Ideology of the Hindi Film - 1

1. Introduction: The Ideology of Formal Subsumption

[A] certain kind of cinema exists only
because a certain kind of state exists.
-Saeed Mirza

The Specificity of Indian Cinema

Until recently film theory functioned with the presupposition that there was some profound, ineluctable kinship between cinema and modern Euro-American culture. It had seemed to investigators of the cinematic institution that film technology had been invented to meet an already existing cultural need, that its advent in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century was, so to speak, no accident. The 'emblematic quality of cinema' was attested to by a series of such 'no-accident' propositions as Judith Mayne 0993: 22) has described them. These situated cinema in a cultural context already inclined towards realist representation, in an era that saw the expansion of consumption supported by modern advertising. This was also the time of emergence of psychoanalysis, which would later provide the tools for analysing the cinematic institution but which in its turn, would appear to have been the manifestation of a historical necessity (Mayne 22).

Classical Hollywood cinema seemed to exemplify this intimate cultural kinship. Accordingly, film theory occupied itself with the Hollywood film text, considering either particular films or an abstract, general form that stood in for all possible texts in the dominant mode.

It is true that some of the lasting achievements of film theory were made possible by this set of assumptions. But students of mainstream Indian cinema confront here a pre-emptive force that defines it in advance as a not-yet-cinema, a bastard institution in which the mere ghost of a technology is employed for purposes inimical to its historic essence.

This hegemonic alliance between advanced capitalism and the cinematic institution was approached by western film theory as a challenge to its efforts at building an alternative cinema committed to progressive social goals. The goal of the theoretical project was to disengage the spectator from his/her habitual, pre-designated location in the dominant cinematic apparatus through a process of critical unravelling of the apparatus, and thereby to produce a politically conscious audience for another cinema. For Indian film studies, the implications of the assumption underlying this have a special significance: if the technology of cinema could be disengaged from the naturalized hegemonic formation within which it served the dominant advanced capitalist ideology, by the same token it could be regarded as in itself empty of any cultural content and capable of entering into other combinations in which its potential could be realized in a completely different form.

Film technology, developed in the capitalist centre, arrived in India during colonial rule and captivated audiences here as it had done elsewhere. It was as part of a movement to promote indigenous enterprise that the idea of an 'Indian cinema' was conceived. If Phalke is considered the pioneer of Indian cinema, it is not only because he made the 'first' Indian film, but because he conceived of film-making as a nationalist, specifically 'swadeshi' enterprise, and produced Indian images to occupy the screens (Rajadhyaksha, JAI 1987: 47-8). Film technology thus did not arrive in a vacuum. There was a cultural, political, social field from within which some people, encountering a new technology of representation, devised ways of putting it to uses that accorded with the field. The technology did not bring with it, readymade, a set of cultural possibilities which would be automatically realized through the mere act of employing it. At the same time, the technology is not neutral, simply sliding into the role assigned to it by the cultural-political field it enters. It has its own unsettling, re-organizing effects on the field.

These effects could be of two kinds: (1) effects specific to the technology, deriving from the unprecedentedness of the naturalistic reproduction of the world, the use of a camera to capture reality in movement and replay it at a different site, etc., and (2) effects that can be traced to the western provenance of the technology, where the 'emblematic' features acquire prominence and in keeping with the logic of technical transfers in a colonial or postcolonial situation, assert themselves as the goal of film practice. One could define these as effects deriving, respectively, from film technology on the one hand and from the (western) cinematic apparatus on the other.

To separate the technology in this fashion from the apparatus which it seemed to inhabit so naturally, is to reopen the old question about the neutrality of technology. Today, few people would contest the proposition that technology is never neutral. Nevertheless, when we are talking about transfers of technology across cultures, we have to face the possibility that the established structures of the host culture will determine the way in which it functions there. Thus it has been shown by Rajadhyaksha (Framework 1987: 20-67) that still photography, when first introduced into Indian representational practices, did not automatically enforce a realist imperative on these practices. Instead, photographic reproductions were submitted to already existing principles and protocols and subsumed into an art practice governed by non-realist representational aims. t Film technology, similarly, enters into a combination of elements within which its reality-effects are employed in ways that conflict with established perceptions of its historic essence. It is equally clear that the introduction of this new element into the Indian context has far reaching transformative effects. The (western) cinematic apparatus, on the other hand, is a globally effective ideological apparatus which presents a particular combination of elements (where the realism cinema connection is asserted strongly) as the only realization of the specific genius of cinema. This apparatus also has its determining effects on film-making in a (post)colonial context, serving as a model for a modern aesthetic that every modern nation must aspire to (re)produce, according to the developmentalist logic that governs the rise and co-existence of nation-states.

Indian cinema has evolved under such atypical conditions. As a national cinema ^[2] it is unlike those of the European countries which are (or were) sustained by state support, as part of an attempt to retain a sphere of national activity within a field dominated by Hollywood. When an effort to produce a cinema that would similarly represent the nation was launched in India, the adversary was not Hollywood but the indigenous popular cinema produced in Bombay and Madras. A vast cultural gap and government restrictions prevented Hollywood from expanding very far beyond a small urban elite market. ^[3] On the other hand, in post-independence India, the policy of independent growth adopted by the state also played a role in creating the conditions for the expansion and consolidation of a national audience, which was, in most parts of the country, either solely captive to the Bombay industry or divided in its loyalties between a regional product, and the Bombay or Hollywood films. ^[4]

The cinemas of India, in spite of significant differences,^[5] share a common ground, a set of aesthetic concerns, certain dominant tendencies, which show that far from simply remaining in a prolonged state of not-yet-ness, Indian cinema had evolved a particular, distinct combination of elements, putting the technology to a use that, whether consistent with the camera's ontology or not, was consistent enough over time to suggest ideological effectivity.

Even as we recognize the mainstream western cinematic institution as the manifestation of a particular, combination of technological, economic, political, cultural and historical elements, and thereby open up a space for the investigation of other such combinations specific to other social formations, it is necessary to acknowledge the dialectical negation of this thesis which consists in recognizing that this particular combination is, indeed, the dominant one among all possible combinations, and that it is precisely this that accounts for the primacy it has been accorded in film theory. This dominance is evident not only in the global circulation of Hollywood cinema, but also in the way that realist cinema has proved to be indispensable, in the Indian case at any rate, as the site that enables discourse about Indian cinema, providing the tools for critical intervention, determining at an unconscious level, the reading practices we bring to bear on Indian film texts, as well as serving as an ideal for film making to aspire to. In other words, over the decades, the effects of the apparatus have become more and more prominent, making it difficult to conceive of a culturally distinctive use of technology.

Further, the develop mentalist trajectory of the modern Indian state has itself led to the advocacy of an evolutionist aesthetic programme for the cinema, not only by state functionaries but by film-makers (including many who make the song-and-dance films) and intellectuals as well. The industry has been constantly bombarded by journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and self-conscious film-makers with prescriptions for achieving an international-style realist cinema. The not-yet-ness of the Indian popular cinema is thus not just a biased opinion coming from western or westernized critics, but also a thesis at work within the industry as the instrument of a drive towards change. It is thus inadequate to simply explain away the mainstream western cinema as the result of a particular combination of elements, without accounting for the way in which it has produced a common ground for practice and reflection in other areas of the world as well.

This is not only inadequate but also problematic, in so far as this would reduce the specificity of Indian or any other distinct national cinema to a matter of pure cultural difference. Proclaiming the difference of Indian cinema as an obvious and absolute fact in itself would lead us into a specular enclosure within which this difference will be forever defined only by reference to the global dominant, requiring no attempt to investigate the specific structures and logics of the institution as it has evolved in India. This trap can only be avoided by locating the Indian cinematic institution simultaneously on two overlapping grounds: (1) the socio-political formation of the modern Indian state, with its internal structure as a determining factor in cultural production, and (2) the global capitalist structure within which this modern state and the cinema we are dealing with necessarily enter into relations of heteronomy, dependency, antagonism, etc.

The Ideology of Formal Subsumption

This book is partly an attempt to analyse Hindi cinema as an instance of what I propose to call the ideology of formal subsumption. At the centre of this ideology is an ideologeme whose conceptual expression most frequently takes the form of the co-existence of modernity and tradition. Fredric Jameson, who introduced the term ideologeme to critical discourse, defines it as the 'minimal unit' of organization of class discourse:

The ideologeme is an amphibious formation, whose essential structural characteristic may be described as its possibility to manifest itself either as pseudoidea - a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or prejudice-or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the 'collective characters' which are the classes in opposition (Jameson 1981: 87).

An adequate description of an ideologeme must demonstrate its susceptibility 'to both a conceptual description and a narrative manifestation all at once' (ibid.).

The binary modernity/tradition, whether it is employed to indicate conflict or complementarity, amounts to an explanation, 'a conceptual or belief system' which regulates thinking about the modern Indian social formation. This binary also figures centrally, both thematically and as an organizing device, in popular film narratives. ^[6] In a social formation characterized by an uneven combination of modes of production only formally subordinated to capital, where political power is shared by a coalition of bourgeoisie, rural rich and the bureaucratic elite, the explanatory scheme in question functions as a disavowal of modernity, an assurance of the permanence of the state of formal subsumption. Such an assurance can only be ideological in nature, operating on an unconscious plane as a guarantee of national identity. It runs counter to the drive, on another level, towards modernization and the establishment of bourgeois hegemony.^[7]

Thus the disavowal of modernity on the ideological plane has co-existed with the contrary drive to modernization, the project of passive revolution that the state adopted at its birth. Barring moments in recent history when the state attempted to break the stalemate engendered by this co-existence (the most significant being the era of authoritarian populism culminating in the internal emergency of 1975), the synchronic dimension of modern Indian history has until recently been centrally defined by the state of uneasy equilibrium between these two dynamics.^[8]

If some of these processes are becoming visible now it is perhaps because we are nearing the end of that prolonged stalemate and entering headlong into a full-scale transformation which has already rendered obsolete many of the discourses and institutions of the earlier era. The political spectrum has expanded outwards, with Hindu nationalism at one end appropriating the fragile national project in an attempt to re-establish political unity on a communal foundation ^[9] while on the other hand the process of globalization seems to be eroding the function of the state as a political constraint on a re-vitalized, rampaging capitalism.

It is against this background that the question of the state as a factor in cultural processes is examined here. I study cinema as an institution that is part of the continuing struggles within India over the form of the state. Unlike the situation in advanced capitalist countries, where an achieved hegemony manifests itself through the subordination of all internal conflicts to the overall dominance of the state formation, it is my argument that in a peripheral, modernizing state like India, the struggle continues to take the form of contestations over the state form. Cultural production too registers this reality through the recurring allegorical dimension of the dominant textual form in the popular cinema. The kernel of truth in Fredric Jameson's controversial assertion that Third World texts are 'necessarily allegorical' (Jameson 1987: 141) is revealed when we read it in this spirit. What the allegorical dimension of texts represents is the continuing necessity to conceive the state form which will serve as the ground for cultural signification. Through the allegorical scaffolding, texts register the instability of their ground of practice and signification, as well as the continuing possibility of struggles over the state, or struggles to reconstitute the state. Through such a re-foregrounding of the state as a political rather than a purely administrative entity this study asserts its continued relevance as a ground of transformative struggles.

This study is a critical reading of Indian cinema as a site of ideological production, understood in the spirit of the above remarks, as the (re)production of the state form. It attempts to identify the social bases of the coherence of cinematic ideology or, where relevant, the lack of such a coherence.

The concept of ideology is central to the practice of cultural critique. Marx and Engels themselves defined ideology in at least two different ways. The famous metaphor of the camera obscura was employed in The German Ideology (Marx 1987) to define ideology as the inverted representation of real social relations. A later definition of ideology described it as the universalization of the particular interests of a class.

The second definition provides the link with Gramsci's concept of hegemony, which refers to the process of establishment and maintenance of an order that is acceptable to all classes while being under the control and serving the interests of the ruling classes. The 'deputies' of the dominant group exercise the function of 'social hegemony' which consists of:

The 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production (Gramsci 1971: 12).

The complement to social hegemony is the 'direct domination' effected by the use of state power.

Louis Althusser translated Gramsci's terms hegemony and domination as ideological and repressive functions, and borrowing from psychoanalysis, elaborated a systematic theory of ideology as a process of interpellation of individuals as subjects. ^[10] The constitution of the subject is effected by a process of socialization undertaken by the principal ideological apparatuses of the state: under capitalism these are the school and the family. The reproduction of social relations (the relations of production and power) hinges on this process of subjectification, without which there would only be a state of pure dominance enforced by the repressive apparatus. By responding to the call of the state to identify him/herself, the subject is interpellated or 'recruited' by the Symbolic. The definition of ideology as 'a representation of the imaginary relationship of subjects to their real conditions of existence' (Althusser 1971: 162) suggests that ideology involves a process of self-recognition by which the subject comes to acknowledge the truth or naturalness of its conditions of existence. Ideological processes are unconscious and inescapable: there is no position outside ideology.

Nevertheless, there is a distinction in Althusser between ideology in general as against particular ideologies which opens the way for a consideration of the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) as sites of struggle. Ideologies are not 'born' in the ISAs, they are not generated by institutions. They arise 'from the social classes at grips in the class struggle: from their conditions of existence, their practices, their experience of the struggle, etc' (Athusser 1971: 186). The ISAs are thus not monolithic, inescapable prisons in which all individuals are ensnared. It is not a relation between an institution and an individual but an individualized recruitment whose initiation is traceable to the classes in struggle in the social. The ISAs are 'the form in which the ideology of the ruling class must necessarily be realized, and the form in which the ideology of the ruled class must necessarily be measured and confronted' (ibid, 1971: 185-6). This is to say that the institutions or apparatuses which serve an ideological function are the means of production of a consensus about the naturalness of the existing order. These institutions are state apparatuses in the sense that the state itself is (apart from its repressive and administrative apparatuses) nothing but the embodiment of the prevailing consensus, and as such has to include the apparatuses through which ideologies are put into circulation. It may be asked how it is that schools and families, which are or can be 'private', are defined as state apparatuses. This objection would be justified if these institutions are understood to be agencies created by the state in pursuit of its goals, thereby implying that the state is separate from and pre-exists the ideological apparatuses. However, their role must be understood as consisting in producing and maintaining a representation of the 'resolvedness' of class conflict, the consensual world picture which is the materialization in ideology of the state.

Thus the ideology of (social) forms offers the most productive site of inquiry for cultural critique. The critique of 'ideological forms in which men become conscious of [social) conflict and fight it out' follows from the 'notion of the ideological apparatus as a site of (displaced) class conflict. These forms have a location, a space of elaboration and reproduction, without which they would be robbed of their consistency and durability (Johnson, 1986/87: 45).

It is through the combined effectivity of ideological forms that subjects are constituted and reproduced. In the practice of cultural critique in a Third World context we are made aware of the fact that these forms are neither of a fixed type and number, nor is their combined effectivity predictable according to some fixed model. The crux of the problem lies in the articulated and internally differentiated nature of the hegemonic formation that results from the combination of different modes of production. This is in sharp contrast to the tendency to homogenization that characterizes the hegemonic process in advanced capitalist countries. In other words, certain stateforms may be defined by the co-existence of bourgeois and pre-capitalist ideologies, that is neither hegemonic in the advanced capitalist sense, nor constituting purely a case of what Ranajit Guha (989) has called 'dominance without hegemony', a condition characteristic of the colonial state.

The problematic can be stated in terms of two concepts of the theory of capitalist social processes: one is Marx's distinction between formal and rear subsumption, and the other is Gramsci's concept of the passive revolution. Gramsci used the term passive revolution to describe a situation in which a bourgeois state is established first, and then undertakes to create the conditions for its hegemony-the creation of civil society, the expansion of the market, etc. This concept has proved useful to political theory in thinking about the mode of functioning of the postcolonial state. Partha Chatterjee has argued, for instance, that' "passive revolution" is the general form of the transition from colonial to post-colonial nation-states in the 20th century' (1986: 50), and that this mode of transition consists in the establishment of a national state which will undertake reform from above to gradually modernize the nation (ibid: 48).

Within the framework of this general thesis, the specific case of the Indian state requires further elaboration. Social theorists have argued that the Indian state form is bourgeois in so far as it is based on the parliamentary democratic form of government identified with bourgeois dominance and because it 'impos[es] on the economy a deliberate order of capitalist planning' (Kaviraj, EPW 1988: 2430-0. However, this is still not a bourgeois state in the classic sense because the capitalist class does not occupy a hegemonic position. The Indian state's control is not based on pure repression, but it is not based on the bourgeoisie's 'moral-cultural hegemony' either. Power is exercised by a ruling coalition in which the bourgeoisie is one of the partners, along with the landlords and the professional classes.

The coalitional nature of political power has certain important consequences. The coalition functions through protocols which reflect the pressures that each element of the coalition brings to bear on the other elements in the pursuit of its own interests. Thus, it could be said that two conflicting tendencies co-exist and give rise to a central contradiction of the Indian state: the trajectory of the passive revolution, which is an expression of the bourgeoisie's hegemonic aspirations, conflicts with and is complemented by, what can be termed the politico-ideological process of reproduction of the conditions of formal subsumption,^[11] a necessity imposed by the coalitional nature of state power. Here the notion of formal subsumption is to be understood in a broad sense as encompassing more than just the economic arrangements. Marx employed the term to distinguish two phases of capitalism. Under conditions of formal subsumption, capital takes control of the production process without transforming it. Real subsumption begins when capital revolutionizes the production process and inaugurates the extraction of relative surplus value. But as Balibar has suggested, the distinction has a much broader significance:

If one thinks about it carefully, the idea of this 'real' subsumption ... goes a long way beyond the integration of the workers into the world of the contract, of money incomes, of law and official politics: it implies a transformation of human individuality, which extends from the education of the labour force to the constitution of a 'dominant ideology' capable of being adopted by thc dominated themselves (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 4).

It is the absence (until recently) of such a thorough-going process of all-round transformation that calls for recourse to 'reproduction of conditions of formal subsumption' as a general term for the synchronic structure consisting of ideological and political arrangements within which the project of passive revolution was put into operation.

It is my contention that the specific form taken by the political structure is of primary importance to the study of ideologies. In the absence of such a specification, cultural critique is condemned to vacillate between the two poles of tradition and modernity. On the other hand, there is a constant temptation to simply regard Indian culture as the 'other' of western culture, to contrast the homogenization of the one with the anarchic exuberance of the other. This mode of analysis is predicated on an erasure of the political difference and an overemphasis on cultural difference abstracted from the social formation as a whole. The attempt here, on the other hand, has been to place cultural production firmly within the political and economic framework of the Indian nation-state. It is in the light of such a conceptualization of modern Indian ideology that this study proposes to analyse the cultural work of the Hindi cinema as the exemplification of an aesthetic of formal subsumption. Such a broad characterization clearly cannot be expected to account for all of the products of the Bombay film industry, nor is it meant to provide an exhaustive explanation for all the elements even in films that might correspond to this label. The effort at theorization will have served its purpose if by means of it we are able to make sense of some of the dominant trends within this institution over the last fifty years.

This study proceeds in two directions: (1) it examines, at the most general level, the political, economic, historical and cultural determinants of popular Hindi cinema as a step towards the elaboration of a theoretical framework for Indian film studies; (2) it undertakes a historical construction of a conjuncture in recent Indian history when, in the midst of a major political crisis, the Bombay film industry underwent a significant transformation, affecting its overall structure as well as the foi-mal properties of individual film texts.

Indian Film Studies

In histories of world cinema produced in the west, Indian cinema usually makes its appearance in 1956, the year in which Satyajit Ray burst on the international film scene with Pather Panchali. ^[12] Some narratives may attempt a brief recap of the decades preceding this (Cook: 1990), but in general the evolutionary thrust of film historiography does not allow for a consideration of early Indian cinema as one of the national cinemas of the silent era. Moreover, having begun in 1956, these narratives do not attempt to tell the whole story, however briefly, concentrating instead on those realist/ artistic products which correspond to a certain conception of true cinema. We have already encountered the spontaneous philosophy behind this approach, in the form of the developmentalist ideology which regards non-realist cinema as not-yet-cinema, as well as the emblematism that has dominated theoretical reflections on the field. The prevalence of this ideology has meant that serious writing on Indian cinema was for a long time restricted to a consideration of the works of masters like Ray, Ghatak, and others. The prestige of Indian cinema at home and abroad, was enhanced by such writings, especially by the influential western admirers of Ray, but these writers did not feel the need to situate this cinema in the Indian film historical context, a tendency that was encouraged by the perception that that context served, if at all, only as a backdrop of mediocrity against which the auteurs shone even brighter.

On the other hand, popular Indian cinema has attracted a considerable amount of attention as the site of an authentically folk culture, from anthropologists and Indologists or others employing the tools of these disciplines. ^[13] In this type of study the tendency is to read popular cinema as evidence of the unbroken continuity of Indian culture and its tenacity in the face of the assault of modernity. Other studies, employing the tools of ethnography, study film culture as a field of reception consisting of popular audiences conceived as a self-sufficient, closed group, ill-at-ease in the modern spaces they inhabit, but whose cultural needs are fully satisfied by the films they see. ^[14]

The first body of texts, while recovering some Indian films as works of art for a national or international high culture, at least do not lose sight of the political dimension, the context of Indian modernity which is a constant concern of the films and film-makers they concentrate on. The second approach, reserved for the popular cinema, however, tends to be largely indifferent to the political dimension, preferring to situate the cinematic institution in a continuous tradition of Indian myth-making and autonomous folk culture. Thus, an effective division of labour is posited between these two kinds of cinema: one is modern, informed by the concerns and cares of the modern nation-state; while the other is the domain of 'tradition' or oral/folk culture (depending on whether the interest in cinema is of Indological or ethnographic provenance). Some even attribute to the latter a conscious purpose: of asserting its autonomy, difference and even hostility to the 'modern' sector (Nandy 1987-8: 1.1-1.3).

Such an approach, which reproduces the ideology of formal subsumption in critical discourse, does not take into account the fact that the relation between popular cinema and the cultural 'community' that converges around it as its privileged collective addressee is mediated by the market. It disregards the fact that the functioning of the capitalist industry which produces and markets these films is determined by a variety of factors, including the political structure and the hegemonic project of the modern state; that there can be no simple and unmediated reproduction of 'tradition', 'myth' or any other residual substance by a cultural institution that is based on modern technology and relies on the desires and interests of dispersed, anonymous audiences, some of them created by the industry itself. Nor does it take into account the unconscious processes that inform cultural production and reception, except in a transhistorical, Jungian form, where myths and archetypes propagate themselves through the unconscious agency of human beings. In recent years, however, there has emerged a small but growing body of critical writing which situates the popular cinematic institution in a modern political-economic context, national as well as global. ^[15] Chidanand Das Gupta's The Painted Face (991) and Sumita S. Chakravarthy's National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (1993) are two book-length studies of recent origin which attempt a comprehensive understanding of Indian popular cinema. Das Gupta describes his book as an exploration by a critic committed to art cinema of 'the mind behind the Indian popular film' (ix). The justification for such a compromising venture is the rise to power of the Telugu film star NT. Rama Rao, which reveals, once"again, the power of cinema over the masses, For the most part, Das Gupta conforms to the safe model of cinema-as-myth, and while recovering a few exceptions from the general mass, regards Hindi cinema as trash that is worth worrying about. While employing Sudhir Kakar's and Ashish Nandy's ideas about the Indian psyche, mythology, etc., he is more brazen than them in identifying popular Hindi cinema with a 'primitive' mass at the core of Indian society (1991: 26), while redeeming another segment that is capable of analytical thinking and appreciates realism. The masses' inability to distinguish myth from fact is Das Gupta's central thesis, and at the end of the long journey through popular cinema, he is relieved to be able to return to his realist haven.

Sumita S. Chakravarty deploys some of the metaphors and discourses used by Das Gupta while rejecting his simplistic judgement. Most importantly, Chakravarty relocates discussions of Indian cinema within the context of the modern nation-state emphasizing its 'eminently contemporary mode of expression' (1993: 8). Such a shift away from 'traditional accounts of this cinema' is of vital importance in a situation where the 'myth' and 'Indian psyche'-based interpretations dominate, with their eternalist proclamations, and while claiming to reveal the truth about Indian cinema, actually contribute to the maintenance of an Indological myth: the myth of the mythically minded Indian. To maintain, as Chakravarty does following Stephen Heath, that 'no film is not a document of itself and of its actual situation in respect of the cinematic institution' (ibid: 164) is not simply to opt for a better approach to Indian cinema; it is also to assert the radical contemporaneity of the time we live in, the determining effect of the synchronic structure of modern India on all our memories of the past.

Chakravarty's metaphor of 'imperso-nation' (although she calls it a concept, it is closer to the 'puncepts' of American deconstruction), however, echoing Das Gupta's metaphor of the 'painted face' and justified by the centrality of performance (as opposed to realist acting), seems an inadequate signifier for the diversity of the content she presents, It seems to indicate her desire to locate Indian cinema in an indeterminate, postmodern global culture. Of course, the world wide circulation of Hindi cinema, among Indian migrants as well as other Third World audiences, may seem to justify such a move. But by doing so, the specificity of Non Resident Indian (NRI) nostalgia, the question of why Hindi cinema appeals to certain Third World audiences, and the entirely different question of the national context of production and distribution are lost sight of. The metaphor functions, most of the time, as a non-interfering linking device, making its appearance at the beginning of every analysis, only to be forgotten as the film text begins to reveal its complexities. It thus ends up functioning rather as a signifier of the absence of a theoretical framework. A dependence on thematic unities results in a blindness to generic differences, to the questions of form and address, and the history of audience segmentation, a weakness reflected, for instance, in the odd suggestion that new cinema was addressed to 'rural and/ or urban working class' audiences (1993: 246).

One of the early attempts at theorizing Indian aesthetic modernity and within that framework, exploring the specific modern character of cinema, was undertaken by a group associated with thefournal of Arts and Ideas. Under a broadly defined programme of investigation into Indian modernity, Geeta Kapur (1987), Anuradha Kapur (1993) and Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1987, 1993) have produced studies of the evolution of a modern aesthetic from the beginnings in colonial nineteenth-century India to the present, focussing on theatre, art and cinema. These studies have demonstrated the importance of the question of frontality as a mode of representation in popular culture:

... frontality of the word, the image, the design, the formative act. This yields forms of direct address; flat, diagrammatic and simply profiled figures; a figure-ground pattern with only notational perspective; repetition of motifs in terms of 'ritual play'; and a decorative mise-en-scene' (G. Kapur 1987: 80).

In the context of indigenous attempts to master a new technology, the still camera, the 'aesthetic relation' (Rajadhyaksha, Framework 1987: 32) implied by frontality is plunged into 'a crisis regarding questions such as just how the frame may be entered, or the ethics of "directly" apprehending the "real'" (ibid: 33). This description tends to somewhat overemphasize the role of technology in producing the crisis and only hints at the political constraints which are more explicitly stated in a reading of early Indian cinema through this thesis: 'Pulling towards the static, the gaze pulled towards [the] idealist, purely specular frontal aspect of the image' (JAI 1987: 67). The frame's ability to 'directly' apprehend the real was thus constrained by an idealization, offering the image as an anchor, a resting point for the gaze. It was thus a case of a technologically aided reproduction of a visual economy that is related to the institution of darsana (see Chapter 3). These critics also develop the points of contrast between this mode and the realist mode, with its different set of spectatorial protocols. Anuradha Kapur, writing on theatre, outlines the cultural implications of the two divergent types of image spectator relations thus:

Frontality of the performer vis-a-vis the spectator ... enables among other things this relationship of erotic complicity. Now 'frontality' has several meanings in the open theatres of earlier times. But perhaps a set of altogether different meanings come about with the construction of proscenium theatres, which is where Parsi companies performed. In open theatres 'frontality' of the performer indicated a specific relationship between viewer and actor. Turning the body towards the spectator is a sign that there is in this relationship no dissembling between the two: the actor looks at the audience and the audience looks at the actor; both exist - as actor and audience - because of this candid contact. A reciprocally regarding theatre transaction of this kind is substantially different from one made in a theatre that takes an imaginary fourth wall, standing where the stage ends and the seating begins, as its governing convention. Parsi theatre companies perform in the proscenium but take as their governing convention an eye and body contact that comes from earlier open stages (A. Kapur 1993: 92)

This combination of codes, old and new, also signifies a combination of narrative movement, and spectacle as that which arrests the gaze. In the Parsi theatre, the narrative, confined to the frame of the stage, proceeds in linear fashion but the actors 'display themselves', thereby continually arresting the narrative flow. This is not however a serial alternating process but one in which both 'presentation' and linear progression occur simultaneously.

In the cinema, however, this unified 'spectacular narration' is over time broken up into its component parts and a serial recombination of the two codes is effected. This has been cogently argued by Ravi Vasudevan, who demonstrates, through an analysis of a segment from Andaz (1949), how this combination of codes takes place and how and what it signifies (Vasudevan, JAI 1993: 60-6). The serial combination includes three kinds of elements: segments of linear narrative, brief moments of iconic stasis, and the tableau, in which a static visual arrangement is infused with narrative value. Vasudevan relates this combination to the exigencies of Indian culture, defining it as 'a rhetorical strategy which makes the cinema both attractive as something new in the field of the visual, and culturally intelligible because it incorporates a familiar visual address' (ibid: 65). Here, Vasudevan seems to be interpreting the combination of codes in purely textual terms by suggesting that the icon and the tableaux simply facilitate access to the pleasures of the modern. He offers a stronger and more suggestive reading later, observing that 'there is a strong tendency to subordinate movement and vision toward a stable organization of meaning, in an iconic articulation. This has a parallel in the way in which the narrative reorganizes the family so as to secure a stable position for the middle class hero' (ibid: 72). This reading links the textual strategies to 'a certain normalizing discourse and hegemonic closure' (ibid: 72). It points in the direction of an active mobilization of the 'familiar' in the service of a hegemonic cultural project. Vasudevan rightly rejects any sociologically inspired allocation of the pleasures deriving from the use of these different codes to different segments of the audience and emphasizes the difficulty of separating traditional and modern modes of address (ibid: 72).

One of the aims of this book is to carry this project forward by foregrounding the political dimension of the problem of textual form. The aesthetics of frontality and its interface with realist conventions of narration have to be seen in the light of the individual subject's position within different political orders and the corresponding constraints and protocols of spectatorship. The realist barrier that the proscenium arch represents as well as the degree of integration and linearization of the narrative are both determined by a social competence related to the generalized figure of the citizen and the constraints and compulsions of cultural production and commodification in capitalist societies.

The difference between the aesthetics of frontality and the aesthetics of realism may be formulaically represented as follows: In the frontal spectacle! the performer is the bearer of a message from the Symbolic, and the performance a vehicle for its transmission to the spectator through the direct contractual link established in the theatre. In the realist narrative, the Symbolic, in its contractual aspect, is represented by the citizen-spectator, whose interpretive authority brooks no challenge from within the frame of representation. This requires some elaboration. ^[16]

The question is: what is the nature of the fictive contractual relation that sustains the film text as performance? The answer suggested by the above formula is that in performances governed by the frontal aesthetic relation, a message/meaning that derives from a transcendent source is transmitted to the spectator by the performance, whereas in the realist instance, no such transcendent source of a meaning/ message can be posited. Instead, the text is figured as raw material for the production of meaning, the latter task being the spectator's by right. Thus, in the first case, the performance as a whole (i.e., including the activity on stage and in the seats) is an apparatus for the devolution of a message/meaning that pre-exists any performative instance; whereas in the latter, the performance as a whole is an apparatus for the production of meaning through the combined activity of the artist/producer and the spectator on the text as raw material.

Consequently, in the first case textual integrity is provisional, and derives not from any internal articulation of its elements but solely from the control exerted by the transcendent point of emanation of the message; ^[17] whereas in the latter instance, such a transcendent point of devolution of meaning being absent, the text must achieve an internal articulation that guarantees its identity as a separate individual product.

The realist aesthetic is governed by the latter fiction. In it the spectator has the opportunity, the rip,ht, to repeat the production process-the processing of raw material to generate meaning-that has already been accomplished by the producer/artist. Even if all the spectators arrive at the same meaning, they must be assumed to have done so individually, through their own labour of interpretation. ^[18] This is the philosophy that is expounded in Bazin's theory of realism, for instance. In Bazin's rendering of the problem, the threat of a direct, interpreted, communication comes from a political source: the politically committed director. Like God, whose messages are communicated directly through the mediation of the performer, the director too can present action in the form of an unambiguous message:

While analytical montage only calls for him [the spectator] to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should see, here [in the cinema of 'depth'l he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives (Bazin 1967: 36).

Bazin associates the freedom of choice provided by depth of focus to the 'liberal and democratic . . . consciousness of the American spectator' (Williams 1980: 44). But he is also clear that it is a question of a purely formal freedom of choice. What analytical montage presents, far from being false, is 'consistent with the laws of attention'. But in being pre-selected, 'it deprives us of the privilege, no less grounded in psychology, which we abandon without realising it, and which is, at least virtually, the freedom to modify our method of selection at every moment' (ibid: 42, emphasis added). The director's freedom to choose is thus in conflict with the spectator's and such a choice amounts to 'a clear standpoint on reality as such'. What is the danger that this represents? It is the danger of a realized individuality, as opposed to which a virtual one formally reiterates the availability of choice, and in order to be able to do so, must forever desist from actually making a choice. Individuality must always be provided for but never realized.

The freedom in question is thus not an 'objective' freedom, verifiable by reference to the diversity of choices made by subjects. It is a potential, given through and testifying to the privilege of citizenship. The director, in order to respect the individual's freedom must curb her/his own freedom, must in other words, merge his/ her own identity into the invisible frame of the state, clearing the ground for the full unfolding of the reality of nation/civil society. At the same time, Bazin argues that this freedom given to the individual spectator to make his/her own choice from a field of objects does not result in a diversity of choices, because there are 'laws of attention' which assert themselves, and in practice, ensure that more or less the same choice is made by all. Thus, not only the director but the citizen too is duty-bound to restrict his/her freedom to a virtual plane. While reality is 'by definition' diverse, the perception of this diversity, as an act of citizenship, must not lead to a diversification of perception. To admit that the eye's choice of objects from a field of perception could be arbitrary and unpredictable would be to jeopardize reality itself and would lead to anarchy.

Bazin's theory foregrounds the relationship between a political system and an ideology. In the case of the Indian popular cinema, we encounter a situation that seems to correspond to the non-realist model that Bazin criticizes. It is tempting at this point to take the sort of line that Noel Burch (1979) has elaborated in relation to Japanese cinema, and conclude that the distinction represented by frontality could be made the basis of a theory of the Indianness of Indian cinema. Such a conclusion would, however, pre-empt the exploration of the political dimension of cultural production. By ignoring the political dimension, we ignore the immense range of cultural possibilities that exist between the poles of 'western' realist or modernist practice and 'traditional' or non-western 'survivals'. We would thus end up reducing politics itself to a western cultural predilection.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, consisting of Chapters 2,3 and 4 is an investigation of the conditions of possibility of the dominant textual form of popular cinema, commonly referred to as the 'social'. Chapter 2 is devoted to the economic conditions-the prevailing mode of production, the mode of manufacture adopted and their role in the reproduction of the dominant textual form. Chapter 3 is a reading of this form as a symptom of the ideological resolution of conflicts within the social formation, of producing and representing the :consensus-effect' that sustains that formation. Drawing on the theories of realism and melodrama, I propose that the dominant form is a compromise formation reflecting the coalitional nature of political power. The definition of the spectator's position within the cinematic apparatus is discussed here with reference to the notion of citizen and the continued and broadened effectivity of the temple-centred institution of darsana. In a discussion of women's melodrama, it is argued that the social, in its all-inclusive character, can also function as an instrument of active resistance to generic differentiation.

Chapter 4 reinforces the argument about the non-contingency of the emergence and effectivity of the dominant form by taking up a peculiar feature of Indian censorship, the prohibition of kissing. This is shown to be a displaced prohibition of representations of the 'private' in the bourgeois sense, which facilitates the perpetuation of an ideological community-effect. The minimal unit of the private domain is the nuclear family, whose rise to pre-eminence coincides with the dissolution of pre-capitalist patriarchal enclaves and the emergence of the modern state as the sole supervizing authority over the family as the site of biological reproduction and socialization. ^[19] From the point of view of the pre-capitalist elements of the coalition, such a re-organization of the social represents a curtailment of its scopic privileges. Thus, while the resolution of the popular film narrative involves the constitution of the nuclear couple, the couple is reinserted into the space of the clan or the family in its political form.

This general theoretical framework serves in Part II, as a point of departure for a conjunctural analysis, of the developments in the film industry during a brief period of political crisis from the late sixties to the mid-seventies. The project is to develop a historical construction showing the broad lines of transformation of the field of film culture. In Chapter 5, I characterize the crisis as a disaggregation of the social or a breakdown of the consensus established and maintained by the ruling coalition. The dominant textual form also came into crisis in this period under the twin pressures of state intervention in cultural production and social changes brought about by political upheavals. The industry responded to this crisis through a process of internal segmentation, which created two proto-genres, the new cinema and the middle class cinema, while also leading to a transformation of the dominant textual form in the direction of a populist aesthetic of mobilization. The Film Finance Corporation, a state agency, entered feature film production as part of a strategy of cultural intervention, forcing the industry to respond in the manner described. This period thus marked the emergence of a developmentalist realism which produced a spectatorial point of view coinciding with the gaze of the state. It also led to the consolidation of a middle-class cinema, in which the private, as the space of middle-class identity, was elaborated. The popular cinema, on the other hand, went through a phase of uncertainty before regrouping around a figure of mobilization, a charismatic political-ideological entity embodied in the star-persona of Amitabh Bachchan. Aesthetically, these three segments represent statist realism, the realism of identification, and the melodrama of mobilization and counter-identification respectively.

Chapter 6 traces the process of construction of the star-figure of Amitabh Bachchan and the manner in which it was deployed in the evolution of an aesthetic of mobilization. Chapter 7 takes up the middle-class cinema of identification, whose generic specificity derives from the effects of ordinariness, familiarity, and realism. This cinema addresses the middle-class subject as a beleaguered entity, facing a threat to her/his identity from the encroachments of the rest of society, in particular the glamorous world of popular culture, and the politically awakened masses. These films also deal with the problem of private space and the related problem of the possibility of middle-class spectatorship. Chapter 8 concludes the study with an analysis of the first three films of Shyam Benegal as instances of an evolving developmental aesthetic employing a statist realism. Although the developmental narrative comes into its own only with Manthan (1976), both Ankur (1974) and Nishant (1975) contribute to its construction by employing strategies of distancing which produce the peasant/rural poor as an object of study and sympathy. These three segments or genres arose in a moment of disaggregation which rendered the old integrated modular text of the feudal romance obsolete. However, this was by no means an irreversible process, nor were the three segments established on a permanent basis. The aim of my project is to demonstrate the manner in which segmentation functioned as a mode of resolution of the crisis at the level of the industry, and to identify the aesthetic possibilities it generated as well as the new strategies of containment that emerged as a result. As an analysis of developments in a conjuncture, it is not intended as an assertion of the absolute novelty of each of these 'aesthetic' practices. On the contrary, the argument foregrounds the way in which all three segments drew from previously existing practices of signification and narrative codes in their attempt to meet a demand for new narratives that was Widely perceived to have arisen among the audiences.

Finally, as suggested above, this mapping of the field of popular cinema has become possible now in part because the social conditions described in the book are fast disappearing as global capitalism has been unleashed on the subcontinent with unprecedented haste. Having constructed a theoretical edifice for the study of popular cinema, we are thus also faced with the task of dismantling it, of witnessing its certitudes dissolve in the flux of contemporary events. In the final essay that forms the epilogue to the main text, a symptomatic reading of two recent films, Damini and Roja, is undertaken, to bring to light, in their formal structure, an allegory of real subsumption that points to the possible direction in which certain new players, functioning by new rules and employing new strategies, are attempting to move the film industry.

_______________________________________________________

^{[1] See Rajadhyaksha, 'Neo-traditionalism: Film as popular Art in India':
-Portrait painters began using the (photographic) print only to get a good facial
likeness. after which they would paint upon the photograph and reintroduce earlier
decorative conventions. like planar surfaces, flattened walls and floors. What is more
interesting ... are the more "documentary" pictures taken by Indians. These inevitably
use flat planes, emphasising surface. seldom using perspective to suggest a point of
entry into the composition or a pathway for the look, jettisoning many of the standard
principles of "balance" or symmetry that the Europeans observed (Rajadhyaksha,
Framework 1987, p. 33), See also Geeta Kapur. 'Mythic Material in Indian Cinema'
(JAI 14/15: 79-107)·}

^{[2] See Higson (1989) for a discussion of the idea of national cinema, with particular
reference to Europe. In a European context, the so-called national cinemas are often
weak. state-sponsored efforts to counter the Hollywood hegemony as the popular
cinema for the majority of Europeans is Hollywood. In India, until now, Hollywood
cinema has only enjoyed a restricted audience. Thus. there is a stronger case for
identifying Indian cinema as a national cinema. The problem here is one of internal
segmentation: raising Hindi cinema to the status of national cinema can only be at
the cost of ignoring major regional film industries such as those of Bengal, Maharashtra,
Tamil Nadu, etc.}

^{[3] This needs to he qualified. There has been a popular audience for 'foreign films'
right from the early days of Indian film history. In the colonial era, the government
favoured measures to discourage Indian audiences from flocking to the American films
which showed the ruling race in an unfavourable light. In this context British policy on
cinema, inspired by fears of social disorder, was not unhappy with the trend towards
mythologicals (See Baskaran nd). Although the mythologicals may have served their
purpose, this did not destroy audience interest in the foreign product. (One wonders if
the Nadia films were not designed with an eye on such divided aesthetic loyalties of
audiences.) At present, in most cities, there are, apart from the front rows of the
exclusively 'foreign film theatres', one or two halls which specialize in reruns of popular
Hollywood films (mainly action films) as well as, increasingly, soft porn probably
produced exclusively for Third World urban markets. There has also always been a
large popular audience for Hollywood and non-Hollywood action films, with stars like
Jean-Paul Belmondo. Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and
Schwarzenegger acquiring their own significant fan following. Hindi films sometimes
try to assimilate the content of these films, though not always successfully.}

^{[4] Strictly speaking, we should be speaking of Indian cinemas, rather than one
cinema. There is some amount of film production in every major Indian language
and there are at least six important non-Hindi film industries, although not all of
them are thriving at the moment: Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and
Telugu. Nevertheless, Hindi cinema has functioned as a site of production and
exploration of national identity and ideology, and depends on the talents and finances
drawn into it from the other language cinemas. Hindi cinema has also assisted state
policy by spreading knowledge of Hindi, the projected national language across the
country. As an industry with a national market, it also attracted talent from all parts of
the country, especially from non-Hindi speaking regions like Calcutta and Madras,
giving Bombay cinema an undeniable national character.}

^{[5] Satyajit Ray, among others, has noted the 'artificiality' and inauthenticity of
Bombay cinema, attributing this to its lack of a specific cultural base, as it has to cater
to a multitude of culturally distinct audiences. From the viewpoint of a realist aesthetic,
of which Ray was an untiring champion, this is no doubt true. But since we are
speaking of an aesthetic that (as will become clear later) is distinctly and consistently
non-realist, such an accusation is premature. Authenticity is a distinctly modern
problem. Even in the regional cinemas, a substantial number of films are made in the
'Bombay' style. Thus it seems that what is acutely manifested in Hindi cinema is not
exclusive to it, and that we must take into consideration not only the lack of linguistic
specificity but also the problems of a transitional social formation.}

^{[6] A .K. Ramanujan, the late poet and scholar, is reported to have remarked once:
'I do not believe in god; I believe in people who believe in god' (Karnad, RUjuvatbu
1994: 40). Ramanujan was more sensitive than most people to the forms in which
ideologies were effective in the national discourse. It is not surprising therefore that
he should have formulated so well, in a proto-narrative form, a key ideologeme of
modern India whose effectivity can be traced in a range of discursive' sites where it
may not always be so explicitly formulated.

This formulation has the distinct advantage of providing, in its very syntax, a
glimpse in miniature of the articulating, structuring effect of this act of suspension of
disbelief. The caesura that separates the two segments of the formulation is also the
link that reveals the structured, hierarchical relationship between them. We notice
here a syntactical relay across the gulf of the caesura, of a subjectivity that first posits
and then suspends itself in order to make place for the concluding phrase, 'those
who believe in god'.

Belief and unbelief alone are not in question here; they also stand in for a range
of meanings associated with the two proposed segments, including the binary of
tradition and modernity. The speaking subject here is clearly located in modernity
and through the double-barrelled proposition, establishes a relation with the other
term, a relation of compromise, a relation in and through which a certain crisis is
sought to be resolved. In short, it proposes that the eroding power of modernity, of
which the speaker's disbelief is a sign, shall be reined in, suspended, as a gesture of
goodwill towards the community of believers, as a declaration of truce, a precondition
for the constitution of a nation out of these two segments.

This strategic suspension or disavowal of modernity proposes a fictive contract
that either supplements or takes the place of that other fictive social contract (Balibar
1992) which, since the French Revolution, has served as the blueprint of political
modernity. What is proposed here is a contractual relationship between two segments
of the population, rather tl,an between all individuals, separately defined as Citizens,
equal in 'all' respects. The individual, defined in modern political theory as a
combination of a political function (citizen) and a pathological, feeling, suffering,
experiencing subject is here replaced by two segments of the population, which
separately embody these two elements, requiring the act of belief as the bond that
will realize the nation. Thus, it is only as a corporate entity composed of these two
segments, only in its totality, and not in respect to each individual, that the modern
political entity is here realizable.}

^{[7] See Dhareshwar's reading of Ananthamurthy's story, 'Suryana Kudure', in
'Postcolonial in the Postmodern' (EPW 1995).}

^{[8] In a note of 1958, entitled 'The Basic Approach', Nehru attempts to rethink
some of his fundamental views on modern society. Written at a time when he was
grappling with the crisis in Kerala following the setting up of the first elected Communist
government there, this text has been described by his biographer S. Gopal as signifying
'a reversion to the earlier Nehru of the 1920s, the conventional Hindu untouched as
yet by rationalist ideas and the unquestioning worshipper of Gandhi... He was
now a socialist but was seeking to mix his left-wing ideas with a sophisticated form
of religious commitment' (Gopal 1984: 62). Present-day neo-Gandhians, who pit
Gandhi against Nehru, fail to see this complementarity, and the fact that Nehru
himself was the original neo-Gandhian. Rejecting communism because it sacrificed
the interests of the individual in the name of society, Nehru proposed a paradoxical
model in which 'opportunity is given to the individual to develop, provided the
individual is not a selected group, but comprises the whole community" 'In such a
society,' moreover, 'the emphasis will be on duties, not on rights' (Nehru 1983: 285).
The confusion and lack of conviction are rounded off at the end when, having
introduced a Vedantic notion that supports the idea of society as an organic whole,
the author concludes: 'But obviously it does not solve any of [life's] problems and, in
a sense, we remain where we are' (ibid: 286). We will see how the ideology of formal
subsumption served, in the context of passive revolution, to produce the reassurance
that 'we remain where we are'.}

^{[9] See in this connection reflections (in Balibar and Wallerstein 1991) on how when
national unity cannot be founded on linguistic homogeneity, racist or other foundations
will he sought. See also Deshpande's essay, 'Imagined Economies' (JAI 1993: 5-36) for
an argument about the erosion of the idea of the nation as a 'community of producers'.}

^{[10] In this context it is interesting to note Foucault's contention (Foucault 1982:
208-26) that the specificity of the modern state lies in the combination of two forms
of power, which he calls the totalitarian and the pastoral (derived from the Church),
one directed at the population as a whole, the other focused on the individual.}

^{[11] The term formal subsumption is usually employed to refer only to capitalist
relations of production. In that area, Jairus Banaji (1990) was one of the few to
employ the distinction between formal and real subsumption in an essay on agrarian
relations in colonial India that formeu part of the famous 'mode of production' debate,
see also Alavi (1990). I use the term in a far more general sense, to refer to a relation
between capitalist and pre-capitalist domains not only in itself but as it is represented
and reproduced In Ideology.}

^{[12] See for ego David Cook (1990) and Eric Rhode (1978).}

^{[13] For instances of this approach, see Kakar (1980), O'Flaherty (1980) and Misra (1985, 1988/89).}

^{[14] How firmly this approach is rooted in western practices of 'othering' is
demonstrated by the difference between the goals of ethnographic popular culture
studies in the west and in a country like India. In the west such studies (of reception)
are engaged in re-affirming the freedom of the 'free individual' by demonstrating the
automaticity and inevitability of audience resistance to ideological interpellation. The
individual subject is free because she is so constructed as to never completely fit the
position that the text offers her. On the contrary, non-western subjects are distinguished
by being completely at home in their ideological environment, the films they see
corresponding exactly to their needs. The very notion of cultural 'need', which figures
prominently in this context, is an indication of the closed system of demand and
supply (the perfect market) that is being assumed. Among those who have employed
the idea of cultural need are S. Bahadur (1982, 1985), A. Nandy (1987-8), R. Thomas
(1985, 1987). Reception studies/ ethnographies include S. Dickey (1993), Pfleiderer
and Lutze, and a 'quickie' by Dissanayake and Sahai (1992).}

^{[15] In what follows only a few texts from which this study derives a problematic
are discussed. Apan from the texts discussed below, mention may be made of writings
by P Bandhu (992), V. Dhareshwar and T. Niranjana (1996), A. Nandy (1987--8),
M.S.S. Pandian (1992), S.V. Srinivas (1996), R. Thomas (987), and P. Willemen (1993),
which evince a shared concern for theoretical advances in the study of Indian cinema
even as they differ vastly in their approaches. The writings of film-makers like Ritwik
Ghatak, Dadasaheb Phalke, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Kumar Shahani are also of
theoretical interest.

More compilations of texts from the early decades of cinema history, such as
Bandyopadhyay (1993) and Basu and Dasgupta (1992) are an urgent necessity. So is
the project to make available to the national public the writings on cinema that exist
in the regional languages, especially Bengali, Hindustani, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil.}

^{[16] (There is a third, intermediate possibility. emblematized in the didactic aesthetic
(Brecht, Eisenstein).}

^{[17] [E]very continuity is effected via the gaze [of the spectator] Rajadhyaksha,
The Phalke Era, JAI 1987: 70).}

^{[18] Recent film theory thus makes a virtue out of necessity when it claims as its
own discovery the rgct thgt spe(tgtors are active producers of megning rather than
passive recipients of it. This productive bhour of the spectator is assumed hy the
realist text and does not constitute either a sign or a guarantee of resistance.}

^{[19] The nuclear family's dominance must be understood as ideological. As Michele
Barret and Mary Macintosh (1990) point out, in reality, this form is not statistically
predominant even in the advanced capitalist countries.}

_______________________________________________________

PART I

2. The Economics of Ideology: Popular Film Form and Mode of Production

There is a good deal of writing on the economics of the film industry, some of it by professional economists. ^[20] This constitutes a valuable body of information on the sources of finance, the roles of various agents (producers, distributors, exhibitors) in the industry, the relations of power and dependency that develop between these agents as a reflection of their relative financial position, the revenues accruing to the government from the industry, the avenues for legitimate and reliable finance, etc. When we place these details alongside the actual cultural content of the films, the ideologies they circulate, there are, however, some questions that arise that have so far remained unaddressed. These questions are neither strictly economic, like the ones just described, nor purely cultural, but belong to a border area between them, overlapping with both. This is the area with 'which this chapter is concerned: the point at which political, economic and ideological instances intersect.

The film-maker Kumar Shahani has remarked: 'The biggest problem seems to be that we are working within a capitalist frame work and we do not have a capitalist infrastructure. It is all run on highly speculative lines, on some systems of trading and circulation of money' (Rizvi and Amlad 1980: 13). Shahani's remark points to an extremely vital link between the mode of organization of the industry and the opportunities for experimentation afforded by that industry. Thus to focus on economic questions relating to the industry is not simply to 'flesh out' the background to cultural production but to uncover the nature of the nexus between economic, ideological and political forces that shape the conditions of possibility of cultural production in India.

In exploring this area, our point of departure will be the dominant textual form of the popular Hindi cinema, the form that has enjoyed pre-eminence in the Bombay film industry for nearly four decades. It is a form that would be familiar to anyone who has watched even a small number of the Bombay films. Even in other languages, especially in films from the south, the same textual form serves to organize the cinematic spectacle to a large extent. In the last few years, the industry has been undergoing changes which may lead to mutations of this form, or the introduction of new ones, but as yet the form associated with what I will call the feudal family romance has by no means exhausted itself.

Let us try to define this form. A definition of form, as opposed to a description of content, should be such as to account for, among other things, the narrative structure, the organization of elements within the structure, the means employed to carry the narrative forward from one stage to the next and those by which narrative closure is achieved.

The feudal family romance employs a narrative structure that goes back to the 'romances' that preceded the advent of modern realist fiction in the capitalist west. ^[21] The romance was typically a tale of love and adventure, in which a high-born figure, usually a prince, underwent trials that tested his courage and at the end of which he would return to inherit the father's position and to marry. This narrative structure occurs, not in its original form, but in the form that it acquired in popular theatre, where the entertainment programme would include the narrative interspersed with other elements like the comic routine, music and dance, etc. It was the Parsi theatre that first popularized this form in India. Indian cinema, however, did not adopt this form straightaway. It could not possibly do so in the silent era, but even after the introduction of sound, the adoption of this form was a gradual process. It stabilized roughly during the 1950s, and was to remain unchallenged until the beginning of the 1970s, when new elements were introduced, without, however, completely discarding the old form.

At its most stable, this form included a version of the romance narrative, a comedy track, an average of six songs per film, as well as a range of familiar character types. Narrative closure usually consisted in the restoration of a threatened moral/social order by the hero. This form was flexible enough to include a wide range of contingent elements, including references to topical issues, and propaganda for the government's social welfare measures (to please the censors). Thus, it should not be thought of as being necessarily and completely a bearer of feudal values, even though the overall narrative form derived from romances of the feudal era.

However, Bombay, as well as other centres of film-making have also witnessed campaigns against this form even during the period of its dominance, in favour of 'realism', a term which was defined in a variety of ways. For people in the industry who were dissatisfied with the dominant form, the model to emulate was Hollywood: in periodicals like Screen and Filmfare, film-makers would confess to a preference for films that were realistic and justify their own inability to make such films by blaming the poor taste of the audience. Whenever big-budget films failed, leading to a crisis, the press would repeat its advice: the audience has rejected ,the old masala film, it wants realistic, authentic stories, not songs and dances. Film-makers were urged to work with a ready script and adhere to short, tight schedules. Producers would try, every few years, to unite and impose order on the industry's functioning, to regulate the work schedules of stars, to co-operate in reducing the duplication of themes, etc. In spite of this recurring effort, the so-called 'formula film' held on to its position of pre-eminence. The question that arises therefore is how and why this form was able to dominate the scene for so long. In this chapter, we will investigate this question primarily from the economic angle.

Before proceeding with the analysis, I will set down for convenience, the general conclusions the study arrives at:
(i) As regards the production sector, I will argue that the mode of production in the Hindi film industry is characterized by fragmentation of the production apparatus, subordination of the production process to a moment of the self-valorization of merchant capital, the consequent externality of capital to the production process, the resistance of the rentier class of exhibitors to the expansionist drive of the logic of the market, and the functional centrality of the distributor-financier to the entire process of film-making.
(ii) The Hindi film industry has adopted what Marx calls the 'heterogeneous form of manufacture' in which the whole is assembled from parts produced separately by specialists, rather than being centralized around the processing of a given material, as in serial or organic manufacture. This is of significance to the status of the 'story' in the Hindi film.
(iii) There is evidence of an ongoing struggle between two broadly defined tendencies within the industry, one committed to an ideological mission in keeping with the goals of the postcolonial state's controlled capitalist development and aspiring to the achievement of a homogenized national culture, the other moored in a pre-capitalist culture, employing a patchwork of consumerist and pre-capitalist ideologies and determined to maintain its hold over the production process from the outside. In this context the role of the state as the primary agent of capitalist development becomes crucial. The unfolding of the struggle between these two contending forces has involved appeals for particular forms of state intervention, a campaign for realism and melodrama, and concerted efforts to establish the production sector on an independent basis. It is a struggle, in other words, to effect an adequation of the political, economic and ideological instances.

In the run-up to independence, a section of the industry expected that the government of free India would recognize the potential that cinema held as a medium of mass education and would give it the same encouragement that was envisaged for other industries. It was felt that a modernizing nation would need a modern cultural institution to undertake the requisite ideological tasks. In 1945, five producers from Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore and Madras undertook an expedition to Europe and America to study the conditions of the film industries there. Their report (Report of the Indian Film Industry's Mission to Europe and America, nd) was full of admiration for western efficiency, and concluded with suggestions that would be repeated by industry spokespersons for decades to come. Government support was sought for establishing the industry on a 'stable and progressive foundation'. The state was urged to supply finance, to launch the indigenous manufacture of raw film and equipment, to start a film council and a film institute (which had been proposed before but had been squashed in the Legislative assembly just before the publication of the report); and lastly, a 'Central Film Academy and Research Institute' was proposed to 'combat ... anti-Indian propaganda vehemently carried on abroad especially in the United States before and during the last war' (Mission: 59--60).

The report projected the industry as a partner in the about-to-be independent country's campaign to modernize and project a good image abroad. This was in conformity with the model of socio economic progress that was emerging as the chosen path for India, and was embodied in Nehruvian socialism. Among others this consisted of a combination of measures to develop indigenous capital, to enable it by protection and other state-initiated economic measures to consolidate itself, while launching a social programme of progressive education, the gradual emancipation of the population into an awareness of the rights and responsibilities of social democracy. But the Nehruvian state did not do for the film industry what it was committed to doing for other industries. Nehru himself had remarked that the film industry was not a priority for the new nation,^[22] causing considerable anxiety in industry circles. Despite attempts to portray the industry as sharing the government's (and in particular Nehru's) views about the role of cinema, and the assertion that it was the state's duty, in a capitalist society, to develop entertainment facilities, nothing concrete materialized.

The need to establish film-making as an industry was emphasized by Phalke ^[23] earlier in the century and continues to be a recurrent motif in debates on the future of Indian cinema. To gain 'industry status' is to acquire legitimacy in the eyes of the state, to be accorded the privileges of a successful native industrial venture. In practical terms such a recognition would translate into availability of institutional finance and a collaborative approach on the government's part.

It is not as if the state was unaware of the uses of cinema as a tool of mass education. Building on the existing infrastructure for colonial propaganda film production, the Films Division expanded into a gigantic machine producing newsreels and documentaries for screening in commercial theatres and other places. This was also a source of revenue, since a small fee was charged for each screening. Thus the state policy conformed with the imperative of reproduction of conditions of formal subsumption. The industry's demand was for initiatives that would enable a transformation of the prevailing film aesthetic. The state's response was to impose a parasitical propaganda element on every screening, which was meant to take care of education in modernity, leaving the form of the feature itself untouched.

Following the Film Enquiry Commission report, however, a Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was set up in 1960. With a budget that was too small to earn it a major role in the industry, the FFC gave out insufficient loans to producers who consequently ended up with incomplete films and unrepayable loans. Later, a revised policy of financing low-budget, non-commercial films was implemented, inaugurating the era of the 'new cinema,' which will be discussed later on. As far as the mainstream cinema was concerned, the FFC brought about no change in the existing state-industry relations. The institution that was expected to change this state of affairs was the Film Council, also recommended by the Film Enquiry Committee (FEC) report. Without the 'political' alliance between the state and the industry that the Film Council would have represented, the economic intervention via the FFC was ineffectual. However, though the industry as a whole clamoured for the economic assistance promised by the FFC, only a few producers were willing to enter into an institutional alliance with the state that would impose obligations on both parties.

Similar ideas for government-industry co-operation had been floated even before independence. Fazalbhoy's review reports, for instance, that the Indian Motion Picture Congress of 1939 was envisaged as a permanent body that would function as a 'central organisation' of the industry as recommended previously by the 1927 ICC report (Fazalbhoy nd: 84-5). This central body was, in the eyes of it proponents, a symbol of the will to lead the film sector into the industrial era, of the industry's self-image as a national institution with developmental responsibilities (ibid: 96-7). The 1951 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (FEC Report), reviving the idea, observed:

On the organizational side we would recommend that early steps should be taken to set up a statutory Film Council of India as the central authority to superintend and -regulate the film industry, to act as its guide, friend and philosopher, and to advise the Central and State governments in regard to various matters connected with the production, distribution and exhibition of films. Such a Council, we envisage, will give the industry the necessary stimulus and inspiration to regulate its affairs on healthy and constructive lines, ensure that organizationally it functions in an efficient and business like manner, ensure professional conduct and discipline in its various branches and enforce standards of quality which would make the film a cultural agent and an instrument of healthy entertainment (FEC Report 1951: 187-8).

The Council had to regulate the industry without controlling it. It was to have statutory powers and the authority to institute research projects, training institutions, a 'story bureau', a casting bureau, a production code administration on the lines of the one in America, etc. (ibid: 189-94).

This measure came up for consideration frequently and was blocked each time by the resistance of a large section who claimed that control rather than benign regulation was the government's real motive. Throughout the fifties, sixties and the early seventies, the idea of a Council was discussed in the film press, with a mounting sense of urgency as the Indira Gandhi regime unfolded its 'socialist' agenda. Support for the idea came from established film-makers like V. Shantaram, Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, Mohan Segal, etc. and from the technicians' and cineworkers' unions which stood to gain from a well-organized industry. It is possible that some of those who openly supported the idea were motivated by a fear of displeasing the government. Opponents of the plan were people with a more traditional business approach like Sunderlal Nahata, Chandulal Shah and lastly, J. Om Prakash, who as elected head of the Film Federation of India, warned his membership that they would have to achieve internal unity in order to ward off the threat of a Film Council. ^[24]

Clearly, the long-term benefits that might accrue from a stable infrastructure were not very attractive to those whose interests were best served by preserving the anarchic backward capitalism that reigned in the industry. Behind the stated fear of government control was a real apprehension of having to forego the benefits of a substantial inflow of black money. It became clear in the course of this conflict between the supporters and opponents of the proposal, that the industry was not ready for a transformation of the prevailing relations of production and power. That the proposal came to nothing is not surprising: even its supporters were not ready to make a crusade of it. Their reluctance was reinforced by fears that the Indira Gandhi regime was contemplating radical measures like nationalization and licensing of producers. In 1980, the Report o/the Working Group on National Film Policy (NFP Report) dismissed the Council idea as ill-advised and instead recommended 'indirect' measures to improve quality (Report 1980: 20) ^[25] Nevertheless, while it lasted, the idea of a Film Council served as a measure of the changing relations between government and industry. It became the focus of a discourse of industrial advancement tied to the project to develop a new, bourgeois aesthetic, a developmental vision of cultural production and state-backed capitalist growth.

The Organization of Production

The film texts that reach us as finished products are made possible, not only by 'cultural' factors, but also by the mode of production that prevails in the industry, and in the society in which that industry operates. Janet Staiger (1985), who has done an exhaustive study of the Hollywood mode of production, begins by asserting that the socio-economic 'base' does not enjoy any privileged role as determinant in the emergence of technology and ideological forms, as Jean Louis Comolli (1993) had argued. Instead, following John Ellis (1992) and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, she regards the conditions of film practice-ideological, economic, political and technological-as 'a series of histories' constituting 'the terrain of possibilities' (Staiger 1985: 87-8).

Staiger argues that we cannot simply assume that the 'group style' that dominated Hollywood film-making was made possible by historical conditions extraneous to it. It is equally possible that certain production practices were adopted because they were the best for the particular style of film-making that the industry desired (ibid: 88). Staiger is right in rejecting the economic determinism implied by the argument that the style is just a reflection of the adopted mode of production. However, she does not take up the same question in a larger context: that is to say, 'do the socio-economic conditions prevailing in the society as a whole have anything to do with the choice of style and form?

Staiger identifies a series of 'systems of production', i.e. the modes of combination of the 'factors of production' in the Hollywood film industlY. She traces the ways in which the labour force, the means of production, and financing combine in different ways to constitute in different periods of film history, specific 'systems of production' organized around the central function of a particular skilled member of the firm: the 'cameraman' system of production, the director system, the 'director-unit' system and so on (ibid: 85-153, 309-64).

In order to determine what systems of production may be in operation in Bombay, it is necessary to first understand the relations between the different sectors of the film industry and the way production is organized within the network formed by these sectors. The FEC report of 1951 notes that unlike the concentration of production in the hands of a few concerns in Hollywood, 'India is distinguished by a plethora of producers' (FEC Report: 64) The figures cited show the extent of fragmentation:

Table 1: A Plethora of Producers
___________________________________________________________________________

Year	Films	Producers	Maximum films by a single producer
1939	167	94	9
1940	171	102	7
1946	200	151	-
1947	283	214	7
1948	264	211	6

_______________________________________________________________________
^{Source: Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, 1951: 64, 323-4}

The average number of films made per producer was highest in 1939 at less than two. By 1948 the average had dropped to just over one film per producer. Not only were there a large number of producers turning out one or two films a year, but a significant number of them were 'newcomer independents' afflicted by a high rate of 'infant mortality'.

The production sector of the industry can thus be divided into two broad segments consisting of a tiny group of 'established' producers and a large number of independents. This has been the general trend at least since 1939, that is to say, before India was drawn into the war effort. YA. Fazalbhoy's Review (nd) published soon after the 1939 Indian Motion Picture Congress that was held in Bombay, shows that under-capitalization was very much the norm even in the 'studio era', thus reducing the importance of the break that was attributed (by Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (980), for instance) to an influx of black money that lured stars away from the studios during the Second World War years.

To begin with, Fazalbhoy traces the entry of independent producers to the early thirties when the arrival of sound suddenly freed the Indian language film from competition with imported films and led to its undisputed leadership and a vast expansion of its market. Thus,

every qualified and unqualified man rushed into film production and over f()ur hundred pictures were made in some of the earlier years. Very soon came a glut in the markd and a number of studios and producing companies closed down because their products could not be sold profitably. The industry has not yet recovered from the depreSSion that came in the train of these successive disasters (Review, nd).

He concludes with the now familiar prescription that organization 'on more scientific principles' and 'better facilities for finance' could alone prevent the high rate of failure of the production companies. The Indian producer, according to Fazalbhoy,

is usually satisfied if he can take one picture in hand at a time and follow it up to its end through many months of hard labor. The economies in overhead expenditure that come from producing a number of pictures at a time have necessarily to be sacrificed (ibid).

Establishing the industry on a firm capitalist basis, with high capital investment and mass production were seen to be crucial but the industry's 'internal organization' was too weak to achieve this and thus could not attract the support of the government and the public.

If the extremely small units of the present day succeed in expanding sufficiently to ensure economic working or if they merge into larger units, they can not only get sufficient financial support, but also secure such an important voice in commercial matters that governmental authorities will scarcely be able to ignore them (ibid: 7).

Related to these symptoms of economic disorder and fragmentation is the question of how the individual film itself is put together: Studio facilities being limited, the lack of pre-planning adds to delays and necessitates last minute improvisations (Fazalbhoy Review: 10-11). Dialogue, role development and even the story's line of progression were being decided during the production. The NFP report, published in 1980, did not see any change in this regard (NFP Report: 17). Thus, while a large number of films are produced every year, there is no 'mass production' in the strict sense of the term. The importance of this detail will make itself felt as we proceed.

The studios, an important cornerstone of the film industry, were in a position of unquestioned dominance in the 1930s, when the film world was 'beginning to have the look of an organized industry' (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 117). Why were they then unable to hold on to their position of strength when it was challenged by the independent newcomers' As it is usually understood, the strategy of the newcomers was based on a shrewd calculation of the role of the star in the success of a film. The stars, whose incomes in the studios were moderate, were lured away with the offer of huge sums, thus drawing the studios into a competition from which they never recovered: The elevation of the stars to the status of independent values, capable of a sort of self-valorization, upset the control over the production process which had enabled the studios to maintain their methods and (non)disciplines of work. This was also the occasion for the entry of 'black money' into the industry. The newcomers, backed by the tainted surpluses of blackmarketeers (later they would be joined by smugglers), offered a part of the high payment to the stars in the form of unaccounted money, which would be 'tax-free'. During the last years of British rule, this practice was even regarded as a patriotic act (ibid: 127).

But there is another reason for the loss of dominance: although the studios were large well-organized production centres, they functioned on what Barnouw and Krishnaswamy call the 'one-big family' principle. 'The big companies of the 1930s, like the Phalke company before them, seemed to be extensions of the joint family system. Many of the companies had, in fact, clusters of relatives' (ibid: 117). Thus, these companies were functioning in a market economy, producing commodities for mass distribution, but the production relations were based on kinship loyalties.

From the trends noted above it would be reasonable to conclude that the transformation wrought by the influx of independent producers intensified rather than caused the dispersed mode of functioning of the industry. The independent producer was at best a small-scale capitalist entrepreneur who could depend on the availability of low-wage casual labour and freelance acting talent with enormous wage differences between the stars, the 'character actors' and the 'extras' and could rent all the requisite technical services and equipment. The star, who was previously only one of the more important units of congealed value (or 'symbolic capital') to go into the product, now became the primary source of value.

A separate distribution sector for the Indian film industry was a late development. In the silent era, when Indian films formed only a small segment of the total films exhibited in the country, only imports were put on the market by distributors. A distribution sector for Indian films only emerged with the birth of the talkies and an increase in Indian language film production. Distribution and exhibition are the two sectors of the entire process that are Widely acknowledged to be the most profitable. The proliferation of small and short-lived production companies with no fixed capital and limited working capital has meant that the distributors' profits have emerged as one of the main sources of finance for film production ^[26] The separate existence and the relation of dependence between the distribution and production sectors ensures that capital remains permanently dissociated from the production sector which it subordinated to its own self-valorization. Capitalist enterprise is still in its emergent form here and for all practical purposes remains a system akin to the 'putting out system' of early capitalism, where production is subservient to distributors' capital which is advanced to producers, the product then belonging to the financier.

Film distribution was not the main occupation of those who entered the business. Most of them were moneylenders who turned distributors in order to recover their money:

The 'minimum guarantee system', which is supposed to assure the producer a minimum return on each film, is also not as favourable to producers as it appears. The amount that is fixed as the minimum guarantee in this transaction is usually the amount loaned by the distributor to the producer during the making of the film. As a result the producer often gets no revenue from a film after production because the minimum return has already been given in the form of loans. It was also in the distributors' interest 'to see that returns from pictures are not so excessive as to enable the producer to pay them off' (ibid: 48).

The exhibition sector's role in this scenario largely complements that of the distributor. In the first place, distributors, to secure their long-term interests, establish control over theatres. A syndicate of distributors has been in operation in Bombay, monopolizing the theatres. The rise of the multi-starrer, and the saturation release strategy led to rental increases which reinforced the monopoly of a few distribution houses (NFP Report: 24). Theatres were scarce in any case because of unfriendly construction rules. Even when new ones were constructed all over India during the seventies after the rules were relaxed, demand continued to exceed supply in densely populated cities.

There also emerged an intermediary class of 'theatre contractors' who booked theatres and sold time to distributors at higher prices. The logic of the industry also gave rise to the staging of 'fake jubilees' in some centres to create a good impression on audiences in late release centres. In 1957, Filmfare decided to focus on the 'exhibition racket'. The sharp rise in rentals-between 1955 and 1957 according to the magazine, the average rental went up by Rs 700 in the case of small and second-run theatres and by Rs 2000 in the case of first-run houses-was the most tangible index of what was seen as a racket involving various forms of deceit. ^[27] In 1972, echoing the Indira Gandhi government's slogan of 'Garibi Hatao', a Filmfare editorial entitled 'Zamindari Hatao' returned to the question of the black money hoards of the exhibitors and the exorbitant rentals. It pointed out that even foreign film theatres demanded black money payments when they screened Hindi films. It wondered how long the 'socialist government' would tolerate such 'antisocial' activities. The title pointed to the links between theatre owners and a more traditional, British-created form of landlordism. The government, which had recently proclaimed its commitment to ending feudal practices was called upon to smash the power of theatre owners and bring them into the modern capitalist economy as rationally-functioning entrepreneurs.

This brief account of the economic structure of the Bombay film industry demonstrates the dominance of merchant capital and the fragmentation and heteronomy of the production sector. Against this background we can now turn to a consideration of the form of manufacture widely adopted by the industry and its significance for the understanding of Indian film ideology.

_______________________________________________________

^{[20] Panna Shah (1981), R.D. Jain (1960), M.A. Oommen and K.V Joseph (1991),
Manjunath Pendakur (1990), Someswar Bhowmik (1986); reports of the inquiry
commissions appointed by government are also a good source of such information
and analysis.}

^{[21] See McKeon (1987) for a detailed discussion of the romance form as precursor of the novel}

^{[22] Filmfare, 28 November 1952, p. 5}

^{[23] See the translations of Phalke's writings published by the National Film Archives
of which a selection has been reprinted in Continuum 2.1 (988/89) 51-73. Especially
significant is the fact that Phalke conceived of Indian cinema as part of the Swadeshi
campaign to develop indigenous industry. For a further discussion of Phalke and
swadeshi, see A. Rajadhyaksha, 'The Phalke Era', JAI (1987).}

^{[24] Screen, 12July 1968, p. 1; 19July 1968, p.13; 14 February 1969, p.1; 16 May
1969, p. 1; 23 May 1969, p. 8; 14 November 1969, p. 1; 14 August 1970, p. 1;
23 October 1970, p. 1.

Also Filmfare, 4 April 1952, p. 4; 27 May 1955; 6 January 1956, p. 5; 3 February
1956, p. 3; 17 February 1956, p. 3; 25 May 1956, p.19; 16 October 1964; 30 October
1964, p. 5; 17 January 1969, p. 7; 11 April 1969, p. 5; 4 July 1919, pp. 27, 29, 31;
1 August 1969, p. 23; 5 December 1919, p. 7; 16 January 1970, p. 7; 28 August 1970,
p. 5; 11 September 1970, p. 5; 17 December 1971, p. 7; 2 May 1975, p. 9.}

^{[25] B.K. Karanjia, as editor of Filmfare and the FFC chair, had championed the
proposal, revived the idea in a 1987 article and harked back to the regulation vs.
control debate. However, the advent of television, the liberalization measures of the
Congress regimes, a new culture of vigorous middle-class consumerism and the
industry's scramble to survive in a competitive environment had meanwhile so
trdnsformed the scene that the idea of state-supported capitalist growth seemed
distinctly odd.}

^{[26] Note that financing of production by distributors is by no means a peculiar
feature of the Indian scene This was commonly the practice in Hollywood and
elsewhere. What is important is the industry's status in relation to that sector.
The chief characteristic of distribution in India is that to a great extent
the firms handling the work are merely departments of financing
houses... Since the returns from a picture will be recovered only
after it is in the market for some time the studio must have sufficient
funds to carry on its activities. The financiers who stepped· in with
this help took as security the returns from the picture and in the
majority of cases retained the distribution with themselves
(Fazalbhoy Review: 28-9).}

^{[27] Filmfare, 24 May 1957, p. 3}

_______________________________________________________

The Heterogeneous Form of Manufacture

Marx makes a distinction between the heterogeneous and the organic or serial forms of manufacture. The first, heterogeneous mode is characterized by the separate production of the component parts of a product and their final assembly into one unit, while in the second a given raw material passes through various stages of production assigned to various workers or units within an integrated serial process (Marx, Capital I: 461-3). In Hollywood, as Staiger points out, the organization of production 'most closely approximates serial manufacture', and features mass production (although far removed from the 'assembly-line rigidity' of large industry) and a detailed division of labour, that is to say a division of labour developed in the factory production process and either intensifying or deviating from the more generally prevailing social division of labour. In Hollywood, the 'detailed division of labour mode became dominant when commercial film-making started emphasizing the production of narrative fiction films after 1906' (Staiger 1985: 93). The comparison with Hollywood is crucial because it establishes the centrality of the question of narrative to the 'economic' questions being considered here.

A broad equation can be established between each of the two film industries under consideration and a 'fundamental form of manufacture'. If Hollywood is dominated by serial or organic manufacture, Bombay is dominated by the heterogeneous form. Marx's example for the heterogeneous form is watch-making. The components of the watch are produced by different and separately functioning skilled workers, and assembled into the final product. If we consider that the Hindi film is conceived in this way, as an assemblage of pre-fabricated parts, we get a more accurate sense of the place of various elements, like the story, the dance, the song, the comedy scene, the fight, etc. in the film text as a whole. On the other hand, what makes this method of functioning unsuitable for Hollywood is the fact that a material substratum-the story-is the point of departure of the production process and its transformation into a narrative film is the final goal of that process. The needle, Marx's example for serial manufacture, is distinguished by the fact that the base material of the product is present from the beginning to the end of the process. In the watch the whole's relation to its material components is that of an ideal signifying process (the measurement and indication of time) to its material means of realization.

It is striking that the typical film produced by the Bombay film industry should bear so close a resemblance, in terms of its relation to 'raw material', to the example of watch-making. Here we encounter the limits of the analysis we have been pursuing so far, which is focused on the internal economic organization of the industry. The fragmented, episodic structure of the Hindi film text reminds us that beyond the combination of the mode of production and form of manufacture, there arises a problem of narrative that can only be resolved at the level of the social totality.

To summarize the argument, it is my contention that while the Hollywood production process is structured around the primary operation of transforming a given raw material, the story/scenario, into a film, in the production process most familiar in Bombay, the separate development of the components of the film text render this process relatively unimportant. Indeed it could be said that the story here occupies a place on par with that of the rest of the components, rather than the pre-eminent position it enjoys'in the Hollywood mode. The written script, which enabled 'disjunctive shooting schedules' and other measures aimed at economy and efficiency and necessitating the division of the task of writing into several stages is one factor of extreme importance to the Hollywood production process, whereas everyone who writes on Bombay cinema notes, that this is conspicuous by its absence there. The script 'became more than just the mechanism to pre-check quality: it became the blueprint from which all other work was organized' (Staiger 1985: 94).

Contrast this with the numerous and constant complaints in Bombay about the lack of a fully-developed script and the equally frequent and shortlived euphoria about signs of change. In the early 1950s, in the wake of one of the recurring production crises, the 'stereotyped films' were condemned universally along with the absence of 'co-ordination' and 'powerful or realistic theme(s)'. ^[28] A 'silent revolution' was discovered, demonstrating audience dissatisfaction with the existing formula films and the search for new formulas based on realistic stories ^[29] was launched. Story writers were said to be coming into their own with producers launching a search for 'original story material'. ^[30] The actor and left-wing cultural activist Balraj Sahni argued in an article that the screenplay and not the story was the vital element in' film-making. 'I cannot imagine', he wrote, referring to one of the conventions of Bombay film-making, 'how the dialogue writing can be separated from the screenplay writing.' Sahni linked his idea of the pre-eminence of a holistically conceived screenplay with a 'revolution in men's minds' that had placed 'man' at the centre of the world. He urged film-makers to study the realist drama of the west, which 'will teach our screen writer the 'method' of realism' and help to emancipate him from 'his feudal outlook'.^[31]

Each of the component elements of the Hindi film is capable of much internal variation but their consistency from film to film is ensured by the fact that these variations are not demanded by the narrative. Thus, there are an infinite variety of songs, many extremely talented musicians with a tremendous capacity for blending different traditions of music and creating a seemingly endless supply of catchy tunes. But the lyrics are written in a language which has its own set repertoire of images and tropes for themes like romantic love, separation, rejection, maternal love, marriage, etc. The songs adopt a literary' style which has a predilection for certain recurrent motifs: the mehfil, shama/parwana, chaman, bahar, nazaaren, and so on. This repertoire of images is drawn from the frozen diction of romantic Urdu poetry.^[32] It is the task of poets, who figure here as traditional artisans with control over their own means of production, to supply these songs.

Dialogue, similarly, employs its own register of terms and idioms. Here we may observe one of the reasons why discussions of the need for a script also combine an exhortation to find realistic stories. For although it is rarely done, it is not impossible to prepare a fully detailed script for the kind of film described so far. But the problem lies elsewhere: the kind of narrative contexts that the given dialogue, lyrics, dances and stock characters make possible do not require a prepared script, simply because the variations in them are caused by innovations internal to the traditions of dialogue-writing, Urdu lyric-writing and dance history rather than the external pressure of the particularities of a narrative. The encounter between the good and bad elements in the fight scene is also a stylized enactment that follows its own logic of elaboration. Within the virtual space of the fight, what is enacted is a choreographed ballet, credited to 'fight composers' who have their own star value.

We are now in a position to state more precisely the manner in which a 'heterogeneous form of manufacture' operates in the Hindi film industry. It does so to the extent that the cinematic instance is not the dominant one in the production of the film text; to the extent that the component elements of the text arise in traditions that have a separate existence or in traditions that, arising in the context of film itself (like the star system), acquire an independence that retroactively determines the form of the text. The different component elements have not been subsumed under the dominance of a cinema committed to narrative coherence. The heteronomous conditions under which the production sector operates are paralleled by a textual heteronomy whose primary symptom is the absence of an integral narrative structure.

Genre and Industrial Organization

In this context let us consider an interesting paradox. Most writers on the Indian cinema agree that during the studio era, while there was a weak but noticeable tendency to generic differentiation, post independence history shows a tendency for generic distinctions to gradually weaken as a dominant form, most commonly known as the 'social', comes to reign supreme.

Rosie Thomas has described the emergence of the social succintly:

By the 1930s a number of distinctly Indian genres were well established. These included socials, mythologicals, devotionals, historicals, and stunt, costume, and fantasy films. As song and dance are a central and integral part of films of all genres, the term musical is seldom used. Although genre distinctions began to break down in the 1960s, they are still relevant, not only to an understanding of the range of films made today and in the past, but because the form of the now dominant socials has in fact integrated aspects of all earlier genres (1987: 304).

Thomas's definition of the social indicates that the term is convenient rather than appropriate:

The social has always been the broadest and, since the 1940s, the largest category and loosely refers to any film in a contemporary setting not otherwise classified. It traditionally embraces a wide spectrum, from heavy melodrama to light-hearted comedy, from films with social purpose to love stories, from tales of family and domestic conflict to urban crime thrillers (ibid).

This form not only subordinated the other generic tendencies to itself externally (i.e. by restricting the number of films with a distinctly different generic identity and/or by relegating them to the more provincial or sub-cultural exhibition outlets), but also by an internal subordination, whereby films in the dominant form included within themselves, fragments of genres like the thriller, the detective film, the gangster film, the costume drama and the devotional. The transition from studio production to the dominance of independent producers is one of the factors cited for the rise to pre-eminence of the 'social'.

Thus, on the one hand, the dominance of a few studios yielded to the new, extraneously backed power of a multitude of independent one-film producers, resulting in a fragmentation of the industry. On the other hand, in a parallel and contrary development, a tendency to generic differentiation, which was supported by the competing studios' desire to give a distinct identity to their products, was reversed and a super-genre swallowed up all the rest. Comparing the studio era with the situation at the start of the sixties, B.R. Chopra, one of the established producers in the industry, commented:

In the past, producers were financed by progressive men who were interested in keeping up a banner like that of New Theatres, Prabhat, Ranjit, Sagar Movietone and Bombay Talkies. gut today the financier advances money only to one single picture which has become a Unit by itself regardless of the banner under which it is made. ^[33]

We can ignore the suggestion that the financiers of the past were all progressive. What is interesting in this passage is the idea that the new mode of film production had led to the conception of each film as a single Unit. The use of the capital letter suggests that what is being referred to here is a conception of each film in its comprehensive singularity, its status as a product specific to the particular combination of financier-producer-director-stars and undetermined by the need to distinguish it from products of a multitude of other similar combinations that together made up the Bombay film industry. Thus arises the ideology of the all-inclusive film, whose vision of the world tends to be multi-faceted, episodic and loosely structured. The post-independence Bombay film's aesthetic has often been traced by critics to Sanskrit dramaturgy but here we glimpse the historically more significant material determinations of the dominant film form.

The structuring of a film text around a single linear strand of narrative with one dominant affect-pathos, comedy, action, mystery, music, romance, horror-indicates the logic of a production process based on product differentiation and the development of 'special needs'. Where such a process has not advanced beyond the elementary stages, where an industry is composed of a large number of individual capitals 'not bound together by any objective social interconnection' (Banaji 1990: 237), the conditions for the planned differentiation of products do not exist. These two modes of capitalist production (by a firm and by individuals functioning in temporary alliances) thus result in two different modes of commodification.

In the Hollywood mode, the commodity unit is the individual film. Each film is marked by a high degree of internal unity and the values and skills that enter into its production are organized into a stable hierarchy, whose primary effect is that of a tightly-organized coherent narrative. By contrast, the independently-produced Bombay film is marked by the relative autonomy retained by the various elements that flow into the production process. ^[34] The system of film songs has an autonomous existence, as we have seen, and so do the dialogue and the star image.

This means that the process of commodification operates along lines that are determined by an unevenly-developed market capitalism, fragmenting the film text into its component parts. Thus the individual film tends to function more as a space for the exhibition of a combination of autonomous talents or values. ^[35] This space is organized by means of a minimal narrative framework.

Returning to the relation between the production practices and ideology, it is necessary to ask whether the haphazard and individualized mode of production that has survived in Bombay for such a long time is necessitated by the kind of ideology that the industry is committed to disseminating. So far, it has seemed as if the economic conditions of the film industry constitute a series of drawbacks, failures and constraints, an image produced by the industry's own perceptions. The analysis rests on a presupposition that the economic realities were acting as a constraint on the type of film that could be produced by the industry. But it is possible to pose a different question: if it is said that Hollywood, when assigned (or assigning itself a certain ideological task, ^[36] developed a mode of production that would facilitate its achievement, can a similar statement be made about the relationship between the ideology of the Indian film and its mode of production? The question, in other words, concerns the instrumentality of the production process to an ideological goal: can we assume that this is true of all situations?

The evidence points to two conflicting answers: on the one hand, there is the perceived failure of the attempt to gain mastery over the production process, to make it serve a determinate ideological project; on the other hand, the very impediments placed in the way of such consolidation by the powerful financiers may be said to have contributed (with whatever degree of 'intention') to the perpetuation of a backward capitalism in production and pre-capitalist ideologies in which relationships based on loyalty, servitude, the honour of the khandaan (clan) and institutionalized Hindu religious practices form the core cultural content. Thus, a state of affairs that appears to be the result of a series of 'failures' ^[37] may well be the one that the particular state form obtaining in India makes possible. Given this, it is difficult to agree with the oft-repeated assertion that the popular Indian film is 'precisely tailored to the tastes of the local audience'.^[38]

Having examined the economic structure of the film industry, we have seen that beyond the distinctly economic constraints on this cultural institution, there remains the problem of narrative whose explanation has to be found outside the narrow framework of the industry's mode of production. We have seen that the prevailing mode of organization of the industry perpetuates itself because the dominant aesthetic form does not require the kind of integrated production process, which becomes imperative where the narratives are particularistic, focused on chunks of the real. Why does the standard Hindi film take the form it does? Why has it proved so difficult, and yet to some so necessary, to integrate the film text around a central, particularistic narrative?

The advocates of realism, narrative integrity, linearity and other virtues function in the history we have recounted as the would-be agents of a bourgeois revolution. Their repeated campaigns, all ending in failure, are symptomatic of the return, at every step, of a logic of form that is beyond their control, beyond the reach of the solutions they propose, a logic that could not be grasped in its totality because it is itself located at the level of the social totality, and determines the discursive possibilities available to cultural producers. Now, perhaps, as the basic conditions are changing, we may be able to catch a glimpse of this logic.

What we observe in Hollywood, during the era of 'classical Hollywood cinema', is a historic turn in the logic of production whereby stories were situated at the beginning of the production process, in the position which, in other industries, is occupied by 'raw material'. This positioning of the narrative as the pre-eminent factor in the process, was what made it possible for Hollywood to establish, for about thirty years, a system of efficient mass production that has been the envy of the rest of the world. Such a shift, however, was facilitated by the fact that the aesthetics of realism itself was capable of being re-imagined in these terms. Realism's political significance becomes clear in this light: Andre Bazin, perhaps the most influential theorist of the cinema, associates realism with the maintenance of the values of liberal democracy. In his way of representing the true nature of realism, we glimpse the traces of a conception of realist performance as the occasion for production of meaning by audiences. Bazin manages to at once acknowledge the productive, creative role of the author, and negate it, by investing the right to interpret and produce meaning in the spectator as sovereign citizen. Such a conception of the aesthetic process is inconceivable without the historical process of capitalist expansion which gradually renamed every bit of the world as 'raw material'. The genius of Hollywood was to have discovered a way to combine the real process of transformation of raw material with the replication of that relation within the sphere of ideology.

How could the Indian industry reproduce that kind of unique historical event? Contrary to the fictive performance contract that prevailed in the west, what prevailed here can be represented as shown in the chart below. In this structure, there is no scope for the raw material relation: the representation of 'chunks of the real' which are made available for interpretation. The devolution of meaning requires no large-scale production system. There is a political problem here which outweighs all the efforts focussed on finding economic or purely cultural solutions to the industry's problems. Only if and when that transcendental point of emanation of meaning ceases to regulate the discourse of cultural texts will the occasion arise for searching for other ways of organizing the text. And when that happens, it may no longer be necessary or desirable to repeat the history of Hollywood: other possibilities may have emerged by then.

Fictive contractual relations in the (film) performance apparatus: Two types
Performance as:

1. Relay of Meaning (Heterogeneous manufacture)	2. Production of meaning (Serial manufacture)
Message from the Symbolic (God, King, star)	(No message from the Symbolic)
Transmission of message through performance (producers, actors)	Reality as raw material for meaning production (author/producer)
Reception of the message (audience)	Reception as meaning production by audience as bearers of Symbolic function

_______________________________________________________

^{[28] Filmfare, 7 March 1952, p. 6}

^{[29] Filmfare, 2 May 1952, p. 38.}

^{[30] Filmfare, 16 May 1952, p. 37-R}

^{[31] Filmfare, 30 May 1952, p. 39.}

^{[32] Film lyricists produce versions of ghazal, qawwali, thumri and other musical
forms with a distinctly 'filmy' flavour. Other traditions drawn from are those associated
with Hindu weddings and other rituals and various folk forms. See Dale (1996) for a
brief account of the almost 1000-year history of the ghazal.}

^{[33] Filmfare, 29 Decemher 1961, p. 19.}

^{[34] But see Alexander Doty's (Wide Angle 102), 'Music Sells Movies' which points to a minor trend in Hollywood that seems to parallel ours.}

^{[35] This explains the otherwise peculiar function of film titles in the Hindi cinema.
Titles are often abstract, symbolic words and phrases: Kismat (Fate), Pyar ka Mausam
(Season of Love), etc. They bear a relation to the text that is metaphoric and disjunctive,
rarely metonymic. They are witness to the non-specificity of narratives. As such
within a few years of the release of a film, the title becomes available for re-use. On
the other hand, the point about a title like Junglee (The Wild One) is that it refers to
a character trait of the hero which is quickly shown to be superficial. It is a sort of
brand-name through which a star persona is identifiable.}

^{[36] The details of which need not concern us here. There is a vast amount of
writing on Hollywood ldeology. Apart from J. Staiger (1985), who makes the specific
point mentioned here, see G. Mast and Cohen (1992), B. Nichols (1993), and
P. Rosen (1986) for a wide selection of representative writings.}

^{[37] On the problems arising from the use of 'failure' as a concept in historiography, see G. Spivak (1988).}

^{[38] Nick Roddick, 'Sticky Wicket for Indian Films', Screen International, No 634 (January 9-16,1988), p. 15.}

_______________________________________________________

3. The Absolutist Gaze: Political Structure and Cultural Form

The question of nationalism (or more precisely, the formation and the chances of consolidation of nation-states) in post-colonial countries has been the object of reflection in much recent work. In the 'Notes on Italian History' Gramsci developed the concept of 'passive revolution' as a 'criterion of interpretation' (Gramsci 1971: 114). In these notes, Gramsci was grappling with a central problem in the critique of political economy related to the development of capitalism beyond the borders of the primary capitalist states and involving a 'transmission' of 'ideological currents' from the 'more advanced countries' to the 'periphery' (ibid: 116-17). These reflections on 'passive revolution' and the related concept of 'war of position' have proved to be a very important point of departure for current thinking on the subject.

In one of the most ambitious applications of these concepts to the question of the postcolonial nation-state, Partha Chatterjee has argued, in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World 'that passive revolution' is the general form of the transition from colonial to post-colonial nation-states in the 20th century' (Chatterjee, 1986: 50). In elaborating this thesis, Chatterjee notes how, according to Gramsci, there are 'organic tendencies of the modern state' which seem to favour the forces which carry out a protracted ... 'war of position' rather than those which think only of an instantaneous 'war of movement' (ibid: 47). The open confrontation associated with the 'war of movement' does not suit the interests of emergent bourgeoisies in the underdeveloped peripheral regions. Under such conditions there are two possible options: either the pre-capitalist sites of resistance have to be modernized as a pre-condition of the establishment of a modern nation-state conducive to capitalist growth; or a nation-state has to be established as the first step, to be followed by a process of reform from above which will gradually modernize the nation and expand the domain of capitalism.

In adopting the second approach, the national state banks on the colonial state machinery, which it inherits through the 'transfer of power' that marks the transition from a heteronomous state formation to a (relatively) autonomous one. An alliance of dominant classes ^[39] mobilizes the masses in support of its programme of develop ment. However, this mobilization, and the transformation that it envisages, are limited in two 'fundamental ways':

On the one hand, it does not attempt to break up or transform in any radical way the institutional structures of 'rational' authority set up in the period of colonial rule, whether in the domain of administration and law or in the realm of economic institutions or in the structure of education, scientific research and cultural organization. On the other hand, it also does not undertake a full-scale assault on all pre-capitalist dominant classes; rather it seeks to limit their former power, neutralize them where necessary, attack them only selectively, and in general to bring them round to a position of subSidiary allies within a reformed state structure (Chatterjee 1986: 49).

An interventionist state apparatus becomes the principal instrument of capitalist transformation in the absence of bourgeois hegemony over civil society (which is to say, in the absence of civil society). Capitalist control of the state apparatus is curtailed by the coalition within which the bourgeoisie has to function, and in which it can only pursue 'reformist and "molecular" changes' (ibid: 49).

Neil Larsen has also turned to the 'Notes on Italian History' in talking about the Latin American nation-states. Both Chatterjee and Larsen identify colonization as the crucial factor in the 'state first' model of capitalist development. The state in post-colonial societies 'finds itself enmeshed in an acute crisis originating in its own abstract negativity as an autonomous power'. Its principal tasks are the 'conquest of civil society' and the concomitant constitution of the 'unitary bourgeois subject' (Larsen 1990: 73).

The thesis that 'passive revolution' is the characteristic mode of transition to (and further development of post-colonial nation-states enables us to retain a dialectical approach to the question of national autonomy/dependency. One of the problems faced by contemporary cultural theory is how to balance the perception of the cultural autonomy of post-colonial states with the reality of their dependent status in global capitalism. Even as we witness the steady erosion of the economic and political autonomy of these nations with the expansion of multinational capital and the military-political power of the NATO bloc, cultural theory takes on the responsibility of a compensatory assertion of absolute cultural autonomy for these beleaguered entities. ^[40] The paradox here is that the sources of this autonomy are seen to reside in the irreducible cultural differences between previously independently developing civilizations and communities, that is, in whatever already existed before the advent of a homogenizing capitalism. On the other hand, within the limits of a capitalist order the possibility of a difference and autonomy in a modern sense is predicted on the construction of a new national culture, itself dependent on political and economic autonomy.

Contrary to such axiomatic assertions of cultural autonomy therefore, this study will assume that there is a complex dialectic of autonomizing and heteronomizing tendencies within the field of mass culture where cinema is situated, and that the cultural forms arising from what Gramsci calls the 'transmission' of 'ideological currents' are a symptom of this dialectic. In particular, in a discussion of cultural forms, we must pay attention to the question of the production (and reproduction) of new subjectivities compatible with generalized capitalist development. The 'Citizen Subject', as Balibar has argued, is the elementary unit of the abstract State, an ideal unit whose actual realization is never complete, even in the most advanced of the capitalist countries. Nevertheless, this 'utopic figure' is, according to Balibar, 'the actor of a permanent revolution', a figure whose very positing, by the bourgeois revolution, inaugurates an unceasing struggle for the equality which was the unrealized premise of that revolution's philosophy (Balibar 1992: 54).

Although the Citizen-Subject remains an incompletely realized utopic figure in all instances, it is also the case that this non-realization itself takes specific forms in different nation-state formations. I will try to elaborate this by reference to Indian culture, where it can be observed that the concept of 'citizen' remains an ideal attached to a unique individual, rather than an attribute that is automatically assumed to belong to all who inhabit the nation-state. Of course, in the political sphere, every citizen votes and thereby realizes his/her 'citizenness'. However, this sphere of symbolic equality is qualified not only by the real differences in wealth that undermine the equality (and indeed necessitate the discourse of equality as a disguise), but also by the uneven combination of ideologies which reproduces other political subject positions.

Post-independence Hindi narrative cinema has been dominated, as stated earlier, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, by a form that can be described as the feudal family romance. The dominant status of this form in popular cinema is a symptom of the nature of power in a ruling alliance in which the bourgeoisie is only one of several constituents. It is a compromise formation specific to the mutually beneficial co-existence, in independent India, of a colonial elite with a pre-capitalist social base and a bourgeoisie aspiring to the status of the dominant (if not the sale) partner in the coalition. The dominance of this form is evidence of the suspension of the process of re-constitution of the social around the figure of the citizen.

The feudal family romance, however, survives alongside tendencies towards the consolidation of realist and melodramatic aesthetic modes. While the feudal family romance is itself a 'melodramatic' form (corresponding to the stage melodrama of early capitalism), its romance form, hierarchical mode of address and its configuration of social space are in conflict with the aesthetic project represented by the new melodrama and realism. However, this conflict does not coincide with the idealist notion of a conflict between tradition and modernity. Rather, it represents a conflict between two ideologies of modernity, one corresponding to the conditions of capitalist development in the periphery, and the other aspiring to reproduce the 'ideal' features of the primary capitalist states. The following section will situate the feudal family romance in relation to the competing modes of film melodrama and realism in an attempt to chart the ideological forces at work in the project of Indian film culture. My attempt is to understand these cultural forms in relation to the processes of modernity, namely the formation of the modern state, the transformation of the social space into a value generating order, and the project of expanding the field of operation of the figure of the citizen.

Realism and Melodrama

Both realism and melodrama have been acclaimed as aesthetic forms bearing an intimate relation to the democratic revolution. For a long time, it seemed as if realism alone was worthy of this distinction but in recent years, since the publication of Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and a series of essays on film, beginning with Thomas Elsaesser's 'Tales of Sound and Fury', (see Landy 1991) the tide has turned in favour of melodrama. However, this shift has not been accompanied by any explanation of how and why these two forms can both claim to be the representative aesthetic form of a democratic society. The 'feminization' of mass culture has been shown to be a feature of cultural theory in the Modern West (Huyssen 1986). Thus, the gendered polarization of culture into a masculine sphere of autonomous modernist works of art, and a feminine sphere of heteronomous and formally diffuse mass culture, has led to an affirmation of melodrama as a feminine form and its pleasures as the denigrated but real and valued pleasures of female audiences.

However, melodrama, which in its early manifestations was too diffuse and fragmentary to be called a form in its own right, achieved its highest level of formal consistency precisely at the moment when it came to be specifically addressed to women, in the Hollywood women's melodrama (Gledhill 1987: 6) and in similar films made by the Bombay industry. On the other hand, a study of Indian film melodrama shows that in its most fragmented, patchwork texture, its most 'feminized' appearance going by Huyssen's argument, it was addressed to a wide, undifferentiated audience. Thus women's melodrama appears to be a specific branching off from a popular form; its achievement of a certain pre eminence for a period in the history of Hollywood cinema may serve as an index to the prevailing social relations in American society, but the question of the conditions of possibility of melodrama remains unresolved.

The relation between melodrama and realism can be best understood by reference to the fiction of the social contract and the field in which the contract is held to be effective. Many of the early European and American stage melodramas were aristocratic romances. ^[41] In the search to identify a 'melodramatic imagination' it is possible to miss the fact that this 'form' does not derive its distinguishing properties from its thematic content, but from features that attest to its origins in a transitional social formation. It is the undifferentiated mass audience on the one hand, and the thematic eclecticism and episodic narration on the other that give melodrama its specificity (ef. Elsaesser on the many points of origin of the melodrama). It is futile to look for any 'essential' qualities of melodrama, any identifiable melodramatic imagination. As Mary Ann Doane (1987) has observed, the term melodrama has occasioned so many divergent explanations and applications that its usefulness as a critical term may well be doubted (Doane 1987: 71). While feminist film criticism has employed the term to designate the '50s family melodrama' of Hollywood, it has had a longer history in drama criticism as theatre has been the 'natural' habitat of the genre. In film criticism, while initially, as Pam Cook (Melodrama and the Women's Picture 1991) observes, melodrama was studied within the auteurist critical tradition, feminist intervention led to more generalized theoretical projects attempting 'a historical appraisal of the genre in cinema as a whole' (Cook 1991: 249; Gledhill 1987: 5). Beyond this, the very clear-cut genre differentiation that is characteristic of Hollywood cinema was itself seen to be overridden by the melodramatic worldview that all these genres shared (Landy 1991: 15). Thus, it could be said that all popular cinema is tendentially capable of being described as melodramatic. ^[42]

The current accumulation of research seems to suggest in the case of Hollywood that no 'pure' melodrama exists in a separate state. 'Melodrama was at best a fragmented generic category and as a pervasive aesthetic mode broke genre boundaries' (Gledhill 1987: 6). Melodramatic and realist codes seem to occur in combination. Nevertheless, there remains the question of the different values associated with these two aesthetic modes. The realist aesthetic occupies a privileged place in the western imagination. In particular, the post-World War II emergence of Italian neo-realism on the international scene led to the equation of realism with democratic, anti-fascist ideologies while popular forms were described as escapist and corrupting (Landy, British Genres 1991: 19). To attribute such political functions exclusively to any aesthetic form is essentialist and anti-materialist; no aesthetic mode can be inherently democratic or reactionary. But the very existence of this hierarchy as well as the evolving compromise between the two aesthetic modes is indicative of the determination of the formal possibilities in capitalist culture by the hierarchies entailed by modern social structures.

Every representation of reality is not a realist representation. Realism is thus not so much a matter of the object of representation but a mode of textual organization of knowledge, a hierarchical layering of discourses. Colin MacCabe (1985), whose essay on realism elaborates this thesis, notes that the hierarchy of discourses in the 'classic realist text' is 'defined in terms of an empirical notion of truth'. In this type of text 'the narrative prose [here it is the literary realist text that is in question] functions as a metalanguage that can state all the truths in the object language ... and can also explain the relation of this object language to the real' (MacCabe 1985: 34-5). The object language belongs to a world of indirection and opacity that is compensated by the transparent metalanguage. This metalanguage MacCabe describes as 'unwritten', not because it is not present in the novel but precisely because of its ambition to become a transparent medium for making visible the meanings immanent in the object language-world. In thus 'denying its own status as writing' (ibid: 36), the metalanguage of realist representation, I suggest, exactly corresponds to the in-betweenness of the figure of the citizen, who, as Balibar has observed can, by definition, be neither singular not collective. ^[43] The citizen-subject is a combination of the abstract unit of the bourgeois polity with the material, 'pathological' subject.

A difficulty arises when this definition of the classic realist text is sought to be applied to cinema. Here there is no manifest equivalent of the written discourse that aspires to 'unwrite' itself, the meta language that, aspiring to a condition of absolute transparency, is nevertheless obliged to go through the materiality of writing. However, the camera's work of narration, 'which 'shows us what happens', functions as a metalanguage, providing 'the truth against which we can measure the discourses' (MacCabe 1985: 37). 'The narrative of events-the knowledge which the film provides of how things really are-is the metalanguage in which we can talk of the various characters in the film' (ibid: 38). What is significant here is the implication that in cinema the metalanguage moves closer to the condition of invisibility, while remaining identifiable in the traces of the work of narration.

But it is not only in cinema that such a potential disappearance of the metalanguage is observable. In his investigations of 'peripheral modernity', Neil Larsen has demonstrated how, in its further adventures within the literary domain, the metalanguage proves that it can indeed conserve all its ideological effects even as it completely disappears from the space of the text itself. Larsen's analysis of a story by Juan Rulfo, 'La Cuesta de las Comadres', while tracking the changing disguises of the metalanguage of realism, also introduces the element that is crucial to its broadened understanding: the question of the state.

The story is narrated by an old farmer in a regional dialect ^[44] (corresponding to the 'object languages' whose reception the metalanguage of realism tries to mediate). It recounts 'what at first appear to be two unrelated series of events: the sudden and unexplained depopulation of the small community of ranchos named in the title, and the equally suspicious activities of Remigio and alidon Torrico, the two local caciques who have remained behind' (Larsen 1990: 57). This story, with its surprise ending, in which the narrator comes round to confessing to a murder, catches the reader unawares. 'For a reader attuned to the narrative signposts and motivations of a conventional prose realism, the initial effect produced by 'La Cuesta de las Comadres' is one of perplexity and shock' (ibid: 58). The reader is left without the reassuring mediation that a metalanguage provides. The source of the shock, thus, is the 'uncodedness' of violence 'within the cultural whole' (ibid: 59). A second reading that is aware of the ruse, Larsen observes, may suggest 'that this sense of an interior plenitude of spoken cultural substance is not self-sustaining but rather the effect of the absence of any obvious rationalizing authority on the level of the narrative discourse as a whole' (ibid: 59), in other words precisely that hierarchizing discourse of the metalanguage that is at once there and not there. But if it is not there in the text, where has it gone, and how does it produce its effects in absentia? Larsen's argument is that while it has disappeared from the horizontal axis of the narrative, its effects are produced on a vertical axis, from a place outside and above the text.

The erasure of 'direct authorial word' from the horizontal axis of the narrative ... appears ... to he the result of its transfer or displacement, to a paradigmatic position from which it is able to govern the flow of narrative as if through filtration. The semic material upon which this vertical writing operate.s is not composed of words or meanings in the standard morphological sense but of whole narrative utterances, macroscopic blocks of a store of oral narrative, which the invisible authorial writing selects and arranges in a predetermined syntax (ibid: 61-2).

Thus the appearance of popular language independently of a dominating metalanguage does not constitute a freeing of the former from the latter. 'The transparency of writing to its regional object, understood transculturally as a failure or at least a deferral of the bourgeois episteme, perhaps tells us something we are loath to hear-that this same "cognitive structure" has now learned to represent itself exclusively in the cultural/aesthetic signs of its Other' (ibid: 62).

Larsen relates the 'aesthetics of vertical writing' to 'the politics of the state as nonstate' (ibid: 63). When the rationalizing discourse of realism does not appear, it is because 'the state, the very center of extra literary authority, has itself become a horizon of representation' (ibid: 67). In the transition from the classic realist text of European literature to this realism of peripheral modernity marked by a strategic suspension of rational mediation, the missing link is the figure of the citizen which, in its in-betweenness, performed the double function of the state-collective, and voice of narration, the present discursive agent of a self-absenting authority. The citizen as the mediating figure between state and individual is an elusive mechanism of social organization in conditions of underdevelopment. The 'regional and "barbaric" circuitries' that resist the formation of 'civil society' necessitate a different hegemonic strategy: 'the consensual stability of civil society must be sought through the direct control of these non-state circuitries themselves rather than through the traditional atomizing approach of the liberal metropolitan states (constitution of the modern 'citizen')' (ibid: 63).

From here we can proceed along two diverging routes to the further critique of realism. The first would remain within the framework of the discursive hierarchies of the realist text, encompassing both the classic realist text of the western tradition and the vertically controlled realist representations of peripheral modernity. The various 'nationalist realisms' like Italian neo-realism, and the realist experiments in Indian 'new cinema' as well as the manifestoes of realism like Bazin's which emphasize its political liberalism, fall within this problematic ^[45] Most extensively elaborated in the writings by and about the Italian neo-realist film-makers, this aesthetic movement finds itself functioning as one of the mechanisms of the modern state's hegemonic project, giving substance to the state's claim to represent the 'nation' that it encompasses. The nation, which Robert Fossaert described as 'the discourse of the state, ^[46] is produced by various means: aesthetic realism is one of them. The land and the people, represented in their objective there-ness, constitute this substance.

The second route open to the critique of realism is the one isolated by MacCabe in his second essay on the subject. In a discussion of Hollywood cinema, MacCabe reminds us that by the Bazinian definition, these films are not realistic. However, the case for Hollywood realism is made, as already mentioned, by considering that the goal of realism, 'a transparency of form'-is achieved by Hollywood through cinematic practices of signification, whereas 'Bazin's criteria for distinguishing between films can only be based on non-filmic concerns' (MacCabe 1985: 60), i.e considerations of a qualitative kind centred on 'any narrative procedure which tends to make more reality appear on the screen' (Bazin).

Although by making visible the productive role of the camera and the suppression of contradiction in the realism of the Italian school, MacCabe makes a case for the fundamental unity of neo- realism and Hollywood realism, there is a secondary axis of difference between these two modes which the essay comes close to denying but eventually leaves open. If, then, we assume that there is ga significant difference between these two modes of realism, how can this be defined? I have suggested above that the distinguishing mark of the first mode, which for convenience can be called nationalist realism (or realism arising at the level of the political instance), is its engagement in the project of producing the nation for the state. The Indian new cinema of the early seventies, especially the first three films of Shyam Benegal, employs this mode (see Chapter 8).

The second mode, identified with Hollywood, and more pertinent to our immediate concern, which serves as an ideal that the popular Hindi film sometimes strives to emulate, arises in the context of a desacralized social order where the free individual is the elementary unit. Here the determining factors include the organization of society into a self-reproducing value-generating order, a mode of regulation of the free circulation of individuals by means of a symbolic equality and citizenship. The realist imperative in this context consists in according primacy to the features of a rationally-ordered society relations of causality, progression along a linear continuum marked by motivation, credibility, and action submitted, in the ultimate instance, to the narrative possibilities arising from the operation of the rule of law; the realist text in this sense is a sign of bourgeois hegemony.

This form of realism, contrasted with the melodrama of the standard Hindi film, bestows an immanent unity (as opposed to a unity that derives from a transcendental plane) on its content. Coming into its own with the consolidation of the modern state, it is distinguished by a transformation of the field of perception such that the spectator's gaze is attracted by the unfolding of a sequence of events focussed around a central character, and whose meaning is constructed through the diegesis, under the aegis of legality.

In such 'rational fictions', the motivation of episodes in their sequencing ensures that a legally justifiable spectacle ensues as a result. Principles of credibility, necessity and relevance hold sway. Such a form does not tolerate 'extraneous' interpolations. The effectivity of the social contract is symptomatically manifested in the agreement to subordinate spectacle to the rules of credible, causal progression of narrative. The narrative contract is a clause of the social contract. Through its operation, the rationality of the bourgeois world is demonstrated and ratified. Narrative restraint-credibility is a chastisement of non-rational ambitions. To flout the norms of narrative credibility is to flout the law.

I shall employ the term mise-en-valeur to designate this work of textual organization that produces the real as rational. ^[47] When Bombay film-makers talk about realism, they have in mind precisely this project of a mise-en-valeur which would streamline the standard film text with its episodic and fragmentary form deriving from stage melodrama, eliminate features that interfere with a unified linear narration, achieve a system of generic differentiation which would break up the heterogeneous components of the 'social' super-genre and enable their separate development and exploitation, ^[48] subordinate the quasi-autonomous factors of the production process to the overall supremacy of the main narrative trajectory and so on.

Mise-en-valeur operates at the level of the economic and legal instances of modern social formations. It has two sides, deriving from these two instances. On the one hand, the legal instance imposes the requirements of credible, rational progression of narrative and subordination of the 'moral' world to the functioning of the legal system. On the other hand, the economic instance calls for streamlining and product differentiation, a rational distribution and ordering, across the text, of affective values, a textual economy that favours internal unity. In combination, these two logics make possible a realism that differs from the politically inspired national realism. However, these two modes of realism are not always to be found in a pure form. Instead, it would be accurate to say that individual texts lean more strongly towards one or the other. At one extreme, the spectator's gaze coincides with the frame itself and operates a vertical control over the space o(the narrative, and in the process approximates the relation of state to nation. At the other extreme, the random configurations of the narrative are focussed by anchoring the spectator's gaze in a relation of identification with a central character, and thus the citizen as the individual embodiment of the legal order is called into being.

_______________________________________________________

^{[39] See Pranab Bardhan (1984) and Achin Vanaik (1990) for a discussion of the
dominant classes that constitute the ruling coalition in India. The bourgeoisie, the
rich farmers and the professional classes have been identified by Bardhan (1984: 40-
53) as the three principal constituents of the ruling coalition. See also Francine Frankel
(1978) and Sukhamoy Chakravarty (1987).}

^{[40] Such, for instance, is the spirit behind the opening argument of Thomas (985).
Ashish Nandy's theory of popular Indian culture is also based on a similar assertion
of an incommensurability of traditional and modern (cultural sectors.}

^{[41] A typical example is 'A Tale of Mystery' written by Thomas Holcroft in 1802 and
based on a French original. Some of the most common plot devices of popular Hindi
cinema are to be found in this play, in which an alliance between good aristocrats is
threatened by the machinations of an evil aristocrat. J.B. Buckstone's 'Luke the Labourer'
(826) also has a familiar plot involving the downfall and restoration of a virtuous
landowning family. Both the plays are included in Michael Kilgarriff's The Golden
Age of Melodrama (1974), 34-52; 94-127.}

^{[42] Today, the subgenre of the domestic melodrama is emphasized exclusively in
attempts to define the filmic genre. Historical epics, gangster films, and horror films
are seen as different genres, distinct from melodrama. This is at least partially a result
of the tendency ... of certain theorists to consider late nineteenth-century British
and American melodramas as the precedent for filmic melodrama. Once the earlier
history of melodrama is considered, we see the immense importance of the historical,
supernatural, colonial, criminal, and mystery melodramas. They provide the
antecedents for the historical epic, the gangster film, and the horror film. It certainly
is necessary to consider the wide range of expression and subgenres that constitute
the nineteenth-century melodrama' (Turim: 156). The Hindi cinema, compressing as
it does the entire history of melodrama into a few decades of film production, is a
uniquely appropriate site for the exploration of this cultural form.}

^{[43] 'The citizen properly speaking is neither the individual nor the collective, just
as he is neither an exclusively public being nor a private being' (Balibar 1992: 51).

Here mention must he made of Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth's Realism and Consensus
in the English Novel which argues that 'fictional realism is an aesthetic form of
consensus' maintained by 'the agreement between the various viewpoints made
available by a text' (Ermarth 1983: ix-x), such agreement witnessing the existence of
a cohesive community. Ermarth does not regard this consensus as a 'consensus
effect', nor does she relate its emergence to the figure of the Citizen and the fiction
of the contract, although in linking realism to the emergence of the Subject/Object
duality (ibid: 77), she could he said to indirectly acknowledge the connection. Because
her notion of 'consensus' is tied to the idea of 'community', Ermarth's use of the term
remains ideological and does not connect the production of the consensus-effect
with the destruction and dispersal of 'communities' at the beginning of the history of
capitalism, a connection which enables us to see that the consensus-effect is an
ideological evocation of community in the service of the dispersed mode of cohesion
specific to contractual bourgeois society.}

^{[44] An English translation (without the 'dialect', of course), entitled 'The Hill of the
Comadres' is available in Juan Rulfo (1967): 17-28}

^{[45] Harry Levin's cryptic observation, that realism has some connection with 'real
estate' (Levin 1963: 68) begins to make sense in this context.}

^{[46] Cited in Larsen (1990): 70.}

^{[47] I have chosen this term because it resonates with the other term - mis-en-
scene - that has become the standard term in English for the organization of profilmic
space. The association helps to understand the meaning of the second term, which
pertains to the text as a whole and the way in which the elements within that whole
are organized. However, the term is not my own: it was used by the French colonial
administrator Gallieni to describe a stage in the process of colonization that followed
after the first stage of 'pacification' which involves the military. In the second stage,
the administrators take charge, in order to dissolve the traditional communities, to
establish a new pattern of relations between the colonizer, the colonized and the
natural resources of the pacified region which would be conducive to a modern
system of value-generation (see Gallieni 1949: 242-7). While my use of the term is
somewhat different, there remains an area of overlap with Gallieni in so far as the
ongoing project of modernization in peripheral countries like India continues to be
centred on precisely such a reorganization of human and natural 'resources' into a
capitalist production system. Indeed, the term can be applied to the general process
of capitalist expansion around the globe, which proceeds with a similar mix of
coercion and administrative initiative and is directed towards the elimination of
blockages in the circuit of value-generation, like traditional communities' resistance
to the development of new needs. A link is thus suggested here between political
economic processes and the transformation.g registered in the cultural sphere.}

^{[48] See an article by Dadasaheb in Filmfare, 8 January 1954, p. 11 which
recommends that shorter films with no songs be shown along with shorts on the
music and dances of India; Chetan Anand (Filmfare, 25 May 1956) said each film
should be in two versions, of which one would be 'short, dramatic, intense and
thematic' and suitable for export to the West; during a period of raw stock shortage
film-makers were urged fo make use of the situation to produce 'shorter, more
integrated film." Filmfare, 24 August 1962, p. 3.}

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The Feudal Family Romance

Indian film melodrama, and its most important precursor, the Parsi theatre, ^[49] together compress the almost 200-year history of European/ American melodrama into less than 100 years of discontinuous evolution. Indian film melodrama has affinities not only with the film melodrama of the west, but also, and more significantly, with the stage melodrama of early nineteenth-century Europe and America. David Grimsted's study of American melodrama in the first half of the nineteenth century is helpful in tracing the formal and thematic similarities between this tradition and Indian cinema.

Thus Grimsted observes that early American melodrama's 'class structure remained generally feudal and predominantly populated with kings and peasants, lords and ladies'. Within this broad framework, variations were possible, 'slaves, peasants, and mechanics were all allowed at times its most elevated' roles' (Grimsted 1968: 208). Characteristic situations included babies being switched in their cradles, children thrown into rivers and rescued by gypsies, servants or monks who were sworn 'to 20 years of secrecy', secret marriages, princes in disguise, etc. (ibid: 175). While 'it was a belligerently egalitarian feudalism', the twists and turns of the plot would succeed in cancelling this egalitarian displacement, most commonly through last minute disclosure of the lowly character's noble birth (ibid: 208). The dislocations of social rank which enable narrative movement in these melodramas are also found in fairy tales and aristocratic romances; the incipient egalitarianism of these plays could also be read as a mechanism of aristocratic self-legitimation, a way of figuring the prince's or noble's organic relationship with his subjects.

A similar feudal structure provides the basic framework for a majority of Indian film melodramas. From the immensely popular Kismet (1943) made by Bombay Talkies to the early post-independence Andaz (1949) and Awara (1951) and further, to the dominant feudal family romances of the 1950s and 1960s, this basic structure reasserts itself. In most films this structure appears in an attenuated form but occasionally one encounters it in all its splendour.

Khandan (Bhim Singh 1965) is a good example. The narrative centres round the threat posed to the unity of a feudal landowning family by the intrusion of alien values embodied in the figures of the villain and his sister played by Pran and Mumtaz, the Singapore returned relatives of the landlord's selfish wife. Their arrival signals the introduction of greed, western social norms and dress, the conversion of traditional wealth into cash, speculative business ventures (Pran takes cash from his aunt and invests it in a circus) and a voyeuristic sexuality. In contrast to the folk rhythm of the songs sung by the villagers, the Mumtaz character and her lover, wear tight shiny clothes and sing a fast dance number full of English words in a setting that looks more like a city park than a rural landscape.^{(see clip here)}Their coming is preceded by the arrival of a poor orphaned woman (Nutan) who, while working as a servant, nurtures the handicapped hero and shows herself worthy of admission into the family. The conflict of values results in a partitioning of the joint family's property between the two brothers, who had till then lived together in harmony.

The villain's attributes are significant: his name, Navrangilal, signifies a changeable, unstable nature, while his parentage (born of an Indian father and a mother who is seen as non-Indian because Goa, her place of birth, was still a Portuguese colony) indicates a new national type that is antithetical to the organic and longstanding heritage that the landowning elite claimed for itself. On arriving in India, he declares it his 'fatherland' and is reminded of the preferred description, 'motherland'-the latter signifying a way of relating to the land that is characteristic of the countryside.^{(see clip here)}

Preceding the villain's arrival, the landowning class's preferred relation to modernity is articulated in the course of a family chat. While the older members of the family talk ironically about the 'darkness' that electricity has brought to the community, the hero (who was paralysed when he climbed up an electric pole to retrieve a kite) refers to the benefits of electricity, signalling a possibility of assimilation of the technological aspects of modernity into the old order.^{(see clip here)} The social order ushered in by the new national type, represented by Navrangilal, however, is firmly rejected. The celebration of Janmashtami and readings from the Ramayana indicate this class's conception of the legitimacy of its socio-economic power. Another more contemporary source of legitimation is Gandhianism, with its emphasis on the stability of village communities, and the role of the wealthy as trustees. The power of the modern to destroy this order derives from certain weaknesses internal to the order, such as the absence of male heirs (since the hero is the son of the younger brother, the line of inheritance is not direct, thus creating a gap which the wife's family tries to widen in order to appropriate the wealth) or, as in the case of the hero, a debility caused by the advent of modernity. The restoration of the old order at the end coincides with his being cured of this handicap. The feudal order has its own scopic regime which comes into conflict with that of the new order, The voyeuristic look is prohibited. With the arrival of Pran, however, we are presented with the only voyeuristic composition in the film, where Pran in the foreground, with his back to the camera, looks at Nutan, her body framed internally by a door, as she sweeps the yard.^{(see clip here)}

This basic narrative structure, where the unity and jouissance of the feudal family, its control over its accumulated wealth, is threatened by usurpers and modern values, is repeated in numerous films of this period. The stability of this structure in the period preceding the early 1970s is proved by films like An Evening in Paris (1967) and Love in Tokyo (1966), where, even though the action unfolds against an international setting, the essential features of the feudal family structure remain firmly in place. From the organic space of the north Indian village to the high-tech tourist spots of the world, the feudal structure displays a mobility that demonstrates how powerful its ideological hold was and to an extent still is. This structure could incorporate consumerism and other 'modern' features without damage as long as it did not slide into a position of affirmation of new sexual and social relations based on individualism. The 'foreign' values that came in for vicious criticism occasionally were a code word for democracy and a capitalism based on the generalization of free labour.

The powerful hold that this structure has had on the narrative possibilities of the Indian cinema is evident in that an emerging middle-class ideology opposed to the feudal family structure still requires a staging of this conflict between the feudal and the democratic as in Rajkumar Santoshi's Damini (1993; see Chapter 9). In such films, which stage a transition from the aristocratic melodrama to a democratic version, we are reminded that melodrama is not inherently democratic, as some commentators have argued, but is a structure within which a struggle between classes, between old and emergent forces, is enacted. Thus we must posit a break between early melodrama, with its aristocratic themes, and the middle-class melodrama, in which we encounter a form that has made a compromise with the dominant realist aesthetic.

Of the crime films of the fifties, Kala Pani (Raj Khosla 1958) ^[50] also employed a broad democracy versus feudalism approach, in its organization of the detection plot. The detective story is one of the popular forms that teaches the cultural values of the new capitalist hegemony. In his cultural writings Gramsci referred to the absence of a detective story tradition indigenous to Italy, and the consequent popularity of serialized detective stories from other countries, which is viewed as a symptom of the failure to constitute a new national culture (Cultural Writings 1985: 254-5; 359-62; 369-74) ^[51]. In India, Guru Dutt and Dev Anand, together with directors like Raj Khosla tried their hand at the detective film. Although these films-like Kala Pani and C.I.D. (Raj Khosla 1956)-had a very elementary plot, the narratives had a distinct anti-aristocratic thrust.

In Kala Pani, the hero's investigation of a 15-year old murder for which his father was wrongly convicted, unfolds in a social space characterized by the coexistence of the feudal and the modern in an uneasy consensus enforced by the feudal elements who continue to control the institutions of the modern state. On the side of the good are the hero, his parents, his lover (the daughter of a lodge-keeper), and his friends (who include a penniless poet, a retired and penitent police officer and a waiter). The feudal order is represented by a Dewan, who is the real murderer, and his lawyer, also a colonial aristocrat as his title ('Rai Bahadur') suggests, who represents the colonization of the democratic legal apparatus by feudal interests. There is also the in-between world of the courtesans, where the murder took place, peopled by ambiguous figures like Kishori, who blackmails the Dewan with an incriminating letter and later surrenders to the new values represented by the hero, by assisting him in his search for justice.

The occasion for the narrative is the discovery' by the hero that his father, whom he believed dead, was alive and serving a life-term for murder. This secret had been maintained by his mother and uncle, both of whom were anxious to spare him the shame of dishonourable parentage. Kala Pani thus revolves around the distinction between honour (which has to be maintained by secrecy, by suppression of the unpalatable) and conscience (which requires the uncovering of truth, the coincidence of word and reality). In this struggle the legal system is democracy's ally, although it must be freed from the control of the feudal class. In a revealing scene, the Dewan suggests to his lawyer that they eliminate the intruding hero, who is digging up the past, whereupon the lawyer reminds him that the aristocratic order does not exist anymore. The murder took place in 1943, linking the aristocratic order with the era of British rule. The police officer who convicted the hero's father declares that he had borne the guilt of having wrongly accused an innocent man and had resigned from his job at India's independence, so that its fledgling legal order would not be tainted.^{(see clip here)}

The 'truth' that the hero of Kala Pani seeks is a legal truth, based on the legal discourse's emphasis on precision of language. As such it enables an escape from the moral categories of shame and sinfulness which, in their diffuse and flexible application, do not allow for exoneration. Thus, the father's immorality is beyond question: even if he did not kill the courtesan, he frequented the brothel. Sinfulness is established on the basis of such association. But the question that the hero undertakes to solve is a legal question, concerning his father's guilt in the murder of a courtesan. It is this shift, from the morality of sinning by association to the legality of guilt by commission, that reactivates a legal apparatus and a new style of narrative involving investigation (the hero poring over newspaper reports that are 15 years old), and mystery. It also mobilizes the nation, represented by the newspaper and the reading public, against the diffuse biradari and samaj (community) which allocate honour. Such instances notwithstanding, the family romance centred around aristocratic or otherwise exemplary figures retained its hold through the sixties.

Early melodrama tends to privilege the moral sphere over the legal (Grimsted 1968: 225-6). One striking feature of Andaz (1949) is the position occupied by the legal structure vis-a-vis the moral imperatives of the feudal family. ^[52] The heroine, who transgresses the feudal moral code by engaging in a series of covert romantic exchanges with a stranger during the absence of the man who is pre-ordained to be her husband, ends up killing the stranger in order to prove her innocence and is tried and sentenced to prison. In the end she declares her punishment as justly deserved, not for the murder, but for her transgression of the moral code. Here the law is figured as being in consonance with the feudal family's worldview, rendering a justice that restores a moral order that is, strictly speaking, beyond its jurisdiction.

Speech in the early melodrama is conventional, contrived, excessive. 'Even when a specific object was mentioned, the reference was usually both metaphorical and highly conventionalized.' It was a language suited to the idealized, extraordinary world that was represented, a world of moral absolutes which did not afford a 'taste of real life' because 'Elevation was the primary aim' (Grimsted 1968: 231). Language in melodrama is not derived from realist speculations about the necessities of the situations and characters represented. The characters are objects of emulation or disapproval rather than identification. ^[53] As such they speak a language suited to the primary function of representing the conflicts of a moral order. They are, as Paul Willemen has suggested, agents or functions, rather than characters' in the realist sense, and as such they are conceived in a non-psychological manner, liberating them from the obligation to speak like 'real people' (Willemen 1993: 185; Elsaesser 1991: 69).

Discussions of Hollywood melodrama have not paid much attention to this question of language or dialogue, which is all important in considerations of western stage melodrama. There is a reason for this: in Hollywood melodrama, the camera's role as an instrument of signification and the visual codes of representation acquire primacy over the dialogue, which is reduced to a complementary function. In the movement towards the consolidation of a separate genre of women's. melodrama, there also occurs a subordination of the stage melodrama's textual anarchy to the control of a realist aesthetic code. ^[54] The excesses of dialogue are in the process pared down considerably. The feudal family melodrama of Indian cinema, however, retains the autonomous signifying function of dialogue intact. Dialogue-writing is a specialization in the Indian film industry, with its own minor star system. In Chapter 2, I argued that this pattern of autonomization of skills and talents led to the prevalence of the heterogeneous form of manufacture in the Bombay film industry. The narrative structure of the feudal family romance is an effect of this separation. This feudal order claims a divine sanction for its power and authority, a claim that is reinforced by the references to the epics and their semi-divine heroes (although historically, the power and wealth of the landowning class derives from the social order instituted by British colonial rule). Representations of this order and the threats posed to it are enunciated from its own point of view, while making this point of view coincide with the will of a divine authority. Thus speech in such a configuration can only be already interpreted speech, whose meanings are readily visible on the surface (d. Barthes 1973) on myth). By contrast, in the realist text the spectator/reader holds the interpretive authority (at least formally) and is therefore presented with a speech that is immanent to a represented scene.

At stake here is also the feudal order's firm resistance to the 'invention of the private' which is a mark of the transition to a modern state. For speech in melodrama is cleansed of its private, interpersonal character and elevated to the status of a symbolic discourse. According to Peter Brooks, melodrama penetrates the 'surface reality' of everyday life to get 'under the surface of things' where a 'mythological realm' of 'large moral entities' comes into play. From this topography, Brooks, derives the notion of a 'moral occult' that is the stuff of melodrama. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, of the early western stage melodrama and Indian film melodrama in any case, that it aspires to the transcendental, ceaselessly sublimating the realities of existence into mythical moral categories because these are the currency of human interaction in the pre-modern symbolic order maintained by the church and the monarchic state. The language of melodrama reduces practical activity to a mythical residue.

Due to its rigid commitment to a moral project, this primary narrative segment of the early melodrama cannot, as Grimsted put it, give us a 'taste of real life'. However, these plays incorporated scenes representing ordinary life situations, with recognizable people speaking a more familiar language. 'Less elevated in principle and sentiment than the heroine', these characters were either servants (in European plays) or simply poor people, 'lively, good-natured and often in love with one another'.

In contrast to the characters in the central structure of the melodrama, they partook more of purely human qualities and less of superhuman virtue or subhuman baseness. The good were likely to be worldly wise, and the bad to have a roguish charm. If seldom many-sided human beings, neither were they moral abstractions (Grimsted 1968: 183-4).

This aspect of early melodrama too is reproduced in the Hindi film. The above description could be applied word for word to the 'comedy track' that was a standard feature of Hindi cinema all through the sixties. Comic characters played by Johnny Walker, Tuntun, Agha, Manorama, Dhumal, Bhagwan, Mehmood, Rajendranath, Jagdeep, etc. figured in these comedy scenes often as servants in the feudal household, or as the hero's or heroine's accomplices. The hero's male friend and"the heroine's female companion often went through a romance that ran parallel to the main narrative and involved some very worldly negotiations and deceptions in which, for instance, the female comic's father, who aspired to marry his daughter to a social superior, would be deceived into agreeing to the comics' alliance. The hero's comic accomplice is often conceived of on the lines of Hanuman, the monkey-assistant of the epic hero Rama. ^[55] This fact perhaps led some critics to regard the comedy track as a distinctly Indian feature deriving from Indian theatrical traditions. However, the association with Hanuman is an additional coding of a feature integral to the structure of the melodramatic form, just as the feudal family's colonial wealth and power is given a divine legitimation by associating it with the moral order of the epics.

The Structure of Spectation

What the two modes of realism discussed above share is a premise that the world represented on the screen is, in Christian Metz's (986) words, a world that is seen without giving itself to be seen. This premise, the true mark of realism, is what distinguishes it from melodrama. The difference emerges sharply in a little story told by Rossellini, about how he deals with non-professional actors:

I watch a man in life and fix him in my memory. When he finds himself before a camera, he is usually completely lost and tries to 'act', which is exactly what must be avoided at all costs. There are gestures which belong to this man, the ones he makes with the same muscles which become paralyzed before the lens. It is as if he forgets himself, as if he never knew himself. He believes he has become a very exceptional person because someone is going to film him. My task is to return him to his original nature, to reconstruct him, to reteach him his usual movements (Rossellini 1979: 98).

While Rossellini wants to capture this person as he really is, the latter, upon seeing the camera, instantly begins to pose for it, to speak to it. He then has to be taught to 'be himself'. This story could be read as a parable about the difference between realism and melodrama. Rossellini's approach is that of the realist, who wishes to capture a reality that does not give itself to be seen, while the ordinary man cannot relate to the camera's presence without attempting to create an ideality - a combination of proper demeanour and proper speech-that, in his eyes, would be worthy of public circulation. It is not that the man 'forgets himself'; on the contrary, it is only when confronted by a camera that he remembers his existence and seeks to produce, from within himself, the distinction between what he really is and what must be represented. Realism disapproves of this because it wishes to retain the task of representation for itself. Melodrama, like the peasant before a camera, can be defined as a representation that gives itself to be seen.

But this realist convention is also the primary requirement of the voyeuristic look of the spectator in the cinema. As Laura Mulvey has argued, the separation of the object from the look directed towards it is central to the constitution of the 'active' voyeuristic aspect of scopophilia. 'Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world' (Mulvey 1975: 9), of 'unauthorized scopophilia' (Metz 1986: 264). Taken in its double function as both a voyeuristic relation and a realist convention, this structure of spectation is distinguished by a displacement of the contractual relation from the site of the performance to a place outside it. There is no longer a contractual coming together of performer and spectator for a mutually agreed purpose. Instead, there is established a contractual link between the members of the audience, including the film-makers, thanks to which the object world can be represented in its there-ness. It is this latter contract that is at the base of the metalanguage of realism and it is because of the operation of this contract that it is possible for the metalanguage to effectively disappear in its material aspect without eliminating any of its effects.

But there is a second, narcissistic aspect of scopophilia which is a function of ego libido (Mulvey 1975: 10), and involves the mechanism of imaginary identification with an ego ideal. This mechanism has the narrative function of organizing the field of perception around a central figure with whom the spectator identifies. It could be argued that this mechanism functions to supplement the invisible metalanguage of the contract with an internal contractual relation. This is necessary because the contractual relation that supports the metalanguage does not include all in its purview, and IS mostly closed to subaltern subjects, especially women (but also the lower castes and the proletariat in general), who are regulated by the contract without being its signatories. ^[56] Excluded from the abstract space of the social contract, the subject requires another kind of anchoring in the real, another axis of relation with the world, which subtends the performance relation. The star, who, despite appearances, is best understood as a reality reference for the subject, is one such 'charismatic' supplement (Dyer 1991). As Mulvey observes, 'the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centring both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference' (Mulvey 1975: 10).

The contractual space ends where the domestic space begins. This is the space of femininity and love, the space where modern film melodrama unfolds. The two limits to the contract's effectivity are thus the family and the world of the subaltern. These are the sites in which many modern narratives are situated, although the watchful eye of the citizen's law is always present, whether in the form of male characters representing the rational world or an invisible frame of intelligibility coinciding with the sphere of the state.

This structure of spectation in which the spectator occupies an isolated, individualized position of voyeurism coupled with an anchoring identification with a figure in the narrative is specific to western popular cinema and a small tendency within Indian cinema. Turning to the Hindi feudal family romance we find that its organization of the look differs from the above model in being governed by a pre-modern institutionalized structure of spectation embodied in the tradition of darsana. There is no study of the politics of darsana (literally 'seeing') that would enable us to identify its principal characteristics. ^[57] But in its most widely employed sense, darsana refers to a relation of perception within the public traditions of Hindu worship, especially in the temples, but also in public appearances of monarchs and other elevated figures. Typically this structure is constituted by the combination of three elements: the divine image, the worshipper and the mediating priest. In common parlance, the act of going to the temple is perceived as involving the 'taking' of darsana (darsan lena) by the devotee and the 'giving' of darsana (darsan dena) by the divinity in question. (This is in Hindi. In the south Indian languages the equivalent expression translates as 'making' or 'doing' darsana) The practice signifies a mediated bringing to (god's) presence of the subject, who, by being seen by the divine image, comes to be included in the order instituted and supported by that divinity. The mediation of this relation by the priest is not incidental but is integral to the structure. The priest performs the task of bringing the devotee to the divinity's attention. In this structure, the priest has monopoly over the verbal invocation by means of which the perceptual link between devotee and divinity is brought about and rendered meaningful.

The devotee's muteness is a requirement of the entire process. The devotee's look, moreover, is not one that seeks to locate the divinity, to inspect it and be assured of its existence. It is not a look of verification but one that demonstrates its faith by seeing the divinity where only its image exists and by asking to be seen in turn. It is not surprising that in the more individualized modes of worship that have developed on the fringes of this central institution, the devotees close their eyes and connect with the deity through words. This development constitutes a threat to the monopoly over language that the priest enjoys in the orthodox structure but given the persistence of this monopoly over language(s) in other spheres of modern society, there continues to operate a set of relations akin to those characteristic of the temple darsana structure.

Before the transformation of the cinematic field in the crisis of the early seventies, the darsana structure imposed a set of protocols of perception that differed from the two inter-related aspects of scopophilia. In the first place, contrary to the voyeuristic relagion, in the darsanic relation the object gives itself to be seen and in so doing, confers a privilege upon the spectator. The object of the darsanic gaze is a superior, a divine figure or a king who presents himself as a spectacle of dazzling splendour to his subjects, the 'praja' or people. Unlike the hero of the democratic narrative, who is, by common understanding, 'any individual subject', the hero of the feudal family romance is not chosen randomly by the camera but belongs to the class of 'the chosen' in the extra-filmic hierarchic community.

The object of the darsanic gaze is only amenable to a symbolic identification: 'in imaginary identification we imitate the other at the level of resemblance-we identify ourselves with the image of the other inasmuch as we are "like him", while in symbolic identification we identify ourself with the other precisely at a point at which he is inimitable, at the point which eludes resemblance' (Zizek 1989: 109). Imaginary identification, however, is enabled by the comedy track, where more familiar, less exalted figures enact a more worldly drama of everyday life. The structure of this staggered identification process powerfully links up, as already noted, with the relation between Hanuman and Rama in the Ramayana, especially as elaborated in popular discourse. This aspect particularly is strongly apparent in the regional cinemas of the south where male comic actors often declare an abiding loyalty to the reigning male star, both on screen as well as off. ^[58]

It is in relation to the figure of the woman, according to Mulvey, that 'the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined' (Mulvey 1975: 12), giving rise to the 'split between active/male and passive/female' (ibid: 11). It is crucial to determine how Hindi films, while inviting the darsanic gaze, are able to deal with this form of voyeurism. One explanation is that typically the Hindi film combines two modes of representation ('realist' narration and a series of punctuating tableaux) as Ravi Vasudevan has insightfully argued. As such it can include scenes of voyeuristic fixing of the female figure as object, while elsewhere asserting the unavailability of the female figure for the spectator's enjoyment. But there are other clues that point to another possible explanation. One such clue lies in the fact that the erotic exhibition of the female figure is mostly confined to the presumably non-diegetic space of the song. (Where it is not so confined, the voyeuristic look is attributed to the villain, as in the Khandaan scene discussed above and is coded as irredeemably evil.) The song-and-dance is a form of spectacle that belongs to the order of contracted performances like stage dances, cabarets and the striptease. As such it calls for a direct perception of the spectacle rather than a perception mediated by the identificatory relation. The frontal orientation of the screen image, especially in the song-and-dance sequences, makes the erotic spectacle less capable of functioning as a device of male-to-male identification. This is not to say that the Hindi film narrative does not privilege the male; however, this privilege does not derive from such cinematic strategies.

Another deployment of the darsanic gaze can be seen in Hindi cinema of the post-70s, especially in the Amitabh Bachchan films. The most interesting example of this is the 1989 film Main Azad Hun(Director: Tinu Anand), which is a remake of Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (1941) with an original darsanic twist that is different from the many variations on the ending that Capra is said to have tried ^[59] In the Hindi version Azad dies. In the original, John Doe is prevented from committing suicide by the intervention of the reporter and the people, who assure him that the movement bearing his name will continue and will succeed in its mission of asserting the rights of 'the common man'. But it is not the difference between dying and living that makes the ending of the Hindi version so unique. It is the fact that, after his death, Azad's Videotaped message to the people (who are figured not as 'other John Does' who are inspired by him as in the Capra film but as followers, or more precisely, fans) is played on a giant screen in a sports stadium in a drama of resurrection and apotheosis staged by the reporter and her associates.^{(see clip here)} This mode of inviting the darsanic gaze is characteristic of the populist films of Amitabh Bachchan. But in Main Azad Hun, made after Bachchan's political decline had begun, the power and charisma of the popular hero is appropriated by his managers who wield his image as a weapon in the political struggle for the people's support. The popular hero's relation with the people is thus mediated by a priestly class consisting of journalists and other middle-level agents.

Thus, in the Hindi film the gaze is mobilized according to the rules of a hierarchical despotic public spectacle in which the political subjects witness and legitimize the splendour of the ruling class. In the horizontal organization of the image-series that characterizes the realist narratives, the spectator's gaze is powerful in its active voyeuristic holding of the image but at the same time its control is forever threatened by the possibility that the distance that separates the look from the object may widen into an unbridgeable gulf. The pleasure of voyeuristic capture derives from the overcoming of this very threat. However, the despotic spectacle creates its own field of perception into which the subject must enter in order to see and be seen-the spectator's gaze here is not threatened by the perils of voyeurism.

In a society of castes and traditional ruling elites, the 'private' cannot be represented in public (or, to put it differently, images cannot be represented from a 'private' point of view) because such a representation violates the ruling class's scopic privileges (this is taken up in detail in Chapter 4). In this context it is pertinent to recall that for the British colonial government, cinema censorship became important not only to suppress overtly nationalist and anti- colonial films made in India, but also to prevent the colonized from seeing images (especially in American films) of white people engaged in activities that exposed the well-kept secret that the white race was also human. Ruling classes protect themselves by claiming to protect their women and it was the 'damage done to the image of British women through the films, mainly American, screened in India' that led to the introduction of pre-censorship of films in 1918. Indeed, the recommendation by W. Evans that 'films suited to an Indian audience' (Baskaran, nd) should be encouraged was not unrelated to a perceived need to wean Indian audiences away from the films about white society which made them contemptuous of British authority. ^[60]

The history of Indian cinema shows that it has not been easy to overcome this injunction against the subordination of spectacle to an individualized point of view. ^[61] Far from being a 'natural' derivative of India's cultural heritage, therefore, the Indian popular film is the product of a specific political conjuncture whose historical force has not yet been exhausted. A struggle for the reorganization of film spectacle around an individualized point of view has been waged by a section of the industry. The universalization of the figure of the citizen is the political goal whose ideological supplement is the point of view narrative. However, in the early decades of independence, the 'public' spectacles staged by the 'social', with their emphasis on corporate identity, retained their position of dominance. At times, when new generic tendencies emerged, threatening to segment the audience, the 'social' reasserted its dominance through strategies of annexation that re-installed the absolutist subject at the helm of the narrative. Sholay achieved this in the seventies, against a sudden eruption of 'cowboy' and bandit films featuring small-time villains and cabaret dancers in leading roles, addressed to a predominantly proletarian B-movie audience (see Chapter 6). But there was an earlier instance of a similar 'return of the social' in the sixties, which demonstrates the centrality of the absolutist gaze to this super-genre. Here it was the middle-class audience that posed the threat of 'secession' from the consensual 'social'.

Why Rajendra Kumar Had to Die

In the detection plot of Kala Pani, we have seen how the individual hero's quest opens the space for a point of view narrative. Another generic tendency could be seen, beginning perhaps in the late fifties, and representing a move towards a Hollywood-style women's melodrama whose subsequent fate is illustrative of the nature of the struggle mentioned above. Films like Chirag Kahan Roshni Kahan (Devendra GoeI 1959), Dhool ka Phool (Yash Chopra/BR Films 1959), Dil Ek Mandir (Sridhar/Chitralaya 1963) centred on the question of women's position in a modernizing society. These and other films represented an unmistakable generic tendency, with the actor Rajendra Kumar, who acquired a reputation as a 'women's star' often playing the male lead. These films were notable for their promotion of middle-class consumerism in the course of narratives of love, betrayal, sacrifice and reunion. Of these Dhool ka Phool is perhaps the most remarkable. It tells the story of a woman who, abandoned by her lover, gives birth to a child, whom she in turn, abandons in a moment of fear and helplessness. Brought up by a kind old Muslim who is ostracized by his community and spurned by the Hindus for his act of kindness, the child becomes the focus of a narrative movement that ends with the Muslim man handing the child over to the mother, while the father is punished for his crime by being denied access to the child. Chirag Kahan Roshni Kahan concerns a forbidden romance between a widow with a child and a man who becomes fond of her child. In Dil Ek Mandir a forgotten romance is rekindled when a woman accompanies her husband to the hospital, where he is treated by her former lover. In all these narratives we see an attempt to represent the woman's point of view or to centre the narrative on a woman caught between desire and an oppressive tradition.

Raj Kapoor breaching the bond between Dilip Kumar and Nargis in Andaz (Mehboob 1954). Courtesy National Film Archive of India, Pune.

[[Image]]

Rajendra Kumar and Meena Kumari in Chirag Kahan Roshni Aaban (Devendra Goel, 1959), a hero willing to belong wholly to the woman. Courtesy National Film Archive of India, Pune.

In Dil Ek Mandir the narrative movement is facilitated by a serial attention to the three main characters' points of view. Each of the characters is shown in interaction with the other two. Thus Rajendra Kumar and Meena Kumari have to work through the unfinished story of their romance; Meena Kumari has to establish her devotion to her husband; and Raaj Kumar (the husband) extracts a promise from Rajendra Kumar that in the event of his death the latter would marry Meena Kumari. The issue of widow remarriage is introduced in the form of a pact between two men about the future of a woman. ^[62] Although the film finally restores the status quo and eliminates Rajendra Kumar, its narrative structure is especially designed to allow for the elaboration of the thematics of love as a relation of mutuality in conflict with the compulsions of marriage. The husband's legitimacy is restored only after a full acknowledgement on his part of the legitimacy of his wife's relation with the doctor.

[[Guilty of love, Gopal (Rajendra Kumar) is full of remorse on hearing that Sundar (Raj Kapoor), presumed dead at the front, is alive and about to return home. Sangam (Raj Kapoor 1964). Courtesy National Film Archive of India, Pune.]]

[[Radha (Vyjayanthimala) is horrified when she realizes that Gopal (Rajendra Kumar) has written a love letter to Sundar in her name. Sangam (Raj Kapoor 1964). Courtesy National Film Archive of India, Pune.]]

In 1964, a year after Dil Ek Mandir, Raj Kapoor released his megafilm Sangam. Critics regard this as a turning point in Kapoor's career because it was seen to mark the beginning of a shift away from the 'progressive' orientation of the fifties, when in collaboration with the socialist K.A. Abbas, he made films like Awara and Shree 420, towards big-budget extravaganzas (d. Chakravarty, 1993: 216).

However, Sangam was an important event in Indian popular film history for a different reason. It represented a decisive (though not irreversible) generic reannexation of the fledgling' women's melodrama by the national super-genre called the social, a genre predicated on the deployment of the absolutist gaze. This conquest was staged through a combination of strategies. The first of these was the expansion of the representational space of the narrative to include the defence of the nation-state as a factor in the unfolding of the story, thus reducing the family as site of melodramatic thematics to a position of unmistakable subordination. Secondly, the text incorporated a long segment, with little narrative value, shot on foreign locations and offering the pleasures of consumerism on an intensified scale. Thirdly, buttressed by these extraneous sources of power, the plot expanded to include both pre-and post-marital romantic conflicts. In Dil Ek Mandir, the narrative begins after the marriage and thus makes the pre-marital romance an event in the past, which the characters must come to terms with in the present narrative. In Sangam, the woman's romantic inclinations are allowed to develop before the marriage, thus opening up the possibility of choice and the need to find justifiable ways of denying her that choice. In thus giving itself a nearly irresolvable problem of woman's desire, Sangam risks more than the other women's melodramas mentioned above, but manages to find a resolution through the deployment of the compulsions of patriotism. The film can therefore be read as an allegory of resistance to generic differentiation where the latter tendency represents the fragmentation of the social body into 'interest groups'.

The central device of this narrative strategy is the unseeing hero, the 'blind' lover, played by Raj Kapoor, This is the figure of absolutist subjectivity, more visibly mobilized here than anywhere else, but nevertheless a characteristic ingredient of the popular film. The story begins with the three main characters as children, the two boys vying for the attention of the girl who gives early indications of being attracted to Gopal (Rajendra Kumar). While both the males are attracted to Radha (Vyjayantimala),^[63] they are also attracted to each other by a strong homosocial bond of dosti, which in Hindi cinema functions as the code of fraternity that binds men into a separate society. The code of dosti takes precedence over that of heterosexual love and in case of conflict, the latter must yield to the former. Thus, in a conflict over love between male friends, the woman remains out of the picture, while the two males decide between themselves who will have her (another instance of this thematic is to be found in Naya Daur). The bond of dosti is then, a prototype of the compact among men that institutes the social contract.

The conflict in Sangam arises not because both the men fall in love with the same woman, but because one of them establishes a reciprocal love relation with the woman before settling the issue of who will have her with the other man, thus breaching the code of dosti. The most difficult representational dilemma that the film creates for itself arises as a consequence of the above breach of the code: since the woman, Radha, has clearly expressed her love for Gopal, the film must justify both his breach of commitment to her, as well as the union between her and Sundar (Raj Kapoor), which takes place after she has been silenced by the combination of dosti and national honour. The segment in which this transfer of rights over the woman occurs begins with Sundar joining the Air Force as a pilot during a war. His plane crashes and he is declared dead, leaving the field open for a romance to develop between Gopal and Radha.^{(see clip here)} Just as the romance is about to take a significant turn, Sundar returns, having survived the crash and made his way back into Indian territory. When the three meet together again, a shocking revelation is made. Recounting his experience of the crash and subsequent escape from enemy territory, he tells Radha that the only thing that preserved his courage in the most trying circumstances was a letter she had written to him after he left for the warfront. Radha, however, did not write the letter. It was written by Gopal in her name. Gopal stifles her protests by lying and pleading silently with her not to betray the secret. This scene reveals to the audience an obscene secret that resulted from a conflict between the two codes of dosti and love.^{(see clip here)} From Radha's point of view a redeeming resolution would be an open declaration by her and Gopal of their love for each other. But the narrative drive is towards another resolution that, forcing Radha to marry Sundar, then turns to the elimination of Gopal (who now becomes an unpleasant memory from her past) and in the process, her complete submission to a love that she did not reciprocate but which, backed by the might of the state, never encounters the need to justify itself. Gopal's claim on Radha is delegitimized by the act that betrays his vacillation between the two codes of dosti and love.

Sangam was released two years after the surprise attack by China, which shattered many illusions and exposed the vulnerability of the new nation. The tensions with another neighbour, Pakistan, were to erupt in war in the following year. Thus the film was topical, but unlike patriotic films such as Haqeeqat, it did not take on the burden of nationalist propaganda in a straightforward manner. "Instead, it employed war in order to resurrect an absolutist subjectivity as the anchoring point of national unity. It used war as the legitimizing ground for an assault on the domestic enclosure, prising it open to insert the absolutist imperative, to repudiate the sanctity of mutuality and reciprocity as signs of true domesticity.

On the other hand, any austerity implied by this negation of domestic love by the imperatives of absolutism is compensated by the lavish consumerism, the access to the pleasures of western capitalism that the heroine enjoys, as a reward for her sacrifices. The long segment shot abroad, mainly devoted to tourism, to consuming the sumptuous sights and pleasures of advanced capitalism, and, not least, to the pleasure of representing India to the outside world, stands in sharp contrast to the forebodings of a duty-bound, self-sacrificing career for the woman that the plot might have prepared us to expect.

In effect the father has overridden the son's desires, and kept the woman for himself, a truth that the film does not fail to acknowledge, if only indirectly, in the humorous song 'Main kya karoon ram mujhe budha mil gaya'.^{(see clip here)} By being blind, Sundar remains powerful. He does not look for an answering desire in Radha to confirm his own; nor does he see the ample evidence of Radha's preference for Gopal. Both Radha and Gopal, on the other hand, are rendered powerless by being reduced to their own particular points of view. Both become guilty by simply having desired each other because their desire, in its mutuality, has the effect of shutting out the world around it, of making them, but especially him, forgetful of the duty of the patriot ^[64].

It is a fellow-soldier at the front who tells Sundar the story of his betrayal by a friend who, entrusted with the protection of the soldier's wife, had an affair with her, a story that Sundar regards as repeating itself in his own life when he learns of the relationship between Radha and Gopal. Perspective or point of view here gets coded as self-interest, self-absorption, a mark of deception and guilt. This coding is not entirely mistaken in so far as Metz has defined cinematic voyeurism as a 'shamefaced voyeurism'. But the power of the injunction against individualized perspective is an extension of the power of a state whose authority rests not on the consent of citizens but on a pact entered into by the '(pre)chosen'. ^[65]

The Hindi women's melodramas were male-centred, as is indicated by the presence of Rajendra Kumar in many of them. But at the same time they raised the question of women's desire, and albeit with adequate patriarchal scaffolding, broached questions connected with the emancipation of women from the oppression of feudal orthodoxy. To that extent Rajendra Kumar himself came to stand as an emblem of female desire. It is thus not a coincidence that in Sangam the death of Rajendra Kumar also extinguishes Radha's desire and cleanses her marriage with Sundar of the dishonour that her desire represents. The quasi-autonomous woman's film thus gets re-annexed to the social genre which symbolizes the form of national integration favoured by the coalition of modern and pre modern ruling elites.

The mobilization of the state apparatus in the service of a perspective-free national subject's enjoyment also reminds us that Raj Kapoor had a special status in Nehruvian India especially because of the role played by his films in providing a cultural dimension to Indo-Soviet friendship. Raj Kapoor was able to get the help of the Air Force as well as shoot some scenes during the Republic Day parade, both involving a scale of operations that few Indian film makers could dream of seeing through at the time. Sangam was also the first and probably the most lavish of a series of sixties films to be shot on foreign locations, which implied a whole range of government approvals.

The killing of generic differentiation begins, of course, at the level of film budgets. The low-cost women's melodrama has to compete with a big-budget social which incorporates the former and thus provides a combination of pleasures for a wider audience. It drags the fledgling genre into a space where its freedom to explore women's issues is constrained by the national concerns that relativize their importance. But the difference in expenditure also translates into a difference between the types of social space represented in the text. The crucial scene where Gopal's obscene secret is revealed shows how in the 'public space' of the social super-genre a woman's questions must remain unasked. When Sundar declares that it was Radha's letter that kept his courage up at the battlefront, Radha begins to deny having written the letter. But she is cut short by Gopal who jumps in to 'remind' her that she had given him the letter to be mailed to Sundar. This is accompanied by a beseeching look that asks her to go along with the lie. At this point there is an extended exchange of looks between Radha and Gopal during which Radha's face registers first perplexity, then suspicion and finally a full realization of the murky horror of the betrayal that she cannot even protest against. Although this scene is explicit enough to give us a clear indication of Radha's recognition of her betrayal and secret prostitution, Sangam succeeds in finding a resolution without answering the woman's unasked but obvious question. The fact that Sundar does not see this long exchange of looks indicates that it belongs to a world of privacy that cannot intrude upon the narrative as public spectacle. The spectator's own muteness is signalled by the fact that his/her witnessing of this private moment remains unacknowledged by the narrative.

The dominance of this spectatorial relation is thus a symptom of the continuation of the despotic/monarchic organization of public space. In the next chapter we will see how this mode of organization of public space is reinforced by means of a prohibition of representations of kissing.

_______________________________________________________

^{[49] Balwant Gargi 1962: 154-61. Also relevant is Gargi's discussion of the regional
theatres, particularly that of Bengal. See also Anuradha Kapur (1993).}

^{[50] See Vasudevan (1993) on the significance of the Indian crime film of the
1950s,}

^{[51] The relation between hegemony and aesthetic forms is also touched upon by
Roy Armes (1971), who observe.g that the 'prevalence of short story over novel, in
Italy as in Germany, is a reflection of wider issues: until quite recent times any sort of
coherent social view has been impossible because of the political disunity of the
country' (p. 23).}

^{[52] See discussions of Andaz by Ravi Vasudevan (1993) and Paul Willemen (1993).}

^{[53] From the beginning, melodrama, as a theatrical tradition, was defended as a
means of popular education, in which 'people were not shown the world as it is, but
rather as it should be' (de Pongerville, a French writer, cited in Hyslop 1992: 65.)
Hyslop discusses the debate over melodrama in which Pixerecourt, known as the
'father of melodrama', defends it as an instructional medium with a high moral purpose.
She argues, against Peter Brooks and Thomas Elsaesser, that the 'democratic' nature
of melodrama cannot be taken for granted (pp. 67-8).}

^{[54] Thus E. Ann Kaplan notes that 'in the modern period (unlike melodrama in
other cultures), in Europe and North America the genre used realism. This was because,
in order to consolidate its power, the bourgeoisie desired art that mirrored its
institutional modes. forms, rituals, making them seem natural, nonideological, "given".'
(Kaplan 1992: 12). For a very useful comparative history of national melodramatic
traditions, see Maureen Turim (1993).}

^{[55] Hanuman. the very emhodiment of devotion and dedication to the master's
GIUSe, is the presiding deity of hachelor cluhs, hire-cycle shops and lower-class
hody-huilding cults. As the quintessential subaltern suhject, he is the figure of
identification for the Bajrang Dal, the vigilante arm of Hindu nationalism.}

^{[56] See Kant (1983), pp. 61-92 on who can he a citizen, i.e. a signatory to the
contract.}

^{[57] I have come across only two studies of darsana, by Diana Eck (1981) and
Lawrence Bann (1981), neither of which. however, deals with the political dimension
of this institution of spectatorship. Ravi Vasudevan has also noted the significance of
the notion of darsana to the study of popular Indian cinema.}

^{[58] Dwarakish, a popular comic actor in Kannada films, was once shown with an
open shirt revealing a vest on which the face of Rajkumar, the top male Kannada film
star, was printed. This recalls the popular calendar image of Hanuman ripping open
his chest to reveal the image of Rama in the place where his heart should be.}

^{[59] See Charles Wolf: (1989) for the story of how the film's ending became a
national issue, and for a sampling of variations on the ending.}

^{[60] See also the Report of the Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship 1909; Margaret
Dickinson and Sarah Street's Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British
Government 1927-84 (1985), shows that the British had their own ideas of nationalism
which included a sense that the colonies were part of the 'nation', although this
claim was made only in the context of a perception that 'trade follows film', that
audiences were 'hypnotised into purchasing items' they had seen in American films,
But there was the additional fear of exposure of the 'private' realm of white society
to Indian eyes. In a parliamentary debate on the subject, Lord Newton declared:
'Imagine what the effect must he upon millions of our coloured fellow citizens in
remote parts of the world who perpetually have American films thrust upon them
which frequently present the white man under the most unfavourable conditions'
(Dickinson and Street 1983: 10). Then as now, American films represented a 'cultural
invasion', though for different reasons.}

^{[61] 0n the centrality of narrative point of view as well as point of view narration
to cinema's aesthetic identity, see Jacques Aumont, Quarterly Review: 11.}

^{[62] When this pact is first broached there is a barely visible cutaway to a church
seen through a window and lit by a flash of lightning, suggesting that widow remarriage
has Christian sanction and thereby mitigating the scandal of a husband's proposal of
his own wife's marriage to another man. At the same time, it also points to the fact
that in India, for historical reasons, the reforms associated with modernity are perforce
also linked up with a Christian world-view.}

^{[63] The characters' names reinforce the allegorical reading: It is not just any couple
but the mythical, ideal couple Radha and Gopal, that must he split in order to re
assert the privileges of Sundar. to suhmit the conjugal scene, once again, to the
inspection of an absolute authority.}

^{[64] The unseeing male lover is a frequently encountered figure in the Hindi film.
Only rarely, as in Deedar, is he actually blind. In Deedar (1951) the blind hero meets
a destiny that is the very antithesis of the all-powerful Sundar's in Sangam. His love
proves incapable of winning the woman back from her mutual love relation with a
doctor. However, his powerlessness there signifies a sacrifice that ennobles him and
makes him the patron of the couple. Thus, in Deedar the blind lover, through his act
of self-effacement (he finally becomes blind again and retreats from the scene of
love), creates a space for the constitution of nuclear couples. By contrast, in Sangam,
the blind lover's tyranny breaks the couple in order to reaffirm by force the unity of
the nation. A more detailed study of the 'blind lover' would be required in order to
draw out all its implications for a national ideology. The hero of Chhalia and the
Muslim character in Dhool ka Pbool are also relevant to this problematic, as is, of
course, the legendary Devdas.}

^{[65] Mehboob's Andaz where similarly the heroine's illicit (because) desiring, relation
with another male ends in the latter's death, is more open in its affirmation of the
feudal family's drive to maintain its status. There too Nargis and Dilip Kumar were
linked by a mutual, intimate and guilt-ridden exchange of glances and Raj Kapoor
was blind. The blind hero who represented the feudal family in Andaz has become
the patriot in Sangam.}

_______________________________________________________

4. Guardians of the View: The Prohibition of the Private

In the post-independence era, a much discussed feature of the censorship code for Indian films has been the prohibition of scenes of kissing. As the enquiry committee on film censorship led by G.D. Khosla reported in 1969, this prohibition was based on an 'unwritten rule' (Report 1969: 93). The written rules prohibited 'excessively passionate love scenes', 'indelicate sexual situations' and 'scenes suggestive of immorality', all of which were derived from the British code of censorship applied in Britain as well as (with modifications) in British India (ibid: 20). No reference to kissing as such, as a target of prohibition, is to be found in the censorship guidelines.

In the first place, the ban on kissing may be related to a nationalist politics of culture. The most frequently offered justification of this informal prohibition has been that it corresponds to the need to maintain the Indianness of Indian culture. Kissing is described as a sign of westernness and therefore alien to Indian culture. In keeping with the logic of this justification, this principle has never been applied in the censorship of foreign films. Further, there has been the occasional Indian film shot abroad, in which the Indian characters have to observe the ban, while the usually white couples, who appear in the background are allowed to break the rule (for eg Raj Kapoor's Sangam). The 'double standard' whereby foreign films were censored according to a different code was justified on the basis that the audiences for these films were different from the ones for Indian films, with some even arguing that this was appropriate since 'foreign pictures cater to a higher stratum of society' (ibid: 82). There also appears to have been (at least in the late sixties, when the committee was doing its work) significant popular support for this ban, with a survey revealing that 51 per cent 'expressed the view that kissing scenes should be deleted from Indian films even if kissing and embracing was a natural part of the story as against 33.3 per cent who voted for a more 'liberal' code (ibid: 83). According to the gender division of votes, more men (52:45) voted for a stricter code than women.

Discussion in the film magazines in the wake of the committee's report proved to be quite revealing of the opinion within the industry. The committee's recommendation to lift the ban did not meet with the sort of universal welcome that might have been expected from an industry that was supposed to be united in its objection to the excesses of censorship. Indeed, many notable film personalities wrote articles opposing the introduction of scenes of kissing. ^[66] It was not until the mid-eighties that films began to appear in which some awkward and perfunctory kissing scenes were included, as if to merely register the lifting of the ban.

[['I am an Indian girl and according to Indian custom, that ... that's only after marriage.' Sharmila Tagore denies Shammi Kapoor a kiss in An Evening in Paris (Shakti Samanta 1969). Courtesy National Film Archive of India, Pune.]]

One must avoid the temptation of concluding, as some 'enlightened critics' have done, that the lifting of the ban in itself represents some form of liberation, although the existence of the prohibition would seem to validate the 'repressive hypothesis' (Foucault 1987). The standard opinion is that the ban on kissing is a manifestation of a form of prudery, a residual Victorianism in Indian culture which constitutes a national embarrassment. But, as everyone acknowledges, there is a great deal of sexual 'vulgarity' in Indian films. The so called 'cabaret dance', and other song and dance sequences are evidence of a sexual permissiveness that contradicts the idea that Indian censorship is a transparent reflection of a Victorian attitude to sexuality.

How do individual films negotiate this prohibition? For it is an observable fact that whatever the self-appointed interpreters of 'Indian culture' may say about the cultural status of kissing, the very fact that a prohibition must be imposed in order to keep it out of sight means that the culture in question is not as homogeneous as it is made out to be. At the level of content, then, we see in Indian films (at least) three different ways of dealing with the ban. The first way is to stage the prohibition itself, as in the scene from Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Ashirwad (1969), where as the lovers move towards each other for a kiss, a fade out overtakes them and prevents, not the act itself, but its appearance on the screen.^{(see clip here)} In such films In this way the film reminds us of the ban and at the same time ridicules it. This is the cinematic equivalent of the 'enlightened' attitude, disdainful of the meaningless prohibition but resigned to the power of the bureaucracy to impose it. It hints at the non-coincidence of representation and its content, in the process representing censorship itself as an extraneous limit, a constraint that curtails representations but does not determine them.

Another approach is to thematize the prohibition as a cultural truth and a duty, thereby inscribing it within the represented content, instead of treating it as a political act of curtailment. This happens for instance, in An Evening in Paris (1967), where the contrast provided by the foreign location, with its alien mores, serves to highlight the uniqueness of the national culture and the responsibility of the characters to uphold it. Thus, the heroine in this film invokes Indian custom to refuse the hero's demand for a kiss.^{(see clip here)} In such films the reality implied by the prohibition is literally produced as truth at the thematic level. The idea of cultural/moral duty is a striking feature of this approach and points to the elevation of particular moral codes in force among some Hindu castes to the status of a national truth. It is significant that the threat posed by a transgression of custom is not only to the family or the institution of marriage, but to the nation itself, as if the expansion of the sphere of sexuality threatened to break open the national borders and destroy its identity. As such it raises the question of the nature of the relation between sexuality and national identity and reminds us of Fanon's assertion, in the course of a discussion of the, contestation over the veil in Algeria, that the 'phenomena of resistance observed in the colonized must be related to an attitude of counter assimilation, of maintenance of a cultural, hence national, originality' (Fanon 1965: 42). This need for counter assimilation as a guarantee of national originality focusses on women's cultural behaviour. It is women who are regarded as the guardians of the national culture, it is women's appearance that becomes the mark of distinction. Thus, while colonialism leads to changes in men's clothing (with the European shirt and trousers becoming standard at least in cities), what women should wear becomes a subject of national debate.

But there is a third way of negotiating the prohibition which complicates the picture. Typically this approach is employed in song sequences: the dancing couple retreat behind a bush or a tree and after a pause the heroine emerges into the frame wiping her lips. This public confirmation of a private act has cultural associations with a certain feudal practice of communal eroticism that consists of the display of the marks of sexual initiation on the female body. In the 1992 film Beta, the heroine's sahelis (female companions), singing in chorus, ask her to explain a series of marks on her body-the smudged bindi, the crumpled clothes, etc.^{(see clip here)} This form of eroticism, which displays the female body for communal inspection, consists of a retreat of the sexual act itself to a zone of privacy while exhibiting the evidence of its consummation. And, not surprisingly, the alleged sexual conservatism of Indian censorship has not prevented such a display of the female body in spite of Widespread public protests. What is it that makes the kiss so objectionable while other forms of sexual display pass the censors without much difficulty?

Here it is necessary to recall one more complicating factor - the informal nature of the prohibition. Such unwritten rules have a way of themselves seeming to be the obscene result of some illicit cohabitation. For one cannot help but ask who thought up such an idea, how it came to be adopted by a group of people licensed to exercise moral authority, who gave the sanction to this at the level of the government, and how it was possible after all this to keep it informal. Viewed from this angle the issue suddenly explodes into questions about the nature of informal authority in a democratic society, the nexus between the state (which is understood to be functioning according to written and legislated codes) and other sources of authority which function on the strength of less systematized but no less effective modes of power. In brief, the prohibition of kissing, a meaningless prohibition of a harmless act, may well reveal some dirty secrets of the state.

We have so far desisted from attempting to verify the truth claim on which the prohibition is based, i.e. the claim that kissing is alien to Indian culture. Such a claim would be impossible to verify and raises questions about the attempt to imagine a homogeneous 'Indian culture' in a country with such a variety of ethnic, religious and linguistic groups. But should we venture to take a step in this direction, we are at once reminded that no one is really making such a claim. We discover a vagueness that goes hand in hand with the appearance of a dirty secret that the whole business of enforcing the ban takes on as we approach it. The secret that it most reminds us of is that of the Emperor's new clothes, one that could be held up as the truth as long as it went unscrutinized. As soon as the child declares that the emperor is naked, what is revealed is not the 'truth' but the fact that community consensus is what maintains the social order intact. By breaking the silence, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, we disrupt the 'intersubjective network' without which our very existence as a community is endangered (Zizek, Looking Awry 1991: 11).

But even this imprecise justification has a further significance. Thus, a witness who was interviewed by the censorship inquiry committee, justified the prohibition in these words:

You cannot have the same yardstick both for the western films and for the Indian films. There have to be two standards. Our culture is different from the western way of life. Our dresses, our emotions, our background arc different. For instance in India, when two people meet, they do not begin to embrace and kiss each other in public, though they may do so in private. In the west, people do embrace and kiss in public (Report 1969: 81).

The meaning of the private/public divide that emerges from this explanation is worth examining in detail. This witness's confusion of the categories is not simply an error of thinking but an imprecision integral to the nature of the prohibition and its social function. The error consists in equating cinematic representation with the representation of the public sphere. In this account there is no recognition of the possibility, which we otherwise take so much for granted, that while the representation circulates in public spaces, it need not necessarily be of the public. Far from being an idiosyncratic view, this idea is actually an accurate description of the consensual ideology that undergirds the popular cinema as a national institution. ^[67] The contradictory attitudes to kissing (which is banned) and the erotic display of the female body as spectacle (which is widespread) in the popular cinema is explained by this very ideology of the public sphere. The female body as spectacle is a public representation, a putting before the public. of an erotic imagery that does not violate the code that prohibits the representation of the private. This is because (1) such spectacle occurs in song-and-dance sequences which are conventionally coded as contracted voyeurism, rather than an unauthorized view of a private world; and (2) where they are not so coded, they serve, as Mulvey has pointed out, as points of narrative arrest. Kissing on the other hand, and by extension the details of a sexual relation between two people, belong to the realm of the private. It is significant that among the recent popular films that feature scenes of kissing this occurs usually in the song-and- dance sequences, as if the intention were to embed this in a stylized space where the kiss would become another novel movement in a dance.

It is not without significance that of all the features that attract the censor's scissors the prohibition of the kiss alone is justified by an argument for cultural non-correspondence. On the other hand, as Kumar Shahani has pointed out, the word shudra is not allowed to be used in a film although it refers to a real social hierarchy (Shahani, Framework 30/31: 88). This is also an unwritten rule in the censorship code. It would therefore be fruitless to speculate whether there is some validity to the truth claim made in this regard: the truth is of little consequence here because if the criterion of cultural authenticity is applied, far more than the kiss would have to be deleted from every Indian film. What is more to the point is to ask why this realist demand is made in relation to this particular representation.

The Invention of the Couple

In reality then, what the prohibition targets is the representation of the private through a meaningless ban on kissing. In order to understand what this means it is necessary to survey the history of capitalism and colonialism leading to the organization of the private that came to be a distinct feature of capitalist societies: the nuclear family, centred around the couple. Some remarks by Alain Grosrichard are extremely pertinent here: Grosrichard speaks of the 'invention of the couple' by Rousseau who, like many French writers of his time, was preoccupied with the spectre of despotism (1979: 222-3). How does this 'invention' of the couple solve the problem of despotism?

Grosrichard's book consists of a complex analysis of the European 'fiction' of Asiatic Despotism. Instead of trying to demonstrate the falseness of this discourse by marshalling contrary historical evidence, he asks what function this fantasy served for the Europeans who so assiduously pursued this idea of the despotic regime. Such an approach enables him to locate Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Bernier and other writers' preoccupation with the nature of despotism in relation to their fears about the degenerate monarchies that they were witness to. It also succeeds in recreating the picture of this despotic regime as one governed by a chain of command which runs from God down to the last position of power in local communities. The absolute power of the despot allows no scope for challenging his authority, but the despotic regime is at the same time rife with transgressions. These transgressions take the form of a subterranean proliferation of 'perversions' which survive through the elaboration of secret codes of communication. Absolute power thus begets rampant decadence. The European thinkers who recognized this relation concluded that any transformation of the microsocial would depend on a permanent securing of the state against the recurrence of despotic regimes. The despotic regime is founded on an acknowledgment of the psychoanalytic assertion that 'there is no sexual relation': here the relation of the phallic authority to the members of the harem is mediated by the eunuch, who is the sexual 'in-between', and polygamy is one of its necessary consequences.

In response to this, Rousseau (and Diderot) construct the couple, as an accomplishment of the impossible (sexual relation). The couple is the 'political subject' that guarantees a State that is free from the risk of despotism (Grosrichard 1979: 223). Here we may recall Carol Pateman's argument in ?be Sexual Contract, which asserts the dependence of the social contract on a (logically) prior sexual contract. The sexual contract, it is to be noted, is not a contract between the man and the woman who form the couple, but between the men, who all agree to recognize one another's right to a space of (despotic) sovereignty: the family and the woman who, within it, becomes the man's property (Pateman 1988: 2). It is this dual contract that alone produces the conditions of possibility of a modern state, where the phallic power is not incarnated in the living body of a despotic king but instead is distributed among the male contracting members of society, the fraternite that formed the third element of the slogan of the French Revolution. Thus the very stability of the post-despotic state rests on the stability of the micro-despotism of the nuclear family. The fiction of contract marks a transition from the rule of fathers to the rule of brothers (ibid: 77-9).

The cinema, emerging in the historical space of the modern, is committed, as Raymond Bellour has said, to the endless reproduction of the couple, in narratives that bring about or restore the conjugal scene (Bellour 1980: 183). However, while the cinema in the west has only to re-present the transition from the familial to the conjugal - 'the resolution of Oedipus' - as an endless cyclical process that has already been inaugurated (Bellour 1986: 78), in Indian cinema the modern state is present as only one of several patriarchal authorities competing for domination. As such we find that in the dominant filmic narrative the drive towards the affirmation of conjugality is reined in by the restoration of the clan to its position of splendour and power; the couple, in other words, is repeatedly reabsorbed into the parental patriarchal family and is committed to its maintenance. The modern family romance occurs in the popular Hindi film only in an embedded form, under the aegis of the compound authority of a feudal and a modern patriarchy. This is amply illustrated by a phenomenon that has been often noted, that in Hindi films (at least in the sixties), the 'police always arrive late'. In other words, the climax of the romance would usually consist of a battle between the hero and a primary villain, with lesser villains being fought by the hero's accomplices in the background. And the police usually arrive only in time to witness the decisive defeat of the villain and to endorse the justice'rendered in their absence. This phenomenon tends to be read as a satire on the incompetence of the police. But something more is involved here: the late arrival of the police attests not only to the endorsement of a feudal system of justice by the representatives of the modern state, it also enacts the formal alliance between these two sites of power which retain their separate identities. Thus, to borrow Marx's terminology from a different context (Marx, Capital, 1977: 1019-28), here the subsumption of the feudal family romance in the modern is only formal, not real. Real subsumption would render the family a transitory functional entity committed to re-enacting the conjugal scene in the lives of its children, after which it must, as Hegel says, dissolve itself (Hegel 1967: 117-22).

The 'new family' in Hegel takes the place of the old one which was committed to 'preserving the family and its splendor by means of fideicommissa and substitutiones (in order to favour sons by excluding daughters from inheriting, or to favour the eldest son by excluding the other children),' a proclivity that Hegel characterizes as 'an infringement of the principle of the freedom of property ... like the admission of any other inequality in the treatment of heirs' (Hegel 1967: 121). The family that does not dissolve itself into the families of its children and instead regards its own enjoyment as the ultimate aim contravenes the ethical life that Hegel is elaborating as the integral external embodiment of the modern state. The old family institution 'depends on an arbitrariness which in and by itself has no right to recognition, or more precisely on the thought of wishing to preserve intact not so much this family but rather this clan or 'house' (ibid: 121) or, in the Indian context, the khandan, gharana or vansh.

The kiss that seals the Christian marriage and inaugurates a zone of privacy, thereby dissolving all other intermediate claims to authority except that' of the state, is the very same kiss that is prohibited on the Indian screen, between Indian citizens. The private is only invented in and through this relationship of the family to the state (the end result of the contract that inaugurates the new patriarchy), whereas in the old family, which is also, at the same time, an authoritarian regime, the private does not exist. As such the unspoken ('informal', like the prohibition) alliance between the modern state (which is only formally in place) and the numerous premodern points of power and authority (which could also be stated in another way: the state is the embodiment of the alliance of premodern centres of power and has no substance of its own) prohibits the invention of the private, the zone of intimate exchange and union, where in the Hegelian ideal, the members of the couple become as one. Thus, while the spectacle of the female body poses no threat to this informal alliance that constitutes the Indian ruling bloc, the scene of intimate exchange where bourgeois female subjectivity (the 'law of woman' being for Hegel the 'law of the inward life' and opposed to the 'law of the land', finding its proper sphere of influence in the family, which is the woman's 'substantive destiny') may emerge, challenges the claim of the intermediate patriarchal authorities to unrestricted control over the space of conjugality.

As a space marked by a discursive shift (the appearance of private languages, the possibility of unsanctioned practices), the private is a self-enclosing libidinal exchange that various authorities seek to oversee. ^[68] Any representation of this private space and its activities in the public realm thus constitutes a transgression of the scopic privilege that the patriarchal authority of the traditional family reserves for itself. Such a representation threatens to draw a circle around the couple, thus realizing its autonomy, its independence from the self-appointed sanctioning authority and at the same time makes the modern state the overseeing authority and the guarantor of the couple's autonomy. This moment also marks the inauguration of the history of realist voyeurism.

The prohibition of kissing, as we have seen, is attributed to 'Indian culture'. The prohibition, according to this understanding, blocks the centrifugal force unleashed by the kiss that would threaten the integrity of the culture. Absence is translated as a negative injunction. We are dealing here with what psychoanalysis terms the 'Big Other', which Zizek describes as 'the agency that decides instead of us, in our place', an invisible hand, which in our case takes the form of Culture (Zizek, For They Know Not 1991: 77). The prohibition of certain practices is attributed to this Other of the symbolic network, by reference to which what is prohibited is also said to be non- existent. This paradoxical prohibition of the non-existent is the basis of the consensual formation that ensures the stability of the community's identity.

Why must the non-existent be prohibited? It is a question of desire, of a certain tendency of desire that cannot be integrated into a homeostatic system (such as the nation-state is envisaged to be), a desire that threatens to break out of the limiting circuits of the national body to seek its fulfilment 'elsewhere', this elsewhere being, precisely, the culturally non-specific, deterritorialized space of modern consumer culture.

Going beyond this we must pose the question that brings the historical into the picture, that is why this specific prohibition is so important to the stability of the social formation. Why should the ban be anything more than a meaningless act that was stupidly continued for a long time? Indeed, if the ban on kissing as such is the issue, there is nothing more to be said about it. But if it is acknowledged that this meaningless prohibition extends beyond the kiss to a certain notion of the 'private', and that it is imposed in the service of an informal alliance of patriarchies, then the picture becomes more complicated.

In Basu Bhattacharya's Anubhav ('Experience' 1971), a film which self-consciously attempts to deal precisely with this question of a 'private space', the problem that threatens the family is defined by the heroine as the lack of lagao (attachment) between husband and wife. The couple then proceed to create this absent connection, which consists in producing a space of intimacy, of closed or restricted exchange. The problem of the couple is the problem of the formation of a middle class, where the possibility of restricted exchange is predicated, paradoxically, on the possibility of the free circulation of autonomous subjects. It is the initial free pact between 'consenting adults' as the law puts it that is the condition of possibility of a private space.

[[A middle-class housewife, trying to set her house in order, encounters a remainder from the past: Dinesh Thakur and Tanuja in Anubhav (Basu Bhattacharya 1973). Courtesy National Film Archive of India, Pune.]]

Thus, in Anubhav the wife's pre-marital romance with the man who has now re-entered her life as her husband's employee, consisted in no more than 'a few hours of conversation' in which the subjectivity denied to her in her parental home found a space to emerge. Having resolved to restore the space of intimate exchange between herself and her husband, the heroine's first act is to dismiss all the servants. The servants have occupied and fully control the domestic space. In their midst the marriage is a daily spectacle and their intrusive presence is the mark of a lack of closure in the relationship. They stand in for a traditional overseeing authority, penetrating the conjugal space with the inspecting glance. ^[69] While in the eye, of this overseeing authority the marriage retains the external features of conjugality cohabitation, economic co-operation, etc. - its internal substance is absent, the love or lagao that guarantees a nuclear family's autonomy. It is the Hegelian ideal of the Christian marriage, distinguished by spiritual unity that is represented as an absence. In bringing it about, support is drawn from the only servant who refuses to leave, claiming for himself a special status in the family: he is the non-intrusive, supportive remainder of the dissolved parental family.

It is in the context of a state-form in which the relations between the citizen and the state (itself guaranteed by the Law of the Father) are mediated by unreconstructed patriarchal codes that the injunction against the representation of the private becomes intelligible. A state that has to oversee the expansion of capitalist production through the maintenance and sometimes intensification of pre-capitalist modes of exploitation is obliged to maintain a protected sphere of cultural traditionalism: women and the peasantry are often the objects of this paternalist attention. This is not to suggest that the patriarchal nexus that maintains this protected culture is actually successfully regulating the modes of reception of new cultural forces by the people. Such regulation would be difficult if not impossible. But what it does accomplish is the naturalization of the ideological notion of a conflict between tradition and modernity and the prohibitive force of tradition.

To summarize, the prohibition of kissing is a symptomatic cultural protocol whose origins lie in the need to prevent the dissolution of pre-capitalist patriarchal enclaves, to rein in the forces of democratic transformation. It is not the transparent expression of a pre-existing cultural predilection but a 'meaningless' (the moment we recognize that it is not meaningless, not just stupid or merely puritanical, it ceases to function effectively) prohibition that regulates the public circulation of images as an obligation of the contract between new and traditional elites. Its tangible result in cinema (which has been the central national cultural institution because mass illiteracy poses obstacles to literature playing a similar role) is a blocking of the representation of the private.

The Prohibition of Cinema

The prohibition of the private in a way amounts to the prohibition of cinema itself. For what is at stake here is the specific scopic regime that is activated by the cinema and its social significance in the context of a capitalist social formation. In a section of 'The Imaginary Signifier' entitled 'The Passion for Perceiving' (1986: 260-7) Christian Metz elaborates on the specificity of the scopic drive within the cinematic relation. The practice of cinema is dependent on the activity of the scopic and the invocatory or auditory drives, both of which relate to their objects at a distance. In voyeurism, there is a constitutive distance between the object (what is looked at) and the source of the drive (the seeing eye). The voyeur represents in space the fracture which forever separates him from the object; he represents his very dissatisfaction (which is precisely what.he needs as a voyeur), and thus also his 'satisfaction' in-so-far as it is of a specifically voyeuristic type'. The looking drive (and with modifications the auditory drive), thanks to this function of distance in its very unfolding, cannot ever afford the illusion of 'a full relation to the object' (ibid: 261).

These features of the scopic drive are however common to all visual and auditory modes of representation. The specificity of the cinema arises, according to Metz, from 'an extra reduplication' of this relation of absence or lack of the object. In the first place, the absent object is infinitely more varied in the cinema and secondly, its absence is not simply marked by the distance that separates the spectator from the stage, as in the theatre, but by the absence of the object from the stage (or its cinematic equivalent, the screen) itself. The cinema 'only gives it [the object] in effigy' (Metz: 262). When the actor was present (during the shooting) the spectator was absent, and when the spectator arrives, the actor has already left (ibid: 264): this 'missed encounter' that constitutes the essence of cinematic voyeurism (reminiscent, we might add, of the missed encounter between the two agents of the 'original' economic activity of barter, when money intervenes to split the exchange relation into its component parts, buying and selling as independent activities) makes cinema a distinctly capitalist cultural phenomenon. Metz contrasts cinema with other 'more intimate voyeuristic activities' like 'certain cabaret acts, striptease, etc', where 'voyeurism remains linked to exhibitionism, where the two faces, active and passive, of the component drive are by no means so dissociated; where the object seen is present and hence presumably complicit .... ' (ibid: 262-3). This presence, 'and the active consent which is its real or mythical correlate (but always real as myth) re-establish in the scopic space, momentarily at least, the illusion of a fullness of the object relation, of a state of desire which is not just imaginary' (ibid: 263).

This vestige of a mythic fusion with the object, which survives in the theatre, is 'attacked' by the cinema signifier in so far as the consent of the object on the screen cannot be taken for given. Cinematic voyeurism thus turns out to be 'unauthorized scopophilia' (ibid: 264) and its difference from the theatre can be further contextualized in the 'socio-ideological circumstances that marked the birth of the two arts'. Thus:

cinema was born in the midst of the capitalist epoch in a largely antagonistic and fragmented society, based on individualism and the restricted family (= father-mother-children), in an especially superegotistic bourgeoiS society, especially concerned with 'elevation' (or facade), especially opaque to itself. The theater is a very ancient art, one which saw the light in more authentically ceremonial societies, in more integrated human groups (even if sometimes, as in Ancient Greece, the cost of this integration was the rejection into a nonhuman exterior of a whole social category, that of the slaves), in cultures which were in some sense closer to their desire (=paganism); the theater retains something of this deliberate civic tendency toward ludico liturgical 'communion', even in the degraded state of a fashionable rendezvous around those plays known as pieces de boulevard.
It is for reasons of this kind too that theatrical voyeurism, less cut off from its exhibitionist correlate, tends more toward a reconciled and community-oriented practice of -the scopic perversion (of the component drive). Cinematic voyeurism is less accepted, more 'shamefaced' (Metz 1986: 265).

Cinema thus reflects the dispersal of the 'community' that is characteristic of capitalist societies. But the 'unauthorised scopophilia' of the cinema 'is at the same time authorized by the mere fact of its institutionalization' (ibid: 265). This' "reprise" of the imaginary by the symbolic', whereby a 'legalization and generalization of the prohibited practice' becomes the established reality of capitalist societies links cinema to certain clandestine but sanctioned spaces like the licensed brothel. In spite of the legitimacy that institutionalization provides, however, this place of leisure remains a "hole" in the social cloth' (ibid: 266).

In Indian popular cinema we observe a tendency to resist the extra-communal tendency that Metz regards as constitutive of cinematic culture. The mandatory 'cabaret' scene in many Hindi films, marked by a tendency to frontal representation (where the dancer often looks straight into the camera, in violation of the 'recipe of classical cinema' which forbids such a direct address, and which originates in the logic of cinematic voyeurism), this spectacle is clearly 'theatrical' in Metz's sense. That which is offered as spectacle for the cinematic voyeur is distinguished by the fact that it 'lets itself be seen without presenting itself to be seen' (ibid: 264).

This disjuncture, which Metz tends to locate at the points of cinematic production and projection can also be related to the aesthetics of realism. What Metz broadly reads as a difference between the theatre and the cinema can also be seen as a historically datable difference between pre-realist and realist theatre, with the latter inaugurating the aesthetic that Metz identifies exclusively with cinema. ^[70] Realist theatre and classical cinema manifest a common attempt to erect an invisible but unsurpassable barrier between the spectator/reader and the object, a barrier whose traces are precisely those injunctions against direct address, as well as the tendency to represent the private, that which does not present itself to be seen. By contrast Indian popular cinema, with its rejection of realist principles of representation accords more with those forms of voyeurism in which the complicity of the object is a crucial real or mythical assumption. It is the representation of the private that engenders the 'shame-faced' voyeurism of the cinema and presupposes the reality of the subject's solitude in the act of voyeuristic perception, and the dissolution of the substantive communal relation into the atomistic individualism of capitalist social relations.

Thus, at the heart of the film industry an informal injunction goes to work to prohibit the representation of kissing and thereby generates a chain of implied prohibitions: the prohibition of representations of the private, the prohibition of cinema (in the western 'emblematic' sense), and, we are now in a position to add, the prohibition of the open acknowledgement of the capitalist nature of the new nation-state. Where socialism was only invoked as ideology, and Congress socialism was no more than a protective shield for the development of indigenous capitalism, the emerging capitalist culture had to be disavowed and this disavowal was the only (negative) proof of the existence of socialism.

The Indian popular film bridges the gap between the screen and the spectator (a gap which in Hollywood cinema is bridged only by the spectator's participation in the unfolding of the narrative, a process which highlights his/her complicity) through the effect (produced by various means, of which the prohibition of kissing is only one) of an underwriting of the voyeuristic relation by the Symbolic. This is made clear by the reading of the politics of the darsanic gaze in the previous chapter, where we saw that the subject is invited to participate in a spectacle as witness to the splendour of that which presents itself to the subject's gaze. The cinema, according to Metz's definition, takes place in a reserved space, where the functioning of the symbolic is suspended (or left outside, standing guard) in order to allow the activity of 'unauthorized scopophilia'. By contrast, the cinema in India unfolds as if under the aegis of the Symbolic.

When the members of the couple turn to each other for a kiss, what occurs (or what is feared) is a decisive shutting out of the Other, whose gaze then at once becomes, or is reminded of its, shamefaced voyeurism. This gesture of withdrawal by the object throws the subject back onto itself, and acts as a reminder of the subject's solitude, the condition of individuals in a capitalist society. The couple's withdrawal into an inviolable privacy threatens to set the image loose from its mooring in the contracted voyeuristic relation, sending it spinning away on an unpredictable course (as the couple literally does in Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Swayamvaram, 1972), leaving the spectator similarly rudderless, the imaginary unity then coming permanently under the ever present threat of an irreparable rupture. In prohibiting this withdrawal, the cinema produces and maintains the illusion of a community, the alertness of all subjects to the existence of all others or the alertness of the subject to the existence of all subjects. ^[71]

The subject's desire, constitutively unpredictable in its choice of object, is a disruptive element that the national ideology - Barthes once described ideology as 'the Cinema of a society' (Barthes 1973: 3) - of communal cohesion has to manage. Indeed, desire (as desire for the modern that cinema is and represents) is often replaced by the curious notion of need as an explanatory factor for the Indian people's enthusiastic reception of the popular cinema. The opposition constituted by the terms need and desire in the context of a theory of (Indian) cinema has implications at the level of a theory of the modern Indian state and its location in the global capitalist system. In order to examine these implications, I turn to a text by Ashish Nandy which elaborates a need-based theory of 'commercial cinema'. This discussion will also disclose the real stakes of the ideological project of Indian popular cinema: in prohibiting representations of the private, this cinema blocks the recognition of the breakdown of precapitalist community bonds and the learning of new modes of solidarity based on the shared interests of the working classes.

The Disavowal of Capitalism

In a spirited defence of commercial cinema, Nandy asserts that it speaks for the masses and has a claim to legitimacy as valid as that of the 'art cinema' in its own sphere.

The basic principles of the commercial cinema derive from exactly the core concerns of the Indians caught between the old and the new, and the native and the exogenous. That is, the strength of the commercial cinema lies in its ability to tap the fears, anxieties and felt pressures of deculturation and even depersonalisation which plague the Indians who do not find the normative framework of the established urban middle-class culture adequate for their need. (Nandy 1987: 72).

The primacy accorded to need in Nandy's discussion gives him a reason to defer the question of the aesthetic. Thus, his comparative treatment of 'art', 'middle brow' and 'commercial cinema' does not question the legitimacy of the art film (Nandy 1988b: 61). The comments made in favour of the commercial cinema are qualified by others stating 'however much we may bemoan the entry of mass culture ... ' indicating an uneasiness on the aesthetic question which is all-important for the art cinema. A second consequence is that the notion of cultural need, which implies that different groups have different needs, leads to the argument in favour of a sectoral division of culture: 'art films cannot and should not hegemonise the entire cultural space available to the Indian cinema' because 'there is need for at least a tripartite division of spoils among the high, middle and low-brow cinema in India' (Nandy 1988b: 60-1).

Nandy produces a folk culture for us out of a supposed intimate fit between a displaced proletariat (uprooted from their relatively stable rural existence and thrown into the uncertainties of urban life) and its favourite cultural institution, the commercial cinema. The usefulness of this cinema lies in its ability to heal the wounds of deracination. This is at the individual level. On another level, this cinema also helps preserve the endangered traditions of the modernizing nation-state by making tradition the 'normative fulcrum' of self-expression, thereby providing the displaced masses with a take on modernity from their own standpoint. Nandy urges 'us' to recognize that this cinema, while meeting the needs of the masses, also satisfies 'our' longing for the preservation of tradition. It is by giving the masses what they want that we can be sure of getting what we want.

This reading of popular cinema marks a break with the more common aestheticist tendency to treat it as not-yet-cinema, a formless and anarchic bricolage of titillation, violent spectacle and moral conservatism. But having left the aestheticist critique behind, Nandy does not quite manage to free his arguments from a temptation to simply reverse the equation. His text has a strong tendency to equate the defence of the commercial cinema with a defence of the people, the masses and their (supposed) role as the preservers of tradition in a modernizing society. He explains his position thus:

Now that modernity has become the dominant principle in Indian public life, when much of the oppression and exploitation in the society is inflicted in the name of modern categories such as development, science, progress and national security, the logic of the situation demands a different kind of political attitude towards cultural traditions. However much we may bemoan the entry of mass culture through the commercial cinema, the fact remains that it is the commercial cinema which by default is more protective towards traditions and towards native categories (Nandy 1988b: 61).

Nandy's claim is that popular cinema speaks for the people and their traditions and against the encroachment of the principle of modernity. And yet he also asserts that it is in the context of the domination of the principle of modernity that this cinema must be defended. Thus commercial cinema, if it is indeed as he describes it, would seem to the fighting a lost battle. Read in conjunction with the idea that different sectors of culture serve different needs, this seems to carry a disturbing implication that popular cinema should be protected because of its ability to serve, not as the site of a transformative critique of modernity, but as a rejuvenating, healing ideological refuge from it. Where these 'native categories' have been irreversibly emptied of any real social effectivity, cinema mitigates the trauma of the masses' encounter with the new by preserving the illusion of a persistence of tradition. This affirmative theory of the popular would thus appear to have as its guiding principle, an administrative concern with normalcy, law and order. Here we encounter the theoretical justification for the disavowal of the capitalist nature of the Indian nation-state. This disavowal is partial, confined to the psychic sphere of the proletariat and accordingly, finds it possible to divide cultural spheres into incommensurable sectors. We of the middle class, who know that modernity can no longer be defended against, and who participate in its expansion with our commitment to the western aesthetic standards that make a Satyajit Ray film so appealing-we are not being asked to commit ourselves to a rejection of modernity or to a denial of its arrival. We are being invited, on the other hand, to confine the modern revolution (or, more accurately, the consciousness of it) to our sphere of existence, not to insist on its extension to the people, for whom the illusion of the normative function of tradition provided by the cinema is a therapeutic necessity.

The discourse of and on popular cinema has always involved a dialectic of modernity and tradition in which the point of enunciation cannot be unambiguously located in one or the other for all time. And even where we are able to clearly identify the perspective, in individual films, the 'traditional' is by no means identical with the interests and desires of the dispossessed and displaced masses. It is problematic to employ tradition and modernity in this sense as terms of analysis. It is true that popular films deploy this binary frequently and that thematic conflicts are structured around it. But to treat it as if it were a transparent representation of some real conflict between these two concepts is to fall into an ideological trap. For the construction of 'tradition' is part of the work of modernity. This is not to deny the material effectivity of the binary in the social. On the contrary, our questioning of the binary necessitates the investigation of the relation of these representations (of conflicts between tradition and modernity) to the real relations that characterize the social formation.

Sectoral need theory neglects the relational aspect of any social divisions that it may identify. In Anubhav, as we have seen, the couple's resolve to produce a private world is supported by a self effacing patriarchal servant figure. In a scene at the beginning of the film, this old man gives the hero, a newspaper editor, a massage while the latter works late into the night ^[72] In the conversation that ensues, the servant gently criticizes the master for working too hard and long and not enjoying the fruits of his labour. Thus the servant makes visible to the man an important truth about his existence. The film tries to realize the positive suggestion contained in the servant's remark. But this suggestion is never allowed to reflect back on the working life of the servant himself, who as we can plainly see, has no fixed working hours and no 'private life' either. The obvious naturalness of the terms of this relationship, in which the servant is made to pronounce a truth that applies to the master but not to himself, also depends on a version of the sectoral theory of needs. The proletariat's right to a fixed working day, a 'modern' right, if asserted in such a context could upset the neat division of the social into sectors.

In his description of the commercial cinema, Nandy refers to its ability to 'tap the fears, anxieties and felt pressures of deculturation and even depersonalisation'. Given the emphasis on culture as a need, it is not surprising that desire does not figure in this list. Desire, once introduced, threatens to lead the subject astray (into the spaces of modernity, reserved for the middle class and the connoisseurs of art cinema), whereas the point of the exercise is to bind the subject to a place in a need-based, self-reproducing cultural economy. The desired image of the masses is an image of the masses as lacking desire.

Need is that which can be met by a specifiable and unchanging object. Hunger, for example, can be satisfied by food and only by food. By making culture a sphere of need, Nandy integrates the psychic into the modern economy and identifies the cinema as that which meets the needs of the population. Culture becomes a sphere of nature, not one in which meanings circulate, producing frames of intelligibility by means of which the relations of power and production are justified. That there may be a demand for a different social order, that cinema provides various explanations for the contradictions of capitalist society, that tradition as the 'solution' for these contradictions may be an ideological construction disseminated by popular Hindi cinema, these are ignored. By this reckoning it must be said that while the other sectors of the economy have failed to meet the basic material needs of the masses, the culture industry alone has succeeded in effectively meeting the demand that is placed on it. If we push this argument further, it may turn out that the culture industry's success in meeting this need gives the other sectors of the economy and the exploitative system itself some respite. For if the basic needs were to become more important to the masses at any time, would the cultural need continue to remain the same? And conversely, if the basic needs were ever to be adequately met, would the masses then not be in a position to demand a different kind of entertainment, even one that is not predicated on a disavowal of modernity? Is it then Nandy's argument that when the people are hungry, commercial cinema is the best thing for them?

It is not simply a question of opposing need to desire but of acknowledging the dispersal of communities and then figuring whether the people's interest in cinema signifies the desire for a transformation that will acknowledge their entry into modernity, or whether they regard the cinema as speaking on their behalf when it disseminates tales of feudal morality. The primary attraction of the cinema is its modern character, whereas once drawn into the theatre, we may be presented with traditional ideologies that try to deny the changed circumstances that are the very condition of possibility of a cinematic culture. What the ideology of cultural need denies is the possibility that human beings may desire the transformation of their conditions of existence, that a utopian element may inhere in cultural activity.

While often anchored in familiar narratives that reinforce traditional moral codes, the popular film text also offers itself as an object of the desire for modernity. The fragmentary text of an average popular film is a serial eruption of variously distributed affective intensities whose individual effects are not subsumed in the overarching narrative framework. As an effective medium of propagation of consumer culture, popular cinema has managed to combine a reassuring moral conservatism with fragments of utopian ideology and enactments of the pleasures of the commodity culture. The very familiarity of the narrative makes it a useful non-interfering grid within which to elaborate the new.

But consumer culture is itself not a neutral 'content' which fits indiscriminately into any available narrative framework. While functioning within the grid of the traditional moral tale, it at the same time conflicts with that tale and makes for contradictions at the level of narrative. These contradictory features can be read as reflecting the contradictions of a capitalist society functioning on the basis of pre-capitalist social relations. Popular films represent the utopian ideal that consists of not only the pleasures of commodity culture but also the microsocial forms such as the nuclear family, which is at once an ideal consuming unit that the industrial economy's logic calls for, as well as an alternative to the existing patriarchal enclaves within which subjects are situated. It is then a question of emerging from feudal social relations into capitalist ones, an epic narrative of the transpatriarchal migration of subjects, a struggle within the social for a radical transformation which cinema represents and resolves in its own way.

The State of Love

It is the discourse of romantic love that the popular film deploys in its representation of this ideal. As argued above, the tale of romantic love has continued to be embedded in an overarching framework derived from the feudal family romance. Thus the romantic couple's courtship takes. place in a space of controlled anonymity. ^[73] They meet by accident in a public space, as if it were a question of two 'citizen-subjects' encountering each other and falling in love in the course of a long courtship: but what begins as an accidental encounter between two individuals turns out to have been predestined. While initially their love invites the disapproval of one or both the families, last minute turns in the narrative disclose certain pacts entered into by the families, which had sanctioned the love relation even before it took place. Thus, the centrifugal force of the love relation is reined in and the family in its feudal self-governing form re-secures its boundaries. This is a narrative pattern that was endlessly repeated in popular cinema throughout the sixties and in spite of many transformations, has not entirely disappeared. The family capital was one of the key issues in the unfolding of the narrative. The son's love adventure ran parallel to the plotting by close relatives to grab the family fortune through manipulative matchmaking, embezzlement, etc. (Waris is a representative film of this type.)

The emergence of the discourse of romantic love has been traced to North Africa and medieval Europe (Spain and southern France), although, if we consider the 1000-year history of the ghazal, or the Indian bhakti movements, an earlier or parallel Asian origin is suggested (Dale 1996). The second great era of the elaboration of this discourse in Europe was the Romantic age, from which the modern conception of love derives (Singer 1984: 1, 23, 283 ff) (Needless to say, it is the concept of love that can be said to have a specific place of origin, not the affect itself). As a concept, romantic love is 'an ideal for changing the world or ... a psychological state' (ibid: 3). Love's transformative potential lay in the idea that it was an 'intense, passionate relationship that establishes a holy oneness between man and woman' (ibid: 23). This ideal of oneness, which was an attribute of religious love before the emergence of courtly love, represents a secularization of religious devotion and as such came into conflict with religious dogma (ibid: 32). Romantic love, like the courtly version, 'finds its divinity in the act of loving' (ibid: 293).

In India it was the medieval bhakti movements and personalities who elaborated a discourse of spiritual love with romantic overtones. Thus the songs of Mirabai, the sixteenth-century devotee and self- proclaimed bride of the god Krishna, express devotional love in a language drawn from the institutions of sexuality: courtship and marriage (Alston 1980) But romantic love as a social practice transforming relations between individuals did not emerge from these moments. Persian and later Urdu poetry, flourishing in India's aristocratic Muslim society, elaborated a discourse of love that Hindi cinema took over wholesale when it turned to the inexhaustible thematics of love. This discourse had no social currency, its intricate conceits and metaphors were more suited to poetry than to everyday language. As such its use was largely confined to songs.

Mainstream Hindu society, which has continued to be governed by the caste system, was in no position to generate a discourse of love. There were attempts at social revolution which consisted precisely in challenging the caste division and proclaiming a direct link between the devotee and the divine. Such was the revolutionary slogan of the bhakti movement in twelfth-century Karnataka, one instance of the early protests against the monopoly over religion by established orthodoxies. But these movements did not succeed in their mission to transform Hindu society. After 1947, Hindi cinema borrowed the discourse of love elaborated in Persian/Urdu poetry and superimposed it on the traditional sexual relations of Hindu society. However, its elaborate conceits and refined language continued to serve as reminders of its aristocratic origin, which meant that love itself came to be associated with a certain soulfulness and otherworldliness.

In this context it is of interest that the last few years have seen a sudden proliferation of the use of the English language expression 'I love you'. From Hindi films to the regional language cinemas of the south, songs and dialogue everywhere are littered with this expression. It is sung to a variety of tunes, subjected to the most unpredictable conceits (as in the song which begins 'yeh ilu ilu kya hai?', a question about the meaning of the expression, which then expands into a musical primer of love). In part this is one more instance of popular cinema's pedagogical function as an initiator of the masses into consumer culture: in the past, new fashions, dance forms and other practices of (western) capitalist culture were similarly introduced, Thus, not too long ago, the song '1 am a disco dancer' taught the national audience the 'meaning' of disco, spelling out the word as if it were an acronym.

But beyond this consumerist function, the utopian aspiration to social transformation that the concept of love embodies also finds itself invoking a certain state-form as its true ground (d. Bellour 1980). A striking illustration of this intersection of consumerism, romantic love in its congealed form as an English expression, and the modern nation-state is provided by Mani Rathnam's highly popular Tamil film Roja (1992; see Chapter 9). The following lines of dialogue, in which the English expression is employed, are exchanged by a newly married couple, who take a holiday in Kashmir when the husband is sent there on an assignment. After an exhausting erotic game of running around the hotel room, the two plunge into bed. The husband is a Madras-based cryptographer, employed by the intelligence Wing of the state, while the wife is from an interior village of Tamil Nadu. (The italicized words are spoken in English):

'Hey village girl, if I say something to you in English, will you be able to understand it?'
'Say it, let's see.'
'I love you.'

Here in these three lines we have the initiation of a closed exchange which can create the private space of the couple. But in these same lines we also get a glimpse of the (impossible) condition of possibility of that closure.

In this exchange what comes across is a strongly felt compulsion to consummate the marriage by means of the English language utterance. It is as if a lack had remained, after the marriage ceremonies, that could only be filled by the intervention of this ritual declaration. The expression, delivered to the adressee, transports the couple into their own private space. In this process the hitherto unapproachable precinct of romantic love is domesticated, by inhabiting it. But this space of symbolic consummation, by whose grace a private space is made possible, is also the most public space of all: like the first person pronoun that circulates freely among all those who enter the symbolic network, and is unavailable for exclusive possession, the expression, 'I love you' transports the speaking subject and the addressee into a different symbolic network, one in which the declaration is the true legitimation of the couple.

Being in English, this expression and the symbolic network into which it transports the couple, are also marked as a social privilege, a mark of social distinction. What is this Other whose recognition is invoked and guaranteed by this expression? This Other, the witness to a coupling that is beyond the formal coupling sanctioned by traditional authority, is as yet unformed, unidentifiable, its only trace being the obsessively recurring English expression that attests to the fact that something is being called into existence, Would it be farfetched to speculate that this Other is precisely the modern state in which the romance of the nuclear family and the state would dissolve or sublate all other mediating categories?

In any case, popular cinema displays no unequivocal preference for a traditional standpoint in its narratives of conflict between the traditional and the modern, On the contrary, one of its constant preoccupations is with the propagation of commodity culture within the context of traditionally regulated social relations. In the process it sometimes represents the utopian aspiration to transform the social in keeping with the promises made by capitalism and the modern nation-state.

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^{[66] See ankles in Screen during the months of August and September 1969.}

^{[67] The same explanation has been repeated endlessly by almost everybody who
defends the ban. Rosie Thomas, commenting on the ban, also cites this argument,
and characterizes it as 'puritanical'. According to her the ban 'came only with the
puritanical reformist zeal after Independence that saw kissing in public as an immoral
Western import' (Thomas 1987: 320; my emphasis).}

^{[68] See Jacques Donzelot, Policing the Family (1980).}

^{[69] That the servants can function as a surrogate of the feudal patriarchal authority
should not surprise us: the eunuch in the harem was precisely such a figure, a
servant who was like an extension of the master's body.} ^{[70] As stated earlier (see Introduction), it is the combination of elements (eg. realism
+ camera + ...) that gives cinema the capitalist specificity, the emblematic quality,
which is disavowed in the Indian case.}

^{[71] It goes without saying that the illusion of communal cohesion can only be
maintained with the active complicity of the audience. It is not a question of an
imposed illusion. One encounters, in cinema halls, signs of this complicity whenever
a scene of intimacy between two characters appears to go on for longer than is
appropriate to the maintenance of the community effect. Shouts will be heard from
someone or the other, expressing discomfort with the proceedings. In Bangalore,
this used to take a particular, curious form. At such moments someone would invariably
shout, 'Thaattiningo!' The word means a palmyra fruit which is usually sold on city
streets at night (usually after 9 or 10) to preserve its juiciness. The everyday experience
of the nocturnal intimacies of couples being disrupted by the call of the fruitseller is
evoked by the shouts and the awkwardness of the moment, which threatens to
remind the spectator of his voyeurism, is thus overcome.}

^{[72] An almost identical scene occurs in Gulzar's Aandhi, with the same actors,
A.K. Hangal and Sanjeev Kumar playing the roles of servant and master: clearly no
accident, given that both Aandhi and Anubhav figure in the list of middle-class films
(discussed in Chapter 7) which, in the late seventies, attracted audiences drawn by
the promise of social distinction.}

^{[73] This pre-marital encounter is often a mere ritual of aristocratic socio-sexual
arrangements as is dear in a film like Chhalia (Manmohan Desai 1960).}

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