversion of relations' or 'the urge of the oppressed to
assert his resistance to authority “not in terms of his own culture but his enemy's”' (The Nation 162). In
contemporary regional politics in Northern India, Lucia Michelutti has written extensively about the
ways in which middle castes like the Yadav leaders have refashioned themselves in recent decades
using elements from Hindu mythology and the notion of caste as divinely-ordained – claiming to be
descendants of the divine cowherd and later the king of the Yadavas, Krishna. They claim that this
lineage makes them natural rulers. Something similar is shown to be at work in this film where Omkara
is apotheosized by a groundswell of local youth, on the terms of orthodox and Brahmanical Hindu
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religious practice – as Shiva and is distinguished by his simmering and ultimately destructive rage and
might.
If pragmatic cross-caste coalitions are shown to be frequently transacted between men in the realms of
politics and commerce, caste-barriers are shown to be less flexible in the realm of marriage and kinship
which constitute the public and formalized aspect of the erotic. Upper-caste femininity and sexuality
are fiercely guarded from lower-caste male desire by the familial. Dolly is unavailable to Omkara but
once she has eloped with him, bets are placed that he will 'play rough' with her but not marry her.
Conversely, lower-caste women may be consorted with by upper-caste men but cannot be given the
sanctified status of wives. Omkara tells Dolly later that in his father's family, no marriage has ever
yielded an offspring – hinting at a concealed history of inter-caste desire and mesalliances. As a part of
its immersive strategy, the film explores caste-barriers to desire as familial affects rather than through
the prism of gendered physical violence – namely, caste-atrocity or honor-killings. After the elopement,
MLA Tiwari convenes a meeting to effect a reconciliation between Mishra, Dolly and Omkara, at
which a devastated Mishra asks between sobs, “If Omkara did not force himself upon her, how is it
possible that my delicately-nurtured, flower-like daughter went with that beast of her own accord?”
Mishra's bewilderment, which after Dolly's confession gives way to a sense of filial betrayal,
illuminates caste as an aspect of a natural order within which the self finds coherence and legibility.
Dolly's cross-caste desire violates this order and a father's knowledge of his daughter, making her a
stranger to him. Instead of being an alienating and hoary presence, here upper-caste patriarchy is
explored inside-out as a generational affect, and as a mode of social being rendered precarious and
deeply vulnerable.
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Dolly is placed within this socio-political universe, as primarily an erotic and emotional agent – who
asserts herself in violation of the familial. Other peripheral female characters in the film, such as
Tyagi's wife Indu and the popular dancer Billo are also shown as sexual agents. This signals a different
presence for the rural woman in Indian cinema who has previously been established as an ethical and
sympathetic subject primarily through her experience of poverty, lower-caste status, violence and her
dependence on the welfare state. As an upper-caste woman from an affluent family, Dolly has no stake
in the welfare-state, and as Mishra's daughter and Omkara's lover, she exists in a peculiar contiguity to
this political sphere with no overt interest in its functioning or objection to its violent ways, even
though in her material comforts and education, she has clearly been a beneficiary of her family's
political influence. She is more acutely aware of the material value her marriage to a local industrialist's
son holds for her father, and her unavailability to the desiring gaze of social subordinates as mandated
by the caste order. Her battle does not pertain to securing access to land, capital, education or legal
redress (issues that are seen to exhaust the world of a Sanwri Devi), but in securing emotional and
sexual agency from paternal proprietorship over not just her body but also her love.
At the meeting, MLA Tiwari asks Dolly in the presence of her father and Omkara if any kind of force
had been used upon her. In response, Dolly provides them with a lyrical testimony of the journey of her
love in which her voice-over is cross-hatched with a song sung in male playback by Rahat Fateh Ali
Khan. Together, the lyrical, aural and the visual landscapes provide a phenomenology of desire.
Transgressive love, the song goes, is bewitchment by one's own gaze:
Don't believe your eyes, don't listen to them,
the eyes will fool you.
Casting their spell in the day
they will make your nights barren of sleep.
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The eyes will fool you.
Heeding neither the good or bad, nor kins or strangers,
the eyes know how to sting.
Their poison intoxicates
they sow rainbows amongst clouds, pouring rain till dawn
the eyes will render you mad.
The eyes lead you through the night to heaven
promising a symphony of rain-filled clouds
and dreams of fecundity.
Their word cannot be trusted,
no accounts or receipts,
all of it lingers in the air.
Making rain without clouds,
the eyes will drive you mad
they will fool you.
171
Here, the eyes function as agents delinked from a socially-marked body. They provoke imaginings that
are unwitting of social barriers. Yet these desires are anchored in a corporeal body – whose material
leaps and flights have consequences. In her voice-over, Dolly expresses a poetic ontology of love as the
loss of self and surrender to a loved one. She says, “Stepping over the bounds of my heart, I had
become a slave of Omkara”. She claims herself from paternal proprietorship paradoxically through the
act of surrendering herself to Omkara. Also emerging in the confession is an incipient discourse of the
possessive-individualist paradigm of love. She goes on, “In the throes of despair I decided to give my
life. But then I thought that at least he must know that it was all for him.” She signs off a final love-
letter to him as follows, “You don't have the courage, but I declare, I love you Om. You may include
my name in the litany of all those you have slain. Yours forever. D.” While Dolly's confession
establishes herself as the prime-mover of the relationship and as the one to provoke the elopement, it
171 My own translation of the song “Nain thag lengein” (lyrics by Gulzar, sung by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and music by
Vishal Bharadwaj).
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also propels her excommunication from her family. Stepping over the bounds and crossing the
threshold, 'dehleej langna' are not merely apt spatial-architectural metaphors, we see how Dolly
literally unhouses herself through this act – which is a specific kind of violence her act incurs. Dead to
her bitter father, she may never return to her familial home again. Yet the sequence emphasizes how the
prohibition of desire does not merely bring a sense of imminent loss and injury, but also engenders
further imaginings of plenitude as well as risky endeavors.
While the film shows Dolly's desire and emotional subjecthood to be constituted, experienced and
expressed within multiple frameworks of morality - to further the film's representation of rural
modernity as a complex composite of multiple entrenched, threatened and emergent modes of social
being, her desire also becomes the centripetal concern of the film – as the plot tightens around the
impossible futurity of Dolly and Omkara's love. As in Shakespeare's play, Dolly's iconoclastic desire
for Omkara is used by Tyagi (through an elaborate plot of deception involving a stolen family
heirloom) to manipulate his particular vulnerabilities inherent as a 'half-caste' man in this political
world. As Omkara grows suspicious of Dolly's real affections, leading to her gradual isolation in his
familial home, Tyagi's wife Indu articulates the film's feminist critique of the pervasive misogyny
underlying patriarchal culture: “When the ancient scriptures have made us wear these imputed follies as
marks of honor, then how can you be blamed for your error [in judging the value of Dolly]?” Indu calls
attention to how the fear of woman's innate duplicity ingrained within patriarchy is converted by
repeatedly reinforced scriptural stories into different modes of self-regulation for female and male
subjects. She locates the gendered violence of which both Omkara and Dolly become lethal victims by
the end of the film – within a mythical time where Omkara's misguided betrayal of Dolly and their love
is the plight of all women through history. Her critique constructs from their experience of
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contemporary rural upper-caste patriarchy, a unitary and universalized conception of patriarchy
characterized by a singular misogyny directed toward the dangerous specter of feminine desire, where
caste disappears as an active vector of difference, power and oppression. Thus even as the film's
immersive approach interpellates viewers multiply – as participants in a threatened upper-caste order, a
groundswell of an emergent folk political culture and an incipient bourgeois-liberal female
consciousness, this heterogeneity is explored through a concern with the upper-caste woman's desire.
This returns us to the genre's foundational displacement of the lower-caste rural woman (who had been
central to the New Cinema and the Transnational rural film), and with it a displacement of other
structural-material dimensions of living with caste.
The Explosive Conjugal and the Rural Widow as Femme Fatale
The world of Abhishek Chaubey's Ishqiya derives greatly from his mentor Bharadwaj's Omkara, but is
a more manic and fantastical film even as its maintains verisimilitude of dialect, culture and ethos.
Quite like the universe of the former, Ishqiya offers a similar immersion in the violent political culture
of Gorakhpur – a small town in western Uttar Pradesh. To recount the plot of Ishqiya briefly: the film
opens with a post-coital scene of intimacy between a husband and a wife from in the 'Hindi belt', wife
asks husband to 'surrender' to the law, husband loses patience, soon after there is a gas-cylinder blast in
the house. Then the film jumps to the peripatetic journey of an uncle (roughly in his late fifties) and
nephew (in his late twenties) duo – Khalujaan (played by Naseeruddin Shah) and Babban (Arshad
Warsi), who are petty thieves on the run from their ex-boss after botching a job and stealing a large sum
of money. Looking to flee the country, they arrive in Gorakhpur – a small town in Uttar Pradesh close
to the Indian border with Nepal (located in the same 'criminal badlands') in search of the man we saw in
the opening scene who we learn is political henchman Vidyadhar Verma (the name signifies an upper-
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caste Brahmin politician) who they hope will aid them in crossing the border. Instead, they only find
his widow Krishna (played by Vidya Balan) living alone in the creaky, dust-ridden house. She gives
them temporary shelter in the course of which the money the duo were carrying disappears and the
dreaded ex-boss shows up threatening to kill all three if the money is not returned within a certain
deadline. Together the three of them hatch a plan to kidnap a local businessman to recover the money
as ransom and in the course of this planning both men fall in love with Krishna and she appears to
enjoy the attentions of both. But after the kidnapping, Krishna assumes control over the dealings. She
offers the duo their money (which she had hidden the entire time) and asks them to leave. Instead of a
ransom, she demands that Vidyadhar Verma himself come to free the man. At this point it is revealed
that Verma had faked his own death in the blast so as to rid himself of his wife's incessant demands to
surrender, and to adopt a new identity to further his criminal-political enterprise of which the
kidnapped businessman is a right-hand man. The kidnapping becomes Krishna's means to force Verma
to come to her. Verma arrives to face Krishna, offering to take her with him this time but she has
planned to burn down the house killing herself and him. Discovering her intentions, Verma tries to
escape by physically overpowering Krishna. At this juncture the duo return to help Krishna. In the
struggle, Verma gets lethally burned, and Krishna, Babban and Khalu walk away as flames engulf the
house.
In an interview with Cinema & Me with film-scholar Shaunak Sen, director Abhishek Chaubey
described the film as a deliberate mishmash of genres including the comic caper, the gangster film, the
femme fatale noir, the male friendship film and a road film (this generic hybridity is suggested in the
film's posters, see Figure 3). However, it was the film's skillful and provocative representation of the
character of Krishna – a rural upper-caste (Brahmin) Hindu widow as a femme fatale that invited the
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greatest degree of attention. Vidya Balan's performance of the character provided a rich and ambivalent
combination of gravitas, vulnerability (as a defenseless and solitary widow), sensuality (played up by a
strategically 'deglam' look), spunk with an occasionally 'foul' mouth, great psychological acumen and
savviness. Expressing what was taken as the genre's progressive even feminist attitude toward women,
other women characters in the film also display the same ambiguity and range of traits. The village 'old
hag' - Kaki also has a sharp-tongue, the owner of the beauty-parlor and the married businessman's
girlfriend turns out to be an important member of Verma's political outfit. However, the gender and
caste politics of the film need to be evaluated in the light of the ways in which the women, in particular
Krishna is located within a larger and contentious socio-political universe.
The outskirts of Gorakhpur, where Krishna resides is contiguous to the provincial city, zones of caste-
militancy and the national border. When Khalujaan and Babban arrive there after dark, on a stolen bike,
the place seems remote and quiet. The sounds of Krishna's home suggest sedate and solitary
domesticity and a world where time appears to pass slowly. However, this sense of a sedate provincial
world, removed from the dynamic processes of modernization is upset when the lower-caste
teenaged boy Nandu who sweeps Krishna's house and feels a fraternal affection for her, reveals to
Babban a different side of the fecund and undulating picturesque rural – where different caste-
communities live in segregated and starkly-contrasting localities. While caste-hierarchies and the
resulting socio-economic inequalities prevail, these hierarchies are also shown as being relentlessly and
violently challenged. Playing with his home-brand pistol, Nandu tells Babban about the caste war that
has been waging in the region for decades with every caste maintaining its own army. He mentions that
in the previous month, “Our army earned 6 thakurs!” which he explains with a gesture simulating the
slitting of throats. Later Babban goes in search of Nandu to his village and finds it to be impoverished,
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populated by sick elders, hobbling youths and malnourished children who play with swords and pistols.
He stumbles into a recruiting drive for the caste-army by leaders wearing red headbands inciting a
group of young men and boys. The men inform Babban that Nandu has joined the caste-army and must
not be traced. This brief vignette ambiguously folds in suggestions of both caste-wars as well as
suggestions of the violent Maoist 'Naxal' insurgency being waged in the forestlands of central India –
which in previous decades had been waged against landlords and their extortionist revenue collection
policies.
Besides zones of systemic poverty, caste wars and insurgency thriving on cross-border traffic in arms,
Krishna's hamlet also borders on a rapidly transforming Gorakhpur. Faced with the necessity of coming
up with the sum of money demanded by Mushtaq, Krishna hatches the kidnapping plot, using the tricks
of the trade revealed to her by her late husband. She reveals to the duo the nature of contemporary
Gorakhpur - a city transformed by new private capital, urbanisms and worldviews with burgeoning
skylines, new horizons for recreation and consumption with growing mall-tiplexes, and an expanding
class of millionaires. These venues are of course class-segregated with a different set of leisure venues
for lower class men like Babban such as the seedy brothels he frequents. The man they intend to kidnap
is businessman Kamalkant Kakkar who belongs the class of new millionaires. Krishna and Babban's
surveillance on his daily habits and movements reveals the moral pretenses of the class and challenges
the putative conservatism of the small-town. Kakkar pretends to go to the temple every morning only to
slip out through the back-door to indulge in sexual escapades with his mistress, who is also his wife's
beautician. As she relates the ins-and-outs of the criminal business she had gleaned from her husband,
the viewer adopts the strange peripheral gaze of a political caste-entrepreneur toward this Liberalizing
urban landscape. Far from being a secluded widow, Krishna displays a range of competencies including
a very savvy understanding of the psychology of the nouveau riche of Gorakhpur, an ability to make
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herself invisible in public spaces, the ability to take control of situations when the kidnapping does not
go as planned.
Director Chaubey in his interview with Shaunak Sen of Cinema & Me complains about the mandate to
make films about the rural 'issue-based'. Ishqiya faced criticism for bringing in the violent Maoist
Naxal movement underway in central India at present and caste-wars in UP and Bihar, merely as a
minor reference rather than an overt thematic of his hybrid – buddy-caper and femme fatale film. In
response, Chaubey asserts that, “It is my right as a filmmaker to use reality for my film, and not make
my film about it. I use the reference as plot-movement...” He goes on to explain that there was no
factual evidence of Naxal activities near Gorakhpur in the present, even though caste-wars have been
on. In other words, the world of Gorakhpur has been deliberately remade in order to locate these
multifarious socio-political phenomena of new and exclusive urbanisms, caste-wars and Maoist
struggle in contiguity – to articulate contemporary northern Indian provinciality as a complex
assemblage of all these realities. Numerous media and fan reviews praised the 'world' of Ishqiya on the
following lines:
Niceties be damned! In an industry where films can’t roll out of the rut of sweet saccharine
romances, brain-dead comedies and insufferable dramas, Ishqiya comes like a whiff of fresh LPG
(laughter propelled grenade) which is explosively raw, ribald, gritty, grimy, and, most of all, real.
(apunkachoice.com)
172
Within the contemporary mediascape with the commercial dominance of genres such as the global
family romance or the metropolitan youth film, Chaubey's film is fetishized as refreshingly 'real'. In
Freudian psychology, a fetish is an object on to which a desire gets displaced. Thus, if the New Rural
Film is a genre on to which the desire for the real, within the contemporary cultural marketplace gets
displace, then the parameters and implications of this 'reality' need to be probed. Chaubey responds to
172 Deoshi, Naresh Kumar. “The Ishqiya Movie Review”. Available at:
http://www.apunkachoice.com/dyn/movies/hindi/ishqiya/ishqiya-review.html
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criticisms of his fleeting engagement with the Naxal movement or the issue of caste-wars in Ishqiya by
asserting his creative freedom as a filmmaker to incorporate contemporary issues and problems to the
degree that he sees fit since his final commitment is to the story he wants to tell. He states that the
film's relationship with these issues is expressed by Babban's words to Khalu after he chances upon the
recruitment drive in Nandu's village, “Something very dangerous is afoot, let's get out of here!” The
film indeed bears out Chaubey's claim, where Nandu never gives a straight answer to why he wants to
join his village's army, instead it is through Babban's accidental foray and quick retreat that we glimpse
the caste-wars. And it is through this displacement of Nandu as a subject that the film avoids the
'serious' sociological treatment of the rural in the film.
While the film's engagement with caste-hostilities and violent mobilizations remains deliberately
tangential, it engages us primarily with a contemporary rural, upper-caste femininity. Chaubey explains
in the same interview that he conceived of Krishna's character first as an image based on his
recollections of vacations spent as a child in rural UP. He goes on:
I had seen there, the women wore a low veil, and on the face of it, it was very clear who was in
control [the men in the house]. But in the night, when the heads hit the pillow, it became apparent
that for all their machismo, they were not. Krishna is like that, she talks in a certain way, very
sweetly, and every now in will use a slang [or cuss] word. So that was something I had seen and the
film came from that. (Cinema & Me).
Chaubey describes Krishna in paradoxical terms - as a 'hyper-real' character that nevertheless emerges
from an experience of the 'real' gender dynamics of provincial upper-caste households. There is an
implication here that the practical aspects of gender dynamics within the marital and the familial
exceed and defy the hierarchies that the ideational plane of the scriptural seeks to impose. However,
crucially, the rural woman is presented through an immersive delineation of the particular gazes,
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desires and fascination of Khalu and Babban – who remain precarious presences in the world of the
film, peripheral observers of its central drama.
The significance of Krishna as a re-imagined rural woman emerges when seen as a neoliberal
engagement with the historical valences of the figure of the Hindu widow. In the nineteenth century
through her association with the social practices of child-marriage and sati ('voluntary' self-
immolation) the upper-caste Hindu widow became the focus of an ethical dilemma for the British
colonial government - raising questions about the degree to which it ought to interfere in 'native'
religious and cultural institutions. Her condition became a justification for imperialism as well as the
focus of Hindu social reformers who appealed to the colonial state for its benevolent and humane
intervention.
173
Lata Mani has shown how the debate on sati between the colonial government, the
protesting pundits and the social reformers like Rammohan Roy was centered around scriptural
interpretation and left out the voice and the suffering of the widow. The ban on sati instituted in 1829
emerged out of this limited debate, so that, in Mani's words, the historical archive of the official debates
between colonial officials, Hindu reforms and pundits presents the question of not 'Can the subaltern
speak?' (as Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak has asked) but 'Can she be heard?'. Subsequently, as Partha
Chatterjee's influential argument goes, with the increasingly vociferous demands by the nationalist
movement for self-rule and changes in economic policy from the turn of the twentieth century onward,
there was a 'nationalist resolution' of 'the woman's question' (or the issue of female emancipation) with
173 Raja Rammohan Roy was one of the prominent voices who opposed the practice of Sati. Roy disputed the reading of
Hindu scriptures provided by the Brahmin pundits and showed how sati was not prescribed as necessary and was seen
as reprehensible unless performed voluntarily. Roy thus retained the idea of voluntary sati as heroic, but he did
emphasize the real reasons behind the practice as being material – namely the concern about the widow's rights to thus
husband's property – something that was also not yet recognized by British family law. Yet Roy continued to support the
idea of ascetic widowhood. Subsequently, the demand for legislation legalizing widow-remarriage was raised by Ishwar
Chandra Vidyasagar in Bengal, Vishnu Shastri Pandit in Bombay, Viresa Lingam Pantulu in Madras. These reformers
variously tried to reform the beliefs and practices Hinduism on more rational lines – based on their exposure to colonial
liberal education and Christian missonaries.
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'a refusal to make the women's question an issue of political negotiation with the colonial state' (The
Nation and its Fragments 132). Instead it was defined as a question of the cultural and spiritual identity
of Indian culture – as sphere that must remain beyond the pale of colonial control and the question was
routed into the space of the home. The figure of the 'New Woman' who was cultivated to occupy this
space appropriately through the inculcation of a new education, lessons in dress, food, composure,
hygiene; was the companion of the New Man or 'bhadralok' (gentleman) who belonged to the growing
native, urban-educated, salaried middle class. She was recruited into the new cultural patriarchy as an
agent who must help the nationalist cause by maintaining the purity of the home and was counterposed
to the westernized 'Memsahib' and the public prostitute.
Kumkum Sangari offers a rich exploration of how the 'eternizing [of] marriage' in relation to wives and
upper-caste widows by much of colonial reformism was underwritten by the logics of domestic labor –
of simultaneously monopolizing and trivializing women's labor while keeping it outside of the market
economy. The widow's labor became a crucial resource in larger urban middle class families with
single male wage-earners in the new economy, where her labor could be extracted for very little in turn.
In lower class families, her labor could be farmed out to perform menial labor in other households.
Ideologically, the sacramental and non-dissoluble marriage (which prevails even after the death of the
husband) was 'represented not as institutions but as acts of faith', as an effect of the Hindu wife's labor,
and as such was made homologous with nationalism (Sangari 1999: 351). Within its ideologies, the
widow was projected as a figure of pure volition – whether as a self-immolator or as an ascetic, she is
one who regulates her own desires and sexuality even in the absence of a paternal figure. Nevertheless,
as Sangari points out, the widow's actual experience of the loss of social status, withdrawal of resources
for her maintenance, hard labor, enforced vagrancy and poverty, even immolation; 'was bound to stand
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in uneasy relation with her symbolic constitution as the ultimate ratifier of the institution of
sacramental marriage' eventually 'hollowing affective claims' to her labor (Sangari 355-6). Her
experience gave the lie to the ethical-ideal claims of both traditional family paternalism and the new
companionate domestic ideal – since the assurance of many things within both was withdrawn
following the death of the husband.
Sharmila Rege has draw attention to dalit feminist histories that challenge the totalized nature of
Chatterjee's claim about the circumscription of 'the Woman's Question' within the home by drawing
attention to the vociferous demands for social change made by dalit women through the anti-
Brahmanical Satyashodhak movement (since the 1870s) and Ambedkarite movements (since the
1930s). Radical feminist histories by scholars like Vidyut Bhagwat have shown how Tarabai Shinde's
'Stree Purush Tulana' [or 'the comparison of men and women'] written within the Satyashodhak
tradition, pointed out the 'linkages between issues of de-industrialization, colonialism and the
commodification of women's bodies' and critiqued Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical patriarchies
(Rege 2004: 215). At the regular women's conferences convened by Ambedkar, dalit women delegates
passed resolutions against child marriage, enforced widowhood and dowry. However, the obfuscation
of these histories within the Indian feminist as well as dalit history and movements – where, all women
have been made 'savarna' (or Brahmanic) and all dalits assumed to be male, has preserved the
predominantly Brahmanical character of the Hindu widow. This has provoked feminist literary
historian Susie Tharu to assert that 'when a writer features a widow as protagonist he or she is,
consciously or unconsciously, making an intervention in a debate centered on this figure; a debate
whose history is a history of Indian humanism and its intimate yet troubled relationship with Indian
feminism' (Tharu 2003: 261). One might add that that writer also grapples with the troubled
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relationship between 'Indian feminism' and radical dalit feminism – frictions that have been absorbed
and somewhat neutralized, as Rege argues, by an emphasis on 'difference' and a stand-point theory,
rather than mutual engagement and interrogation. While in postcolonial India incidences of sati have
been rare, the Roop Kanwar sati case of 1987 in Deorala, Rajasthan became another flashpoint - where
local women's organizations such as the Dharma Raksha Samiti (Committee for the Protection of
Dharma) organized campaigns glorifying Roop as sati, even as other women's organizations fighting
for gender equality across the country petitioned successfully for the Rajasthan Sati (Prevention)
Ordinance, 1987 and the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Bill, 1987 that made any attempt to commit,
abet and glorify sati punishable.
174
Yet the virulent defenses of the act by women also threw open the
question of the construction of consent or volition.
Ishqiya intervenes into this chequered colonial and postcolonial history of Hindu marriage and
widowhood through the seemingly counter-intuitive move of foregrounding Krishna's desire through
the notion of eternized marriage. We are introduced to her in the opening scene of Ishqiya as she lies
sari-clad on a bed, facing the camera with her eyes closed and humming the words,“I wait no more...”
with closed eyes and wearing a look of great serenity and contentment. A moment of post-coital
affection and flirtation follows between she and her husband. Shortly after, as she fluffs chapatis on the
stove, she asks Verma to surrender to the law since she has learned that the police cases against him –
under [articles] '302 and 304' [of the Indian Penal Code, detailing punishment for murder and culpable
homicide] have no evidence, and 'for the 396' [charge of dacoity] he is likely to be convicted for not
more than four years. When Verma berates her for going to the police-station, Krishna retorts, “Yes I
did. In three years we have barely spent three days together. For days after you leave, I am unable to
174 For a more detailed analysis of the legal trajectory of the case see: Rajalakshmi, T.K., “Sati and the Verdict”, Frontline.
V olume 21, Issue 5, February 28-March 12, 2004.
http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2105/stories/20040312002504600.htm
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get out of bed. I just lay in the folds, like a dead body. I can't take it anymore.” They argue for a bit
before it is time for Verma to leave again. As Krishna re-enters their room with the thali of aarti the
lighted lamp appears to trigger an explosion presumably from a gas-leak.
175
This opening sequence allows the film to establish its 'novel' subject of interest – a solitary Hindu wife
and then a widow residing in a remote rural world. Crucially, she is not located in a larger marital
family – there are no other family-members or children. Her occupying positions of wife and
subsequently that of a widow do not imply a change in either familial status, increased surveillance or
social denigration, difference in the nature of domestic labor demanded, or a change in status in the
labor-market. This is crucial in the light of Hindi cinema's many iconic representations of self-
sacrificial but powerful mothers discussed in previous sections, who are forced to enter back-breaking
construction-work, or farm labor and teeter on the brink of prostitution following the specter of
widowhood (including, Mother India, Deewar amongst others). Krishna is also unaffected by
prevailing regimes of law-enforcement and politics – unlike the corruption, apathy or denigration that
Sanwari Devi experienced in Bawandar or Phoolan Devi did in Bandit Queen, or the delayed
intervention of the developmental state in Mother India. Given her more privileged caste and class
location, the manner in which they affect her is not through the maintenance of oppressive material and
social conditions of work or living with dignity, but rather as an alternative erotic horizon for her
husband and his political ambitions - which curtails her conjugal bliss.
Electoral politics in this provincial universe is shown as having become more lucrative but also more
unstable and contentious by the democratization of caste (where middle and lower castes have been
politicized) as well as by the post-Liberalization expansion of opportunities for crony capitalism and
175 It is the plate [thali] full of Hindu ritual offerings used for the daily worship of gods, and is also used to bless and
propitiate the path of individuals departing for a journey or to perform an important task.
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criminal entrepreneurship. There is now a constant need for back-stage criminal-political entrepreneurs
like Verma who will gather financial and other resources (like sophisticated ammunition) to institute or
dislodge political leaderships, and to fuel the different parties engaged in caste-wars. Through Krishna,
the film imagines and explores the domestic and conjugal aspect of this socio-political universe in
fantastical ways. Her solitude enables and structures the film's interest in exploring her as a primarily
emotional and erotic subject. She articulates her relation to this political universe as one of emotional
deprivation (and eventual abandonment by her husband) and in asserting her conjugal needs, she is
unwilling to be made subordinate to his political ambitions. In the post-coital moment of affection we
see between Verma and her in the opening sequence, he presents her a gold chain with a pendant
replicating the the design of the Taj Mahal – the 'timeless' Mughal-era 'monument to love'. Addressing
him as 'Jahapanaah' (a term of regal address that literally means 'the refuge of the world'), Krishna
jokingly quips, “Now that you have built the mausoleum, why don't you kill your queen?” Krishna
evokes the Islamicate imaginary with its Urdu-poetic, architectural topos of transcendent love as a
more appropriate register for expressing her own impatient and 'incommensurate' longing for him, her
abnegation owing to this love, and a desire for release – than the paradigms of traditional Brahmanical
Hindu marriage (with its basis in dharma and moral obligation) or the companionate model. The
comment also foreshadows the imminent blast and Krishna's subsequent 'revenge' plot to convert the
house into a burning mausoleum for both of them.
The blast is shown from outside of the house and the events of the night are left murky with the film
cutting away to Khalu and Babban living it up after committing a big theft. Hounded by their angry ex-
boss, and running out of allies, they think of seeking shelter and help from Verma, a powerful politico
and an old acquaintance of Khalu's from his prison days. We see Krishna again, this time as a solitary
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widow when unaware of Verma's death, the two men arrive at her doorstep. During this hiatus from the
opening sequence, we have moved from a position of emotional proximity and understanding with
Krishna to a distanced gaze toward her mediated through Khalu and Babban. What unfolds gradually is
the growing attraction of both men toward her, which she appears to elicit, resist and enjoy – creating a
hermeneutic challenge for them as well as the viewer. Events, encounters, looks and conversations
waver between innocence, happenstance and calculated intent. The viewer is privy to the
consciousnesses of these men – inhabiting the distinct cultural and generational memories and ethos
that structures the gazes of these Muslim men of humble origins, toward Krishna.
Krishna and Khalu's relationship channels the sublime, the spiritual and the sensual – indulging in their
shared enjoyment of food, music and poetry. On his first morning in Gorakhpur, Khalu is woken up by
Krishna singing a semi-classical devotional song as a part of her morning prayers. The lyrics of which
go as follows:
“The night burns ever so slowly
the haze seeps into my eyes
through the nights bit by bit
I've unraveled each new dawn
my eyes have, bit by bit
seen the break of a new day...”
176
Following the voice through the corridors of the house, Khalu pauses at the window of the room where
Krishna is singing with her eyes closed. We follow Khalu's stolen, voyeuristic gaze toward her and the
camera lingers on the spontaneous gestures of her tender fingers and her eyes as she sings seemingly
unmindful of Khalu. Her raptness and intensity suggest that the song is a heartfelt expression of her
longing buried beneath the life of seclusion. As he expresses his admiration of her singing to her later,
176 My translation of the song “Bade dheere jali”. Lyrics by Gulzar, music composed by Vishal Bharadwaj and sung by
Rekha Bharadwaj.
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he talks about his own artistic origins – as his uncle was a famous Ustad (or guru of classical music) in
Aligarh. The reference brings up the obscured histories of a cultural and artistic frisson that occurred in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in cities like Aligarh which have been rendered provincial
in postcolonial India. These obscured provincial histories are overlaid with an evoked cinematic history
in the film's most popular track “Dil toh bachcha hai ji” [“The heart is just a child”]. The rhythm,
tempo, the sound of the accordion and the style of singing used in the composition recall, as many
commentators have observed, the romantic ethos of the Raj Kapoor-Mukesh era of the 1950s – which
had memorialized the figure of the tramp (inspired by Chaplin), while the quotidian, irreverent yet
poetic Urdu lyrics insert a provincial Islamicate history into the consciousness of this historical figure.
These fuse with the lost and now rediscovered youth of Khalu. During the song, Khalu travels to
Faizabad, a nearby city to steal the car with which the kidnapping will be conducted. But all day his
mind is suffused with daydreams about Krishna. In his twilight days, he experiences love as a scary
delirium, surprised to find how quickly the memories of his dead wife fade to be supplanted by dreams
of a nikaah with Krishna.
By contrast, Krishna's relationship with Babban is fraught with mutual suspicion (especially after their
money disappears) which develops into a sexual tension. Krishna alternately repels and invites his
advances. On one occasion, Babban secretly watches Krishna undress – however, the reverse-shot
shows Krishna to be aware of/sensing the secret gaze as she continues to undress. As Khalu goes off to
steal the car, Babban makes yet another attempt to woo her awkwardly before she finally responds and
they engage in passionate sex. Afterward, he regards her with great tenderness as she sleeps. The film
foregrounds its iconoclastic portrayal of the Hindu widow by placing her within and showing her to
actively elicit, an erotic economy of gazes, desires, dreams as well as camaraderie – which she appears
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to inhabit both sincerely and strategically. She positions herself as a vulnerable widow before both men
but differently with each – a diffident and anxious one with Khalu, and as a no-nonsense survivor with
the promise of a softer side with Babban. In other instances, framed at angles beyond the gazes of both
men, she also appears genuinely gleeful and lightheaded.
Yet even as she is inserted into this erotic economy to defy the religious and cultural proscriptions on
her sexual being, the film also interrogates the terms on which love is offered to her by the men. Both
men begin to entertain hopes of marrying Krishna – each assuming to have peeled away the layers and
finally engaged the true core of her being. Their imagined futures with her are based on culturally-
instituted equivalences between feminine affection and desire on the one hand, and monogamy, willing
ownership by marriage, on the other. While Khalu returns home with the stolen car only to find Babban
and Krishna (in one of his snazzy shirts) gyrating to a foot-tapping low-brow Bollywood number [“The
moment I set eyes on you, my heart's guitar went off!”] in what is clearly a moment of post-coital
joviality, Babban's 'true love' for Krishna is crushed when she takes control of the kidnapping, reveals
to them her actual revenge plot and throwing them the money, asks them to leave. She is neither a
monogamous sexual subject, nor does she have any desire for a shared futurity with either of them.
Stunned, both men can only mouth misogynistic slurs about women's innate duplicity as the virgin and
the whore.
What is significant here is not simply that the film shows her as a complex and canny sexual agent to
defy the cultural circumscription of the figure of the Hindu upper-caste widow within the normative
discourse about the death of desire, sexuality and consumption; but that in doing so the film defines this
as the mode of defiance of the norm of Hindu widowhood. It presupposes a reading of widowhood that
isolates and abstracts the prohibition of erotic desire and sexuality from other aspects that have also
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historically defined the institution including the control and extraction of physical, sexual labor,
property, inheritance and social status.
This isolation of and emphasis on the erotic and emotional dimension of a woman's being within the
institutions of marriage and widowhood is also evident in the ways in which the film re-centers the
conjugal through Krishna's revenge-plot. She prepares for the meeting by placing bundles of firewood
in all the corners of the house, sealing its doors and windows and engineering a gas-leak. She wears all
the insignia of marriage - sindur [the vermilion mark worn by a Hindu wife on the parting of the hair],
bindi, red-and-gold bridal sari and waits for him, prepared to burn down the house killing herself and
him in what would be a re-enactment of Sati - the practice of 'voluntary' self-immolation by a widow
on the funeral-pyre of her dead husband. Sati had been the focus of tremendous ideological debate in
the nineteenth century in the colonial metropolitan circles as well as amongst Indian social reformers –
leading to its ban in 1829. At the time it became a flashpoint for the colonial regime's self-definition (as
a non-interfering military and economic presence or an enlightened social-civilizational one) and an
assertion of the religious and spiritual independence of native Hindu castes and communities. Though a
rare occurrence in postcolonial India, Sati has also been a subject of debates between neo-Hindu
orthodoxies and the liberal-feminist movements on questions about the presence or absence of female
volition in the context of actual incidents.
If the ideology and social practice of 'eternized marriage' enabled the continued extraction of the
woman's labor after the death of the husband, Krishna's 'revenge-plot' that forces Verma to return to the
blasted hearth to face her, deploys the ideology differently. Here, the intended immolation is an
assertion of the conjugal bond by the upper-caste widow's desire. When Krishna asks Verma why
despite loving her, he did not take her with him, he angrily retorts, “Being my wife, you should have
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joined me of your own accord!” Here, the complex nature of Krishna's desire and rebellion emerges
more clearly. By refusing to join him or to endure his absence, she had asserted her autonomy as a wife
and conjugal partner, choosing to hold him accountable to her emotional needs. In doing so, she had
rejected the disproportionate claims of both traditional and companionate models of marriage on the
woman's emotional being, residence, labor (which, it is prescribed, must be dedicated to the well-being
of the husband), while upholding the sanctity of the conjugal bond as a source of self-realization. Given
the dominant pull of the outer world of political ambition and violence – which had caused her to be
consigned by Verma to a false widowhood, Krishna seeks to recoup the conjugal as the horizon for self-
realization through a union with him in death.
Krishna's desire is a cause that is morally endorsed by multiple figures in the film. Nandu – the
sweeper-boy, who is now a member of a dalit militia supported by Verma and is appointed by him to
kill Khalu and Babban, relates to them the history of Krishna and Verma's marriage in a quick
flashback. Opposed to the violent nature of his political-criminal entrepreneurship, Krishna had been
holding Verma accountable to his promise of leaving it all behind by surrendering to the police and
serving time. Unwilling to sacrifice his ambitions, Verma had orchestrated his own 'death' – we see
through Nandu's memory, how after the explosion a bloodied and burnt Krishna had crawled toward
what she thinks is his corpse – only to realize in the following days what had actually happened. Nandu
lets the duo escape (so that they could possibly help Krishna) because, in his own words, “Bhaiya [a
term of honor for Verma] has done much for my jat [caste] but I can never forgive him for what he did
to Bhabhi [meaning 'sister-in-law' : Krishna]. And for this reason I am letting you go.” While Krishna
desires a dramatic self-ejection from the mire of violent battles of caste, power and masculinity, it is
significant that the figure of Nandu is shown to subordinate his own political considerations to morally
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nominate Krishna's battle for feminine selfhood. When her desire for an eternity of togetherness in a
shared conjugal death proves unrealizable – Verma physically resists her death-wish by beating her
faint, Khalu and Babban return at great risk to themselves, to aid her. As they are about to escape from
the house which has been invaded by Verma's men and surrounded by the police, the aged Tai (old lady
shown sitting at the public square throughout the film, asking passersby for a light) stands in quiet
solidarity with a burning torch and sets the house on fire leading to another cylinder-blast. In a moment
that has been described as 'Tarantino-esque', a burnt and dying Verma tries to reach longingly toward
Krishna who stands grimly at the door-frame before turning away. Thereafter, Krishna walks across the
bridge and toward the camera, flanked on either sides by Babban and Khalu, as the house behind her
explodes and crumbles into flames.
The film validates Krishna's violation of the emotional and sexual mandates of ritual Hindu
widowhood through her multiple relationships as well as her 'excessive' conjugal desire. Yet even as it
supports her paradoxical desire for self-realization through the obliteration of self and the beloved, it
also exceeds her 'plot' to ensure her survival. The solidarity of the other peripheral figures with her
expresses the relation of these other contiguous social battles – of caste contestations, electoral politics,
poverty, the obfuscated histories and material impoverishment of Muslims – to the battles that are
focalized through the new rural woman-protagonist i.e. the politics of the erotic within the marital, the
domestic and widowhood. Ishqiya imagines a contemporary rural feminine/feminist consciousness by
positing the relation between the public and the private as the conflict between an upper-caste wife's
conjugal desire and the husband's political ambition. In this battle, the gas-cylinder, which is a symbol
of the gendered and mundane domain of the modern Indian kitchen in its redeployment as a tool of
explosion symbolizes the explosive potential within this domain owing to its subordination of women's
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desire. It is the exploration of this critical potential of the marital-conjugal that the new rural film
enables as a critical product of this neoliberal moment.
To conclude, the new rural film offers a very visible mode through which the post-Liberalization
popular Bombay cinema engages with 'non-metropolitan' realities of caste and gender. The rural and
the provincial become sites on to which discussions of caste and electoral politics are deflected even as
metropolitan India has developed its own exclusionary structures of caste and class through new modes
of urban planning, spatial and commercial organizations. The new rural film positions itself as an
intervention into inherited cinematic tropes for the representation of the rural as an abject and typically
lower caste woman who either must fend for herself amidst the quotidian violence perpetrated by local
landed elites to receive the much-delayed munificence of the developmental state (Mother India), or is
actively oppressed by a state co-opted by the elites (as in the New Wave and transnational rural films).
As demonstrated in this chapter, the embedded mode of exploration allows Omkara and Ishqiya to
approach these themes in novel ways wherein caste-masculinities, politics and violence within and
beyond the realm of elections get absorbed in the 'worlding' of the films, while the plots pointedly
explore questions of female desire, sexuality and violence in the realm of the familial, marital and the
post-marital. The chapter has demonstrated how the new upper-caste rural woman is both located
within and abstracted from the socio-political transformations underway in the contemporary Indian
rural and provincial with subordinate groups demanding increased access to living wages, land, credit,
education and political representation even as historically dominant groups reassert their power
violently and recuperate their losses by adopting other economic strategies. Her construction as a figure
with iconoclastic erotic and conjugal desires taps into neoliberal transformations in gendered
subjectivity. It enables the recognition of how feminine sexual agency is negotiated and resisted within
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the uneven coalescence of modern, secular and non-secular ideologies of social being in the gendered
realms of family and marriage. Conversely, the emphasis on the elite feminine-erotic also limits the
critical potential of the genre's engagement with this social-epistemological heterogeneity within which
multiple social oppressions, contestations and alliances occur, and which are reduced to a subordinate
contiguity within the films.
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Conclusion
Critical Interventions and Afterlives of the Cinematic Provincial
This dissertation has considered a significant and distinctive set of genres within the contemporary
spectrum of popular Hindi cinema, that dwell in provincial and rural settings and which have been left
largely unexamined by scholarship. In their consideration of emergent trends within the Hindi
filmscape, recent critical volumes and articles have examined the transformation of cinematic
subjectivity, sexuality, refigurations of national and cultural identity, statehood in the light of financial
and cultural Liberalization (Jaikumar 2003, Virdi 2003, Rajadhyaksha 2004, Mazumdar 2007, Kapur
2009, S Gopal 2011a, 2011b). Significantly, these questions have been pursued with respect to the
changing representations of gender, sexuality and family within the cinematic spaces of global or
domestic metropolises as increasing numbers of films came to be set in not merely Indian metropolises
but also the affluent Indian diasporas in London, New York, Toronto, Melbourne. This dissertation
reorients the question of popular cinema and contemporary modernity toward the cinematic 're-
appearance' of provincial and rural spaces over the past two decades across a range of genres. In doing
so it has sought to both, reconceive the relation of popular cinema and Indian modernity – unmooring
this relation from the site of the metropolis, and explored the ways in which these provincial genres
pluralize the cinematic conception of postcolonial modernity.
Successive chapters of this dissertation have explored the ways in which contemporary provincial
worlds are presented through narratives of travel, and as sites of encounters between different kinds of
political subjects (metropolitan, meritorious, elite, subordinate, newly-ascendant, civic, subaltern,
gendered). While the metropolitan cop films and the provincial cop films depict the meritocratic
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protagonist cop (trained in the metropolitan academy) travel out to the provincial small-town and rural
outpost to encounter a range of provincial figures, the provincial youth film and the new rural film
provide more embedded cinematic experiences of provincial worlds where provincial and
entrepreneurial protagonists negotiate members of entrenched political elites as well as subordinate
social groups as savvy insiders. These encounters play out across 'natural', civic, institutional
landscapes and provoke questions about the nature of regional political cultures, cultures of
masculinity, the legitimacy of the electoral state, the efficacy of law-enforcement. In the critical
examination of these varied encounters, the effort has been to ascertain the terms on which these are
staged and how they are made morally, socially and politically legible. Grasping the terms of these
encounters requires them to be read in relation to extra-filmic ideological horizons and circulating
social texts which may be explicitly addressed by the films or which may in turn be implicitly
structuring the films. Moreover, the dissertation approaches the terms of these encounters as not only
specific themes that are addressed directly by the films (such as, for instance, the 'lawless' and
'unraveling' countryside, degenerating provincial educational institutions), but also as implied norms
informing the representation of political subjectivity, the relationship between subjectivity and space
(natural, social, metropolitan, provincial, rural), the mutual relationship between these diverse spaces
(as center and peripheries, or distant elite and on-ground realities), notions of agency and resistance.
Successive chapters demonstrate how these terms as overt themes and implied norms locate this
'provincial' corpus of films within a particular historical horizon which is constituted of three paradigm
shifts within the Indian polity through the 1990s: financial and cultural Liberalization, Mandal or the
democratization of electoral power, and Mandir or the rise of Hindu nationalism.
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Recent critical interventions on post-Liberalization Hindi cinema have emphasized the ways in which it
straddles a dynamic marketplace and dominant political economies. The revisionist and aspirational
city-skylines and 'panoramic interiors' of global family-romances, the new urban delirium of
commodity fetishism, the celebration of a 'westernized' female sexuality and the simultaneous
reconstitution of Hindu patriarchies are seen to reflect multiple industrial, political and cultural shifts.
These include the new revenue streams for the transforming Bombay film industry (video and digital
formats), metropolitan 'multiplexization' of exhibition venues to lessen the reliance on rural audiences,
the positioning of 'Bollywood' by the Indian state as India's international cultural ambassador, the new
political ascendancy of urban middle classes and diasporic communities as well as the emergence of the
Hindu Right (Rajadhyaksha 2004). Recent work has explored how the multiplex came to enable genre-
diversification and the formation of new and critical urban publics (Dwyer 2011). If the cinematic
metropolis elaborates new forms of commodity-driven, cultural, sexual citizenship ushered in by
Liberalization and the rise of Hindu nationalism, this dissertation has contended, that the cinematic
provincial offers a different set of cultural and aesthetic hermeneutics for this ideological configuration.
These hermeneutics derive from circulating social texts and mythologies, such as the mythology of
'Jungle Raj' that emerged from the 1990s in relation to the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The
identification of these states with rampant political corruption, crime and utter lawlessness through
these circulating mythologies demonstrates the efficacy of the provincial as a delimiting horizon for
India's new financial and political modernity. Here, the provincial delineates the absence of the new
principles of Liberalization (stringent law and order, free market, unencumbered middle class with easy
access to public space, education). It also represents the perceived roots of two other phenomena – the
emergence of caste as an axis of electoral contestation (of which figures like Laloo Yadav, Mulayam
Singh and Mayawati are seen as egregious examples), as well as the outburst of the 'fanatic' Hindutva.
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This dissertation notes how as a delineating horizon, the provincial is invested with dual potentialities.
On the one hand its paucities underscore the reality of an incomplete process of national modernization,
so that it is seen as always temporally lagging behind the infrastructural amenities (vigilant law-
enforcement, free market) and unfettered aspirational (consumerist) horizons of the metropolis.
However, this lack is inverted into the presence, even plenitude of other persisting seemingly 'pre-
modern' imaginaries of caste, kinship, eternized marriage etcetera. Of course, this division of modern
social structures of individualism, civil society, nation-state; from so-called pre-modern ones of caste
and kinship is in itself an epistemological production of (colonial) modernity. The provincial not only
demonstrates the persistence of older social structures and forms of subjectivity, it also reveals the
complex ways in which they have been transmuted by, and have in turn, reworked the evolution of
colonial and postcolonial modernity. Nicholas Dirks has shown how caste was abstracted from a web of
social structures and forms of identity by colonial governmental mechanisms like the census and the
principle of separate electorates, and consolidated (losing its fluidity of practice) which in turn
generated newer forms of dominance as well as contestation around electoral representation in a
postcolonial democracy. This 'public' life of caste has gone hand in hand with more private, familial
ritual aspects of caste. While discussions about caste has been placed under erasure in the urban
imaginary, the provincial with its proximity to 'belligerent' caste-identified politics and associations of
caste 'conservatism' in marital and social affairs, becomes the site for the cinematic exploration of the
disavowed dimensions of contemporary Indian modernity.
This dissertation has demonstrated how the cinematic provincial amplifies these dual potentialities of
lack and plenitude within these circulating mythologies about provincial worlds, and thereby offers
other interpretive frames for contemporary Indian modernity. The provincial cop-film such as
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Gangaajal/Holy Water explores the centripetal and centrifugal thrusts animating these mythologies, in
the way it enters the provincial outpost and develops an immersive experience of its regime of terror.
The regime is in turn shown to generate fantasies and actualities of mass-vigilantist 'justice'. Sequences
depicting abusive law-enforcement officials, elected politicians committing murders with impunity,
routine threats to women at public spaces – offer the spectator the subject positions of the meritorious
metropolitan-nationalist citizen, as well as a threatened provincial 'ordinary person' who is undeniably
middle class. These sequences generate a 'temporality of crisis' that demonstrates to the modern
metropolitan-identified citizen-spectator the unsuitability of electoral democracy for 'many parts of
India', and the need for a revitalized and 'protective' law and order apparatus to lay the ground for a
'clean' and safe public space and a flourishing free market. At the same time, the genre is punctuated by
interludes where the temporality of the everyday prevails. Here we witness the more ambivalent
strategies and postures employed by common folks and low-rung state-officials in order to survive
amidst inequalities of power and access. These strategies involve other modes of social relation to
figures of power, the culture of corruption – through gestures of humane identification, sympathy,
placation. The temporalities of the everyday and crisis distend the vision of state-centered power,
governance and development by presenting it through two irreconcilable vantage points. A precarious
reconciliation between these divergent viewpoints is effected by presenting the question of the safety of
the 'ordinary' citizen – who is represented through the figure of the endangered middle class woman in
need of the paternalist arm of the state.
Provincial youth films like Haasil/Seized and Sehar/Dawn amplify other centrifugal thrusts animating
the Indian polity today – most conspicuously the 'politicization' of institutions of higher education, or
the interrogation of their efficacy in the reproduction of caste and class hierarchies in the public realm
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through the question of reservations. In this genre, the provincial university is presented as a space
which appears to at once suffer degeneration owing to the 'invasion' of politically-connected youths,
but is also exposed through a dramatic ethnographic lens to be a segregated space where the divisions
of civil and political society are starkly manifested. While the university offers possibilities of
successful adulthood and upward mobility to upper-caste, middle class students as they prepare to enter
a burgeoning neoliberal economy, others fall by the sidelines owing to their 'lack of merit' or forced to
make their fortunes in other ways. Through the figure of the impoverished political youth who moves
in the increasingly violent and high-stakes world of university politics, the genre illuminates the history
of the postcolonial developmentalist state (including its sites of citizen-production such as the
university) as being inequitable from its foundations with its institutions having been hijacked by the
upper-caste, landed/industrial proprietorial classes. The cultural narrative of 'degeneration' – typically
attributed to the national and regional political scenes emerging after the Congress-era, when
represented and thereby reconceived through the vantage of impoverished youths, illuminates the
belligerent 'caste' politics associated with the northern provincial hinterland as also being
democratizing. Spectatorial identification with the creative and entrepreneurial ventures of political
youths, enables a different recognition of the domains of electoral politics (easily written off in
metropolitan discussions) that even with their inequitable history may hold liberatory possibilities for
historically subordinated subjects.
The new rural film occupies a unique position in this new 'provincial' corpus of films because of the
ways in which it juxtaposes the public worlds of youth culture, politics and industry; as well as the
private worlds of family, marriage and erotics. Moreover, through the new rural woman it articulates
the question of feminine desire and sexuality to considerations of contemporary modernity. Its rural
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setting as well as subjectivities are a far cry from the organic village communities depicted in feudal
family films or the brutal agrarian world of caste exploitation reprised in New Wave cinema, and as
such it complicates previous cinematic explications of how caste hierarchies operate in public and
private domains. Omkara and Ishqiya, both depict electoral cultures where the traditional upper-caste
elite preserves its eminence by co-opting lower caste candidates who in this post-Mandal universe
commandeer enviable voting constituencies. But while alliances may be formed across the caste
hierarchy for votes, political patronage, industrial licenses and 'illicit' dalliances, they are fiercely
resisted in the domain of marriage that is sought to be insulated from the 'democratizing' public world.
Just as the political alliances throw a more ambivalent light upon the narrative of 'democratization', the
new rural woman articulates her sexual subjectivity from within the affective structures of the familial
and the ('eternized') marital. She uses them as complex 'traditional' epistemological inheritances from
which to forge a critical, modern subjectivity. The genre thus captures other centrifugal impetuses
structuring non-metropolitan modernities, revealing their constitutive, ethical and epistemological
plurality as well as their creative dimensions.
Larger Implications of the Cinematic Provincial
The provincial corpus examined in this dissertation offers a distinct cinematic archive of contemporary
Indian modernity. In a larger industrial and cultural context where the dominant film genres offer a
thoroughly metropolitan (consumerist and technological) imagination of modernity, and conceive of the
metropolis as a space where the fetters of class and gender have been transcended, the cinematic
provincial becomes the space that foregrounds the salience of fundamental gulfs within the modern
Indian polity. The dominant genres which constitute the emergence of 'New Bollywood' have
announced a clean break from the social and political concerns of older film narratives, which had
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catered to a more broad socio-economic spectrum as its audience (than the one served by the multiplex)
by addressing social realities such as inequality, the inefficacy of the developmental state in redressing
the same. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the poor migrant in the metropolis – who grew up to be the
Angry Young Man, foregrounded issues of economic divides as well as state apathy even as he offered
a melodramatic resolution to them. The New Wave rural film evaluated the developmental state's
failure in fulfilling its promise of social redistribution in a realist idiom, and from the perspective of the
landless agricultural laborer. The commercial genres that emerged with economic Liberalization of the
economy and the industry, highlighted the irrelevance of such 'feudal' concerns, the failures and
irrelevance of the developmental state (given the horizons of aspiration freed by the liberalized state),
as well as the projection of the patriarchal family as a limiting horizon for individual self-realization
(through love or consumerism).
The contemporary provincial corpus follows from the genre diversification that occurred by the late
1990s, enabled by the multiplex as well as the corporatization of the Bombay film industry. It
constitutes a cinematic return to the rural as well as a complex emergence of provincial spaces with a
difference. Frequently, the films of this corpus foreground their critical departures from not just the
metropolitan genres, but also the prior figurations and generic formats for the rural. As this corpus
elaborates the mythologies about the dystopic hinterland into visual narratives of lawlessness, terror
and correction, the cinematic provincial is no longer merely a delineative horizon to the contemporary
neoliberal modern, but rather the familiar interior of the nation and the postcolonial modern, as it is and
has been lived. The temporality of the everyday that operates differently across the provincial genres,
explores the ways in which people negotiate the inequitable structures of caste, class and gender in the
practices of daily life. In the provincial cop film, this temporality is used to render everyday life in
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small-town Bihar overrun by the 'Jungle Raj' brought in the wake of the new political leaderships that
emerged in the northern Hindi-belt since the late 1980s. This mode of representing the 'realities' of
Bihar, even with its ambivalences, disaggregates the terrain of increasingly contentious electoral
politics from the older history of the passive revolution and the contentious agrarian predating
contemporary. Instead, these longer historical horizons appear, either as aural elements haunting the
frames (for instance, as a farmer's folk song intended to establish location), or are thematized through a
narrative about 'atrocity' and redress (of which the urban middle class is the ethical addressee). These
are the more alternately reactionary and/or 'progressive' modes of representation and interpretation to
emerge from the ideological conjuncture of Liberalization, Mandal and Mandir, which consolidate the
urban middle class as ethical and hermeneutical subjects by effacing or disaggregating the
contemporary provincial from broader histories of the postcolonial Indian developmental project and
the passive revolution.
The provincial youth film sets the temporality of the everyday amidst various institutional spaces of the
provincial city (classrooms, universities, development administrations, railways, real estate) to
explicitly set its narrative about disaffected youth and agency against this long and contentious
historical backdrop. Impoverished and marginalized youths are shown to occupy these spaces with the
knowledge of how these very postcolonial institutions that were meant to initiate processes of social
redistribution and transformation, have reproduced inequities of caste, class and gender. Daily
encounters between youths show how these structures work through the accessing and evaluation of
formal education, inner and outer perceptions of success and adulthood, and also how they play into the
domain of the emotional and the erotic in heterosocial as well as homosocial settings of youth cultures.
In these sequences can be found a contemporary cinematic archive that reflects upon the inheritances of
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India's post-Independence 'passive revolution' where the country's metropolitan-based nationalist elite
with its secular and liberal ideals had to rely on the traditional provincial (upper caste and propertied)
elites to gain the support of the rural masses. This reliance severely curtailed the execution of the
developmental state's top-down vision of technocratic national transformation, and entrenched crony-
capitalism. These film sequences mobilize the passive revolution as experienced by those outside of
both, the metropolitan world of the secular-modern as well as the upper social echelons of provincial
and rural society who monopolized the developmental state's gravy trains (including positions in
legislatures, bureaucracies, higher education, industry). If Jungle Raj as a political mythology
emanating from the metropolitan mediasphere counterposes the acrimonious political landscape
symbolized by Mandal against the 'progressive' impetuses of Liberalization and the 'unifying' currents
of Mandir, the provincial youth film as well as the new rural film wedge this landscape against the
longer historical backdrop of the retrenchment of caste and class hierarchies in postcolonial India,
through its developmental institutions. Reframed in this way by the cinematic ethnography of the
everyday offered by these genres, the 'dystopic' sphere of electoral politics reveals its capacity to
potentially remedy historical inequities.
Through this visual and dramatic ethnography of everyday encounters – of conflict, camaraderie,
attraction and alliances between various characters, the films explore provincial modernities not merely
as formations of paucity and deprivations, but also of complex creativity. This creative dimension
includes the distinctive horizons of desire, selfhood, power, visions of violent reform that are
articulated within the everyday experience of marginalization and reactionary belligerence at the loss of
historical privilege. Moreover, these cinematic articulations of the creative within the mundane – in the
shape of cultures of homosociality, competitive masculinity, desire, misogyny and violence, are
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presented as familiar to the viewer. Chapters on these genres discuss how viewer-responses to these
films on the increasing numbers of blogs reflect the ways in which viewers are interpellated by them as
knowledgeable denizens of these worlds and modes of social being that continue to persist alongside
and outside the secular-modern categories of selfhood and modes of relationality. These films
complicate Madhava Prasad's argument that cinema is always implicated in the question of the
production of citizen-subjects attuned to the needs of capitalism. On the one hand they serve a
diversified neoliberal marketplace as distinctive cinematic narratives, where the provincial emerges as a
novel cinematic setting and subject to relieve spectatorial jadedness with the metropolis. They also
engage the new 'centripetal' imaginations of statehood and governance that are corollaries of
neoliberalism – cop-films elaborate these mythologies of lawlessness and fantasies of 'correction'.
However, the other genres engage the 'dystopic transformations' that these imaginations of a renewed
state seek to neutralize. They posit new provincial subjectivities who simultaneously inhabit structures
of caste, gender, familial, marital and religious practices identified as 'pre-modern' as well as modern
notions of individualism, desire, consumption-based citizenship, secularism and civic practice. In doing
so, the cinematic provincial depicts these complex and constitutive dimensions of Indian modernity.
And yet, since this reappearance of the provincial and the rural occurs within the logic of a neoliberal
cultural marketplace and ideological horizon, the dissertation seeks to preserve a critical ambivalence
toward the generic formats that enable this reappearance. The enabling as well as disabling dimensions
of these new visual-narrative forms are explored in each of the chapters against prior iterations of the
metropolis, the rural, rural femininity, metropolitan masculinity as well as those of universities, law-
enforcement and formal electoral politics.
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One of the primary ways in which this provincial corpus interpellates the viewer is through its
distinctive representations of spatialized practices of gender. In the high-intensity drama of the
provincial cop film, verbal and sexual harassment of women at the town's public spaces by politically-
connected youths mobilizes the townsfolk and local police (as well as audiences) to engage in forms of
vigilantism to 'cleanse' and reclaim space. In Gangaajal, Superintendent of Police Amit Kumar
encourages the mother of a sexual-harassment survivor to arrange the latter's wedding to a 'good match'
as he promises full police-security – thereby seeking to restore a bourgeois marriage. When the event is
violently interrupted by the young woman's assaulter, the townsfolk gather into a mob and seek to blind
the perpetrators. The viewer is brought to relate to the townsfolk as an 'ordinary' person whose safety,
dignity, family and property are besieged by a criminal-political class. Given the depredations of the
political class, the paternalistic arm of law-enforcement is presented as the desired alternative to the
mass-vigilantism of a disaffected public. While the viewer is positioned in the genre as a member of
civil society, sympathetic to the plight of the residents of the small-town, he (this is an implied male-
identified consciousness) is positioned very differently in the provincial youth film and the new rural
film in relation to the divides between civil and political societies. The romance plot of the provincial
youth film aligns the viewer sympathetically with upper-caste/middle class characters. At the same
time, the exploration of other aspects of university-campus life, especially the more 'utilitarian'
concerns of impoverished students – about passing exams, breaking into formal politics; their exclusion
from the elite quarters of literature classes, Shakespearean theater or computer-science education,
engage the viewer as a familiar denizen of social worlds that are outside of, and contiguous to those of
the bourgeois family and civil society. These everyday spaces are structured as much by resilient
creativities as they are by paucities and structures of dominance. If upper-caste male students insist on
Brahmanical practices at the communal canteen or during student elections, another student leader
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'raises the banner of the backwards' and seeks to mobilize students of lower castes as a distinct political
bloc. Alongside these contestations, flourish male camaraderie, homosocial cultures of leisure,
recreation, intimate discussions about male inadequacy. These sequences are underscored across
reception venues (reviews, blogs, YouTube repostings) by viewers as the most enjoyable aspects of the
films – where they 'recognize' these fraught aspects of spaces, institutions and social life at large, as in
fact, familiar.
Though the recognition enabled by the provincial youth film pushes against the 'degenerating'
hypothesis about provincial universities, as well as against the whitewashing of the landscape of
education in metropolitan narratives, this is achieved primarily through a focus on provincial, youth
caste-masculinities. While the erotic features prominently in these narratives, women are shown to
occupy the 'private' world of the familial and the marital. When positioned in institutional spaces such
as the university, they are at a remove from student disaffection and politics. As upper-caste and middle
class women, they are shown to have no stake in these enterprises. Just as the mythology and cinematic
narratives of Jungle Raj portray the criminal-political agencies as hyper-masculine, and endangering
women, by a similarly gendered logic, the provincial youth film privileges masculinities (elite and non-
elite) as its specific mode for re-presenting the provincial and through it, many elided aspects of
contemporary modernity. The new rural film juxtaposes the public world with its fraught interactions
between civil and political societies, together with the private world of the familial, marital and the
erotic, but here it privileges the latter. Through the rural woman protagonist, it reveals the
epistemological and ethical heterogeneity that structures the lived experience of women within the
spaces of the marital or familial home. In the new rural film, women simultaneously and difficultly
negotiate notions of equality, free love, companionate marriage as well as caste-derived notions of
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familial honor, devotion to parents and 'eternized' (Hindu, upper-caste) marriage (which while being
categorized as 'tradition', emerged precisely in relation to colonial modernity and are in that sense
modern). The familiar address of these sequences calls upon the viewer to relate as one who resides
knowingly within a complex modernity.
In calling upon the spectator in this way, these sequences both engage and hold at abeyance Prasad's
claim that cinema is implicated in the production of subjects compatible with capitalism. These films
with their distinctive treatment of the provincial and the rural emerge from within the demands of a
diversified post-Liberalization filmscape and seek to capitalize on their own novelty. And yet this logic
of the marketplace also propels new cinematic treatments of questions of history, space, subjectivity,
which emerge from and in turn address the historical conjuncture of economic Liberalization,
Mandalization and Mandir. For this dissertation, this corpus of films enable a critical methodology of
reading cinema that, it suggests, might be applied to a range of cinematic genres – as the first chapter
attempts to do with the metropolitan cop-film where certain notions of citizenship, national history and
agency are normalized. Here the protagonist cop is also revealed as a caste-subject with a specific
historical lineage of privilege that bears upon his everyday spatial, social and hermeneutical practices.
And yet, as the chapters demonstrate, these new iterations of the rural and provincial also mean
erasures of other kinds of cinematic presence that the rural for instance, has had in post-Independence
Indian cinema. The new rural film turns away from the lower caste, landless protagonist and a
primarily agrarian rural. In doing so it both creates marketable 'novelty' but also reprises neoliberal
erasures of structural issues relating to the distribution and ownership of capital, and their relation to
structures of caste and gender. In this sense, a continued engagement of Prasad's argument remains
vital.
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The Afterlives of the Provincial
The trend of 'provincializing Bollywood' (to use Akshaya Kumar's phrase) has only strengthened
following the time period this dissertation spans. In these varied and voluminous afterlives of the
cinematic provincial, we see a diversity and intermixture of aesthetics ranging from high political
drama to more textured narratives of realism. Equally visible is the consolidation of particular themes.
Abhinav Kashyap's Dabangg/Audacious (2010) and Dabangg II/Audacious II (2012) show the
movement of the provincial cop-film away from its earlier dramatic realism bolstered by a brave but
non-heroic protagonist (and outsider to the small-town) to the overtly star-driven action genre that
deliberately eschews realism in its depiction of theatrical criminality and stylized action. Rakht
Charitra/Bloodthirst I & II (2010) as well as Gangs of Wasseypur I & II (2012) are multi-part sagas
that demonstrate similar mutations of the provincial youth film toward the idiom of dramatic action
(with excessive and graphic violence). Both the provincial cop-film and the provincial youth film have
come to be motivated by a familial revenge plot – the figure of the distant metropolitan subject
traveling to and encountering a dystopic provincial world is jettisoned in favor of narratives about
youths embedded in this world. The performative style and the nature of the action in these new
mutations of the genres, show a reveling cinephilia as they embrace the heightened cinematic styles of
Bollywood as well as those of international postmodern cinema (Tarantino is a conspicuous influence
here). Dabangg 'retro-visits' the masculinist Hindi action-dramas of the 1970s by pitting larger-than-life
good and bad guys within a small-town universe, the performative style of which allows for the
incorporation of star-texts – most visibly that of Salman Khan who plays the protagonist cop Chulbul
Pandey. Dabangg paved the way for Singham/Lion, another similar 'retro' provincial cop franchise. In
the latter, Ajay Devgan (the lead of Gangaajal) returns but as an action-hero and enforces the law as its
individual and vigilantist arm. Dramatized in the idiom of an action-drama, the films emphasize the
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spectacular agency of the hero in the climactic sequences. In doing so, they also signify a turn away
from the provincial cop film's prior civic address and use of a social realism to table questions of
political agency, and flirting with possibilities of mass political action. In Dabangg and Singham, the
small-town's public appears as a peripheral community presence surrounding the central couple in
romantic sequences or the hero's action-sequences and is no longer itself a crucial if volatile political
agent.
Gangs of Wasseypur [henceforth GoW] offers a more embedded narration of a historical saga of two
powerful and warring families set in small-town Wasseypur in the industrial district of Dhanbad
(located today in the state of Jharkhand) – in the mineral-rich hinterland of central India. Through this
dynastic battle, the film tells a provincial story about the violent crony capitalism of post-Independence
India. The film plumbs this history in a stylized idiom of hyper-realism, kitschy-folksy musical scores
as well as performative styles. It references the popular Angry Young Man films of the 1970s as well as
Tarantino-style action. The film's canny negotiation of international popular and documentary film
languages (in its use of SteadiCam) made it successful with international film-literate multiplex
audiences and critical blogosphere, as well as the circuits of international film festivals.
177
Both the new
provincial cop film as well as youth films continue with the exploration of India's postcolonial
modernity and its developmental state as fundamentally inequitable, where caste, class and gender
hierarchies have been violently buttressed by power, but which have also always been contested in
mundane as well as spectacular ways. GoW also recovers a 'provincial' Islamicate imaginary of Hindi
cinema which had disappeared since the late 1960s. Tigmanshu Dhulia's Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster/The
Master, the Wife & the Gangster (2011) remade Guru Dutt's Sahib, Biwi, Ghulam/The Master, the Wife
177 See Chute, David. “Indian Film Festival Opens With Pop Mob Drama 'Gangs of Wasseypur'”. Indiewire.com.
Available at: http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/with-the-eggs-on-top-11th-indian-film-festival-
opens-with-anurag-kashyaps-pop-feast-of-a-mob-drama-gangs-of-wasseypur.
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& the Slave (1962) and set its story about the degenerating Rajput political dynasty of Debgadh (an
erstwhile princely state in Uttar Pradesh) that attempt to carry their historical influence into the age of
electoral politics.
While these genres explore and revel in the depiction of masculine homosociality, they also develop
noticeably complex portrayals of rural and provincial women. The assertive sexuality of these
characters is a pronounced trope of the emergent genres of the provincial corpus through which it
continues to push against older and iconic depictions of rural women in Indian cinema as chaste and
passive sexual subjects. In Tigmanshu Dhulia's Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster/The Master, the Wife & the
Gangster (2011) as well as its sequel Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns/The Master, the Wife & the
Gangster Returns (2013) Madhavi Devi, the beautiful queen to a nominal king, dissents against being
abandoned by him, his romantic affairs with courtesans, she herself finds sexual fulfillment in affairs
and at the conclusion he gets his comeuppance as she assumes control over Debgadh's affairs. With
their irreverence these films debunk the mythical construction of pre-colonial Hindu kingdoms as the
age of honor, bravery and cultural purity. There is also an emergent body of romances that depict a
thoroughly contemporaneous provincial urban world. The young leads of Habib Faisal's romantic
drama Ishaqzaade/Born to Hate...Destined to Love (2012) set in Almore, openly defy their politically-
influential families (Chauhans and Qureishis) with their relationship. Relentlessly hounded by their
families, but unwilling to succumb to pressure, the lovers shoot each other in a poignant yet perverse
assertion of their love. Other romances like Tanu Weds Manu (2011) set in Kanpur and Shudh Desi
Romance/A Random Desi Romance (2013) set in Jaipur, show youths to struggle more with their own
predilections, fear of the idea of marriage rather than overbearing patriarchal figures. They are shown
to have transcended notions of honor or chastity. In this second set, the realm of formal/electoral
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politics is either entirely absent or a mere backdrop, and families are largely accommodating. Unlike
the older cinematic iterations of provincial small towns, in these films, the metropolis does not figure as
the ultimate horizon for the fulfillment of aspirational or existentialist longing and desire.
178
Crucially,
this second set of films militates against Jungle Raj as an interpretive frame for the provincial urban,
and offer a different exploration of the everyday from the perspective of middle class, caste-ambiguous
(or caste-transcendent) youths.
A different return to the contemporary rural is charted by two recent films by Shyam Benegal: Welcome
to Sajjanpur (2008) set in a village in northern India, and Well Done Abba/Well Done Dad (2010) set
primarily in a village near Hyderabad. In Sajjanpur, we see a range of social and political battles
through the encounters of an unemployed undergraduate student as he writes letters on behalf of the
largely illiterate residents of his village. In the broad social landscape opened up in the film, political
confrontations and transformations in grassroot rural politics, and education are juxtaposed with gender
conflicts experienced by a range of characters. In Well Done, an elderly driver working in Mumbai is
forced to return to his village to solve his family's financial troubles and the village's drought. Through
the film we see him and his daughter negotiate development administrations, politicians, the media as
they launch a political protest, and finally the judiciary in their crusade to get wells constructed in the
village. This journey is juxtaposed with the daughter's battle with her father for individual liberties.
While both films function largely as political satires of the gargantuan developmental state and law
institutions, they also emphasize the resilience, pliability and adaptability of their underprivileged but
increasingly aware rural subjects. In doing so, these two films displace the developmental hero that
featured centrally in Benegal's work in the parallel cinema of the 1970s. A more dystopic representation
178 This can be contrasted with the evocation of the small town as a space of claustrophobia and anonymity, which
generates longing and aspiration for the wealth, fame and consumerist paradise offered by the metropolis in films
like Shaad Ali's Bunty aur Babli/Bunty and Babli (2005).
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of the predicament of rural agricultural economies and peasant indebtedness can be found in Anusha
Rizvi's Peepli Live/Live from Peepli (2010), an absurdist dark comedy about a farmer (Natha) who
weighed down by mounting debts, is advised to commit suicide so that his family can collect relief
money. While politicians, local and national media seek to monetize the Natha's impending suicide,
Natha escapes and another burnt body recovered by the police. The government denies the family
financial aid since the death was accidental and not a suicide. In the last scene we see a dusty,
disoriented and migrant Natha at a large construction site at the outskirts of a metropolis. The later
Benegal films as well as Peepli Live represent two ways in which structural critiques of the post-
Liberalization India appear on the screen – while one foregrounds a resilient adaptability of rural folks
in demanding their dues from the developmental state; the other emphasizes the alienation of the same
from elected representatives, development administrations as well as the metropolitan mediatized
publicsphere.
These different afterlives of the cinematic provincial that emerged in the late 1990s, illustrate the varied
cinematic languages through which non-metropolitan spaces and worlds continue to be posited on the
contemporary Indian filmscape. These different generic treatments seek to speak truth to the narratives
of a progressing nation – revealing the violent and masculinist crony capitalism and class oppression
that was often at the core of the postcolonial developmental enterprise. GoW along with films by
Dhulia with their concern with violence, corruption and crime can be seen as another distension of the
Jungle Raj films. The provincial cop films made in the 2000s and discussed in this dissertation,
dramatized everyday life in small towns under the sway of Jungle Raj – in order to amplify the
ambivalences inherent in new ideologies of governance, citizenship, elite distrust of legislative politics
from which this mythology had emerged in the first place. As chapter Two has shown, these
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ambivalences were triggered by encounters between figures of state (politicians, policemen) and the
provincial civic body were central. The metropolitan cop's worldview and responses during these
encounters (as well as those of metropolitan media, human rights tribunals) effected the tension
between metropolitan, national and international norms of law and justice on the one hand, and the
'ground realities' of the small-town, on the other. The appeal to change that was frequently made at the
conclusion of the films also framed the drama within a Lukacsian social realism that was invested in
effecting social transformation (quite like the New Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s).
179
In the more
recent provincial cop and youth films, the metropolitan protagonist and the framework of normative
modernity that he represents drop out of view; as does the contentious civic theater where these
encounters had occurred. Similarly, Chapter 3 had drawn attention to a significant mutation in the
provincial youth films from political youths being presented without individual familial histories in
Haasil and Sehar, to a story about the desired assuaging of aristocratic intergenerational caste-based
trauma in Gulaal. This move is further consolidated in GoW, where the provincial everyday is explored
through a cross-generational dynastic saga about ambition, violence, loss, simmering rage and revenge.
Here, the provincial acquires a different kind of plenitude where the everyday is also imbued with
irreverent humor, old wives tales, poetry, song and generational cinephilia. This 'world-ing' of
Wasseypur grants it a cinematic and social density enabling it to be read on its own historical, cultural
and social terms rather than merely through the lenses of paucity or corruption.
180
179 See Bhaskar, Ira. 'The Indian New Wave.' Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas. (eds) K. Moti Gokulsing,
Wimal Dissanayake. Oxon: Routledge. 2013.
180 Suvadip Sinha describes the film's combination of excess and realism as a 'territorial realism' that demands that
the provincial be recognized as a cinematic space that is distinct from the rural as well as the metropolis. See
Sinha's 'Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary Bollywood cinema.' Studies in South Asian
Film and Media. V olume 5 Issue 2. pp. 701-15.
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As yet another distension of Jungle Raj, Dabangg charts a self-conscious re-turn to an older idiom of
dramatic action films of the 1980s where the good hero (morally nominated by his community)
confronts the evil villain. Crucially, here the provincial cop is not an 'ordinary' middle class man, rather,
he is recast as a charming, rakish, corrupt and muscular figure, who breaks effete institutional rules to
uphold 'the spirit of the law'. While this returns to the trope of 'necessary' circumventions of law in the
Jungle Raj films, here the cop is a son of the soil, native to Lalgunj (the setting here is deliberately non-
realistic) and he confronts the local goon on behalf of the ordinary people. The fight sequence allows
the visual economy of the film to fetishize the hyper-masculine body of the hero and the villains. The
film and its successors mark a departure from the prior iteration of the genre which dramatized the
'predicament' of ordinary provincial people in a strictly realist-dramatic mode where there was no
superhuman cop to save the day and the civic public had to confront its limited options for exerting
political agency. Dabangg signals the recuperation of the provincial of Jungle Raj into a more stylized
idiom where the restoration of order and justice can be transacted once again through a violent and
emotive excess.
181
The contemporary provincial romance takes the cinematic provincial into a more progressive direction.
If the mythology of Jungle Raj ultimately hinged on the perceived threat posed by criminal-politicians
to the safety of women, the provincial romance recasts the socio-political terrain of the provincial city
181 GoW had generated a marked interest on the question of how the film related to the actual history and present day
life in Wasseypur. The following news-articles testify to this: Iqbal, Javed. 'The Unreality of Wasseypur.'
Kafila.org. September 17, 2012. Available at: http://kafila.org/2012/09/17/the-unreality-of-wasseypur-javed-
iqbal/; Iqbal, Javed. 'The Real Gangs of Wasseypur.' India Today. August 24, 2012. Available at:
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/gangs-of-wasseypur-anurag-kashyap-brutal-mafia-vengeful-
families/1/214585.html; IANS. 'Real life Wasseypur fumes over reel portrayal.' The Hindu. July 4, 2012.
Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/features/cinema/real-life-wasseypur-fumes-over-reel-
portrayal/article3602546.ece; Murty, Vijay B. 'Real gangs of Wasseypur brace themselves for fresh war.' The
Hindustan Times. June 21, 2012. Available at: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/real-gangs-of-
wasseypur-brace-themselves-for-fresh-war/article1-876781.aspx. Suvadip Sinha rightly notes that while GoW had
provoked 'an anthropological scramble' for the realities of Wasseypur, this had not been the case with Dabangg's
Lalgunj (Sinha 2013).
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through the portrayal of provincial young women as self-reflexive and assertive subjects. While in
Ishaqzaade the realms of formal politics, gender politics and erotics are juxtaposed when the
protagonists belonging to political rivals fall in love, the other romances demonstrate a conspicuous
lack of concern with the contentious terrains of electoral politics and caste. The plots of the latter are
built around finding resolution to the youths' own generational fears about the institution of marriage,
and reckoning with their own capacity or incapacity to love another in an enduring way. Concentrating
increasingly on the lives of provincial middle class youths, the films refuse to characterize the
provincial with its proverbial 'traditionalism'. The young women-protagonists manage to carve out
economic independence and sexual freedom, and agree to marriage only on their own terms. The
genre's mode of framing gender conflict and politics within a broadly same class, caste and cultural
milieu naturalizes its disengagement with a contentious socio-political landscape where upper-caste
gendered violence against lower caste especially dalit women remains alarmingly high, where
legislatures, institutions of higher education and public employment remain arenas of contestation.
The 'new' recognition of the provincial as modern on the axis of heterosexual and especially female
erotics and sexuality occurs in these genres through an evacuation of a larger socio-political landscape.
The job of foregrounding of structural disparities created by the developmental state and aggravated by
a neoliberal one, for those outside of its grids of consumer-citizenship and heightened urbanization
falls, within this filmic landscape, to the mock-documentary style of Peepli Live (employing a mix of
actors and non-actors) and the social realism of Well Done Abba. They recenter aggravating agrarian
issues, the egregious inefficiency of development administrations, the rapid conversion of farmlands
into urban residential and industrial zones. It is in the wake of these crises that vulnerable populations
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are forced to rely on and negotiate with elected representatives, metropolitan civil society and media.
182
While Peepli Live emphasizes the recalcitrance of a decimated agrarian world, Benegal's films depict
its necessary adaptability for survival.
In the diversified exhibition structure of the multiplex and the new viewing publics it has facilitated,
these varied and dynamic generic films signify the new ways in which the Hindi 'hinterland', its
histories, idioms, cultures are being mined artistically and commercially. While the national had always
been conceived in Indian cinema as constituted of urban and rural spaces, their discreteness was
imagined in ways (modernity/tradition, technological/agrarian, state/community) that also sutured them
together harmoniously into the national. As this dissertation has demonstrated, the provincial genres
have effected a vital and critical splintering of the cinematic conception of the national, and challenged
the preponderance of the metropolis over the cinematic and spatial imagination of the modern. This
splintering, as the dissertation has argued, derived from the ideological conjuncture of Mandal, Mandir
and Liberalization. The emergent provincial genres used different ethnographic, realist, dramatic modes
to depict spatial, institutional and social practices that express subjectivities that have been formed by
the inequitable trajectories of postcolonial development planning, passive revolution of Indian society
and the successive waves of democratization. In rendering these visually, the films pulled on to the
screen histories that are sought to be effaced or neutralized by the expanding grids of national
sovereignty, marketization and consumer-citizenship. In doing so, they also politicized the relationship
between subjectivity and space that had been naturalized by national dramas set in the metropolis –
such as Sarfarosh. As the myriad afterlives of the cinematic provincial continue to unfold, the question
of space and subjectivity remains crucial, particularly in the light of the restoration of the 'national
182 Meheli Sen has described this as a provincial India 'captured in a liminal zone between globalized consumption
and unrequited desire, between nation narrative of development and its ubiquitous limits' (quoted in Sinha 2013).
Paul 291
consensus' in the most recent general elections in India around the leader of the Hindu nationalist
political party that had headed the Mandir campaign. This figure and party have re-branded themselves
with the promise to deliver India as the belligerent super-power it deserves to be, vowing to uproot all
impediments. Concomitantly, a distinct rightward shift has been noted in dalit politics (especially by
the dalit middle class) in the hinterland, which after a critical disaffiliation from the predominantly
upper-caste national parties, is now being recuperated into the Hindu fold and mobilized against
Muslims.
183
Elsewhere, the deracination of indigenous communities in central India is being sped up as
forestlands are opened up to corporate mining, hydro-electric dams.
184
Given these continued tectonic
shifts within the Indian polity, how the countrysides will signify, and the terms of their unraveling and
reconstruction, will illustrate the nature of Hindi cinema's imbrication in the question of producing
citizen-subjects. This will also determine the degree to which these subjects may align with the material
and ideological grids enabling an intensified national 'structural adjustment' to global capitalism. And
yet, as this dissertation has explored, while the rural and the provincial become heightened sites of
'transformation' as well as contestation, they may yet generate critical dissonances and ambivalences
about about the very cultural apparatuses or 'mythologies' through which they acquire visibility and
narrative force.
183 Gudavarthy, Ajay. “A rightward shift in Dalit politics”. The Hindu. September 13, 2014. Available at:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-a-rightward-shift-in-dalit-politics/article6405607.ece.
184 Chauhan, Chetan. “Prakash Javadekar clears 240 projects in 3 months”. The Hindustan Times. September 11,
2014. Available at: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/on-fast-track-environment-minister-prakash-
javadekar-clears-240-projects-in-3-months/article1-1262676.aspx.
Paul 292
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Paul 294
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Paul 295
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Paul 296
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This dissertation examines the reappearance of provincial and rural spaces within post-Liberalization Indian cinema across a range of 'hatke' (or 'off-center') film genres, namely, the national cop film, the provincial cop film, the provincial youth film, and the new rural film. It argues that this 'provincial corpus' complicates political mythologies about governance, electoral democracy and political agency that emerge in India through the 1990s at the historical conjuncture of financial Liberalization, Mandal (or the democratization of caste) and Mandir (the rise of Hindu nationalism). This engagement is evident in the ways in which different subjects are shown to relate to institutional, civic and geographical spaces of the provincial small-town and the rural countryside. Successive chapters explore the particular ways in which these encounters bring into view the disavowed historical evolutions of structures of caste, gender, political power and crony capitalism within the edifices of the developmental state, statist capitalism and electoral democracy. In doing so, it is argued, this corpus pluralizes the conception of the postcolonial modern. The dissertation assesses the critical effectivity of these cinematic interventions along twin axes of—previous iterations of the 'countryside' in commercial, New Wave and transnational rural films
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Paul, Arunima
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Unraveling countrysides: provincial modernities in contemporary popular Indian cinema
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11/20/2016
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developmental state
gender
'hatke' cinema
Indian cinema
national cop film
new rural film
provincial cop film
provincial modernities
provincial youth films