Ideology of the Hindi Film - 2

PART II

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PART II

5. The Moment of Disaggregation

Aaina hamen dekhke hairansa kyun hai?
-Shahryar

Part I developed a general theoretical framework for the study of popular Hindi cinema through an investigation of the conditions of possibility of the dominant textual form, the 'social'. We have seen that in the post-independence era a modular and 'public' textual form rose to dominance, whose ideological mission was to produce a coherent subject position in a situation where the democratic revolution had been broached and then indefinitely suspended. Three mutually-reinforcing factors served as the conditions of possibility of this textual form: (1) backward capitalist conditions in the film industry; (2) a transitional state-form determined by the interests of the dominant coalition, characterized by the deferral of bourgeois dominance; and (3) the persistence of pre-capitalist ideologies and the continued authority of traditional elites.

Against this background I turn in Part II to a conjunctural analysis of developments in the field of film culture during a brief period of political and ideological crisis of the Indian state. The attempt here will be to develop a 'historical construction' of the transformations in the field and their ideological significance. A historical construction is not a 'reconstruction' in all its detail, of the events of the period in question. It is an attempt to understand the historical significance of a constellation of events by focussing selectively on certain aspects.

The hypothesis constructed and substantiated here can be stated as follows: a period of intense political upheaval beginning in the mid-sixties brought into crisis the political form of the national consensus (represented by the dominant integrationist role of the Congress party). Since the forces unleashed by this crisis were re- contained by an authoritarian populist government, only a limited transformation of the political field occurred. re-organized in a looser, somewhat disaggregated form, including a more visible though fragmented opposition, the political system was able to absorb or marginalize radical challenges through populist mobilization.

Within the ideological sphere, the film industry faced a challenge to its established aesthetic conventions and mode of production. It was able to survive the crisis by a strategy of internal segmentation which enabled it to absorb the challenge of a politically-mobilized and demanding audience, and at the same time to reduce the threat of a state-sponsored rival production apparatus. The segmentation produced three distinct aesthetic formations-the new cinema, the middle-class cinema and the populist cinema of mobilization. This chapter will explain and specify the political and institutional factors behind the pressure for change within the film industry, and the manner in which segmentation evolved as a solution to the crisis. The process of segmentation will be discussed in relation to the theoretical problem of genre formation as a feature of capitalist culture.

In political history, the period in question roughly coincides with the first phase of the Indira Gandhi era, from 1966-when after Lal Bahadur Shastri's death, the Congress Party elected her to take over as Prime Minister - to the state of Emergency which was in place for 18 months from 1975 to 1977. ^[1] This period was marked by the decline and fragmentation of Congress and the beginning of a series of political challenges from the left and the right to the Congress managed 'consensual' stalemate between the defenders of traditional privileges and free-market principles on the one hand, and the forces agitating for the realization of the new nation's professed democratic and socialist ideals on the other. According to some political theorists, the consensual stalemate, which amounted to a negotiated suspension or retardation of the democratic revolution, required two conditions: 'a low level of popular mobilisation, when the lower orders of the electorate voted on the advice of superordinant interests of some kind'; and 'a loose and largely federal political machine in which negotiation of local support, at local prices, were [sic] left to local bosses of the Congress' (Kaviraj, EPW 1986: 1699).

Indian politics, according to Kaviraj, was coalitional in two senses. There was first of all the class coalition, whose significance is structural, and entails 'long-term constraints'. This structural feature is threatened but did not undergo any significant transformation during the Indira Gandhi era. Politics is also coalitional in a second sense, at the level of 'parties or political formations'. 'Around a central, disproportionately large party of consensus were arranged much smaller parties of pressure, which imposed a coalitional logic-on both government and opposition political groups.' The right and left factions within the Congress party had more ideological affinities with opposition parties like the Communists and the Swatantra than with each other. Thus the Congress itself was a coalition that enforced a coalitional logic on the functioning of the party system as a whole (ibid: 1986, 1698). Both these coalitional structures have a bearing on the ideological question. While the general theoretical framework elaborated in Part I must be understood by reference to the class coalition, the historical construction attempted in Part II refers itself to the local crisis in the mode of political functioning of the coalition.

The crisis in question begins with the unmistakable signs of popular dissatisfaction in the late sixties, an indication 'that lower orders of people were becoming less inclined to vote on the basis of primordial controls' (ibid: 1699). The particular strategies adopted by the regime (authoritarian populism based on a direct appeal to the masses over the heads of the intermediate leadership), were determined by the challenges to the consensus from both left and right and a recognition of the need to transform the political form of the consensus. Through the late sixties and early seventies, the political situation in India remained volatile, with a wide variety of movements occupying the centre of the political scene. While one segment of the communist left was making political gains through participation in the electoral process, another Maoist segment aligned itself with the rebellious peasantry and rural working class and appeared to be gaining ground in the countryside. Urban working class militancy was at its peak in this period, and a combination of forces led by the ex-socialist Jayaprakash Narayan mounted a strong offensive against Congress dominance ^[2].

The crisis can be usefully described as a deep disaggregation of the socio-political --Structure resulting in the delegitimation of the consensual ideology of the state. Given the central role of the Congress in maintaining the political equilibrium up to this point, it is not surprising that the party became a prominent site of the unfolding of the crisis. The fragmentation of the Congress, beginning with the various dissident formations that sprang up in the 1967 elections, at the state and regional level culminated in what was popularly known as the 'Indicate-Syndicate' split in 1969. The former group, led by Indira Gandhi and defined by its left-oriented programme, broke away and quickly marginalized the Syndicate with a reorganization of the political machine that rendered the existing modes of political negotiation obsolete overnight. In the Nehru era, the ability of the Congress to either marginalize or absorb rival political tendencies had enabled it to produce and maintain the cohesion effect. Its modular unity reflected the unreconstructed articulation of a variety of old and new enclaves into a national political network. The disaggregation of this structure manifested itself in the form of a serious political crisis with several possible resolutions.

This crisis represented the culmination of a democratic ferment which promised a transformation of the social order. During British rule the nationalist movement had mobilized the masses with the promise of democracy. After independence, the people were repaid in the heavily devalued currency of citizenship, whose only tangible benefit was universal adult suffrage. The new regime found that the long process of colonial exploitation had left the economy too weak, that the infrastructure for self-reliant industrial growth had to be built almost from scratch. In view of this constraint on capitalist growth, the Nehru era, with its programme of state-led economic growth and 'gradual revolution' found itself relying upon the continued operation of the ideology of the despotic colonial state and the feudal order it had instituted.

The forces opposed to this order gathered strength in the post Nehru era. Thus, this eventful period represents a revolutionary upsurge whose potential was hijacked by the Indira Gandhi government and channelled into an authoritarian interregnum.

'Social Tax' Versus State Competition

The crisis in the ideological instance of popular cinema took the form of a segmentation of audiences, the obsolescence of. the feudal family romance, the pressure to develop new textual forms. It was the period in which the 'social', whose cultural status was remarkably similar to that of the Congress on the political plane, underwent a multi-faceted transformation. While one significant causal factor behind this drive for transformation was the politicization and mobilization of the masses, another was the state-sponsored movement that sought to give substance to the idea of a national cinema. These two factors were related, because the decisive step towards a new approach to film financing by the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) in 1969 was made possible by the Indira Gandhi government's interventionist policies. These were strongly stated by her and the information and broadcasting ministers in her cabinet, Nandini Satpathy and I.K. Gujral. The latter, in the course of an exhortatory speech, told the industry that its demand for a reduction in entertainment tax would be considered seriously if it was willing to pay a 'social tax' instead. ^[3] Thus, government co-operation in developing the capital base of the industry was to be purchased by a commitment by the industry to the production of films with progressive themes, to provide cultural support for the developmental goals of the 'socialist' government. The industry'S leaders were habituated to making pledges of loyalty to the policies of the ruling party, but on this call for commitment unanimity was out of the question. The maintenance of a posture of deference towards the leadership was all that the industry could manage. ^[4] The most that such government pressures on the mainstream industry achieved was to inspire some producers to include, within a formally unaltered framework, 'progressive' elements which they hoped would win government approval. ^[5] Sometimes this led to the granting of entertainment tax cuts or exemptions.

However, the Film Institute and the Film Finance Corporation together formed part of very different kind of intervention which was to have a lasting impact. While the institute offered training in the technical as well as performance aspects of film-making, the corporation, after a few years of lethargic and unimaginative functioning, launched a financing policy aimed at the development of 'good cinema', which for most people associated with the project, meant a cinema that was realist, narrative-centred, developmental, and culturally distinctly Indian. Although the change in policy had been initiated in 1964 by Indira Gandhi when she was the Information and Broadcasting minister, its decisive implementation roughly coincided with the arrival of a number of trained directors, actors and other technicians from the Film Institute.

The FFC had hitherto functioned somewhat like other state financial institutions, supplementing the budgets of mainstream film makers (and of individuals with international standing like Satyajit Ray). Now, changing course to became a producer, the corporation entered into direct competition with the mainstream industry. Although the protests were muted in deference to the prevailing mood of populist mobilization, this development caused great panic in the industry. The industry had for a long time been demanding that the FFC should expand its operations by increasing the capital available for lending, to provide state support for the transformation of production relations within the existing industry. But it had not anticipated the form of expansion that the FFC finally chose. While depriving the industry of even the meagre finance hitherto available, it now established a parallel industry with an alternative aesthetic programme. No longer Content to produce newsreels as an instructional supplement to the entertainment film, the government was now expanding the sphere of state-sponsored production to the aesthetic realm. However, the crux of the matter was not the ideological dangers of state-sponsored cinema (which were minimal since the FFC policy was administered by an independent body), ^[6] so much as the economic danger of the emergence of a formidable competitor.

The implications of the new FFC policy gradually became clear with growing signs of audience interest in the promise of novelty, and Wide support from the press for the experimgntal ventures. The industry was also preoccupied with the more immediate dangers foreboded by rumours of an impending nationalization, Gujral's active pursuit of the Film Council idea, the calculations within the industry about the mode of accommodation with the government's new socialist agenda, etc. As president of the Film Federation of India, Sunderlal Nahata called for internal unity and discipline as the only way of side-stepping the encroachment by the government which was seen as the main purpose for the institution of the Film Council. Unity was to be supplemented with a stance of co-operation in the national project:

Big social changes are taking place in the country. Society has been awakened to the: realities and socialistic trends are on in the country for the welfare of the nation... the government can ill-afford to ignore our problems when we prove to it that we share in the responsibilities to contribute to the welfare of the nation in our own humble way as any other industry does. ^[7]

But with the visibility achieved by Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969), which won awards and had a limited but surprising commercial run, it became clear that a substantial challenge was gathering strength. In the past, figures like Satyajit Ray had developed their own individualistic trajectories which precluded any institutionalized aesthetic programme. The industry had found it possible to acknowledge Ray as the 'Master' and a national cultural hero, without jeopardizing its own system of production and values. As Bikram Singh observed at the time, 'It is mainly the institutional forces and the strength they began to gain in the late sixties which the established film industry has found less easy to ignore than it did Satyajit Ray. ^[8] While providing opportunities for a variety of styles and political and aesthetic positions, the new aesthetic programme was unified by an oppositional stance towards the commercial cinema. The political dimension of the challenge posed by this initiative was not lost on the mainstream industry. In a review of Mrinal Sen's Interview, Screen, while acknowledging its strengths, called it biased, and nervously observed that the film may appeal to a 'now growing type of Indians' but not to a 'normal' audience. ^[9] Among the many compromises that the mainstream industry explored as a means of defusing this challenge, one was particularly significant for the manner in which it sought to blunt the political thrust by foregrounding the 'artistic' dimension of the new movement.

In response to Nandini Satpathy's speech at the National Awards presentation reiterating the cultural policy of the Indira Gandhi government, Screen published a long 'critical study' of the speech. Noting that the speech seemed to be an indication of the policy of the 'new radical leadership', the writer drew attention to Satpathy's approving comments on the 'new wave' films. The government was mistaken in thinking that these films fulfilled the aims of cultural policy, the writer warned. 'Mrs. Satpathy could be wrong about the Indian "new wave". Its inspiration appears to be outlandish and there is little of Indian reality in its products.' ^[10] By contrast, the Bombay film 'has been a vehicle of Indian thought, culture and ideals'. Moreover, the government was warned that by encouraging the 'new wave' it was playing with fire. The virtues of the Bombay film lay in their 'innocuous' story-telling technique, while the 'committed film-maker, committed to advance a particular ideology, can pose a serious danger to society'. On the economic side, the 'new wave' was a loss-making venture and it was 'unethical', a 'grievous misconception of priorities' to encourage such indulgence in a poor country. The article concluded by suggesting that instead of the new FFC programme, an academy of motion picture arts should be set up with Satyajit Ray-'the undisputed master of the medium' at its helm.

The mainstream industry had good reason to invoke the authority of Ray to serve as an aesthetic focal point that would reduce the importance of the political dimension. Ray's opinions on the 'new wave' were first aired in an article 'An Indian New Wave?' published in Filmfare (8 October 1971) and again in a review article 'Four and a Quarter', published in Indian Film Culture in 1974. ^[11] In the first of these, Ray drew attention to the practical constraints on the ambitions of the new film-makers. Debunking the trendiness of their enthusiasm, Ray pointed out that narrative was central to cinema, that 'experiment' was costly and bound to fail where audiences were untrained in cinematic language. This criticism was based on the assumption that experiment necessarily entailed an imitation of 'Godard', a code word for experimental cinema. Welcoming the new FFC policy, Ray nevertheless implied that products of such a policy were not going to succeed with the audience at large. Besides, films like Bhuvan Shome, which had been hailed as the harbinger of a new movement, were old-fashioned narrative films after all. In his response the critic Bikram Singh pointed out that while Ray found foreign experiments always suited to their time and place, he wanted Indian film-makers to know in advance the effect of their experiments on the audience, the commercial viability of the films, etc. The viability criterion amounted to a pre-emption of experiment. ^[12] Ray's rejoinder and Singh's counter-response ^[13] only reinforced the basic point of difference. Ray's argument was circular: he regarded narrative as central; he opposed experiment because it was anti-narrative; he found that the films made under the FFC aegis were narratives after all; he therefore questioned its claim to be a 'movement'. It was a no-win argument. If the new film-makers wanted to be called a movement they must experiment; if they experimented, they were out of touch with reality. Mrinal Sen, in a letter purporting to be an extract from a letter to a friend, summed it up thus: 'to me it (Ray's article) doesn't mean much except that he emphasizes on the necessity to build opinion for the "prevention of alleged cruelty to money-backers". And this, to my mind, hardly builds an aesthetic case ... ^[14]

Ray's emphasis on narrative was shared by most people in the FFC. As the project unfolded, it was narrative that became the most visible mark of the new cinema's difference from the popular. However, the dispute between Ray and some in the FFC was over political and institutional questions. Ray's arguments were anchored in a notion of the film-maker as an individual artist who must function in a market that imposes its own rules. He was pragmatic in his recognition of market constraints but this did not impair his image as an artistic genius. The new film-makers would introduce a political element into the aesthetic field, by claiming for their experiments a significance that went beyond the 'improvement' accomplished by good narratives. At this juncture, Ray decided to side with the commercial industry by invoking pragmatic considerations, rather than serving as a supportive elder figure for the new enthusiasts.

The biggest obstacle to the FFC's project was the strong nexus between the theatre owners and the financier-distributors, on account of which the new films found themselves without exhibition outlets. The construction of theatres by the government was seen as the only possible solution, but despite such appeals only one or two feeble attempts were made in this direction. This impasse was one of the factors that led to compromise formations such as the middle class cinema, whose most widely known practitioners, Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, were both associated with the FFC project, but made most of their films in this period with private finance.

Segmentation

The main sponsors of the middle-class cinema included the N.C. Sippy family, Tarachand Barjatya, B.R. Chopra, Suresh Jindal, etc., most of whom were established figures in the mainstream industry. This cinema was distinguished by its narratives of upper caste, middle class life with ordinary-looking deglamourized stars. It consolidated itself by elaborating a negative identity based on'its difference from the mainstream cinema, thus appropriating one of the main slogans of the FFC-sponsored 'movement'. An inter-textual reference system developed thanks to the regular appearance of a set of stars, the iconography and language of the middle-class household, a constant use of the popular cinema as a point of counter-identification, even direct references to other middle-class films (as in Gulzar's Mere Apne in which a poster and a radio advertisement for Anand figure prominently). While remaining firmly within the structure of the established industry, middle-class cinema represented the first serious and successful attempt at a planned segmentation of the industry based on the perception of a changed market and the threat of a rival's potential monopoly over that market. The middle-class cinema took over that aspect of the FFC's 'realist' aesthetic project Which consisted in narratives of identification, centred on the urban upper caste family, a demand for authentic urban middle-class characters who were recognizably ordinary, etc. The two films which are usually cited as the first successes of the new FFC policy, Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome and Basu Chatterji's Sara Akash both presented this aesthetic of authenticity and simplicity. When it came to commercial exploitation, however, the main cultural 'resource' proved to be Bengali middle class culture, which for historical reasons had developed early and boasted of a rich literary tradition.

Significantly, while FFC failed to create exhibition space for its films, the middle-class cinema movement within the mainstream industry was strong enough to prompt a suitable expansion of exhibition outlets. In many cities new theatres with reduced seating capacity were built specifically for the middle-class film. The Nartaki- Sapna complex in Bangalore, which was built in the early 70s, reproduced architecturally the relations between the mainstream film industry and its new branch, the middle-class cinema. Nartaki is an enormous theatre which showed only the biggest of the big Hindi films at that time. Sapna, which is still associated with the 'realist' cinema, is a single-level theatre wedged into one corner of the ground floor of the building. Sapna was soon followed (and elsewhere, preceded) by other such small theatres clinging to bigger ones. Thus permanent exhibition space was created for a new sector of the industry.

Certain FFC principles were thus appropriated and developed into a viable segment of the industry relatively easily due to the fact that those who had included the middle-class aesthetic principles in the FFC 'manifesto' were themselves responsible for initiating their commercial exploitation. Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee were key figures in developing the commercial middle-class cinema with the financial backing of people like N.C. Sippy. Other principles, however, seemed doomed to a slow extinction until Shyam Benegal emerged, literally from nowhere, to exploit their commercial potential. As editor of Filmfare, B.K. Karanjia provided crucial media support for all aspects of the new cinema movement. But Mukherjee and others like B.r. Chopra and even Karanjia, were unapproving of, and sometimes extremely hostile to the radicals who had used the opportunity provided by the new FFC policy to make films ranging from the openly political to the experimental. Such experimentation, which resulted in films like Mani Kaul's Uski Roti or Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan, was ridiculed as an elite preoccupation for which the masses had neither the time nor the inclination. (Many writers on Indian cinema spontaneously echo this populist argument, with the result that the names of Kaul and Shahani have become a convenient shorthand for the denunciation of experimentation.) A common sense demand for easy intelligibility was deployed to mobilize public opinion against experimentation. FN the proponents of middle-class realism, the role of new cinema was to function as 'leaven' to improve the quality of the mainstream product. ^[15] Not to compete with, but to supplement-was the slogan that Karanjia, for example, developed with vigour in Filmfare. Coupled with the even more forceful argument of economic viability, this amounted to an effective prohibition of aesthetic exploration aimed at developing a cinematic discourse distinct from both the 'realism' of instantaneous consumability and the aesthetic of the dominant popular cinema.

As a powerful player in the world of the commercial film industry, B.R. Chopra had much to say on the dangers of the new development. Chopra had acquired a reputation as an innovator by virtue of having made successful films without songs (Kanoon, Ittefaq). The latter was marketed as a turning point in Indian cinema: it was short; it had taken only a few weeks to complete; it had no songs. Chopra, who presided over a symposium on 'parallel cinema', leading to a walk-out by some new film-makers, ^[16] attacked the very notion of a parallel cinema movement and heaped abuse on the pretensions of 'a crop of pseudos', who 'in the name of art and realism, (had) introduced new kinds of vulgarities'. He attribl1.ted the art versus commerce split to the evil of democracy, which he defined as 'rule by mediocrity'. Film, 'which was once the entertainment of the intelligent middle class' had been destroyed by democratic forces which 'had taken over cinema and converted it into a mediocre art', leading to a compensatory art film movement. The solution was a 'healthy' cinema that was free from the compulsions of democracy. The middle-class cinema was thus not only a partial commercialization of the goals of the FFC project, it was also seen as a protection against the lures of political cinema.

But it is puzzling that a segment that was manifestly handicapped by a variety of impediments should cause so much panic in the industry. One reason for this was the perception that the privilege of serving as India's 'national cinema' would be more or less monopolized by the FFC sector. The auteurist FFC films were natural candidates for awards and for foreign festival entry. Such a turn of events also presaged government indifference, if not hostility, to the mainstream industry, which meant that the process of bargaining with government for concessions, incentives, and other forms of co-operation could well cease altogether. The industry's claim to national cultural significance would lack any credibility.

Although there was no possibility of a significant popular success of the experimental films, their continued production under the supportive aegis of the government implied real long-term consequences for the mainstream industry. The alarm would not have assumed such proportions if it were not for a fear that there existed a growing interest in precisely the kind of aesthetic shifts that the political cinema was attempting. While the 'normal' audience was still there, a 'new type' of audience was perceived as growing. There was a real possibility that a substantial segment of the audience for cinema would be drawn to an alternative cultural space, thus cutting into the size of the middle-class audience for popular cinema. Although the press and popular opinion continued to propagate the myth of a cinema exclusively addressed to a mass, proletarian audience, the middle-class audience (as Ashish Nandy has pointed out) is the decisive factor for the survival of the industry. The genius of the middle-class cinema lay in its ability to construct an aesthetic based on disidentification with the popular cinema while remaining within the financial and talent structure of the mainstream industry. But there remained a political excess which the identificatory realism of the middle-class cinema was unable to accommodate because its field of representation did not include the domain of the urban working class or the countryside, where the feudal order was being challenged by violent uprisings in which urban middle-class youth were prominent actors. It was through the construction of a developmental aesthetic that commercial cinema eventually managed to exploit this political excess.

While the lack of exhibition spaces kept most of the experimental films off the market, one of the incentives for a commercial exploitation of urban middle-class political discontent was the exhibition space that became available with the lapsing of the contract with the Motion Picture producer's Association of America (MPPAA) for import of Hollywood films, as pointed out by Shyam Benegal himself (Rizvi and Amladi 1980: 8). Until this happened, though the 'demand' for a political cinema did exist, there was no sector in the industry that was competent enough to exploit it. 'Blaze', an advertising company, had entered distribution and, sensing the existence of a market for a cinema different from the popular as well as the 'middle class' variety, engaged one of its ad-film makers, Shyam Benegal, to direct Ankur, thus inaugurating the commercial exploitation of the political dimension of the FFC's aesthetic project.

The politically committed film-makers who benefited from the new FFC policy had no common aesthetic programme. Some adopted Brechtian aesthetic principles, while others pursued an aesthetic based on a critical appropriation of the techniques of melodrama. Some of the successful films were pure political thrillers in the Costa Gavras tradition, while a fourth category of films made in the regional languages, focussed on rural India, with its feudal social order, the community rituals, etc. This last category provided the material from which Benegal forged the developmental aesthetic that came to be celebrated as the political cinema par excellence. This aesthetic was based on the appropriation of regional realism, and its elaboration as national cinema, while retaining the regional content as the object of a strategy of framing that produced a spectator position, allied with the developmental perspective of the state.

Thus, the FFC's intervention in film production can be read as a story of the establishment of a research and development facility, which conducted a variety of experiments from which the commercial cinema picked up and exploited the most viable forms, leaving the less viable ones to be pursued by individuals who came to be identified with aesthetic preoccupations irrelevant to the national culture. Commercial viability depended on the amenability of the forms to ideological re-inscription. The cross-over process filtered out critical experimentation resistant to the prevailing ideologies. What remained of the FFC's interventionist aesthetic programme was undercut by the 1975 report of the Committee on Public Undertakings, which recommended commercial viability as the primary condition for film-financing.

The Construction of Amitabh Bachchan

While these developments were made possible by a combination of widespread politicization of cinema audience, especially the middle class and the students, the declining efficacy of the feudal family romance prompted a move by the commercial cinema towards an aesthetic focussed on the mobilization-effect. The legendary star figure of Amitabh Bachchan, the single most important mass cultural phenomenon of the seventies and after, with a fame stretching from the subcontinent to North Africa, was constructed through a series of contingent occurrences within a relatively short period of two to three years.

The Bachchan persona, identified with a primordial anger and populist leadership qualities, was, ironically, given its first exposure in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand and Namak Haram. In Mukherjee's films, Bachchan's roles were varied. But beginning with Prakash Mehra's Zanjeer, a series of films isolated and elaborated the image of the 'angry man', which soon pushed the other Bachchan persona out of popular memory. While Mukherjee continued to cast Bachchan in his films (Abhimaan, Mili, Chupke Chupke, Alaap), the 'industrial hero' had overtaken the middle-class character.

The disaggregation of the national audience should not be taken to mean an empirical division of the population into distinct consumer groups. Although a section of the population clearly patronized only foreign films and indigenous art films, the rest of the national audience was not so clearly segmented, and even after the decline of the feudal family romance, the audiences for the emerging generic tendencies were not mutually exclusive. However, new expectations arising out of the political upheavals of the period produced the conditions for exploration of new forms, narratives and characterological innovations. Disaggregation brought to the fore, class, gender and generational differences which the social had contained within its overarching feudal form. Thus, to give just one example, while the 'social' usually incorporated consumerist references to the latest fashions and other preoccupations of youthful audiences, these did not contribute to a distinct 'youth culture' because the paternalism of the reigning feudal ideology resisted any delinking of youth from its sphere of authority. But during and after the seventies, commercial culture gained access to a student/youth audience without paternalist mediation even if these films ultimately worked towards restoration of a reformed familial bond. (In Hare Rama Hare Krishna the reform of parental authority comes after the death of the Janice character played by Zeenat Aman.) This is a clear sign of an emerging capitalist tendency towards a disaggregated commercial culture.

In the context of the commercial film industry which was in the process of a many-sided and unpredictable transformation along with manifest tendencies to audience segmentation, the Bachchan phenomenon, though apparently 'in the spirit of the times', is best understood as a unifying phenomenon which re-established the popular film industry on a new foundation. While radically different from the feudal form that had dominated the scene for almost twenty years, the Bachchan film was nevertheless the means by which the industry transformed itself internally, providing it with a new identity .:lat was capable of combining the novel aesthetic possibilities opened up in the period of crisis with fragments of the old form. The mobilization effect was the most significant new element, whose force was capable of holding together a new form of modular text in which the old ingredients would reappear but under a new aegis.

In the era of the feudal family romance, the star-image and the acting role were linked by the prevailing Hindu codes of iconicity. The roles of aristocratic or upper-caste heroes and heroines were played by actors carefully chosen for their looks, which had to match a certain conception of the 'heroic'. This attempt to approximate upper-caste and aristocratic ideals of physical beauty dates back to the time of Dadasaheb Phalke, who in one of his writings, outlined the ideal features of the actors who would play lead roles (Phalke, Continuum 1988-9: 65-9). Star glamour in such a context was indistinguishable from the 'innate' glamour or the splendour of the elite.

With the Bachchan phenomenon, however, we see the emergence of a new function for the star image. Now it is not just a question of exceptional physical features. ^[17] Nor does it follow the Hollywood tendency, as described by John Ellis (1992), where acting roles and star-persona exist side by side, with the films serving as instanciations of a star's image. In this western model, the star's image is built on the combination of ordinary and extraordinary traits that are developed in stories published in star magazines. Crucially, a clear line separates the star from the acting role, although there is a degree of seepage of star value into the acting role. ^[18]

The Bachchan persona is different because in it there is a degree of integration of star-value with narrative that is unprecedented in the Hindi cinema. What this demonstrates, however, is not the unfathomable power of the Amitabh mystique as much as the demands placed upon the star image by a new form of narrative in which the innate charm of the aristocracy was no longer the obvious central content of the text. The Bachchan phenomenon cannot be analysed in isolation from the construction of this new narrative form, in which the writer duo Salim-Javed played an important role. With the disintegration of the feudal family romance, the entry of 'ordinary' heroes into the popular film became possible, perhaps even necessary. Dockworker, mineworker, railway porter, police officer, small-time crook: these were some of the roles Amitabh played in his career, roles that were predominantly lower class and integral to the evolution of the aesthetic of mobilization (discussed in Chapter 6).

Such ordinariness brought with it a dilemma: the old hero's pre eminence had derived from the hierarchies of a social order that were reproduced within the film text. The middle-class film, on the other hand, adopted a code of ordinariness that excluded both the divine splendour of the aristocracy and the political passions of the proletariat to create a circumscribed representational field where narrative requirements prevailed over the self-valorizing logic of the star system. But from the mainstream industry's perspective, ordinariness, in reinforcing the primacy of narrative movement, is a threat to the old order, in which as we have seen in Part I, heterogeneous manufacture, predicated on the assembly of pre existing 'craft' products and congealed values was the prevailing mode of production. While the political ferment of the Indira Gandhi era was strong enough to render the old form obsolete and give rise to pressures for change, it did not bring about a complete transformation of the aesthetic bases of the industry. The problem that the industry faced was how to continue to function with the existing mode of production without the readymade narrative framework of the feudal family romance. The FFC project's long term threat was a reorganization of film-production on the basis of the centrality and autonomy of the production sector. This was the factor that prompted a search by established industry figures for compromise solutions involving a workable mix of star and narrative values. Salim-Javed also identified themselves with this project for internal reform. But the resolution that imposed itself finally was g:me which would make this change of direction unnecessary. This resolution was made possible by the intensification of the value deriving from the star system through the infusion of political power into the figure of the star on the model of the populist cinema of Tamil Nadu. The star became a mobilizer, demonstrating superhuman qualities and assuming a power that transformed the others who occupied the same terrain into spectators. As the auratic power of the represented social order diminished, there was a compensating increase in the aura of the star as public persona.

The Politics of Genre

Before moving onto a more focussed analysis of films from these three segments, it would be useful to draw out the implications of the historical construction attempted here for the question of genre. Specifically, how is the segmentation of the industry discussed above related to or different from genre formation?

The question of genre has been a notoriously difficult one for critics of Indian cinema. Some critics evade the difficulties by simply identifying the mythological and the social as the principal Indian genres. Others recognize that generic differentiation in the Hollywood sense is not evident in Bombay cinema, although in the early studio era similar distinctions were prevalent. ^[19] In a recent essay, rashmi Doraiswamy (1993) acknowledges the difficulties surrounding the question, but decides to use the 'personality type' as the basis for making generic distinctions. In Chapter 3, we have seen how incipient generic distinctions are undermined by the expansive identity of the 'social'. However, the 'social' has eluded a precise definition, serving simply as a label for a large quantity of films which resist more accurate differentiation.

One of the reasons for the relative weakness of generic differentiation in the Hindi cinema could be the prevalence of a particular mode of production in the industry, as argued in Chapter 2. Besides, the possibility of cultural production under such circumstances bespeaks a whole array of other factors, including a distinct political structure and an ideological impasse. The pulls and pressures of such a social organization impose certain conditions of possibility, certain constraints on cultural production and genre formation. At the same time, the existence and wide circulation of Hollywood genres gives rise to imitations and fragmentary appropriations by Hindi film-makers: the dacoit film was combined with elements from the Hollywood 'western in films like Khotey Sikkay and Sholay and 'horror films' combined mantravadis and white-clad ghost-beauties from folk narratives with hairy monsters from a western repertoire. ^[20]

In the midst of such forays, the portmanteau 'social' has remained the dominant, and during certain periods, the sole genre with a contemporary signified. The only element that is exclusive to the social and thus critical to its identification as a genre is its contemporary reference. Its dominance attests to a certain ideological imperative that is peculiar to the modernizing Indian state. With a few exceptions, these socials are usually musicals. The musical, which is an intermediate form in which cinema's links with the stage are worked out, and in which pre-and extra-cinematic skills and languages are put on display, has become a marginal form in Hollywood, whereas in the Hindi cinema the continuing dominance of the musical-social is a symptom of the continued dependence of the cinema on the resources of other cultural forms. This is not to be read simply as a question of a gradual technological advancement which will eventually lead us out of a dependence on music. The problem of what Rajadhyaksha (Framework, 1987) calls the 'neo-traditionalism' of Indian popular film culture is a political, not a technological, issue. The social does not occur as a transitional form marking the non-completion of some technological journey. Its function, on the other hand, is to resist genre formation of any kind, particularly of the type constituted by the segmentation of the contemporary. This ideological function is imposed on it by the nature of political power in the modernizing state. The segmentation or disaggregation of the 'social' is prevented by the very mode of combination of the aesthetic of the signifier (music, choreographed fights, parallel narrative tracks, etc.) with that of the signified (or realism, which requires continuity, a serial track and subordination of music to a narrative function).

In the period of crisis, we encounter a moment when a genre formation based on political differentiation is forced on the industry as a solution to the delegitimation of its dominant formal strategies. Here it is necessary to free ourselves from the spontaneous association of genre formation with the specific form it has taken in the case of Hollywood cinema. While differentiation does manifest itself in the Indian case, it does not follow the Hollywood pattern. The neg cinema, the middle-class cinema and the reformed social emerge as three strong generic identities whose necessity derives from the same political pressures that led to a transformation of the national consensus from which the Indian state derived its legitimacy. In the three chapters to follow, I take up each of the three generic tendencies identified above for discussion, in order to bring to light their substantive identity, to investigate their strategies of representation and their ideological projects.

__________________________________________________________

^{[1] In view-of the goals of my project, I make no attempt at providing clear cut-off
points for the 'period'. There can be no exact overlap of political and cultural logics
of periodization. Taken separately, the period of crisis for the film industry could be
said to begin in 1969 with the launching of the new FFC policy. But it is more
difficult to say when the momentum of a new thrust comes to an end. politically,
1969 and 1977 can serve as more stable cut-off points because it was in 1969, with
the split in Congress, that Indira Gandhi's transformation of Indian politics began
and it was in early 1977 that the first phase of her rule came to an end with the lifting
of the emergency and the electoral defeat.}

^{[2] For a detailed description of the political ferment of this period see Francine
Frankel, chapter 9-13, pp. 341-582. See also Biplab Das Gupta (1974), Sumanta
Banerjee (1980), Achin Vanaik (1990)}

^{[3] Filmfare, 4 July 1969, p. 29. Gujral championed the Film Council proposal with
great passion. The progressive role of cinema would only be guaranteed by a well
organized industry communicating with government through 'a single highpowered
authority capable of acting as a guide and mentor, as well as a responsible executive
agency for undertaking worthwhile programmes of establishing professional norms
and a rational code of intersectional relationship' (ibid: 27). In his presidential address
to the seventeenth Filmfare awards assembly in 1970, Gujral expanded on his vision
by arguing that politicians and artists were united by the bond of 'the people'. He
contrasted the regressive tendencies in cinema with the 'genuine national style of
expression' that had been developed in theatre, literature and painting. that the
intervention was conceived as a measure to break the hold of the popular industry
by setting up a rival sector is borne out by his assertion that while Bombay was
merely following foreign models in its 'retarded growth', the question for India was
which cinema would dominate. Offering to 'share power' with the industry, Gujral
asked for a reciprocal abandoning of 'laissez-faire' and greater social responsibility
(Filmfare, 22 May 1970, pp. 29-33).}

^{[4] Even this form of feudal allegiance without specific commitments on policy
came under severe strain in these years of political turmoil. Thus, at a meeting
addressed by the prime minister, I.S. Johar who was at the time the head of a producers'
organization, responded to the prime minister's criticism of the industry (Mrs. Gandhi
is reported to have said: 'We do have an impression that this industry is only interested
in making money'!) by reminding her of the 'obscenity of poverty' (Screen, 2 January
1970, p. 1). This led to an uproar in the industry, with several major figures writing
letters of protest, publicly dissociating themselves from Johar's position and even
writing letters of apology with a promise of good behaviour to the prime minister
(Screen, 9 January 1970, pp. 1,6; 16 January 1970, p. 1).}

^{[5] Some tried easier ways to align themselves with the 'socialist' power. Thus,
Shyam Behl, in his Gold Medal (1970), had sequences shot at the annual Congress
session, and presented a reel containing these scenes to the prime minister (Screen,
20 February 1970, p. 1).}

^{[6] Several prominent members of the FFC board, led by Hrishikesh Mukherjee
and B.K. Karanjia. resigned in 1976 when the Emergency leadership started interfering
in the affairs of the corporation (Filmfare, 11 June 1976, p. 35).}

^{[7] Screen, 14 November 1969, p. 8.}

^{[8] Filmfare, 10 January 1975, p. 26.}

^{[9] Screen, 11 December 1970, p. 19.}

^{[10] Screen, 18 February 1972, p. 4.}

^{[11] Both are now available in Ray's Our Films Their Films, pp. 81-99; 100-7
respectively.}

^{[12] Filmfare, 14 January 1972, pp. 21-3}

^{[13] Filmfare, 25 Fehruary 1972, pp. 51-2, 53.}

^{[14] Filmfare, 24 March 1972, p. 51.}

^{[15] Filmfare, 1 January 1971, p. 31}

^{[16] Screen, 17 January 1975, p. 15.}

^{[17] Amitabh Bachchan's acting ambitions were initially ridiculed by some producers
Who found his face unherolike; Hrishikesh Mukherjee's role in launching Bachchan
is crucial precisely because unmindful of the unattractive physical features, he cast
him in his narrative films and provided a showcase for Bachchan's unorthodox talents.
Bachchan's first role, however, was in K.A. Abbas's Saat Hindustani.}

^{[18] See also, Dyer (1987)}

^{[19] Sudhir Kakar (1980) has observed that there was a caste system of film genres,
the mythological being the Brahmin of them all and the Nadia-style stunt films being
the shudras. This would seem to have given way to the era of the secular sociaI,
incorporating the brahmanism of the mythological as well gs the shudra antics of the
stunt film. It is thus not surprising that in the crisis period under consideratlon, the
decline of the social led to the resurgence of the 'shudra' genres like the stunt film,
with 'shudra' stars (in the sense of being exploited minor stars) like Jyothilakshmi
and Vijayalalitha reviving the Nadia phenomenon. (See G. Karnad (1994) and B.
Gandhy and R. Thomas (1991) for discussions of the Nadia films.) In Hindi cinema.
in the era of the dominance of the social. there was a sub-culture of gladiator films
gnd ·thrillers' featuring stars like Dara Singh gnd Feroze Khan. Sheikh Mukhtar gnd
Ansari. These were shown in cheap theatres frequented by a predominantly Muslim
sub-proletariat. One of the reasons for the tremendous success of the first few Salim
Javed films was the strategic use of motifs from urban Muslim culture and Muslim
folk religion which was 'In invitation to a hitherto marginalized audience. On the
other hand. the 'Brahmin' mythological did not enjoy 'I corresponding resurgence.
This may suggest that the social had effected an irreversible secularization of the
mythological (Kakar, 1989: 25), although the revival of the latter on television in
recent years complicates the picture.}

^{[20] Steve Neale (1980) provides a good introduction to the theoretical significance
of the genre question in film studies. See also Jane Feuer (1982) and the essays in
Grant (1986).}

______________________________________________________

6. The Aesthetic of Mobilization

The recuperation of the commercial film industry from the crisis of the Indira Gandhi era required a reconstruction of its cultural base and a reform of its mode of address. In the past its composite textual form had been capable of including a variety of pleasures. The protocols of darsanic spectacle had been sustained by the deployment of narratives of familial splendour. With the disaggregation of the socio-political order, however, the middle class became amenable to the seductions of a new identity based on disidentification with the 'socialist' programme in the national project. The dominant textual form's consensus-effect broke down and a search was launched for new modes and targets of address.

Amitabh Bachchan's star personality has to be understood in this context. Bachchan came to be identified with the dominated, a figure of resistance who appeared to speak for the working classes and other marginalized groups. "However, the effectivity of the Bachchan persona must be investigated not only at the level of a shift to proletarian themes but more importantly, in its function as a rallying point for the industry as a whole, a magnetic point around which the industry reconstituted itself. The ingredients of this persona go beyond the personal 'charisma' of the individual and include political, aesthetic and institutional values. Bachchan thus became an 'industrial hero' (Valicha 1988) not only in the sense that he played working class characters but also because he was the hero of the industry.

Bachchan's emergence as the main source of value for the industry was preceded by parallel attempts to achieve autonomy of the production sector through an emphasis on narrative. ^[21] Further developments contributing to this end were the experimentation with a novel approach to screen writing in which the indivisibility of the story and dialogue departments was maintained. ^[22]

Rajesh Khanna was the reigning male star during the years in which the Bachchan persona was being constructed. Sippy Films, Shakti Samanta and other commercial film-makers had tried to make films with an emphasis on narrative. Shakti Samanta's Aradhana, based on an old Hollywood melodrama, To Each His Own, proved a tremendous success, with its message of patriotism and a little boost from the rumoured 'controversy' over Sharmila Tagore's appearance in a bath-towel. G.P. Sippy's Andaz was also a 'script film' with a borrowed French narrative. It was successful, but the brief appearance of Rajesh Khanna in a flashback, singing the immensely popular 'Zindagi ek safar hai suhana' became the highpoint of the film, obscuring the somewhat unorthodox plot involving widow remarriage. Thus, there were signs that commercial cinema was itself experimenting with a gradual reform of the dominant textual form that could preserve the star as the industry'S main source of value while asserting the autonomy of the production sector with an emphasis on narrative. Other successes of the period like Bobby, Jawani Diwani, Imtihan, Hare Rama Hare Krishna addressed the student/youth segment of the audience. Of the star figures involved in these films, only Zeenat Aman and Rishi Kapoor developed lasting careers, Dimple Kapadia, who might have had greater success than any of the others, left the industry to get married. While many stars succeeded in developing star-images of minor significance, only Bachchan evolved into a national figure. His role is thus to be understood trans-textually, as a figure of cohesion in the industry as a whole.

'Bachchan's star-image was constructed through two different points of entry. After an initial period in which he failed to secure any significant acting roles, Bachchan found a hospitable climate in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's middle-class films where he appeared as a cultured, concerned doctor (Anand), angry son of an industrialist (Namak Haram), a singer who rebels against his orthodox father (Alaap), etc. In this early period he also worked as a hero of the old style in films like Pyar ki Kahani and Bombay to Goa, while taking on roles in some low-budget films as well which might well have led him the way of minor stars like Navin Nischal and Vinod Mehra. The turning point came with the scripts written by Salim-Javed. Of these the most significant were Zanjeer (1973), Deewar (1974), and Sholay (1975). Bachchan came to be associated so strongly with the latter that his early films, even the successful ones made by Mukherjee, have been almost forgotten. ^[23] This is despite the fact that it was Mukherjee's casting of Bachchan in the 'brooding' roles of Anand and Namak Haram that disclosed the potential that would be exploited on a gigantic scale by the commercial industry. ^[24]

The difference between Mukherjee's films and those that built up Bachchan as a star persona was that in the former, the star represented only an infusion of additional value into a narrative which retained its primacy. (In a film like Abhiman, the conflicting trajectories of narrative and spectacle were sought to be resolved through the narrativization of the star figure.) In the Salim-Javed led project, however, the star remained a semantic excess of the narrative process, available for future exploitation.

The value deriving from a star persona is part rent and part profit. From the star's perspective, his/her body is a source of rent, since its principal quality, charisma, is coded as a possession that he/she is 'born with', notwithstanding the work that goes into producing it. From the perspective of the film-makers, the payment of rent enables the exploitation of this 'ground' in profit-making ventures. The star's persona thus accumulates within itself attributes that are specific to various instances of performance, as well as various value-laden associations deriving from personal history. Thus, as an example of the latter, we may cite Bachchan's literary and political affiliations. His father, Harvansh Rai Bachchan, is a well known Hindi poet and his mother Teji Bachchan, a distinguished member of the social elite. (Mukherjee's Alaap showed Amitabh singing one of his father's poems.^{(see clip)}) The Bachchans were also close friends of the Indira Gandhi family. Amitabh would later enter politics as a Congress candidate for parliament and remain Rajiv Gandhi's close ally for many years. These bits of information were stirred into the star persona by the press.

The persona also absorbed the characteristics of several characters played by Amitabh in the early part of his career. Anger, self absorption, rebelliousness, devotion to mother, proletarian identity were some of the attributes of the roles that came to be absorbed into the star persona. While the power derived from elite affiliations served to legitimate the persona for the middle class, the personality derived from the subaltern roles was the basis for a new mode of address, which spoke to the proletariat and other marginal sections and mobilized the spectator behind the star. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to a discussion of the first three Salim-Javed films, Zanjeer, Deewar and Sholay. The primary aim will be to identify the strategies through which these films constructed the mobilized (and mobilizing) subaltern hero as an agent of national reconciliation and social reform.

Zanjeer (Prakash Mehra, 1973)

This was one of the first independent successes of the writer-duo Salim-Javed, whose star status is intimately tied up with the three films we are concerned with. Employed for a period in the G.P. Sippy Films Writing Department, where they participated singly or together in the writing of Andaz (based on A Man and a Woman), and Seeta aur Geeta (based on Ram Aur Shyam), Salim-Javed struck out on their own with Nasir Husain's Yadon ki Barat (based on an idea that Husain had already tried out in Pyar ka Mausam) and Prakash Mehra's Hath ki Safai and Zanjeer. While all of these films were big earners, Zanjeer was the film that launched Salim-Javed into stardom. Bachchan was chosen for the role of Inspector Vijay when Dev Anand, enjoying a resurgence of popularity after the success of Johny Mera Naam and Hare Rama Hare Krishna, rejected the offer. As Salim-Javed recollect it, the final form of Zanjeer owed much to their insistence on strict adherence to a tightly-composed screenplay. (Prakash Mehra, the producer/director, had wanted to make room for a plane hijack half-way through the shooting.) Indeed, by their own reading, it was a novel approach to screen-writing which insisted on the indivisibility of the 'story' and 'dialogue' departments (traditionally regarded as separate skills in the industry) that made their films distinct.

The institutionalization of the subaltern as mobilized subject, however, was effected through narrative mechanisms to which we now turn. In Zanjeer, the Bachchan persona came to be identified with a subaltern anger and an affiliation with the masses symbolized by an alliance with a figure representing the Muslim minority. The hero of Zanjeer is an honest police officer who uses extra-legal methods to bring criminals to justice and in the process antagonizes his colleagues and incurs the wrath of the criminal underworld. Tormented by the memory of his parents' assassination by a criminal, Inspector Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) has a recurring dream of a masked figure on horseback ^{(see clip)}. The image is traced back to a bracelet worn by the killer. The dream and the hero's inability to understand it signal his possession by an elemental force which drives him to act in unorthodox ways but always towards honest ends. In the course of an investigation, he becomes friendly with a female knife sharpener (Jaya Bhaduri) whom he rescues from the street after persuading her to give evidence against some criminals.^{(see clip)} Next he confronts Sher Khan (Pran), a Pathan who runs a gambling den in a mohalla notorious for criminal activities. This confrontation has a symbolic dimension because it pits Vijay, as a representative of the law against Sher Khan, who is a law unto himself. Agreeing to Sher Khan's challenge to meet him on his own ground, Vijay goes to his mohalla after duty. In the ensuing duel neither is able to defeat the other. Sher Khan, acknowledging his rival's strength, abandons his illegal activities and pledges to assist Vijay in his fight against crime and injustice. ^{(see clip)}Thereafter, dismissed from the force on a false bribery charge, Vijay, assisted by Sher Khan and a Christian old man (Om Prakash) confronts the city's big crime gang, discovers that the gang boss is his parents' killer^{(see clip)}, and has his revenge. The novelty of the narrative is the combined result of two elements.

1) The revenge of the orphan: The orphan is a figure of marginality, deprived of the normal familial pleasures by the intrusion of evil. The orphan's actions are attributed to a force beyond his control, haunting his dreams and driving him to act in ways that conflict with the procedural protocols of the law. He lacks the personal stability that would enable him to function as a normal law-enforcing agent. He is a loner and a stranger to his colleagues, a narcissistic personality. His personal need for revenge is not recognized by the law that he serves. The law draws upon his strength to implement its will but refuses to loan him any part of its strength so that he may exact his revenge. This figure exists in a space between the law and illegality, a figure whose ability to fulfil his role as a citizen is obstructed by the pathological history of the subject, which demands a cure that is extra-legal by definition. It represents the unfinished character of the bourgeois revolution, the failed reconstruction of the social in accordance with a new philosophy.

At the same time, the figure of the inspector with an unreconciled history stands for the existence, within the field of the law, of a fund of transformative will. It heralds the possibility of a reform of law to make it serve the needs of the dispossessed and the marginalized. The law displays its humanity by revealing its pathological side: it too is haunted by unfinished projects of retribution and redistribution. Through the in-between figure, the law maintains its position of impersonal power, while allowing a part of itself to respond to the demands of those who are its victims.

2) The mobilization of the dispossessed: Whether it is a question of the suspension of the law for the duration of a retributional narrative or the re-awakening of the law to its unfinished historical project, the solution has to be backed by the will of the people. In Zanjeer the hero's mission is aided by a series of 'donors' (to use V.I. Propp's term somewhat loosely), who stand for different segments of the dispossessed. There is first of all the female knife-sharpener, who represents women on the margins of respectable society, abandoned by the patriarchal network to fend for themselves. Second, there is Sher Khan, who represents a criminalized but essentially honest Muslim proletariat. And third, the Christian old man, drinking to forget his son's death at the hands of the criminals, who comes to Vijay's aid with information about smuggling operations. These poor/ gendered victims of society and marginalized minorities gift their combined strength to Vijay, giving his mission a significance beyond his need for personal revenge. It is through their active involvement in the mission that Vijay comes to be identified as a hero of the masses. He acts with their support but also on their behalf, as their voluntarily chosen representative. Their support endows his personal mission of revenge with a social purpose.

The Amitabh persona is a 'proletarian hero' who is at the same time a representative of the state. It is the act of switching sides, positioning himself on the side of the 'illegal' (but morally upright) margin, that gives the figure its power.

Deewar (Yash Chopra, 1974)

In Deewar, however, this double identity of the hero is split into two separate figures, resulting in a powerful drama of epic conflict, a civil war between state and community. The film begins with a traumatic childhood event, the humiliation of the father and his disappearance, and the flight of the mother with two children to the city to escape the community's insults. The father (Satyen Kappu) is an upright trade union leader who is forced to sign an agreement detrimental to the workers' interests when the mine-owners threaten to destroy his family. Unable to bear the opprobrium, he disappears.^{(see clip)} The mother and two children go to Bombay and become part of the unorganized working class, living on the streets. As the children grow up, a field of conflict is established in which the state/citizen confronts the community/subject. Inspector Vijay of Zanjeer, who embodied the combination of citizen and pathological subject, is split into two separate figures in Deewar. Inspector Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) and criminal Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan). Educated with the earnings of both his mother, who works at a construction site, and his elder brother, who works as a shoeshine, Ravi grows up to be an exemplary citizen, passing all his exams with high marks and after a futile search for employment, trains as a police officer.

Meanwhile, Vijay grows up to be a dock worker and defends his fellow workers against gangsters who take away a part of the workers' weekly earnings. Picked up by a gang leader (whose rivals run the extortion racket at the dock), Vijay soon becomes the second in command. The gang leader Davar (Iftikhar) becomes Vijay's surrogate father. Meanwhile, Ravi completes his training and is posted in Bombay, to tackle the smuggling menace. When he realizes what his brother does for a living, Ravi tries to back out of the case but, inspired by a visit to the house of a poor schoolmaster, he resolves to put aside all personal considerations in the fight against injustice. The mother Sumitra Devi (Nirupa Roy) who loves Vijay more than Ravi, nevertheless opposes Vijay's criminal activities and goes to live with Ravi. Vijay, for whom his mother's love was the sole justification for living, despairs. Meeting Ravi near a bridge where they had spent their childhood, Vijay reminds his brother of bygone days and tries to persuade him to take a transfer out of Bombay. Ravi refuses and steps up the anti-smuggling operations. Vijay is pursued on the other side by the rival gang. Resolving to marry his girlfriend Anita (Parveen Babi), a call-girl, and then give himself up, Vijay sends word to his mother to meet him at the temple. Meanwhile, Samant (Madan Puri), boss of the rival gang, returns to take his revenge. He kills Anita as she is getting dressed for the wedding. Giving up all hopes of a return to normal life, Vijay kills Samant and his gang members. Ravi, informed about Vijay's killing spree, sets out to catch him. His mother hands Ravi his gun and wishes him success in his mission. She then proceeds to the temple to await the arrival of Vijay. Fatally wounded by Ravi and pursued, Vijay arrives at the temple and dies in his mother's arms.

The narrative is framed by an awards ceremony at which Ravi is receiving a medal for bravery. In his speech Ravi invokes those who stand behind the nation's heroes but are never acknowledged in the official record. He asks his mother to receive the medal on his behalf The mother, escorted to the dais, receives the medal but is distracted by a memory. Her gaze, directed at a point outside the frame, prompts the 'flashback' which tells the entire story. Thus the story of Vijay is presented as doubly erased, confined to the depths of a mother's memory, remaining her secret, not to be recounted in the public space of the awards ceremony. ^{(see clip)}The flashback structure codes the narrative as a mother's memory hidden from public view, evoking a powerful sense that the film will tell an 'unofficial' history, one which the audience can share in, although no official record will include it. It evokes the community of the 'pre-historic', the solidarity of the mother's world against the world of the father, the Law. It imbues the tragedy of Vijay with a secrecy, a subterranean quality. The 'flashback' concludes with Vijay's death and we return to the official assembly where the mother is still standing on the dais and the hall resounds with applause. The applause, officially intended for the brave police officer, has now been partially re-allocated to the rebellious son. The enactment of masochistic fantasy takes place in the shadow of the triumphal march of the patriarchal order.

Thus the text stages an imaginary and unofficial elevation of the resistant subject to a place of honour in the community's informal memory. Sumitra Devi serves as the link between the world of the citizen, of law and the rule of merit, and that of the poor, the victimized and the unreconciled. As a 'woman', she is firm in her submission to the law, she takes Ravi's side and leaves Vijay when his smuggling activities are disclosed. As a 'mother', she is equally firm in her love for Vijay, the elder son, the one who has borne the permanent mark of his father's dishonour^{(see clip)}. By thus splitting the woman into two functions, the film offers the spectator the pleasure of a secret liaison with the mother as a surrender to the political power of matriarchy. The martyred rebel has achieved a reunion with the mother's body suggested not only by the concealment of Vijay's story in the mother's memory but also by the image of Vijay resting his head in her lap at the end and asking her to put him to sleep. Vijay's tragic destiny is ensured by his attempt to place his mother in the position of the Father, as the authority whose desires he seeks to fulfil. After joining the gang, Vijay buys a skyscraper as a gift for his mother, who had worked as a coolie when it 'was being constructed. This phallic offering, an invitation to occupy the position of dominance, is rejected by the mother ^[25] Instead she punishes him by serving as the vehicle of the Father's law. Before the final confrontation, handing Ravi his gun, she gives him her blessing: 'May your hand not tremble when you shoot.' After his departure, she declares, 'The woman has done her duty, now the mother will go and await her son.'^{(see clip)}

Deewar dramatizes the relations between the contractual, law abiding society and its subterranean, criminal obverse, through a masochistic scenario in which the hero's movement towards death becomes a fantasy resolution of-me impossible desire for reunion with the mother's body. This dramatization points to the political uses of masochistic fantasy as an ideological disavowal (which amounts to an acceptance) of the legal order. Deewar can be usefully read as an example of cinema as masochistic fantasy as defined, for instance, by Gaylyn Studlar, following Gilles Deleuze. 'The masochistic fantasy may be viewed as a situation in which the subject (male or female) assumes the position of the child who desires to be controlled within the dynamics of the fantasy' (Studlar 1992: 778). According to Deleuze, masochism is an enactment, 'above all formal and dramatic', determined by 'a specific story' (cited in Studlar 1992: 774). It is the enactment of mythical reunion with the oral mother. The subject desires such a reunion, a return to the state of infancy, but '[t]he promise of blissful reincorporation into the mother's body and re-fusion of the child's narcissistic ego with the mother as ideal ego is also a threat. Only death can hold the final mystical solution to the expiation of the father and symbiotic reunion with the idealized maternal rule. The masochist imagines the final triumph of a parthenogenetic rebirth from the mother' (ibid: 780).

This theory locates the origins of masochistic fantasy in the experience of the child and by extension, defines the cinematic experience itself as being continuous with that experience. However, Deewar is more accurately described as an allegorization of the history of the nation-state itself through the masochistic fantasy. The film text deploys the fantasy politically, as a mechanism of provisional counter-identification. In doing so it draws from the power of masochism to produce a resolution of the internal conflicts of the nation-state which is pleasurable and acceptable to the dominated. In Deewar the masochistic subject elevates the mother to the position of the all-powerful ruler and enacts death as the means of mystical reunion. In the context of a patriarchal order, whose triumph cannot be disavowed and to which all must submit, the fantasy serves as a pleasurable staging of surrender coded as masked victory. The masochistic fantasy enacted in Deewar is subterranean by definition in that it must be staged in the shadow of the patriarchal order's triumph. In its political dimension, the fantasy becomes possible only in a relation of subordination to the dominant patriarchal order. The masochistic fantasy in Deewar is fully determined by the dominatedness of its scenario, by the fact that the fantasy cannot be represented in the public domain except in the shadow of the dominant, although it offers itself as a subversive alternative to the dominant.

The conferral of power on the female serves to allegorize the problem of the internal schism of the modern state, the co-existence of the law and the community as conflicting terrains. The 'ideal' configuration would have the law fully enveloping the community, of reconstructing the individual as citizen-subject. But the crisis of the state derives from the fact that the law, in its drive to desacralize and colonize the space of the community, ^[26] faces a number of hurdles and rival political formations. The mother-figure serves as a narrative surrogate for all such rival formations: the traditional family, the criminal underworld, the community of the devout. She represents the border between the law and these rival formations. But she is not the 'prize' for which the two realms are fighting, because only one of them has the discursive ability to reduce the mother to the status of a possession. She is thus a liminal figure who represents the resistance of the community to a reorganization of social space according to the laws of private property. (This does not mean that the resistance represents a collective consciousness. In its resistance to reorganization along individualistic lines, the past comes to be embodied as 'community'.) One of the turning points in the film is the scene of the meeting at the bridge where Vijay tries to persuade Ravi to take a transfer to another police station. The entire scene is constructed to highlight the difference between Ravi, whose memory has been erased by his emancipation to the position of a representative of the law, and Vijay who remains a victim of his past. The scene opens with Ravi waiting at the bridge. On the soundtrack the patriotic song 'Sare jahah se achcha' is playing, reminding us (but not Ravi) of an event from the past: One morning, finding Ravi missing, Vijay and his mother go in search of him. They find him standing at the gates of a school, listening to the uniformed children singing the song. Up to that point, the mother's earnings had been too meagre to send either boy to school. On that day, Vijay decides to take up a job himself so that with the additional income Ravi could be sent to school. The spectator recalls this earlier scene, but Ravi has no memories of the bridge under which he had slept as a child. For Vijay this bridge of memory is the only remaining link between him and Ravi, and he wants to reactivate it. Ravi does not yield to the unifying power of memory. Frustrated, Vijay boasts of his achievements, his worldly possessions, beside which Ravi's sub-inspector's salary is a pittance. 'I have all this, but what do you have?' he asks, to which Ravi replies, 'I have mother.'^{(see clip)} This scene prefigures Vijay's tragic destiny. It is here that we learn the difference between the new figure, that is representative of the law, and the old one. One is possessed by the past and seeks to be possessed and dominated by the mother, who is a figure from that past. The other, emancipated from the past, is able to 'have the mother', to possess her as a part of his familial affective realm.

Through the metonymic link to the world provided by the narcissistic son, the mother also comes to stand for the marginalized, the working classes, as well as the minorities. Vijay's rebellious spirit is aroused when a fellow dockworker gets killed after refusing to pay the extortionists who run the protection racket. The next week he too refuses to pay and takes on the whole gang single-handedly. His victory makes him the workers' hero.^{(see clip)} An old dockworker, Rahim Chacha, advises him to hold on to his badge because it bears the number 786, which is sacred to Muslims. ^{(see clip)}Like Sher Khan in Zanjeer, Rahim Chacha functions as a donor, bestowing on the hero the beneficent powers of his religion and at the same time nominating him as a representative of the minorities and the marginalized. This is another instance of the scenes of election and nomination that we have already noted in Zanjeer in which the Muslim minority symbolically adopts the hero as its own leader. The badge saves his life twice. The third time, pursued by Ravi, Vijay drops the badge and cannot retrieve it, ending his good luck.

Deewar is one of the few film epics produced by the Bombay industry. It is the most powerful of all Salim-Javed screenplays, combining tried narrative devices, a new mode of address, and new iconic material in a displaced enactment of the hopes and disaffections of modern India. Two films from the past provided the primary narrative material. Mother India (Mehboob 1957) was the source for the thematics of the mother-son relationship. There the mother herself killed the rebellious son, who had turned into a bandit, and was rewarded with a symbolic role at the opening of a dam. Her sacrifice thus made her a contributor to the progress of modern India. From Dilip Kumar's Gunga Jumna (Nitin Bose 1961) Salim-Javed took the theme of confrontation between two brothers, one representing the law and the other an honest and hard-working farmer forced into a life of crime by feudal exploiters. Combining the two, Salim Javed added to an already powerful mix, a third element, the spectacle of nomination whereby the hero becomes a point of counter identification for the spectator, assuring a pleasurable 'subversion' without undermining the supremacy of the law. Amitabh is at once Birju, the rebellious son of 'Mother India', whom the mother must sacrifice in order to establish the rule of law, and Gunga, the honest man forced into crime by a feudal system which the law is unable to smash. Gunga also represents the consequences of the failure of the legal system of the modern state. Where the law does not fulfil its role as destroyer of feudal oppression, an alternative system of justice arises. At the same time both Gunga Jumna and Deewar emphasize the element of primitive accumulation through which the modern state itself is established. Both Gunga and Vijay work to send their brothers to school, their sweat has gone into the making of the exemplary citizens, Jumna and Ravi. Thus, the law is presented as a product of the labour of the poor which turns against the poor, the dead labour of the proletariat, alienated from it and turned hostile.

Gunga Jumna and Mother India portrayed the rebels as dacoits,· rural bandits who belonged to the world of popular criminality celebrated in folklore. Their criminality was a direct result of feudal oppression and had the additional dimension of Robin Hood style altruism. In Deewar, however, the hero does not start an enterprise of popular criminality. He joins an existing smuggling ring and rises to the top. The initial elaboration of the confrontation between exploiters and exploited is displaced onto a more traditional plot-line of police versus criminals. Within the world of crime, Vijay's gang is depicted as being more ethical in its criminality than the others and the audience is invited to applaud Vijay as he tricks the rival gang. Haji Mastan, the real life smuggler and slumlord of Bombay, is reputed to have been the model for Vijay's role. (Mastan and other smugglers were arrested after the film was made, under the new laws of Indira Gandhi government.) Although Mastan, like other urban gangsters, enjoyed popularity in the slums where he ruled and dispensed charity, as a point of counter-identification the smuggler did not have the same power that the rural dacoit had. This is why Davar's gang had to be endowed with a vague ethical status and Vijay himself to be isolated from the gang into a figure of brooding inwardness. It is through this isolation that it becomes possible to return the spectator to the 'psychic' pleasures of a masochistic fantasy.

Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975)

Sholay was the third high point in the formative phase of the aesthetic of mobilization. Here again Amitabh Bachchan's star-image was combined with Salim-Javed's narrative of the epic confrontation between the state and an internal rival political power. The setting is a village where a ruthless dacoit, Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), is terrorizing the villagers and extorting payments in the form of seasonal gifts of farm produce. The biggest landlord in the village, Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar), is also a police officer who captures Gabbar Singh and has him sent to jail. Swearing revenge, Gabbar escapes from prison and kills everyone in the Thakur's family, except his daughter in-law who was not at home. The Thakur goes to Gabbar's camp and is captured. Gabbar cuts off both his arms and sends him back to the village. During his tenure as police officer, the Thakur had had occasion to observe the valour of two petty criminals, Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra), who helped him when the train they were travelling in, was ambushed by dacoits. The Thakur tracks them down and offers them money to help him capture Gabbar alive. They arrive in the village and decide to run away after raiding the Thakur's safe. The Thakur's widowed daughter in-law Jaya Bhaduri arrives as they are trying to break open the safe and offers them the keys. Shamed, they give up the plan and decide to stay. The first opportunity for a confrontation arises when three of Gabbar's men arrive to collect grain from the villagers. The Thakur intervenes, and with Jai and Veeru demonstrating their bravery, the three dacoits have to return to camp empty-handed. All three are killed by Gabbar. On the day of Holi (a spring festival of colours), Gabbar leads his men in an attack on the village. Jai and Veeru are disarmed but manage to trick Gabbar, leading to a fight in which Gabbar's men are defeated. Jai and Veeru make another attempt to capture Gabbar as he meets with an arms dealer, but fail. Meanwhile Veeru falls in love with Basanti (Hema Malini), who drives a tonga and Jai is attracted to the mysterious widowed daughter-in-law of the Thakur.

Ahmed (Sachin), son of the blind Imam (A.K. Hangal), who has secured employment in the city, is on his way to the railway station when he is captured by Gabbar's men. Gabbar kills Ahmed and sends the body back to the village. The villagers turn against Jai and Veeru for inviting Gabbar's wrath upon the village but the Imam stands by them, declaring that he would sacrifice more sons for the honour of the village. Jai and Veeru kill a few of Gabbar's men in retaliation. The Thakur persuades the widow's father to agree to her marriage to Jai. The final movement begins when some dacoits come upon Basanti waiting for Veeru near a pond. After a long chase, she is caught and so is Veeru who went in search of her. Gabbar makes her dance on broken glass to save Veeru's life. Jai arrives and frees Veeru and Basanti and the three make their way back to the village. When they lose a horse, Jai stays back and sends the other two away to fetch help. He blows up the bridge but is fatally wounded. Veeru, returning with the villagers, vows revenge, rides into Gabbar's camp, and captures Gabbar. The Thakur arrives and asks Veeru to keep his promise and hand over Gabbar to him. He then proceeds to take his revenge but the police arrive just in time to prevent him from murdering Gabbar. Veeru, mission accomplished but minus his friend, boards the train out and finds Basanti waiting for him.

Like most of Salim-javed's other films, Sholay is also a reworking of elements borrowed from various sources. However, unlike Zanjeer and Deewar, Sholay transformed the epic formula and its borrowed ingredients into an explicit narrative affirmation of the feudal order and the subordination of the counter-identified spectator's pleasure to the restoration of that order. The central narrative device in this project is the figure of the Thakur, who embodies the unity of the interests of the state and the feudal order. The Thakur is a landlord who became a police officer, as he puts it, for the sake of the thrills the job promised. His role as representative of the law is thus coded as disinterested but at the same time, tied up with the drama of rural conflict. The Thakur's dismemberment has two conflicting but equally significant meanings: On the one hand, it represents the disabling of the apparatus of law and order, its debilitation in the confrontation with criminality. On the other hand, it also signifies a temporary breach of the coalition between the rural rich and the state: the Thakur remains but loses his hands, which he had himself described as 'the hangman's noose', i.e. the law. Both of these scenarios make possible and necessary the infusion of new energy from a source outside the coalition. The petty criminals, who provide this supplement of energy and serve as replacements for the lost limbs of the Thakur, are the infra-legal, but not irredeemably criminal, figures with whom the new proletarian and other disaffected audiences could identify. One of the truly astonishing features of the developing cinema culture of this period is the success with which criminality could be deployed as a metaphor for all forms of rebellion and disidentification.

The liminal figure in this narrative, the one that straddles the border between two realms is itself doubled. The petty criminals, already doubled, provide the link across one border, between legality and criminality. They are criminals who function on the side of the law. But there is another border, which previously coincided with the first one, but now stands separate: this is the border between the state and one of its former representatives, undertaking an infra legal mission of vengeance. Here the border figure is the Thakur himself, who temporarily sets aside the legal protocols in order to effect a justice which the law cannot bring about. The Thakur initiates the suspension of legality, thereby breaching the border, but his plan has to be implemented by the production of another border internal to the criminal order. This doubling is implicit in both Zanjeer and Deewar: in Zanjeer, Sher Khan is the figure of the second border, the good criminal, and in Deewar, the mother's role as the figure in between the law and the community is doubled by Vijay himself When he allies with the 'good criminal' Davar against the bad Samant. But in Sholay, the doubling takes on an added significance for two reasons: one, the figure who demands our sympathy at the first border is a landlord; by sharing in his desire for vengeance, we are also seduced into participating in a reaffirmation of the feudal order. Secondly, the political address to the audience through which Vijay (of Zanjeer and Deewar) wins a constituency in the cinema hall as well as among the diegetic co-workers, is eliminated in Sholay by the fact that the two men are hired as mercenaries. The film begins with the Thakur's attempt to track down the two men with the help of a jailor, as part of his plan for revenge. Of course, there is an attempt to provide a certain amount of political support through the mobilization of the village. But the villagers appear as the prize for which the Thakur is fighting the dacoits. It is a rivalry for the rights to political power over the villagers. The protection of the villagers is only a subsidiary effect of the primary plot to defeat Gabbar and restore the Thakur's honour. This is why, although they are hired to go out and capture Gabbar, Jai and Veeru function more as hired protectors of the village. Protecting the village is the form taken by the action initiated to restore the Thakur's honour.

The spaghetti westerns were the principal source of narrative material for Sholay. In this period the Terence Hill/ Bud Spencer adventures and Sergio Leone's films starring Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, For a Few Dollars More, etc. were extremely popular in India. Indio, the mad laughing villain of For a Few Dollars More was the model for Gabbar Singh, India's most popular screen villain. Throughout the seventies, indigenous film makers cashed in on the popularity of this genre by making 'westerns' in local settings, with local themes. The most significant phenomenon arising from this transfer of cowboy iconography and revenge themes was the Tamil/Telugu 'western' (the English press referred to it as the 'idli western'). A series of cheaply made films were released in the seventies in which male stars like Krishna and two 'cabaret dancers' Jyothilakshmi and Vijayalalitha, starred in avenger roles. It was a sub-cultural phenomenon which re-duplicated the cultural status of the spaghetti western (and the indigenous stunt films of an earlier era) not only in its choice of themes of revenge but also in the construction of an alternative star system which survived in the interstices of mainstream culture on the enthusiasm of proletarian audiences.

In Hindi, a similar tendency was manifesting itself just before Sholay arrived on the scene. An emblematic film of this sub-genre is Khotey Sikkay, released in 1974. The main character in this film was played by Feroze Khan, who until then had been a star in another long-standing sub-culture supported by a predominantly Muslim lower-class audience. (Sheikh Mukhtar, Dara Singh, Ansari were some of the other stars in this subterranean constellation. Others like Mumtaz began their careers there and moved up into the mainstream.) Feroze Khan's role in Khotey Sikkay was a blend of elements from Clint Eastwood, Zorro, and perhaps also the Lone Ranger comics. He was a man in search of a dacoit who had killed his parents. He roams the countryside, protects the weak and punishes the wicked in the course of his search for his parents' killer. Meanwhile, the son of a farmer who was killed by the dacoit's men brings a gang of five people (echoes of The Five-Man Army, a popular foreign film of the period) from the town to help him protect the village. Helping each other but acting separately, the gang of six and the Zorro character together enact a narrative similar to that of Sholay, at the end of which the dacoit is vanquished and order restored to the rural landscape. The title, which literally means 'counterfeit coins' is a metaphor for the gang of five: they are urban petty criminals who are persuaded to give up their disorderly life in order to help a village. They give up their counterfeit lives for the authenticity of village life.

In Sholay, the same term is employed to describe Jai and Veeru. When the Thakur tells the jailor to find the two men, he explains that although they were criminals, they had a good side. The jailor responds by saying that a counterfeit coin is bad on both sides. The Thakur, however, asserts that there is a difference between coins and human beings. ^{(see clip)} Khotey Sikkay was released the year before Sholay and it is difficult to say whether Salim-Javed had made use of its narrative material. However, the westerns in circulation at the time (in particular Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More) provided most of the material that these two films shared. Like the southern 'westerns', Khotey Sikkay was a sub-cultural text in which marginal figures and 'villains' like Narendranath, Ranjit and Danny became heroes.

Sholay, on the other hand, is one of the most expensive Indian films ever made, with a long list of top stars, spectacular fight scenes and other potlatch features. It was a successful appropriation of a sub-cultural form for mainstream exploitation. Like Sangam, which a decade earlier had annexed the fledgling genre of women's melodrama to the 'national' textual form (see Chapter 3), Sholay annexed a marginal B-film genre to a mainstream big-budget extravaganza. It supplemented the structure of the revenge film with a frame that incorporated other interests into the motivations for the narrative.

Sholay adopts a mode of othering that follows the urban/rural divide. In films like Gunga Jumna, Jis Desh mein Ganga Behti Hai and Kachche Dhage the dacoit is portrayed as a rational subject, i.e. one whose criminality has a social motivation. In Sholay the dacoit figure is evacuated of all social content, has no personal history. Pitted against the legitimate rule of the landlord, his political ambitions are not supported by any manifesto, whether personal or social. The film stages the triumph of the Law over the intransigent political order of the countryside which threatens the dominant coalition's rural partner, the landed bourgeoisie.

As we have seen, the narratives of these three films were drawn from other sources. The originality of the textual form derives primarily from the mobilization effect which accompanies the narration. The scenes of nomination, in which the hero is elected to lead workers and minorities, function to extend the relationship of leader and led to the audience as well. The figure who commands the audience in this way is the star. The star's function is mobilization, the rallying of forces behind a narrative exposition. This elevation compensates for the loss of the hero's traditional authority, and enacts a transition from feudal to populist power. Through the production of a supplemental charisma, the industry overcomes the problems posed by a shift of narrative focus to the realm of the ordinary. The star-image restores the heteronomy of the text. Although unprecedented in the history of the Hindi cinema, the extra-cinematic authority of the star as mobilizer was already a feature of Tamil cinema, in the star-image of MGR. Amitabh Bachchan did not enter politics until much later in his career but even in the formative stage his star-image had a political dimension that paralleled MGR's. A populist political culture, elaborated through the cinema, developed very early in Tamil Nadu as a supplement to the Dravidian movement ^[27] The spread of populism led to similar developments in the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, where Rajkumar and N.T. Rama Rao, respectively, became the focal points of a political-cultural formation. The Amitabh Bachchan phenomenon can be said to represent the arrival of populism on the national arena. Populism, employing the supplement of charisma produced in the scenes of election and nomination, enables the control of the text's meaning-production from a point outside it. Through this supplement the heteronomous condition of the text as a darsanic occasion is maintained. The industry favours a situation in which its profits depend on the rent-earning star body, rather than one in which the ability of a narrative to interest audiences is the decisive factor in making or marring a production. In response to the pressures for a transformation of the textual form, the industry thus managed to produce a populist aesthetic of mobilization designed to contain the centrifugal tendencies to segmentation.

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^{[21] See interview with G.P. Sippy in Screen, 21 February 1969. Combining arguments
for national reconstruction with promises of economic benefit, Sippy remarked that
films depicting social and political problems that could raise awareness were necessary
to 'revive the declining patronage' of the industry'S products. The immediate evidence
for this was the failure of some big-budget productions. The industry wanted freedom
from censorship to tackle themes that would help 'the crystallisation of political,
social and religious outlook of the country and restoration of communication between
the generations.'}

^{[22] Filmfare, 13 December 1974. See also, interview with Javed Akhtar in Kak
(1980). Filmfare, in the spirit of its leadership role in reforming the commercial
industry, had in 1969 renamed the award for the best dialogue as a screenplay
award, to give importance to 'the blueprint which incorporates the total vision of the
projected film' (3 January 1969, p. 3). While the reformist impulse of the magazine
may have had some impact, the problem it was supposed to attack was not caused
by the incompetence of individuals but by the conditions prevailing in the industry
(discussed in Part I). The peak of Salim-Javed's fame, moreover, was reached with
the enormous popularity of the dialogues of Sholay. While the story and dialogue
departments were indeed fused into one in the sense that they were both written by
the same people, the autonomous force of the dialogue within the film text remained
unaffected.}

^{[23] Sumita Chakravarty, who mentions some of Bachchan's early films, nevertheless
makes the surprising observation that Chupke Chupke was 'the only film in which
Bachchan appears as a "gentleman"' (1993: 231). This perhaps demonstrates the
retroactive power of the evolved Bachchan image. Chakravarty does not dwell on
the process of production of the Bachchan persona, attributing his success instead to
his 'haunting and haunted eyes' (ibid: 231) and other 'innate' sources of charm.}

^{[24] Thus Filmfare, looking back in 1989, commented: 'They called him the One
Man Industry and for sixteen years he churned out hits with assembly-line regularity.
Zanjeer, Deewar, Don, Amar Akbar Anthony, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Trishul, Kasme Vaade, Kaala Patthar, Mr. Natwarlal, Laawaris, Kaalia, Naseeb, Namak Halal, Andha Kanoon, Coolie, Mard, Geraftaar ... It seemed as if the sun would never set on the
reign of Blockbuster Bachchan. Never before had a star seen this kind of success,
and for so long. The distance between him and his rivals was so vast that in the
number game, they'd allotted'the numbers 1 to 10 to him, the competition 'really
took place way down there and it never affected the big man at the top' (Filmfare,
6 June 1989, p. 38), cited in Sumita S. Chakravarty (1993: 230). Not a single Mukherjee
film is named in the list, although Abhiman was a big success and other films like
Chupke Chupke cashed in on his star status.}

^{[25] By contrast, the mother in the British gangster film The Krays submits entirely
to the criminal splendour of her sons' world. In return she is worshipped by one of
them and elevated to a position of familial power.}

^{[26] See Jameson's (988) essay 'Cognitive Mapping' for a discussion of the capitalist
reorganization of space.}

^{[27] M.S.S. Pandian's The Image Trap is the best available study of the politics of
Tamil cinema and the persona of MGR (M.G. Ramachandran). See also S.T. Baskaran's
The Message Bearers for a history of Tamil cinema's role in the national movement.}

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7. Middle-Class Cinema

The FFC project was defined by a commitment to realism, but this was by no means the first attempt in that direction. There already existed a progressive realist tendency of which K.A. Abbas's Dharti Ke Lal (1946) and Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1953) are the best known examples. Italian neo-realist cinema, seen in India for the first time in 1952, is said to have inspired some realist ventures, including Do Bigha Zameen, the story of a small peasant family driven to the city in an unsuccessful effort to save their little piece of land from the landlord's greed. While Dharti Ke Lal, made under the left-wing Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) banner, ended with the vision of a brighter future modelled on Soviet collective farming, Do Bigha Zameen ends without the slightest hint of hope for the peasant. realism here signified a thematic shift, focusing attention on the poor and the exploited but continued to feature a melodramatic narrative.

Satyajit Ray's work represented the other great strand of realism. In an influential essay, Satish Bahadur hailed Pather Panchali as 'a film which reflected the Indian reality as no other film had done before' (Bahadur 1982: 13). Ray was the exemplar of realism as an artistic form which Bahadur in another essay defined as:

an organic form in which all elements are in a state of interdependence; it has no extraneous elements in its structure. The technique of composition used in creating the form derives its logic from the themes which the work expresses; in other words, what is being said is achieved through the way it is said .... (Bahadur 1985: 71).

While progressive realism was political in its choice of themes, the aesthetic project associated with Ray was political in the sense that it was related to the project of nation-building. The Nehruvian theme of the 'discovery of India' was seen to have found its cultural expression in a realist portrayal of the nation in cinema (ibid: 70).

The FFC project drew from both these strands in defining its realist programme. However, in 1969 the possibilities for a realist aesthetic were determined not only by the available models but also by the political imperatives of the moment. In the event two broad tendencies began to emerge within the single programme of realist cinema. The beginning of the shift is usually identified with two films, Bhuvan Shome and Sara Akash. In a comment on the latter, we find this version of a frequently encountered statement: 'A simple story, told with touching realism, Sara Akash was made the same year that Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome ushered in the "new Indian cinema". Part of the same genre, both films have realistic locales, new faces, and an unglamorous setting' (Banerjee and Srivastava 1988: 162). ^[28] Five years later, a new round of national enthusiasm was focused on two privately-financed films, Ankur and Rajnigandha. The first named in the two sets (Bhuvan Shome and Ankur) represent a continuation of the political realist tendency while Sara Akash and Rajnigandha belong to the genre of the middle-class cinema. The movement from Sen's film to Benegal's is paralleled by the movement from Basu Chatterji's first film to his first major commercial success. These continuities are reinforced by another feature: while Sen and Benegal set their narratives in rural India, Chatterji's films were about the urban middle class. One invoked the image of the nation, while the other addressed itself to a class. One invited the urban spectator to witness a world other than its own but falling within the same political unit, while the other promised to create a world which the spectator could recognize as his/her own.

While these two tendencies within the realist programme thus seemed to diverge in their thematic concerns and seemed to posit two different spectator positions, they were addressed to the same audience. The audience is an empirical category, referring to the actual individuals who frequent the cinema whereas the spectator is a theoretical concept that stands for the viewing position arising from the text's strategies of representation. ^[29] As spectators the audience of citizen-subjects were called upon to occupy two different positions. One corresponded to the citizen side of the entity and involved a frame of reading that included the perspective of the nation-state while the other was addressed to the subject, the individual in society, faced with the struggle for existence, the locus of desires, fears and hopes. This chapter deals with the realist cinema of the subject, or what is commonly known as the middle-class cinema.

In Sara Akash (The Whole Sky', 1969) the urban middle-class world is treated with a solicitous detachment that was to disappear with the further development of the middle-class cinema. This mild trace of ethnographic objectification is a sign that Chatterji had not as yet recognized the possibilities of a cinema of identification based on realist principles. The interventionist agenda of the FFC project and the freedom from considerations of marketability no doubt contributed to this. The objectification effect in Sara Akash is achieved through an emphasis on the characters' immersion in a feudal culture, although the joint family home in which the story unfolds is located in an urban milieu. The potential for a cinema of identification was still concealed by the burden of ethnographic distancing which the FFC's realist programme placed on the film-maker. As in Avtar Kaul's 27 Down, the story deals with the problem of modern individuals still caught up in a network of feudal customs and mental habits. A university student marries an educated woman but both are in the grip of family traditions which determine their lives. The marriage is arranged by the family. Unhappy with a relationship brought about in this manner, the hero rejects the woman, while his family burdens her with all the housework. When she goes away to her parental home, the hero finds himself missing her company. A reconciliation is brought about when, after her return the wife becomes more assertive and rejects him.

While employing the imagery of feudalism to effect an ethnographic distancing, the film does not undertake a critique of feudalism. Instead, it attributes the failure of the couple's union to their shyness and immaturity. The film tries to produce a nuclear couple within the confines of an extended family. Since both members are educated, there is a possibility of their overcoming the initial extraneous compulsion that brought them together and of establishing intimacy. In their ability to do so lies the value of the aesthetic: to wrest from the feudal space a couple who can be relocated in the space of modernity. In this task it is equally necessary to distance the feudal structure of the extended family as well as foreground the couple as the object of our sympathy. A visit to the cinema is an important moment in the film: the scene where the couple walk to the theatre, with the wife walking several steps behind the husband, heightens the pleasures of realism.^{(see clip)} On the one hand, the ethnographic interest is aroused by the recognition of the image: who has not seen such a phenomenon - (The answer of course is: those who walk like that, in single file; but the pleasure of recognition that realism offers us is not diluted by such reminders of realism's institutional/class determination.) On the other hand, the narrative proceeds to 'demonstrate' that the possibility of closing the gap between husband and wife depends on a process of psychic, rather than social, reform.

The middle-class cinema is predominantly characterized by an emphasis on the extended familial network as the proper site of production of nuclear couples. Even when, as in Rajnigandha, no such common ground of kinship is suggested, the idea of endogamy is strongly inscribed in the narrative delineation of the class. This is because middle-class narratives are confined to the world of the upper castes. These castes find themselves dispersed in an urban world, and define themselves as the middle class in the language of the modern state, while maintaining their endogamous identities. In deference to the semiotic prohibition which inaugurates the modern state, the caste identity of this urban society is generally concealed behind the term 'middle class'. It is thus that the paradoxical thematics of 'class endogamy' emerge as a narrative element in films like Guddi and Rajnigandha.

The middle class, however, also carries the burden of national identity on its shoulders. While one sector of the middle-class cinema represents a community hemmed in by the larger society and devoted to its own reproduction, there is another that presents the class's national profile, its reformist role in the drama of class and religious conflicts within the nation-state. Here the realist aesthetic draws upon the tradition of Gandhian melodrama, including Bimal Roy's Sujata and Bandini, and the films of his pupil Hrishikesh Mukherjee from before the FFC era, such as Ashirvad and Satyakam. Thus, there are two broad sectors of the middle-class cinema, of which one is oriented towards asserting the national role of the class while the other is committed to the construction of an exclusive space of class identity. While the first sector enjoyed a strong pre FFC history, in the post-FFC era it was redefined around the political pressures of the moment. Three significant films of this type are Anand, Namak Haram (both by Hrishikesh Mukherjee) and Mere Apne (Guizar). All three take up the question of national and class reconciliation in a period of political crisis.

The second, sector, concerned with the consolidation of middle class (upper caste) identity, can be further divided into three sub types based on thematic differences. The first sub-type would include films like Guddi and Rajnigandha, both of which raise the question of the threat to class identity posed by the lures of the outside world, to which women in particular are susceptible. The second sub-type includes Abhiman, Kora Kagaz and Aandhi where the post-marital tensions of the middle-class family arise from the ambitions and individualistic tendencies of one or both the partners. Films of the first sub-type differ from the second mainly in that they resolve the conflicts prior to marital union. The third sub-type includes films which take up the question of the space for middle-class existence, the dependence of middle-class life on the possibility of privacy. While Piya ka Ghar deals with the problem of private space in a humorous fashion, Anubhav and in particular Dastak, in a complex mode uncharacteristic of the middle-class cinema in general, employs the thematic of private space to explore questions related to the institution of cinema itself as well as the transition to class society. Aandhi, included in the second sub-type, can also be discussed in terms of the third sub-type.

The Dissemination of Bengal

The middle-class cinema is marked by an overwhelming dependence on Bengali culture for its narrative and iconographic material as well as film-making talent. This cinema was founded on the twin distinctions of primacy of narrative and the ordinariness and authenticity of the world represented. Bengali literature and cinema provided a ready source of such narrative material. Even a commercial film-maker like Shakti Samanta, after making films like An Evening in Paris, Pagla Kahin ka, and the deftly plagiarized Aradhana, turned, for Amar Prem, to a Bengali middle-class narrative set (without too much emphasis on realist detail) in the nineteenth or early twentieth-century BengaI. ^[30] It would be wrong to conclude, on this basis, that there was a demand for Bengali middle-class narratives. It would be more accurate to say that the industry found in those narratives a ready supply of 'difference' which could be re-"presented. Examples of films directly based on and iconographically faithful to Bengali narratives were Ba/ika Badhu, Uphaar, Amar Prem, Chhoti Bahu and Swami. Others like Guddi, Anand and Kora Kagaz derived part of their claim to difference from the fact that the characters had Bengali names and dressed like the Bengali middle class. In Kora Kagaz, the final scene at the railway station, like a similar one in Swami, has Bengali literary resonances.^{(see clip)} Yet others, like Rajnigandha (based on a Hindi story), Abhimaan and Aandhi were less specific in their cultural allusions but reinforced the popular association of good middle-class culture with Bengal if only because they were either directed by Bengalis or had Bengali actors in principal roles. (It is difficult to think of Aandhi without being reminded of the historic 'return' of Suchitra Sen to the Hindi screen,) Of course, Bengali narratives had been used in the Hindi film industry before, but in the seventies they served as the resource for a major thrust towards product differentiation and market segmentation. The FFC-sponsored films of 1969 played no small part in provoking this change. Let us now turn to a discussion of the sub-types of the middle-class cinema.

Narratives of National reconciliation

National reconciliation acquired urgency in the context of the disaggregation of the social already discussed. Martyrdom is the cleansing event which produces the possibilities of reconciliation in all the three films in this category. In Mere Apne, the martyr is an old peasant woman. In Anand and Namak Haram, he is a middle-class individual (played by Rajesh Khanna) who rises above the conflicts that surround him and reunites a divided world by dying.

In Mere Apne ('My Dear Ones', Gulzar, 1971), based on the Bengali film Apanjan) an old woman is brought to the city by her relative who needs household help, while he and his wife go out to work. The woman is thrown out when she questions the exploitative motive behind the altruistic gesture, and finds refuge in an old ruined building where two orphans live. A student gang leader, estranged from his family, also spends his nights there. In the midst of daily confrontations between two rival youth gangs, the woman's motherly affection and innocent and upright behaviour win the hearts of the gang members. At election time the two gangs are hired by rival candidates. In the explosion of campaign Violence, the woman is killed by a police bullet as she tries to stop the street fighting between the gangs.

During a conversation with the gang members, the old widow recounts an event from her past which identifies her as a patriotic woman along the lines of the heroines of Bandini, Mother India and the Tamil film Andha Naal (1954). Set in pre-independence India, the flashback recounts the events of a night when the woman and her husband hid a freedom fighter, who was being pursued by the police, in their bedroom. This scene serves as a reminder of the sacrifices made in the past to produce the community which is now breaking apart.^{(see clip)}

A conversation between some gang members at the beginning establishes the film's reading of the contemporary world. Socialism has become a mere collection of empty slogans which all parties, including communal ones, use indiscriminately. On the other hand, the blood ties which united people in the past have become an excuse for exploitation. The well-to-do extract free labour by using the rhetoric of kinship while the poor and the young find themselves helpless in a world in which parents and college principals do not understand their idealism or the frustrations of the unemployed. The woman functions as the agent of an infusion of binding affect into a world divided by class and generational conflict.

While the peasant woman is the textual agent of resolution, the affect deployed in the movement towards resolution is a complex one, combining values drawn from several sources. One such source is the village, which figures in the text as an 'elsewhere', untouched by the conflicts that are tearing the urban community apart. Another source is the past, the history of nationalist struggle, of which the woman serves as a reminder. Thirdly, there is the maternal element that the peasant woman brings to the urban scene. The hero's disaffection with the world is partly attributed to the fact that his mother died early. The only urban mother in the film is the wife of the peasant woman's relative. She is a working woman with a character that is completely negative. She colludes with the husband in exploiting relatives as unpaid servants and readily abandons her child to the servant's care in order to enjoy the pleasures of the city. Finally, part of the affect is also drawn from the star system. The legendary actress Meena Kumari is cast as the peasant woman while young trainees of the Film Institute play the roles of the gang members. The nostalgia evoked by the presence of Meena Kumari, combined with the emerging star identities of actors like Vinod Khanna and Shatrughna Sinha, enabled a textual compromise between old and new which reinforced the narrative drive towards a resolution of present conflicts through the restoration of links with the past and the far away.

In Anand and Namak Haram, the martyr figure is male and clearly identified as belonging to the urban middle class. Nevertheless, Anand, the eponymous hero of the first film, is closer to the woman in Mere Apne in being a figure of national reconciliation whereas Namak Haram directly takes up the question of class struggle. The story of Anand (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1970) is narrated by a doctor. The film opens in a literary gathering where Dr Banerji (Amitabh Bachchan), is being honoured for a novel based on his diary entries about a man who defied death by living life to the full and spreading happiness wherever he went. In his address to the assembly, the doctor recalls his own state of mind at the point of time when Anand (Rajesh Khanna) first came into his life. An idealist, Banerji had devoted himself to treating the poor who could not afford to pay for his treatment or buy the medicines they needed to recover from their illnesses. His helplessness against the social 'diseases' of poverty and unemployment had driven him to a state of utter despondency. At this point a fellow doctor and friend who runs a small hospital informs him of the imminent arrival from Delhi of a patient with a fatal illness. Anand arrives, a day early, and with his charming ways, endears himself to all. He becomes a living enigma for everyone around him. He knows that he does not have long to live but will not let that spoil his fun. Doctor Banerji feels angry with himself for being unable to cure him. Moving into Banerji's house, Anand hides his own private anguish and involves himself in good deeds. He reunites the doctor with his girlfriend (Sumita Sanyal), whom he had neglected in his idealist pursuits. He adopts doctor Prakash's wife as his sister, the matron in the hospital, Sister D'Souza (Lalita Pawar), as his mother, and a theatre owner, Isabhai (Johny Walker), as a friend. Hindu, Christian and Muslim pray to their respective gods for the health of Anand. On his death-bed Anand asks for a tape of Banerji's poetry reading to be played and he dies as the poem ends. When Banerji, who was away, returns with some medicine, Anand's and his laughter, taped inadvertently, bursts forth to break the spell of grief. The last words in the film, spoken by Banerji, are 'Anand is not dead, anand (joy) does not die'.^{(see clip)}

In Anand as in Mere Apne, the central character comes from elsewhere and 'brings purpose and meaning into the lives of those who were drifting apart and sinking into despondency. Anand functions as a focus for the scattered, free-floating affect of his acquaintances. Failing in their commitment to social causes, they take him up as a surrogate cause. He is an exemplary figure who teaches the despondent to value all that life offers. In contrast, Dr. Banerji's clear and unambiguous perception of the evils of society makes him despair. As a doctor he rejects the path taken by his friend Prakash (Ramesh Deo) who thrives on the anxieties of his rich patients. On the other hand, he perceives that society is plagued by evils that are for the most part beyond the healing power of medicine. His clarity of vision makes him anxious. The arrival of Anand serves as a distraction from this anxiety. Anand is an enigma. In a world whose reality had seemed so transparent to Banerji a moment ago, there now appears a mystery. The paralysing effect of intellectual clarity is reduced as the enigma re-activates the emotions. The centripetal force of the enigma effects a displacement so that the spectator can participate in a surrogate resolution for the world's problems.

In Namak Haram ('Traitor', Hrishikesh Mukherjee 1973), the martyr is explicitly named as a member of the middle class. The film is roughly modelled on the Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole starrer Beckett. Somu (Rajesh Khanna), a middle-class youth, and Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), a big industrialist's son, are close friends. When Vijay takes over the running of a factory, he refuses to concede a legitimate demand for compensation and abuses the trade union leader (A.K. Hangal). Faced with a strike, he is forced to apologize to the union leader. Swearing vengeance, he recounts the whole affair to Somu. The latter offers to help him. Joining the factory as a worker, Somu (now called Chander), with the help of Vijay, scores a couple of successes as a self-proclaimed workers' leader. His popularity grows as the workers find that his confrontationist ways pay quicker dividends than the old union leader's slow, rule-bound methods. He defeats the old leader in the union elections. Having had his revenge, Vijay wants Somu to leave the job and go back to his old life. But Somu, having lived in the workers' colony and become acquainted with their misery, has had a change of heart. Vijay's father (Om Shivpuri), who believes in the policy of divide and rule, realizes the threat posed by a middle-class man whose conscience has been awakened. He deliberately exposes Somu's real identity before the workers. When the workers turn against him, it is the old trade union leader, who has recognized Somu's change of heart, who defends him. Vijay goes to the slum to bring his friend back but Somu declares his intention of staying on with the workers. rejected, Vijay prepares to fly to another part of the country where his father is setting up a factory. In his absence, the father hires some criminals to get rid of Somu. Vijay misses his flight, and on returning home, learns about the plot. He arrives too late to save his friend, who is run over by a lorry. Knowing that his father is too powerful to be convicted of a crime, Vijay takes the blame for the murder on himself and goes to prison. On his release from prison, he is met by the old trade union leader, his girlfriend (Simi), and the mother and sister of Somu.

At the heart of the film is a long speech by the industrialist who tells his son about the unreliability of the middle class. They are usually pliable and can be useful, but every now and then, when their conscience is aroused, one of them decides to aspire for greatness.^{(see clip)} Somu, fulfilling this prophecy, becomes a martyr to the cause of working-class rights. But in the process he also unites the classes: Vijay rejects his father's divide-and-rule strategy as anti national and pledges to continue Somu's struggle.^{(see clip)}In terms of the film this does not mean Vijay's transformation into a trade union leader but a process of reform whereby capitalists abandon their loyalty to British values and enter into a mutually beneficial pact with workers. The virtues of socialism are proclaimed in the film by Vijay's girlfriend, daughter of another industrialist. The camp of capitalists is thus shown to be internally divided and containing the seeds of a self-transformation. The middle-class martyr functions as a catalyst of reform, cleansing the capitalist class of its colonial habits. In these narratives political conflicts are resolved by aesthetic and affective infusions mediated by disinterested subjects whose power lies in their ability to serve as distractions. Gandhi is the prototype for this magnetic point, whose charismatic power draws the spectator into the fiction of a surrogate resolution and liberates her/him temporarily from the obligation of decisive action imposed by intellectual clarity. These narratives thus propose a non-political resolution of political conflicts as the middle class's contribution to national cohesion. They assert the role of the middle class as a depoliticizing influence, as a repository of affect that absorbs and neutralizes class conflict.

The second type of middle-class narrative, on the other hand, attempts to represent the class as struggling to maintain its unity and identity in the face of disruptive intrusions and external pressures. Hrishikesh Mukherjee bridges these two segments. Firmly committed initially to Gandhian melodrama, which portrayed the middle class as the force of national reconciliation and reform, Mukherjee turned, with Guddi, to the new aesthetic of identity in which middle-class isolationism was the primary theme. The two forces that threaten middle-class identity in these films are sexuality and politics.

The Middle Class as Endogamous Unit

In Guddi (Hrishikesh Mukherjee 1971), the sexual economy of a middle class upper caste extended family is disrupted by the lure of the cinema. Guddi is the pet name of Kusum (Jaya Bhaduri), a charming school girl who is obsessed with the film star Dharmendra, who plays himself in the film. A chance meeting with the star turns this fan's admiration into a serious sublimated love for him which is modelled on the medieval saint Meera's love for the god Krishna, a love that is unrequitable but eternal. The change is registered by means of a linguistic shift, with Kusum adopting the grandiose prose of pbpular film dialogue. This love threatens the endogamous network within which she has been marked out as the future wife of Navin (Samit Bhanja), her brother-in-law, an engineer from Bombay who is in search of a job. A visit to Bombay provides an opportunity for visiting the studios, where her uncle (Utpal Dutt), entering into a secret pact with the star, introduces Kusum to the 'reality' behind the images seen on the screen: the low-paid workers, the screen villains who are kind souls in real life, the stuntmen who substitute for the stars in fight sequences, etc. She. also discovers her friend's brother (Asrani), who had run away to Bombay to be a film star, working as an extra and struggling to stay alive. These revelations apart, the star and the uncle, in a patriarchal plot to direct the girl's desire towards the legitimate object, provide opportunities for Navin's courage and masculinity to be revealed in a dramatic form. Kusum's education, a two-pronged process of demystification of the cinematic image and a remystification of the legitimate male's image and the patriarchal system, is complete when she expresses her love for Navin of her own will.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the maker of Guddi, was one of the people involved in the implementation of the new FFC policy. He also played an important role in transferring the realist aesthetic to the commercial sector. In this context, Guddi can be read as an ingenious allegorical representation of the construction of a constituency for the realist sub-sector of the commercial cinema. The subject who is liberated from the spell of commercial cinema in the film, is also the subject who is addressed by the film. As we watch Guddi maturing into responsible middle-class womanhood, we too go through a process of maturation at the end of which we, and Guddi with us, become rational, intelligent film-goers. Through our privileged access to the machinations of the well-intentioned men who undertake to educate Guddi, we become partners in an operation to reclaim the middle-class woman from her captivity to an irrational obsession.

The film deploys images of authenticity and realism as a point of contrast to the illusions of popular cinema. Here it would be appropriate to mention the role of the press in promoting the aesthetic value of authenticity and narrative integrity. Filmfare played a pioneering role in this regard. In its pages the necessity of short, integrated, linear narratives was emphasized relentlessly. read primarily by the English-speaking middle class, the magazine served as a vehicle for the creation of a demand for a realist cinema. One of the most popular columns in the magazine was called 'readers Don't Digest', under which were printed entries from readers pointing out errors and inconsistencies in popular films. In Budtameez, a reader pointed out, the hero and heroine covered 'four miles on foot in the space of a three-minute song'. ^[31] Here the objection is to what more charitable critics have described as a non linear conception of time that is characteristic of Hindi film narratives. Another reader observed the Hindi film-maker's indifference to historical accuracy: in Baharen Phir Bhi Ayengi, the Chinese war of 1962 is shown but a character refers to the narrative present as 1965. Sociological accuracy was also demanded: 'Funny that Dharmendra becomes a News Editor and still stays in a hut. ^[32] Other readers pointed out formal inconsistencies: in Vaasna, 'Surprising that Padmini, narrating the past to her son, remembers the comedy sequences in which she didn't figure. ^[33] More commonly, failures of continuity like a character's clothes changing within the same scene were detected by the dozen. As a pedagogical tool, this column was instrumental in training the readership to anticipate a Hollywood style realism. It also provided opportunities for a kind of disdainful engagement with the popular which sustained the existing industry by making available the supplementary pleasures of readerly superiority. ^[34]

Guddi combines both these pleasures in its representational strategy. It offers a narrative suffused with iconic and situational authenticity, inviting spectator identification. At the same time it softens the critique of popular cinema through a 'disclosure' of the human world behind the illusion. The film industry emerges from the process unscathed, with the stars absolved of any blame for the fantasies the industry puts into circulation. One of the devices employed to produce a 'realist' effect in the film is that of 'not going to the cinema'. Guddi and Navin set out to go to the cinema but Navin changes plans and takes her to an archaeological site. This deflection or re-routing of the characters gives what follows a realist significance. Taking shelter from the rain in a cave at the site, Guddi offers to sing a film song but is persuaded to sing a 'classical' song instead, reinforcing the withdrawal from cinematic fantasy.^{(see clip)} At this stage in the film, Guddi's obsession with films is contrasted with Navin's complete dislike for them. In the concluding segment, at a party to celebrate her birthday, Guddi sings a film song. But this time the song, 'Aa ja re pardesi' has been wrested from the fantasy world of film and redeployed as an external aid to the resolution of a 'real' narrative (Its difference is also guaranteed by the fact that it is from a film- Madhumati- made by Bimal Roy, one of the revered precursors of the middle-class cinema.)^{(see clip)} The song, whose meaning is appropriate to the context (while Guddi is singing, Navin is absent and thus becomes the addressee of the song), serves as an illustration of the ideal attitude to adopt towards cinema. This attitude consists of a detached indulgence, a knowing and provisional surrender to its pleasures. The subject must be able to draw affective material from the cinema for the narratives of real life without being sucked into its illusory world. The middle-class cinema thus provokes a disidentification with the mainstream only to open up the possibility of a reidentification based on a compromise.

The carefully produced authenticity-effect is the source of the positive counter-popular valence that is assigned to this cinema. Its ideological function differs from that of the New Cinema in that its site of intervention is not only a 'real' in which new subject positions, allied to a shared political anxiety need to be produced; further, rather than a representation of an alternative reality in its distinction from the reality represented in the popular cinema, the middle-class cinema confronts the popular cinematic image and exposes its falsehood, its unworthiness as an object of emulation. At the same time, by means of the very cinematic devices which conceal the realities of the industry, it renders the 'real' world of the endogamous petty bourgeoisie desirable in itself. The new screen image is not a fantasy creation with no basis in reality, it is coded as the spectator's own image reflected back to him/herself. The mirror is adjusted to remove the look of surprise from its face.

In this world, endogamy-the signifier of class solidarity-has to be enforced in order to maintain that solidarity, which rests on the affirmation of patriarchal authority. Meera Bai, the bhakti poet and devotee of the god Krishna, whose example Kusum wishes to emulate, is an instance of the disruptive power of a love that transgresses the rules of endogamy: Meera was a princess who abandoned her royal family for a life of spiritual love and devotion. Woman is the displaced site of the struggle over the re-integration and re-identification of the class which hitherto shared the spectatorship of the popular cinema with the lower classes. If Kusum is not cured of her spiritual love, Navin would have to go to his new posting alone, increasing the potential for the breakdown of the network. The reconciliation between the cured Kusum and the engineer takes place in the nick of time, a few hours before his departure to his posting.

The film rescues the popular cinema from its own critique in another way too: Navin, the man who never goes to the movies, however finds a good friend in Dharmendra. The industry, as an economic enterprise, is thus represented as redeemable even as its product, the screen image, is rejected. The logic of this is not difficult to see. In the first place, the rejection is only partial: cinema as a source of discursive devices for use in the real world is approved. What is criticized is the absorption of real subjects into the screen image, the displacing, ungrounding of the spectator from his/her true being. Besides, by endorsing the industry and the entrepreneurial spirit behind it, the film is more firmly restricting its audience membership, for it does not dispute the suitability of the fantasy screen image for another kind of person, another class of people. It situates its audience on the other side of the camera as potential participants in the economy of film-making, which effectively renders the top strata of film personnel the class allies of the real world characters as well as the implied audience, thus distancing itself from those whose only access to the film world is through the image on the screen.

Basu Chatterji's Rajnigandha ('Tuberoses', 1974) also includes, at the very beginning, a scene of not going to the cinema. The scene begins with the heroine-waiting in front of a theatre. Her boyfriend arrives, but has forgotten to bring the tickets. She is disappointed but agrees to go to a restaurant.^{(see clip)}This initial turn away from the cinema, which in Guddi occurred a little way into the narrative, is even more effective in establishing the authenticity of the rest of the narrative as a representation of the real world. The story centres round Deepa (Vidya Sinha), who is writing her Ph.D. thesis and looking for a teaching position, and her boyfriend Sanjay (Amol Palekar), who is a clerk awaiting a promotion as officer. Sanjay's initial indifference to the movies is a character trait-when he does go, he eats constantly, disturbs his neighbours and goes out for a stroll whenever a song begins. His eyes are never fixed on the screen like the others' in the theatre.

Sanjay's promotion faces two hurdles--one, a rival in the office who has the advantage of being from the same region as the boss, a strain of mild social satire which provides some gentle humour. The second hurdle is Deepa herself and her conflicting desires: the impending Ph.D. which signifies her independent ambition, her job search, which threatens to take her away from Delhi (where they live), and Navin, a college boyfriend whom she has almost, but not quite, forgotten. The possible negative outcome of her transgressive desires is prefigured in a nightmare, with which the film opens. An interview call from a college in Bombay is the occasion for the surfacing of the anxieties over these potential threats to their stable life. Sanjay jokes about the imbalance that her Ph.D. will cause and the equalizing potential of his promotion. He does not object to Deepa's desire to go to Bombay for a job, and even talks of taking a transfer in order to be with her. In response to her anxieties about getting around in Bombay, Sanjay jokingly drops the name of Navin, which Deepa has forbidden. Bombay itself (as in Guddi) is a possible threat, the city of disruptive fantasies.

Arriving in Bombay alone, Deepa is met by Navin (Dinesh Thakur), who has been sent by Ira, Deepa's host and former college friend who couldn't come herself. Navin is wearing sunglasses and khadi clothes-the sole mark of continuity between his college days, when he was a student radical, and his current life as an ad film-maker with high connections. In a flashback that followed Sanjay's mention of Navin we have already seen him and Deepa as students, at the moment when they break up because of a difference of opinion over a strike. Deepa insists on breaking the strike and going to classes, which leads to an argument and Navin's words of rejection.^{(see clip)} Deepa's apolitical subjectivity is shown on one more occasion when, trying to persuade Sanjay to leave his urgent office work and meet her, she suggests, 'Why don't you start a strike?' Her indifference to the strikes that preoccupy the young Navin and the promotion hungry Sanjay is a repudiation of politics. But while Navin's radical politics is as threatening to middle-class integrity as his later ad world life-style, Sanjay's trade-unionism, restricted to economic demands, is not subjected to any critique-it is presented with humour and equanimity as an unavoidable means to upward mobility. Deepa's forgotten fascination for Navin resurfaces almost instantly. Ira tries to encourage her and Navin to rediscover their old passion. Navin, taking a keen interest in her job search, makes phone calls to fix a favourable impression prior to the interview while Deepa wonders expectantly about the significance of his interest in her welfare. Deepa faces the interview board and spends her free time going around Bombay with Navin.

On one of these outings Navin takes her to see his ad film unit in action, filming a beach scene. Watching the two models come running out of the water, Deepa fantasizes herself and Navin in the same roles. This fantasy transforms her revived emotions into a consuming desire to hear Navin speak the words of love that she is sure are on the tip of his tongue.^{(see clip)}

The recurring image of Navin with sunglasses (Deepa too begins to wear them in the course of her outings with Navin), like the images of the cinema, is irresistible. Sometimes the image is interrupted by that of Sanjay, but reasserts itself. The transgression, thus, is located in the obsessive return of a cinematic image of Navin which, like Kusum's absorption in the screen image, is a form of possession, a capture by an alien force which portends a ruinous loss for the endogamous sexual economy. Navin is not blamed (any more than the film-makers are in Guddi) for causing this obsession. On the other hand, Navin's use of his connections to fix Deepa's interview is presented with no moral overlays. At once (economically) useful and (sexually) dangerous, the figure of Navin is invested with both the fears and desires of the class.

Returning to Delhi and awaiting news of her interview results, Deepa continues to be haunted by Navin's image. Sanjay, who has meanwhile been regularly bringing a bunch of tuberoses to replace the old ones in the vase, has had to go away on duty and is absent in this period of continued fascination with the screen image. When Navin's letter arrives, it proves to be quite formal, informing her 'of her success in the interview, wishing her well, but with no hint of any other emotion. The image finally fades and at that very instant, as she is still holding the letter in her hand, Sanjay reappears at the door with a bunch of tuberoses, smiling-the image is repeated, lingered over, till it suffuses her lately evacuated being. Sanjay has got his promotion, Deepa decides (on the spot) not to take the job in Bombay.^{(see clip)}

While in Guddi the endogamous group was still represented as a natural (blood-related) one, Rajnigandha takes the logical step forward by introducing a stranger into Deepa's life - a stranger who is familiar, instantly recognizable, trustworthy. They meet one rainy day when Sanjay invites her to share his umbrella on the way to college. He quickly becomes a member of the family and endears himself to all with his wit and charm. He talks non-stop about his job, the union, his rival for promotion, the coming strike, and cannot be persuaded to act romantically. The familiar grammar of romance which everybody has learnt from the movies is foreign to Sanjay but we are assured that a more genuine love lurks behind the clerical facade, signified by the constant supply of tuberoses that he brings to Deepa. The title song, which is heard as Deepa paces her home and arranges the flowers, speaks of her longing for the man's love to flourish in her heart as the flowers do in the vase. When the song exclaims 'How enjoyable is this bondage', it speaks of the flowers uncomplainingly standing in the vase in a corner as well as the woman who stays at home.^{(see clip)}Another song, played against Deepa and Navin's wanderings in Bombay, tells of the mind's (natural) boundaries which it breaks on occasion and goes in search of 'unfamiliar desires'.^{(see clip)}

In moments of crisis, thus, the spotlight is turned on woman, locating all threats to class identity in the transgressive nature of female desire, a desire that takes its own undiscriminating route to fulfilment, threatening to establish undesirable contact with the lower classes (through the cinema) and disruptive political movements (through declassed individuals like the student radical turned ad film-maker). The polymorphous sexuality of the Bombay woman, Ira, who whispers in Deepa's ear on her departure, that she will 'miss her in bed' provides a glimpse into the future in store for Deepa if she were to abandon the security of Sanjay's love for the exhilaration of a renewed affair with Navin.^{(see clip)}

The third set of middle-class films deal with post-marital conflicts arising from a variety of factors. In Abhiman and Kora Kagaz, the couples are torn apart by envy and pride. Of these Abhiman ('Pride', Hrishikesh Mukherjee 1973) is the more significant film from our point of view because its narrative of domestic conflict is intermeshed with certain cultural questions important to the middle-class cinema's identity. Subir Kumar (Amitabh Bachchan), a popular singer, marries Uma (Jaya Bhaduri), daughter of a traditional brahmanical scholar and herself a singer in the classical style, although she only sings for her own pleasure. After marriage they decide to sing together (and only together) in public. Her popularity soars and recording companies ask her to sing solos. She resists but Subir persuades her to break their pledge and accept the offer. Subir is consumed by envy and the suspicion that she is a better singer. In an attempt to save the marriage Uma gives up her career, but as the relationship deteriorates, she goes back to her father's house. She has a miscarriage and enters into a state of deep shock. Subir, now repentant and trying to save his wife, agrees to a plan that is aimed at making her cry and break out of the state of shock. At a public gathering, Subir sings a song which he had written in happier days, expressing their longing for a child. Uma breaks down and sings with him.

The contrast between the ordinariness of popular music and the superior skills required for classical singing is deployed in Abhiman to provide the affective aura within which domestic conflict is staged. The 'light classical' song was reinvented for the middle-class cinema with Vani Jayaram's 'Bol re papihara' in Guddi. Abhiman includes some songs of this type. Unlike the popular song that Subir sings at the beginning of the film^{(see clip)}, the 'classical' song is not presented as a spectacle, with the singer dancing on stage. Popular music is meant for others' pleasure, whereas Uma's singing is not addressed to any audience. Parallel to this theme of musical traditions in conflict, the film also touches upon the question of the conflict between narrative and spectacle. Domestic harmony is broken when, in his desire to display Uma's talent to the world, Subir urges her to sing with him in public.^{(see clip)} Her singing thus acquires an addressee other than herself and the members of her family^[35] In Abhimaan the classical aura is maintained by making Jaya a reluctant public singer. The disruptive effect of her popularity is not her own fault because she did not want to sing in public.

Gulzar's Aandhi (The Storm', 1975) however, does not 'protect' its heroine in this way. Political ambition is the factor that disturbs domestic harmony in Aandhi. Arati Devi (Suchitra Sen), a popular politician, goes to a town for campaigning and stays in the only hotel there. It is owned by her husband (Sanjeev Kumar), from whom she has been estranged for many years. The husband lives in the hotel with his trusted servant. After their encounter at the hotel, a series of flashbacks cover the previous history of their relationship. Arati's father (Rehman) is a man with great political ambitions for his daughter and is impatient with her for wasting time in romantic frolic instead of pursuing a political career. For a while Arati tries to balance the two lives but ultimately decides to sacrifice family life for her political career. In the narrative present, Arati Devi's election campaign is jeopardized by gossip about her relationship with the hotel owner. At a public meeting where her rival is exploiting the gossip for political gains, she makes a confession of her true relationship with the hotel owner. After winning the election, she decides to subordinate her political career to her renewed domestic life.

Indira Gandhi may have been a possible model for the character of Arati Devi. Mainly for this reason, Aandhi was banned and then allowed to be re-released with changes. There are references within the film to Nehru and Indira Gandhi which leave us in no doubt as to the parallels being suggested. However, it is not a 'biopic' that purports to be based on Indira Gandhi's life. The protagonist emulates Indira Gandhi and brings suffering upon herself as a result. Arati feels suffocated by the dullness of domestic life and longs to return to public life. The husband contributes to her rebellion against domesticity by his authoritarian ways. In the movement towards resolution, both have to acknowledge and atone for their sins.

Arati Devi's political career serves as a narrative device to symbolize a threat to the middle-class family. Arati is an idealist in politics, and is oblivious to the shady dealings of her own supporters. She is thus represented as a pawn in the hands of male politicians, who exploit her sincerity and honesty. The cinema, the world of glamour and advertising, politics: all these have the same function, in the middle-class cinema, to signify a threat to the integrity of the family. With the change in enemies, however, there is also a change in the protected object itself. The family unit in these films is nuclear while its field of existence is the class. This is a significant step away from the narratives of pre-crisis popular cinema, in which the threat was directed at the khandan's property and honour, and where the couple's sexual and affective energies remained harnessed to the furtherance of the khandan's splendour and enjoyment. In middle class cinema the class continues to be identified with an enlarged and more diffuse traditional unit, the kinship network or the caste, but the couple emerges into relative autonomy. The sources of conflict shift from the economic and moral domains to the realm of the psychic, where envy, ambition, pride and other disruptive emotions reside. With the middle-class cinema, women's subjectivity becomes a cultural issue.

This brings us to the last sub-type of the middle-class cinema, which takes up the construction of a class space as a condition for the emergence of bourgeois subjectivity. (Anubhav, one of the films in this category, has already been discussed in Chapter 3.) Piya ka Ghar (Basu Chatterji 1972) narrates in a humorous mode a couple's trials in the city of Bombay as they search for a place to have sex. In Rajinder Singh Bedi's Dastak (1970), the housing question is combined with the thematics of conjugal intimacy in a complex narrative that foregrounds some of the central preoccupations of the middle-class cinema.

When it was first released, Dastak ('The Knock') achieved notoriety for a single shot lasting no more than a couple of seconds in which Rehana Sultan appears in the nude. This 'displacement' of audience attention, which in any case was encouraged by the publicity, points to one of the central contradictions of middle-class ideology that the film tries to deal with but itself ultimately succumbs to. Hamid and Salma, a newly married couple, find an apartment in Bombay after a long search. After moving in, they realize that the previous tenant had been a tawaif (courtesan) called Shamshad Begum. Her customers, unaware that she has moved, come and knock on the door and disturb the young couple. The panwala in front, who owns the apartment, expects to persuade or force the young woman to become a tawaif. Two youth living in an opposite apartment watch Salma as she bathes and dresses. As if all these signs of scrutiny motivated by voyeuristic interest were not enough, Hamid finds a framed photograph of a stranger lying in the house and hangs it up on the wall. (This man is later discovered to have been a client of Shamshad Begum.) The mise-en-scene functions to foreground a lack in the conjugal relationship. At first sight it appears to signify the absence of privacy, the difficulty of maintaining a zone of intimacy impervious to the prying eyes of the world. Soon we learn that there is more to it. When Hamid goes away to work, Salma is alone, and unaware that she is being watched by the men across the street, enacts her fantasies. She plays cards with an imaginary partner, smokes a cigarette and dresses up as a man.^{(see clip)}Her subjectivity is expressed in these enactments but it is only the intrusive eyes of the voyeurs (and, by extension, the spectator) that witness her self-expression. Hamid protects her from the world, and orders her to stay indoors. A caged bird which he brings home for her symbolizes her condition. When Salma tells Hamid that it is a crime to keep a bird in a cage, Hamid replies that the alternative is worse, because the bird would be devoured by animals if it were set free.^{(see clip)}

Thus for Salma, the attention of the outside world, while distasteful at one level, is also a reminder of an aspect of herself that the protocols of domestic space prohibit. Listening to a song being sung by a tawaif in the neighbourhood, Salma sings the same song to a different tune, thereby indicating that the tawaif is also a part of her being, a part that Hamid will not acknowledge. When she finishes singing, Hamid appreciates the performance for its elevating artistic qualities but does not hear the expression of desire.^{(see clip)}

The middle-class home, whose boundaries are penetrated by the voyeuristic gaze of strange men, will achieve its closure only when the woman's desire is acknowledged by the husband. The porousness of the domestic boundaries represents the failure of bourgeois subjectivity, whose closure must be achieved not by the forcible confinement of woman within the walls of the harem or behind the veil but by an inter-subjective bond. By confining her in the apartment, Hamid, like the strange men, treats Salma as essentially a sexual object. He stands between her and the would-be clients. The problem of the narrative is to constitute the bourgeois couple by achieving an adequation between the two spaces in which a woman's sexuality is distributed: the home and the brothel. On the one hand, a woman's sexuality is reduced to its reproductive function and the repression of excess is achieved by the erection of impenetrable walls. On the other, a woman is pure sexuality, her quarters open to all comers, but she is also an independent subject, capable of self-expression. This arrangement of sexual relations corresponds to a despotic political structure. The nuclear couple, disengaged from the reproductive sexual economy of the feudal home, has yet to find the erotic substance that will cement the relationship and secure it against the feudal public space. (The feudal public sphere is out of bounds for an honourable woman, which is why any woman who shows herself in this space is automatically identified as a prostitute.) The couple must produce its own habitat through a struggle for domestic space. For Hamid this battle is a repetition of the feudal one: in the new neighbourhood, he tries to erect a barrier between the world and his own domestic space. But he does not realize initially that the intrusion is not purely external. The photograph of the previous tenant's client, which he himself hangs up in the apartment, clearly indicates that the voyeurs who look in from outside are only external embodiments of a gaze that is inside, haunting the domestic space. When a group of angry men gathered outside try to force their way in and attack the couple, Hamid, in the midst of the panic, turns to Salma and asks, 'Who are you Salma?' This question marks the beginning of the process of internal scaffolding by which domestic unity will ultimately come to be secured. It is by going through the role of a tawaif that Salma returns to Hamid as a wife. The film ends with a scene in which a former client of Shamshad Begum enters and before Hamid can send him away, Salma takes up the tanpura and begins to sing. The man stops to listen to the song. Hamid resolves to kill Salma and positions himself behind her with a knife. At the end of the song, however, Salma throws the tanpura at the man and turning to Hamid, asks for his forgiveness. Hamid declares that he too had 'fallen', and vows to stay on in the house and fight to protect their home. Salma whispers in his ear that she is pregnant.^{(see clip)}

On a visit to Salma's parental home in the middle of the film, we witness a feudal family in decline. Salma's sister, whom the impoverished family is unable to marry off, soon runs away from home. The sister thus falls into the gap between feudal honour and bourgeois domesticity, a gap created by the decline of the feudal order and the fragmentariness of the new bourgeois patriarchal order. In Hamid's office, the Christian typist Maria represents another example of female subjectivity. Maria once types out a little love note and leaves it in front of Hamid. When he looks up, she does not return the look.^{(see clip)}She remains a sympathetic but silent colleague, coming to his aid but making no demands. For Hamid she represents female subjectivity, a person whose actions and words are not always reactive or response-seeking. It is precisely what he does not see in Salma that reveals itself in the form of the mysterious Maria.

Dastak deals with the middle-class Muslim family, whose difficulties are doubled by the minority status of Muslims. The film's conclusion reveals Hamid's resolve to fight for the transformation of Muslim society to produce a habitat for the middle-class family. Another option, however, is explored only to expose the compromises it necessitates: at first the realization that they are living in a red-light district makes the couple decide to move to a better place. Hamid struggles to find money to pay for an apartment under construction. When asked for his name, he hesitates and comes up with a Hindu name. The option thus translates into a fugitive existence in the midst of a Hindu middle class. However, the problem of the divided woman whose re-integration is one of the conditions of bourgeois subjectivity, is not exclusive to Muslim society but also affects Hindus, as the other films in this category demonstrate. The message of Dastak, however, is that Muslim society must be reformed from within by its educated members, instead of running in search of neutral spaces in which they can only survive by adopting a Hindu identity.

The middle-class film foregrounds the problem of bourgeois subjectivity through the exploration of the contradictions and conflicts of conjugality. Sometimes the continued hold of the parental family over the conjugal scene is the source of the conflict, as in Kora Kagaz where the wife's rich family tries to compensate for the husband's meagre salary by providing modern amenities. In all cases, however, the woman is at the centre of bourgeois narrative, the journey towards the recognition of woman's subjectivity stands as proof of the arrival of bourgeois conjugality.

For middle-class cinema as an institution, the thematics of female subjectivity and the problem of domestic space form the basis of a new aesthetic. Homologous to the problem of the domestic space and its unresolved conflicts, the middle-class segment of the industry, in its products, confronted the problem of its own cultural space. In the populist/socialist political climate, [he middle class, whose class identity was intimately tied up with an upper-caste status, was more amenable to the exclusivist aesthetic enclosure produced by the narratives of domestic conflict than the national integrationist role delineated in the narratives of martyrdom.

The structure of the narrative of Dastak can be read in this context as an allegory of the middle-class cinema's aesthetic aspirations. The gaze mobilized by the popular cinema is a national gaze which reads the woman-in-public as a 'public woman' and thus denies her subjectivity. The unity of middle-class cinema as an institution however, depended on an ability to create an audience whose gaze is responsive to the subjectivity of the protagonists, especially women. As such the task that the film-makers undertook was not a confrontation with the popular cinema but an education of their audience in a narrative form which could retain its integrity while absorbing the libidinal excess of the polymorphous popular film text. From the contracted voyeurism of the popular film text (and the brothel), the middle-class cinema turned its audience towards a 'realist' voyeurism in which sexuality occurred in the depths of screen space, as an attribute of subjectivity.

In one of the most intriguing sequences in Dastak, the two voyeurs on the balcony opposite the apartment are seen looking through the window at Salma. From where they stand, they can see her only, holding a bunch of playing cards, but her actions suggest that she has company. The two men try to look from various angles but cannot catch sight of Salma's companion. Leaving them behind with their frustrations, the camera takes the spectator into the room to disclose the truth: Salma is alone and is playing with an imaginary Hamid. She follows up the card game with more playacting; she lights up a cigarette, chokes on it and then dresses up as a man. The importance of this scene lies in its representation of the imaginary which startlingly draws our attention to the naive materialism of the spectatorial gaze in the popular cinema. As long as we persist, like the spectator of the popular film and the voyeurs on the balcony, in reading the image as a (partial) representation of objective reality, our attention is fixed, with intense curiosity, on the point outside the frame where Salma's gaze is directed. By means of a leap through the window, however, the camera rallies the spectator behind another strategy, which permits us to see that the other resides in Salma and is an expression of her subjectivity. The spectator is separated from the communal voyeurism of the men on the balcony (such voyeurism is always collective), placed inside the room and made intensely aware that he/she is alone with Salma and her fantasies. The bourgeois spectator is invented as a support for the institution of the middle-class cinema.

Dastak and Phir Bhi (1971) belonged to a sub-genre which explored sexuality and the question of bourgeois (female) subjectivity. But Dastak in particular came to be identified with the sex films, which briefly ruled the film scene in India. They were supplemented by the sex education films, another brief eruption in the early seventies, which represented cinema's taking over of certain develop mental functions, particularly the more lucrative Ones. In any case, Dastak's attempt to forge an aesthetic predicated on individualized voyeurism was negated by the reigning logic of collective voyeurism. The bourgeois cultural revolution had to be postponed yet again.

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^{[28] It is also characteristic of the standard critical explanation that Sara Akash and
the middle-class cinema that it prefigured should be defined in relation to the other
realist enterprise. In the comment cited, the authors place Sara Akash in the exalted
neighbourhood of Bhuvan Shome. The latter is said to have 'ushered in' the new
cinema, thus suggesting that it was the more important historical landmark. The very
next sentence refers to both as belonging to 'the same genre'. This ambiguity is
symptomatic of the fact that middle-class realism had a subordinate position in the
project as a whole. The same authors, in their comment on Bhuvan Shome make no
attempt to highlight its kinship with Sara Akash.}

^{[29] See Kuhn (1987) for a discussion of the significance of this distinction.}

^{[30] Some of the narrative clements of Amar Prem can he recognized in the sociology
of prostitution in nineteenth-century Calcutta. See, for instance, Sumanta Banerjee
(1993).}

^{[31] Filmfare, 5 August 1966, p. 45.}

^{[32] Both in Filmfare, 19 August 1966, p. 45.}

^{[33] Filmfare, 28 February 1969, p. 33.}

^{[34] Another feature that enhanced the pleasures of disdainful engagement was the
film review. Baburao Patel, editor of Filmindia and later Mother India, was a pioneer
in this regard but it was S.J. Banaji of Filmfare who liberated the review from the
referential relation that it bore to the film. Banaji, whose byline began to appear in
1969, developed the review into an independent prose form which quickly abandoned
the responsibility of commentary. Although the stories of the films were recounted,
the main source of enjoyment was the style, which was copied by reviewers
everywhere. When Filmfare started a column for readers' reviews, it was the Banaji
clones who won the prizes for best reviews.}

^{[35] The story of Abhiman has echoes of the real-life story of its leading actors,
Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri (as does Silsila, a later film). Jaya Bhaduri gave
up acting after her marriage to Amitabh in a realization of the moral of the story of
Abhiman.}

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8. The Developmental Aesthetic

The FFC's policy shift, as we have seen, is usually traced to 1969, when Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome was released, heralding a new aesthetic turn. But it was initiated much earlier, for it was in 1964 that Indira Gandhi, as Information and Broadcasting Minister, prompted a change in policy that was carried out by B.K. Karanjia. From 1964 until 1968, when Sen got the loan for Bhuvan Shome, though the new policy of encouraging low-budget 'art' films had benefited Satyajit Ray and a few others, it had not gathered momentum as a national aesthetic programme (Vasudev 1986: 33-4). The conditions for such a momentum emerged in the late sixties, mainly in the form of a small, politicized audience, the arrival of new directors and actors from the Film Institute, and the rise of a re-invigorated Congress socialism. In such conditions, what had until then been an isolated policy decision suddenly became the rallying point for a cultural movement, reminiscent of an earlier national cultural initiative by the left, the Indian People's Theatre Association.

The list of films made in the first few years after Bhuvan Shome demonstrates the diversity of formal and thematic concerns, techniques and political positions that were emerging at the time: Basu Chatterji's Sara Akash, Kantilal Rathod's Kanku, Shivendra Sinha's Phir Bhi, Mani Kaul's Uski Roti, Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan, Avtar Kaul's 27 Down, Basu Bhattacharya's Anubhav, Chidanand Das Gupta's Bilet Pherat, Satyadev Dubey's Shantata, Court Chalu Ahe, Pattabhi Rama Reddy's Samskara, Girish Karnad and BV Karanth's Vamsa Vriksha, Kamad's Kaadu, Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Swayamvaram, M.T. Vasudevan Nair's Nirmalyam, Mrinal Sen's Interview, Calcutta 71, Chorus. The travails of the urban middle class, questions of women's agency and sexuality, social satire, agit- prop, critiques of feudal power structures, conflicts of modernity and tradition, realism and formal experimentation: a multiplicity of directions were being explored.

Nevertheless, about five years after Bhuvan Shome, when Shyam Benegal's first film was released, it seemed to many that a 'New Cinema' had just then arrived. Aruna Vasudev, for instance, explains that before Ankur, 'new modes of perception and technique for both film-makers and audience were still hazy and barely formulated. In the context of its time, Ankur was a major step' (Vasudev 1986: 40). While Sen, Chatterji, Mani Kaul, Shahani, and others are hailed as major figures of the New Cinema, there is also a teleological perspective on the era which settles on Benegal as the moment of arrival, after a preliminary phase of experimentation. It is as if his films contained the essence of the New Cinema.

Benegal was the first major figure not financed by the FFC to be identified with this movement. His first two films were financed by Blaze Advertising, the company for which he had been making commercials. The third, Manthan, was financed by collections from the members of a milk co-operative in Gujarat. Vasudev regards the entry of private financing as 'the signs of a widening of the base of the means of production' (ibid: 40). Like many others who write on Indian cinema, Vasudev regards the New Cinema as a long-gestating, aesthetic propensity nourished by the FFC project and coming into its own with the entry of private finance. From the early 'gropings' of KA Abbas, Bimal Roy and others, the 'genesis' in Ray, to the FFC project and its adoption by private finance, what Vasudev presents is an evolutionary history culminating in the emergence of the 'good film'. The changing conditions of production are thus explained as external constraints and contexts. As such, with the expansion of the 'base of the means of production' the aesthetic undergoes maturation and expands its sphere of influence but remains essentially the same.

I am less interested in disputing the claim made on behalf of Ankur than in investigating the reasons for the success of this aesthetic re-formulation in redrawing the map of the New Cinema movement so as to place itself at the centre. It is equally important to return to the texts of other film-makers and track the exploration of other significant aesthetic choices which may have had limited popular success but which demonstrate that the triumph of the 'realist' aesthetic was not a foregone conclusion. My concern here, however, is less with an alternative Indian film history and more with the investigation of the cultural politics of the cinema and the dominant ideological tendencies.

Apart from the entry of private finance, the availability of exhibition time in the foreign film theatres was an important institutional factor in the growth of the New Cinema. The industry, faced with scarcity and high cost of theatre rentals, had for some time been demanding that the foreign film theatres should be made to reserve part of their exhibition time for Indian films. The FFC programme increased the pressure for such reservation. In 1971, when the five-year contract for import of Hollywood films came up for reconsideration, the government decided not to renew it. This decision resulted in part from the United States' aggressive posturing on behalf of Pakistan during the recently-ended Bangladesh war. The decision was also justified by making a case for more imports from other film producing countries and breaking the monopoly of Hollywood. This did happen to some extent. It was as a result of this policy that Indian audiences got to see films from France, Germany, Japan, Poland and other countries in commercial theatres. However, since these imports were canalized through a government body, exhibition time was not monopolized by foreign distributors and remained available for the local product. But exhibition space is not value-neutral. Only a certain kind of Indian cinema could be exhibited in theatres which were associated in the public mind with the aesthetic modes of Hollywood.

Benegal forged a distinct aesthetic with elements drawn from various sources to fill this gap. While the realist tendency represented by Ray was important to the formulation of the Benegal aesthetic, the more proximate sources were the realist films made under the FFC aegis, in particular the energetic regional cinemas of Karnataka and Kerala. Ray's had been a humanist realism, akin to the 'documentary humanism' of the photographer Cartier-Bresson and perhaps to the cinema of Jean Renoir. Ray's Apu trilogy had already inaugurated the project of representing the nation, and charting the emergence of India. However, his work retained an aura of individual artistic achievement. This is why critics referred to the FFC project rather than to the work of Ray as the beginning of the New Cinema movement in India. Under the FFC aegis, realism became a national political project. Bhuvan Shome represents this dimension of the project. It was a realism devoted to the mapping of the land, producing the nation for the state, capturing the substance of the state's boundaries.

The State and the Nation

The basic structure of this realist mode of representation can be traced to Bhuvan Shome, a fact which is somewhat obscured by its comic narrative. Shome, a stern and unbending bureaucrat, goes on a holiday to the western state of Gujarat after ordering the dismissal of a ticket collector accused of taking a bribe. In the course of this holiday he is transformed into a more caring, slightly insane, human being who sheds his stiff demeanour and even reinstates the ticket collector. The main agent of this transformation is a charming rustic woman who, it turns out, is the wife of the ticket collector. She breaks through his tough exterior and humanizes him with her innocence and exuberance. The visual dimension of the transformation is the shaking up and softening of the bureaucrat's body through subjection to a series of unfamiliar movements. Utpal Dutt's brilliant acting is thus of vital importance to the effects of the film. (Sen has acknowledged Jacques Tati as an inspiration.) The buffalo chase is one of the highlights of the film, where the comedy derives from the contrast between the bureaucrat's customary stiffness and the transforming power of fear, helplessness and speed. ^{(see clip)}

Sen has said that the details of the narrative were made up on the spot, and has even attributed some of the episodes to Utpal Dutt's imagination. The basic structure, however, consists of a relation between centre and margin, state and nation. Quite literally, here the bureaucrat encounters the nation in a remote corner of the state and is humanized by the experience. Set in the late forties, this basic structure can be described as a national allegory, enacting the realization of independence through a transformation of the relations between state and nation. It is the narrative of a bureaucracy, previously serving the colonial project of domination, which must now establish a more intimate relation with the world over which it rules. It is the allegory of transition from colonial domination to independence, in which the object of transformation appears to be the bureaucracy, which represents the continuity between the colonial state and the independent one. This link with the past, which condemns it to a position of external domination, is broken by an immersion in the awkwardnesses of Indian everyday life. The film thus enacts the submission of the inherited and overarching power of the state to a reworking that must go through the people. While developing the basic structure of the realist mode, Sen's politically radical move was to suggest that the consolidation of the nation-state's democratic structure could only come through a subjection of the metalanguage of the state to a process of 'corruption' by the languages of the indigenous population. The body's conventional, 'standardized' language is corrupted by the strange 'dialects' that it has never before spoken-running, twitching, jumping, etc. Bhuvan Shome erects the realist edifice only to subvert it through a narrative that critically comments upon the politics of realism. The celebration of the 'simple, charming and authentic' story by commentators misses the complexity of Sen's political vision. If the bureaucrat's body represents the metalanguage of realism, Sen's narrative undermines its position of eminence in relation to the 'object language' of the nation's regional extremities and makes it go through a reconstruction from below. The congealed definition of corruption in the language of the bureaucracy is subjected to change. It is not a question here of 'condoning' corruption but of making visible the gap between the language of the state and the realities of everyday life, the contradictions arising from the formulation of legal codes without the participation of the people in the process. A film made under the aegis of an institution selving the project of passive revolution, Bhuvan Shome inverts the relations between state and nation assumed in that project and submits the state to a transformative process.

The result of this process of subversion of the realist hierarchy of discourses is a conclusion in which the bureaucrat's craziness is matched by an editing pattern that Sen himself described as 'all erratic and illogical' (Sen 1977: 40), disrupting the realist conventions and leaving the spectator with a sense of a world devoid of rationality. Sen's own commentary on the film seems to suggest his embarassment at how it concludes, as it dwells too much on the 'mad kick' of the final sequence and detracts from its critical force by tracing it to his own and Utpal Dutt's 'private experiences'. Perhaps Sen is putting in an 'insanity plea' to escape charges of abetting corruption' The corruption episode, however, is a critical challenge to those who regard a top-down enforcement of the constitution as the way to achieve a socialist democracy.

The subsequent development of the realist aesthetic retained the basic structure of the relation between state and nation but discarded the subversive commentary on it that distinguished Bhuvan Shome. The regional cinemas of Kerala and Karnataka further elaborated the realist mode. M.T. Vasudevan Nair's Nirmalyam and Karnad's Kaadu (both 1973) are the best examples of this tendency. A village temple is the site of the conflict in Nirmalyam, offering opportunities for spectacle such as the temple festival and the oracle's final frenzied dance and public suicide. With the erosion of the feudal system which sustained the temple, the villagers including the oracle's family adapt to the changing situation while the oracle makes a defiant exit, rejecting both the new order, as well as the one which betrayed him. The fascination of the feudal order in decline was also the source of the power of Kaadu. The climax of this film also features a village festival at which the tensions between two neighbouring villages explode in a violent finale. The feudal landlord, played by Amrish Puri, exudes a power that cast a spell on urban audiences and led to a series of similar roles for Puri. The landlord's wife tries to win her husband back from a lover in the neighbouring village by recourse to black magic while the entire narrative is anchored in the innocent curiosity of the young son, who acts as a surrogate intra-textual point of relay for the urban spectator's voyeuristic pleasure in the contemplation of the 'distant' feudal order.

In dealing with such feudal narratives it is tempting to regard the use of a figure of relay, like the child in Kaadu, as a device to bring a distant and strange world closer to the audience. However, the realist project of representing feudalism in a society like India does not face the problem of a gap that must be bridged as much as a proximity which requires to be negated by a process of distancing. This gives to the mediating figures a wholly different function. The feudal world is not already distant, and needs to be made distant by the narrative. The familiarity of the feudal world and its proximity to the everyday world of the urban audience is a mark of the composite nature of the postcolonial society. The consolidation of the nation state thus requires the production of a distance and a hierarchy, not the bridging of an already existing gap. True, there is an already existing hierarchy, but it is the continuing power of this existing order that must be counteracted by the establishment of a new hierarchy in which the old order is distanced in its entirety, as a world. This process of institution of a new hierarchy based in the pre-eminence of the modern state is a continuation of the process by which, during British colonial rule, a clarification of the existing social order resulted in the production of a new patriarchal order as the point of departure for Indian nationalism. In pre-British India the social order was a horizontal web in which patriarchally organized communities existed side by side with matrilineal ones, as well as other patriarchal orders conflicting with each other. British rule, through the identification of Brahminical Hinduism and Islam as the two patriarchal orders with nation-wide validity, inaugurated a process of the construction of that validity. This internal distancing effect was crucial to the emergence of a national movement.

A similar strategy of internal distancing is at work in the realist aesthetic of these representations of feudalism. Thus, the child who relays the spectatorial gaze in Kaadu serves two functions: 0) the more obvious function of serving as a diegetic motivation for the voyeuristic gaze, a rationalization of the spectator's vantage; (2) the production of a distance, a virtual, pan-textual depth-effect which is different from the cumulative effect of the employment of depth of field in the representation of profilmic space. The effectivity of this distancing strategy is not to be gauged by the nature of the images deriving from it but by the spectatorial position that is produced as a consequence. This position is the manifestation within the field of cinema of the citizen/state as a medium of cultural intelligibility.

The use of sexuality as a site of exploration of the fascinations of feudal power is another recurring feature of the realist aesthetic that is prefigured in Kaadu. The tension arising from the conflict between the two Villages is heightened by the sense of danger and adventure involved in the narrative detail of the feudal lord's mistress being a resident of the other Village. The boy's curiosity about sex and the wife's frustrations add to the centrality of the sexual thematics to the feudal narrative. The film encodes the sexual scenes with suggestions of savagery, primal physicality, innocence and erotic wilfulness. right up to Govind Nihalani's Aakrosh (1980), the power and fascination of the feudal world was linked in realist cinema with images of the untamed sexuality of feudal lords, their mistresses and peasants.

Although the regional cinema's strategies of distanciation produced a realist spectatorial position coinciding with that of the state, its regional-ness was still a hindrance to its national effectivity. This is why the realist cinema of the regions, which arose at the same time as its Hindi counterpart, is still relegated to a subordinate role in the histories of the New Cinema. These films belonged to specific regional and linguistic formations whose cultural difference conflicted with their ability to communicate the distancing effect outside the regions where they were produced. In a multi-lingual state, this distancing effect needed a supplementary articulation that would provide the aesthetic with a national ground for its operation, otherwise there was a risk that the citizen-function, wrested from the undifferentiated social by a process of hierarchization, would be re-absorbed into a regional cultural formation. In India, regionalism is still associated with feudalism. The citizen-function could only achieve stability (and function as the distinguishing mark of an aesthetic) if it could be inscribed in a more tangibly hierarchical discursive order. The regional cinema's realist efforts, in other words, could not sustain the metalanguage of realism because their languages were themselves region-specific. The solution was to deploy Hindi as the metalanguage in relation to which the regions, their languages and cultures would automatically fall into place as the objective substance.

Benegal's central importance to the realist programme derives from his successful construction of just this classic realist hierarchy. A minor event in the career of the Benegal aesthetic helps explain the nature of the discursive hierarchy and its significance. Soon after the release of Ankur, Screen published a letter from Aziz Qaisi of Hyderabad, who complained that his contribution to the film had not been properly acknowledged in the credits. He claimed that although he had written the dialogue for the film, Satyadev Dubey had been given credit for it, and his own name had appeared in a subordinate function. (Qaisi is credited with 'dialect' and his name is placed below that of Dubey, in smaller type.) In his reply, Benegal explained that Dubey had written both the script and the dialogue for the film. But since the film was set in rural Andhra Pradesh, it was decided to use the Dakhani Urdu spoken in that region in order to heighten the realism. Qaisi had been commissioned to 'translate' the dialogue written by Dubey into this regional dialect. As such it was proper to give primary credit to Dubey and not to the letter writer. ^[36]

We need not concern ourselves with the justness of this rationale. What interests us is the conception of the relations between metalanguage and object language that lies at the heart of the formulation. For Benegal, the regional specificity achieved through the use of a 'dialect' amounted to the enrichment of an already complete text. Qaisi's complaint is based on the perception that the specificity of the film text derives from its regional setting and therefore cannot be detached from its use of the regional language. But for the 'central producer', the abstract text of the realist narrative can be potentially filled by any regional content. Its meaning, for the national spectator, is not 'Andhra' or 'Dakhani'. The regional element is there simply to signify 'regional' as a means of establishing the centre-margin relation as a frame of cultural intelligibility. If the authentic representation of the regional were at issue, Ankur would be a bad example of it. The fact that the characters speak Dakhani makes the spectacle authentic only from the point of view of the subject who speaks a standardized Hindi/Hindustani. In reality, the people of Andhra speak both Dakhani and Telugu and most of the characters in Ankur and Nishant could be expected to speak Telugu 'in real life'. Since 'region' in general (paradoxical as that may seem) and not 'Andhra' in particular is the real signified of the representation, this relation reminds us once again that the most important product of this representational strategy is the viewer, not the viewed. By inventing 'regionality' as a grid of intelligibility, the new cinema was able to forge a new aesthetic of statist realism.

Benegal's first three films do not deploy the realist mode of representation in the same way. It is therefore necessary to examine each of them in some detail to trace both the unique achievements of each one and to assess their cumulative cultural significance. Or. the latter question it can be said at the outset, in the form of a hypothesis, that the movement through the three films in question is a movement towards the consolidation of a developmental aesthetic allied to the contemporaneous stage of the passive revolution.

Spectacles of rebellion

In Ankur and Nishant, the narratives of feudalism are set in the past, that too in a past doubly distanced from the present by the rupture of independence. The pastness of feudalism is a necessary protocol of realist representation. realism, as argued earlier, is a mode of cultural production that is tied to the fiction of the social contract. The legal citizen-subject of the modern capitalist state is its only possible addressee. In the post-colonial Indian state, the proclamation of the social contract in 1950 did not put an end to the feudal order. In the early seventies, the audience for the New Cinema's narratives of feudalism were well aware that the immediate provocation for this aesthetic venture was the post-independence peasant struggles against feudalism, especially the rise of Naxalism. But to admit the contemporaneity of feudalism would be to place the citizen-subject addressee of realism at the hypothetical end-point of a still ongoing revolution, to admit, in other words, that the nation-state is not yet governed by contract Thus the pastness of feudalism is a representational protocol which retroactively 'proves' the post-feudal, contractual nature of the present. No other purpose is served, for instance, by setting the narrative of Nishant in '1945', and 'in a feudal state'. The narrative itself contains little by way of historical detail which substantiates and justifies the precise dating, The date is simply a device of distanciation that enables the spectator to gain access to the fascination and power of the spectacle of feudal oppression and rebellion without being reminded of its proximity in time and space, without undermining the realist spectatorial position.

Ankur (1974) tells the story of an absentee zamindar's son Surya (Anant Nag), who having failed his examinations, is despatched to the village to look after the land. In a hut close to the zamindar's house lives a woman Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi), who is employed in the house as a servant with her mute husband Kishtayya (Sadhu Meher), who drives a cart and does other odd jobs for the master. Accused of theft and shamed before the community by the zamindar's son the husband runs away, Surya seduces Lakshmi and she begins to live in the house as his mistress, After some time, the young zamindar's wife, who had remained in her parents' home, comes to join him in the village, putting an end to the relationship with Lakshmi. The father arrives and restores water rights to' his mistress's family which the son had taken away. Kishtayya also returns one night and is pleased to see his wife pregnant. The next morning, telling Lakshmi that he will go and ask the zamindar for work, Kishtayya sets out with a stick in hand. Striding purposefully, he walks along the ridges of the paddy field, with his arms stretched across the stick resting on his shoulders. The young zamindar, watching him approach, grows anxious, suspecting that the man is coming to confront him. As his fear mounts, he runs into the house and comes back with a stick and when the smiling man approaches, starts beating him. People gather, Kishtayya takes the blows without retaliating and Lakshmi comes running to save her husband. She curses the young zamindar, who goes back into the house and shuts the door. A young boy, who had witnessed the beating, stands staring at the house. The film ends as he picks up a stone and throws it at the house.

Ankur's ending generally evoked positive responses. It was seen as a powerful moment which captured in miniscule the awakened consciousness of the innocent oppressed peasant. The years had not dulled the pain nor blunted the power of Ankur's climax', remarked the critic Maithili Rao in 1991, 17 years after its release. While this was the general opinion, Satyajit Ray, in his comments on the film soon after its release, raised the question of the credibility of the conclusion from a realist point of view. 'The whole denouement has the air of being conceived as a forced rounding-off of a story whose normal course would have led to an impasse' (Ray 1992: 103). Ray's reading betrays his unfamiliarity with the context in which Benegal's film was made. Missing the strong evocation of 'feudalism' in the film, he regards the hero as 'a rather trite symbol of urban pollution invading the pure air of the country' (ibid: 102-3) ^[37]

As a film promoted and received as an example of 'political cinema', the abrupt ending of Ankur was more important to the effectivity of the text than a conclusion deriving from the 'natural' propensities of the narrative. Indeed, it can be said that it is the narrative preceding the denouement that had to be contrived as a way of leading up to the climax. The motivation for the ending derives from the representational dynamics of the preceding narrative and the extra-textual 'demand' for the spectacle of peasant revolt that the film promised to satisfy. ^[38] There was no question, then, of not including in the text a glimpse of the violence of feudal oppression and revolt. The question was how to prepare the ground for it, how to frame it in such a way as to contain its potential for challenging the citizen-figure's own position. It was not a question of building a naturalist case for the spectacle but of erecting a structure within which rebellion could be produced as spectacle. The possibilities of manipulation lay not in the details of the narrative but the dynamic in which the spectator was engaged with the figures of the represented.

Upto the point when the denouement begins to unfold, the text functions through the deployment of two structures of relay, one intellectual, the other libidinal. The three figures who form the three points of these paths of relay are the spectator, the urbanized zamindar and the object world of the feudal social order, represented by the figure of the servant woman. Their positions in the two relational paths can be represented as follows:

1. The intellectual relay:
Spectator -----❭ Zamindar ❬---------------❭ Servant woman.

2. The libidinal relay: Zamindar -----❭ Spectator ❬--------------❭ Servant woman.

The first path belongs to the ethnographic dimension of the representation. The spectator's relation to the represented image here is one of curiosity about the inner workings of feudal society, the desire to gain knowledge about the 'unfamiliar' world of the feudal other. In realizing this wish, the zamindar's son functions as an intermediary. By having been a town-dweller, himself not very familiar with the village, he goes through a process of learning that makes him an unwitting 'native informant'. At the same time, he is not urbanized enough to consciously adopt an ethnographic approach to the field which would place him more in our space than in the space of the represented. It is important for him to be an unwitting point of relay of our desire for knowledge. In one of the scenes at the beginning, when we are still in the process of being led around the place to familiarize ourselves with it, the zamindar's son asks the servant woman if she has ever seen a film. She says yes and names the Telugu film Balanagamma. This popular film from the early forties helps to date the narrative or to indicate the distance between the film-literate spectator and Lakshmi. But the scene is also meant to enact the intermediary role of the zamindar's son. He has no particular use for the bit of information which he has extracted but we do. ^{(see clip)}The zamindar's relay function must be 'unsolicited' because otherwise he would be the conscious agent of our investigation. Our detachment from him, on the other hand, assures us a position of non-complicity with the feudal power and the objectivity of the knowledge produced, while sustaining our sympathy with the oppressed peasant as the overt justification of the exercise.

In the shadow of the intellectual relay structure, which provides one logic of representation, and as a supplement to it, there functions another, the libidinal relay structure. Here the spectator becomes the 'unwitting'-though not unwilling-point of relay for the zamindar's gaze directed towards the servant woman as well as her desire for him. The material evidence for this lies both in the. narrative ordering, as well as in a recurring shot composition in which the three points are arranged in such a way as to force the look to be relayed through the spectator. On the narrative plane, the spectator is first afforded a brief glimpse of Lakshmi, before cutting to Surya in the city. Lakshmi is praying for a child. ^{(see clip)}Throughout the film, occasional glimpses of Lakshmi as she ponders her situation enable a veiled relation between the two points. In these moments of solitude, Lakshmi discloses her own desire, revealing to us an intention that Surya is not aware of. Visually, there is a supplementary strategy of shot composition which places the spectator at the node of a periscopic conveyance of the gaze. Thus, in one of the scenes which develop their love relation, Lakshmi is in the foreground, facing camera, while Surya is sitting up in bed in the background, and looking through the open doors into the room where Lakshmi is standing. As she is positioned to one side of the door, he cannot see her directly. His gaze is directed straight at the camera but is coded as directed at her. Her look is directed downwards and to the left, crossing the open door and settling on a point to screen right but outside the frame. Her look is thus directed out of the relay structure, although it is also coded as inclining towards the zamindar, since they are engaged in conversation.^{(see clip)} The distribution of figures and spaces thus compels the spectator to function as the point of relay, as the empty conduit in a circuit, whose points of emanation and arrival are elsewhere. The mediated depth produced by the intellectual relay is here negated by the spectator's direct access to the other as sexual object by virtue of the unwitting function of relay. Another scene, when Surya encounters Lakshmi near the well in the backyard, shows the same relational structure in lateral inversion. The same positions of the two figures in the frame are maintained, woman in foreground and man in the background. The look and its object similarly cannot meet without mediation, although they are 'intended' for each other. In the process of serving as the point of relay, the spectator is afforded a direct access to the image of the woman.

Thus, during the film's middle segment in which the love relation between the two unfolds, an intimacy between the spectator and the woman is established by means of the libidinal relay structure. The middle section constitutes an interregnum, a restful pause in the linear narrative during which the libidinal theme unfolds. During this segment the spectator is drawn into an intimate complicity in the unfolding of the sexual relation between the zamindar and the servant woman.

After the erotics of feudalism, however, the spectator must confront the reality of the exploitative relation in which he/she has been seduced into participating. How is the spectator to extricate him/herself from this complicity so as to be able to identify with the oppressed? It is here that the dramatic climax of the film comes to the spectator's rescue. The film has enacted a voyeurism that captures the rural/primordial in its field. The breaking of the voyeuristic nexus, however, is so engineered as to spare the spectator and enable a last minute switch of loyalties. The spectator knows that the voyeuristic interregnum will have to come to an end but he/she does not anticipate the intensely pleasurable way in which this parting of ways with the zamindar will be staged. Our ability to switch loyalties at this point depends on a supplement of knowledge. This is provided by two scenes: in the first, Kishtayya, finding Lakshmi pregnant, is happy and takes her to the temple, demonstrating that he has no suspicions on that score^{(see clip)}; in the second, he indicates to his wife his intention of going to the zamindar to ask for work. Armed with this knowledge, we recognize that his aggressive stride as he walks towards the house is simply an expression of his innocent and energetic rural persona. The zamindar does not.^{(see clip)} This difference in knowledge for the first time liberates us from the compact in which we were bound to the zamindar and places us in a position of objective arbitration, as well as identification with the peasant.. Had we not been in possession of this additional knowledge, our speculations about the approaching Kishtayya's intentions might have been closer to those of the zamindar, thus traumatically foregrounding our complicity and undermining our assumed position of objectivity. However, erotic exploitation, in which the spectator is complicit, goes 'unpunished'. Instead, we witness the zamindar's beating of Kishtayya with a consciousness of its wrongness. When the little boy throws a stone at the house at the end, we are grateful for it, we are able to stand with him because we know that the stone is not directed at the sexual exploitation in which we were complicit. Had the stone been motivated by a different revenge, we might have been at the receiving end of it.^{(see clip)}

The 'power' of Ankur's climax, which has provoked so much comment, thus derives from the sense of relief and pleasant surprise that we feel when we are rescued from the menage-a-trois and placed on the side of the oppressed for the brief space of a stone throwing incident. responding to the 'demand' for a political cinema, Ankur provides the pleasures of voyeuristic contemplation of the feudal world as well as the opportunity to vicariously participate in the peasants' moment of awakening, without ever calling into question the spectator's own position.

Muteness and innocence are the primary attributes of the oppressed in this school of New Cinema. In Ankur, Kishtayya is literally mute. In Nishant (1975), Benegal's second film, the peasants suffer the landlord's injustices silently until they are awakened by two leaders. In Ankur, peasant rebellion was represented symbolically in the form of a child's act of protest. In Nishant, a full-scale peasant uprising, a spectacle of violence, explodes on the screen. While some of the representational strategies from Ankur are carried over, Nishant approaches a more explicit and direct representation of feudal violence and retaliation. Of the three films, Nishant is the least reassuring because in it the possibilities of a framed and distanced presentation of the spectacle of peasant violence are strained to the point of rupture. It is not surprising that Nishant was the least successful of the three films. All its representational strategies could not effectively contain the force of the spectacle of peasant violence. The struggle for narrative control over spectacle is clearly lost at the end. By its evocation of anarchy, the film hinted that the position of the sympathetic consumer that the spectator was able to occupy in Ankur was in fact not available, that peasant unrest was capable of breaking through the barriers erected by the leadership as well as the representational grids put in place by artists, and gathering a momentum all its own.

Nishant tells the story of a village ruled over by a family of brothers who exploit the villagers economically and sexually. The unmarried head of the family is Anna (it is only the Telugu word for 'brother' but this is how he is addressed) who rules over the village and his manor with a brutal hand. Of his three younger brothers, the first two (Anant Nag and Mohan Agashe) are brutal womanizers. The wife of one escaped to her parents' home and never returned while the other committed suicide. The youngest is the timid Viswam (Naseeruddin Shah) who disapproves of his brothers' activities but does not heed his wife's (Smita Patil) advice to stay away from them.

The film begins with the priest discovering early one morning that the temple jewels have Leen stolen. In the pit where the jewels were kept the priest finds a locket. With a close-up of Viswam's worried face, we enter the feudal manor and we learn, through the conversation between him and his wife as well as a later scene, that the brothers had stolen the jewels. Meanwhile Shamsuddin (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), the policeman stationed in the Village, arrives to document the theft and the homeless man who was seen sleeping on the temple steps in the beginning is jokingly accused by another villager of having stolen the jewels. An oracle, dancing and singing, identifies the thief as a man of strength, unmarried and a drunkard. The homeless man, fearing that suspicion will fall on him, begins to retreat from the crowd and is caught and accused of the crime. Anna beats him with a stick and he is taken away by the police. Anna talks to the priest about renovating the temple and replacing the jewels and 'persuades' the priest to return Viswam's locket.

The new schoolmaster (Girish Karnad), his wife Susheela (Shabana Azmi) and their young son arrive in a horse-cart and take up residence in the small house allotted to them in the school compound. Their domestic life is settled and happy except for Susheela's longing for a big mirror which hints at a disruptive narcissism. Curious and free-spirited, she attracts the attention of Viswam who stares at her with a mysterious fascination. Catching him looking, one of the older brothers discovers his desire and together they kidnap Susheela and take her home. She is raped by the brothers and confined to a room in the house. The schoolmaster, having failed to mobilize the villagers behind him (although they had witnessed the kidnapping), bangs on the door of the manor but to no avail. The next day, he tries in vain to get the police, a lawyer and the district collector to help him fight the injustice. Meanwhile, Susheela becomes a part of the feudal household, living there as a mistress and attended by Pochamma, the maid. The schoolmaster, driven to extremes of despair and frustration, leaves his job and sits in the temple. Susheela, meanwhile, becomes more and more entrenched in the feudal household.

Meeting her husband at the temple one day, Susheela accuses him of lacking the manliness to confront the oppressor and liberate her from his clutches. resolving to fight, the schoolmaster, with the assistance of the priest, begins to campaign among the villagers, urging them to rise up against the oppression. The mobilization of the villagers begins at a buffalo fight where the villagers are gathered and continues through a series of meetings and a final gathering for a street play based on the Ramayana, where the priest reminds the villagers that suffering oppression silently is as sinful as oppression itself. On the day of final confrontation, the residents of the feudal manor awake to find that none of the servants have come to work. As they cope with the situation, distant sounds announce the beginning of the temple procession. The procession stops before ghe manor and the eldest brother goes to the temple car to make his offerings. The schoolmaster makes the first move, and soon the landlord is beaten to death. The peasants enter the manor and a battle ensues. Meanwhile, Viswam grabs Susheela and leaving his wife Rukmini behind, escapes from the house to the hills. After killing the rest of the family, the peasants run towards the hills to capture the runaway couple, with the wounded schoolmaster running behind them. Entering the manor, a little boy surveys the devastation. He comes upon the priest, sitting on the floor, paralysed by the violent spectacle he has witnessed. As the boy runs away, the priest rises and covers the body of the dead Rukmini with his shawl. Outside, the boy is still running and in the last shot the rest of the children are seen huddled together in the safety of the temple.

Nishant offers the spectator a considerably less secure position of contemplation than Ankur. Vijay Tendulkar's script includes many brutal scenes of feudal violence and the fascinating power of the big brother is counteracted by the obscene, thoughtless viciousness of the brothers Anjaiah and Prasad. In the scene where these two brothers tell a poor peasant to send his wife to them at night, the camera shifts to a perspective from behind the woman, seeming for a disturbing moment to share in her mute suffering, unsettling the voyeuristic economy of feudalism-as-spectacle.^{(see clip)} There and later in the feudal manor, her mute submission is emphasized as the brothers refer to her and other women as cows. But at the same time the film is unable to ground the rebellion in the peasants' understanding of their condition. It is only through the intervention of a man motivated by his own need for revenge that they are mobilized for a battle with the oppressor.

Like the young zamindar in Ankur, the schoolmaster is an intermediary who is neither organically a part of the represented world not completely alienated from it. As a studious and responsible schoolmaster who comes from the town on a transfer, he brings values which are alien to the feudal order that reigns in the Village. But at the same time he is not a conscious modernizer, and is himself mindful of feudal compulsions. His teaching is traditional and he expects his wife to stay indoors and away from the eyes of strangers. More importantly, we are not dependent on him as a point of intellectual relay because he arrives after we have been introduced to the village and its power relations. His function is to bring to the village a catalytic element which upsets the equilibrium of oppression and suffering. He is also an individual sufferer, who enables a narrative movement that the collective nature of peasant struggle cannot provide. The peasants have the experience of suffering but not a consciousness of it.

The film presents us with an image of feudalism in which the landlord stands all alone on one side while everyone else is ranged against him, except the policeman who vacillates between the two positions. The opening scene centred around the temple theft enables this demarcation. As the poor man is falsely accused and beaten up, the two figures who wield an independent authority in the village (deriving from the state and god) both submit to the might of the landlord. ^{(see clip)}The priest meekly hands over the incriminating locket when the landlord asks for it.^{(see clip)} The policeman is more actively servile.

The schoolmaster observes the arrogant behaviour of the landlord's brothers but stays out of trouble. It is his wife Susheela's transgressions that generate the new conflict which culminates in the peasant uprising. Here the realist narrative is overlaid with an epic structure that enables the transformation of feudalism into spectacle. Her repeated demands for a big mirror and new clothes indicate a narcissistic preoccupation with looks. Soon after their arrival in the village, the schoolmaster stops to talk to the two brothers who have parked their car outside the school and are chatting with the policeman about filling up a pit in front of the school. Seeing his wife looking out at them through the window, he gestures to her surreptitiously to withdraw. She fails to understand. Back in the house, he rebukes her for not behaving as befits a schoolmaster's wife.^{(see clip)} A little later Susheela comes out of the house dressed carelessly and walks unselfconsciously to a shop where she is seen by Viswam who stares at her.^{(see clip)} A third scene follows in which her unwitting seduction of Viswam is carried a step further. Passing by a high wall behind which a peasant who did not pay his dues to the landlord is being evicted, she stops and peers over the wall at the scene. Viswam, who is standing there, stares at her again and is caught doing so by Prasad. That night, teasing him for keeping his desire a secret, they offer to bring her home for him. As the schoolmaster's family sit down to supper, there is a knock on the door and Susheela, who answers, is taken away.^{(see clip)}

The realist representation is thus channeled into an epic narrative. From the point when the schoolmaster's family arrives in the village, the film's narrative unfolds roughly along the lines of a part of the Ramayana. Beginning with the transfer to the remote village which Susheela resents and which parallels Rama's banishment to the forest, her abduction, like Sita's, results from a transgressive desire. Her confinement in the feudal manor, the mobilization of the peasant army and the assault on the manor to rescue her complete the parallels with the epic. This combination of a realist representation of a feudal structure and an epic narrative of one man's battle with the forces of evil gives rise to contradictions that the text is unable to deal with. The problem of the narrativization of feudal oppression is primarily a problem of the identification of the agencies of struggle and resistance. The statist realism of the Benegal aesthetic does not allow for the elaboration of the complex processes through which movements of resistance are organized by the peasants, nor can it explicitly represent a modern political force entering the peasant world and organizing them on the basis of a programme of resistance and opposition. Instead, it increases the temporal distance (the action is supposed to take place in 1945) by a few thousand years and inscribes peasant revolt in the timeless overarching epic narrative of conflict between elite groups.

As a result when the priest and the schoolmaster begin to mobilize the peasants, we only hear a few sentences about the need to fight oppression. The rest is elided as images of meetings with peasants are accompanied by loud music which drowns out the content of the conversations.^{(see clip)} In order to remain faithful to its contemporary project of depicting feudalism, the film must indicate that the peasants were mobilized on the basis of a manifesto. But this manifesto cannot be made explicit because the mobilization of peasants as an obedient army would be disrupted by it. Tellingly, in one of the few lines spoken in this sequence, a peasant declares that they would do exactly as the schoolmaster and the priest tell them to.^{(see clip)}

But, in the contradictory space determined by the conflicting co- presence of two aesthetic projects, the epic narrative cannot outrun the realist one without betraying itself. The epic's triumph is always the epic hero's triumph, the restoration of the epic couple. Nishant cannot afford to move towards such a denouement because it would negate the realist analysis at work in the understanding of feudal society. The spectacle of peasant violence would have to be subordinated to the restoration of some transcendent order. Abandoning the epic parallel before the utopian moment, Nishant suddenly turns around and leaves us with the vision of a terrible, uncontrollable, anarchic explosion of mass anger in the midst of which only the temple seems safe. Both the leaders of the rebellion are left behind in the avalanche of peasant revenge, the priest reduced to complete inertia, the schoolmaster running behind the crowd as they climb up the hill and begin assaulting Viswam and Susheela who are hiding behind a rock. After the epic interregnum, we have a traumatic return of the real, the spectacle of violence we are waiting for, but without the guarantees of a stable position from which to contemplate it. The scared faces of the children as they sit inside the temple, which is aglow with a warm light, may well reflect the position of the spectator, caught up in a whirlwind of destruction and deprived of all secular support.^{(see clip)}

While the rebellion must be provoked by the priest and the schoolmaster as an act of conscience, it cannot be controlled by them unless their leadership was based on a programme. In the absence of a critical realist approach to feudalism, rebellion can only be represented in voluntaristic terms as the result of an incitement. Once the rebellion transgresses the boundaries set by the leadership, it comes to be equated with feudal lawlessness.

In the end the tension between narrative and spectacle is resolved in favour of the latter. rebellion can be staged as spectacle only in the absence of mediation, that is, in the absence of a purposive, goal-oriented programme. Nishant demonstrated that the game of observing the feudal spectacle from a distance was fraught with risks. Taken to its extremes, the spectacle of rebellion reminded the spectator that its consequence was an anarchy that would undermine his/her own position of objective contemplation. By representing the peasant in revolt as a figure of complete anarchy, it raised the question of leadership. The image of the schoolmaster running behind the crowd demonstrated the trauma of the loss of leadership. For the urban middle-class audience, lured by the promise of a safe, thrilling glimpse into the workings of feudalism, these were unexpected lessons. Consciously or not, Nishant, through its attempt to expand the spectacle of feudal violence, demonstrated the poverty and risks of the conception of 'political cinema' which consisted solely in a vicarious 'experience' of the political ferment in India's villages.

The unsaid of the text is the historical truth about peasant struggles in Telengana, where the film is set. In the late forties, Telengana was the site of a communist-led armed struggle against the feudal landlords and the Nizam. But the political cinema for which a demand was being created was not one which could explicitly define peasant revolt as a Communist programme. It was the peasant's 'instinctuality' that provided this cinema with its ideological armour. As such only a leadership that was 'national' in the sense of being derived from the consensual framework of national politics, could be acknowledged as legitimate. In 1974, Benegal's film was unable to identify such a leadership. Its bleak and terrifying vision of rural anarchy is a reminder of the break-up of the national consensus.

Unlike Ankur and Nishant, Manthanhas a contemporary setting. It was noted earlier that the realist aesthetic, working through the figure of the citizen-subject, must represent feudalism as a thing of the past How then does Manthan escape this rule?

The Bureaucracy in Arms

Manthan (1976) acknowledges the contemporaneity of feudalism because its narrative concerns the interventionist state. The citizen figure here is mobilized in the service of a transformative politics.

The bureaucrat who undertakes a reformist social programme in Manthan is a mobilized intellectual, the citizen as revolutionary. This turn in the developmental aesthetic occurs in the context of a mobilized state apparatus which, during the Emergency, intensified the Congress programme of 'socialist' transformation. In her attempt to break the traditional chain of power in which the traditional ruling elites functioned as intermediaries, Indira Gandhi was aided by a mobilized bureaucracy which implemented her government's socialist programme. This combination of a Congress-left political alliance and a mobilized bureaucracy disrupted the old stabilities and made a bid to transform the social basis of the political order. The fight against feudalism was one of the highlights of the new agenda. The abolition of bonded labour and the cancellation of the privileges of the princes, who had continued to enjoy the special status bestowed on them by the British were two of the measures taken by the government which indicated its will to complete the bourgeois revolution. The actual achievements of this programme were of course limited and were cancelled out by the atrocities committed during the Emergency by the new ruling group and its implementation machinery. But the mobilization-effect was very strong and produced a sense of radical transformative possibilities.

Manthan is an Emergency film, a film about the transformative power of a mobilized bureaucracy. Emergency slogans are heard throughout the film, on the radio. The film begins with a scene epitomizing the changed circumstances of a nation in transition. The first shot is of a railway platform, where a train arrives and the bureaucrat who is sent to start a milk co-operative in a Gujarat village gets off the train. He is met by a few men who apologize for turning up late, saying 'Sorry, the train came on time'. ^{(see clip)}This humorous incident establishes the mood of the film and places its narrative in the context of the Emergency period. One of the well-known achievements of the Emergency was the punctual operation of the railways. The rhetoric of efficiency, which was circulated throughout the country in the form of posters, radio announcements and slogans painted on lorries and buses ('Work more talk less', 'The nation is on the move', etc.) found its most visible illustration in the railways' punctuality. In the opening scene, this reference to the alert and responsive state also establishes the changed relationship between bureaucracy and hinterland. In the past, political leaders arriving in remote parts of the country would be welcomed by local leaders and people who sometimes gathered hours before the actual arrival.

With the bureaucracy taking on the mantle of leadership, the film suggests that there is a reversal, with the state representative arriving before the village has had time to prepare for his visit. The state is ahead of the nation: the condition of passive revolution.

The narrative can be divided into three segments, corresponding to the stages of exposition, intervention and resolution. The first segment, beginning with the arrival of the bureaucrat, consists of a process of getting familiarized with the situation on the ground. The existing power relations are mapped in a few deft strokes. The bureaucrat, Manohar Rao (Girish Karnad), is a veterinary doctor employed by the Dairy Board and sent to the village to start a milk co-operative with the help of two others from the board. He is brought to the village by a man (Sadhu Meher) who is used to old ways and contrasts his experience with the newcomer's lack of it. He is friendly with the local landlord, Ganganath Misra (Amrish Puri) to whom all the villagers sell their milk, and whose business is threatened by the efforts to start a co-operative. Together they represent the order which is traditional not in the 'timeless' sense in which that word is usually employed, but in that they represent the intermediate leadership through which the older Congress maintained the national coalition. The new socialist agenda is intended to replace this order. The two discuss the 'idealism' of youth and Misra, declaring that the country needs idealists, adds that idealism does not last very long. Rao, going round the village collecting milk samples, encounters the hostility of the poor villagers towards urban intruders. Meeting Misra, he reminds him of the changing situation. Acknowledging that in the past Misra's approach may have been useful, he asserts that now new methods were in order. The reformist goal is specified: not to merely transfer the control of the milk trade to a new agency but to ensure that the producers get their proper returns. Misra wants him to concentrate on health and family planning and leave the local economy, which he claims he built up, to him At a public meeting where the co-operative idea is explained, further obstacles a:-e revealed. The sarpanch, a traditional village leader, is opposed to the dilution of his authority by the introduction of elections and equal say to all members. The dalits support the co operative only if they can get credit and one of them, Bhola (Naseeruddin Shah), is suspicious of all city folk.

The opportunity for an interventionist move comes when a medical emergency arises in the village. ^[39] A villager asks Rao to save his child. Deshmukh, one of the other members of the team objects to Rao, a veterinarian, treating a human patient but in the absence of a doctor, Rao decides to take the risk.^{(see clip)} It is crucial for the interventionist narrative that the demand for such a radical step should arise from the field. This moment is decisive because it establishes the need for radical measures in a situation where a scrupulous adherence to the ethics of the professions is shown to be counterproductive. Deshmukh represents a conservative approach to the reformist work of the bureaucracy. While Deshmukh keeps reminding him that they must try to accomplish their task without upsetting the existing order, Rao extends his interventionist methods to the political structure of the village and actively campaigns among the dalits to raise their consciousness and make them active participants in the development project.

The poor villagers are won over by Rao's unorthodox intervention in the medical emergency and the co-operative gets going. When a film show on the milk co-operative movement is disrupted by stone throwing, Bhola is arrested. Rao gets him released and realizing that Bhola is the key to getting untouchables to participate, gradually breaks through his hostility and gets him to become a supporter. Bindu (Smita Patil), a dalit woman who, after initial hostility, comes to appreciate the good intentions of the bureaucrats, helps in this task. resisting the sarpanch's attempts to maintain caste divisions and traditional modes of power, Rao urges the dalits to contest the election. Emboldened, the dalits enter a nomination, and when the votes are equally divided between Moti, the dalit candidate and the sarpanch, Moti is elected by a draw of lots. Humiliated, the sarpanch transfers his loyalties to Misra, inaugurating the moment of conflict and resolution.^{(see clip)}

The sarpanch and Misra plot to destroy the co-operative movement. While the sarpanch goes to the city to use his influence and get Rao transferred, Misra gets Bindu to sign a paper accusing Rao of molestation, which he uses to blackmail Rao. Misra and the sarpanch also set fire to the dalits' huts and Misra then wins them over with charity. He gets the dalits out on bail when they are arrested after the fire. While Bhola remains firm in his commitment to the co-operative, the others are lured by Misra's promise of restoration of the old ties of trust and paternal protection. The resolution is marked by an escalation of class struggle on the one hand and the withdrawal of the interventionist bureaucrat, who is transferred out of the village. Rao's Wife, who joined him half-way through the film, is bed-ridden with typhoid and wants to go back to the city. Her presence is represented as a private obstacle to Rao's political idealism. As he informs her of the transfer, a popular love song 'tum jo hue mere hamsafar raste badal gaye' plays on the soundtrack, ironically commenting upon the anti-climactic end to his hopes. The song is followed by an Emergency slogan which declares that with courage and legislative initiative the nation is being transformed.^{(see clip)} Before this, we see Misra's lawyer attempting to bribe Rao, provoking the latter to explode in anger, vowing to destroy Misra if it is the last thing he does. This anger is dissipated by the external agency of the transfer notice, but it stands as an expression of the resolve of the bureaucracy to crush the feudal order.

After his departure, the disappointed Bhola gathers a few people around him and revives the co-operative, determined to keep the development project going. The intervention thus has left behind an organic intellectual, who, fired by the developmental ideology, feels empowered to take charge. Thus, the film affirms the positive transformative power of the government's agenda.^{(see clip)}

The single most important difference between Nishant and Manthan is that in the former rebellion was a spectacle of anarchy, whereas the latter represents the rebellion of the oppressed as the result of a calculated intervention from above by a militant bureaucracy. The Indira Gandhi government's populist reprise of the momentum of peasant revolt results in a developmental aesthetic built around a reformist ideal. Unlike the traditional, 'mythical' leadership of the peasant revolt in Nishant who are left behind by the tide of vengeance they unleashed, the mobilized bureaucracy in Manthan produces an organic leadership which takes over the struggle and conducts it in a rational manner. The structure of the passive revolution remains intact.

Manthan is relatively free from the spectacle of feudal sexuality that was so important to Ankur and Nishant, as well as Bhumika which came after Manthan. Instead, an erotic supplement to the developmentalist project is included in the relationship between Rao and Bindu, the dalit woman. Hostile at first, Bindu soon becomes attracted to Rao and remains a reliable ally of the co-operative project. A song sung by a female voice, which recurs through the film, is first played when Rao arrives in the village, establishing the village's demand for a 'pardesi' (outsider) reformer.^{(see clip)}This song comes to be associated in the course of the film with Bindu's unexpressed feelings for Rao.^{(see clip)} Rao's wife, who joins him in the village, represents the personal limitation which Rao has to overcome in order to function as a militant bureaucrat. When he is called out to the village at night when the huts are burning, Rao leaves his sick wife in bed and pleads with her to go to sleep. At this moment her presence is clearly coded as a hindrance. The film is unable to deal with the bureaucrat's private world except as a tool for narrative resolution. The middle-class cinema dealt with similar bureaucrats and professionals struggling with the difficulty of securing their domestic arrangements (Guddi). The bureaucrat-as-militant, however is constructed as a free-roaming figure who is lonely in his idealism and has to break his world up into two incommensurable segments. While the unspoken intimacy with Bindu makes the developmental aesthetic attractive to audiences (without it the film might have become indistinguishable from Films Division documentaries), the episode with Chandavarkar's (Anant Nag) sexual escapades emphasizes that the militant bureaucrat must put aside all emotional attachments in order to function effectively.

Thus, from Ankur to Manthan we move from a consumerist evocation of rebellion to a depiction of the initiation of class struggle by the mobilized state apparatus. The return of feudal sexuality, epic narratives and other features in Benegal's later films suggests that Manthan's difference owes a great deal to the pressures of the era in which it was made, as well as the modernizing ideology that the milk co-operatives stood for. V. Kurien, one of the architects of the 'white revolution', as the milk cooperative movement is known, is credited with the story idea for the film, along with Benegal. Govind Nihalani, Benegal's cinematographer, made a documentary on 'The White revolution' during this period, no doubt a by-product of the Manthan venture. The film was thus something of a state project, meant to serve as propaganda for the developmentalist efforts of the Congress government. Critics have generally avoided comment on the emergency references of the film, no doubt because of the embarrassment it entails, although it is simplistic to equate the Indira Gandhi era as a whole with the atrocities committed during the emergency. After Manthan Benegal did return to the developmentalist aesthetic in films like Susman (1988), which was made with the assistance of a handloom co-operative. But such ventures were determined by their conditions of production and should not be submitted to a purely auteurist reading.

The reformist narrative of the film requires the removal of the bureaucrat from the scene. Any deeper involvement in the class struggle that he has contributed to intensifying, would cancel his bureaucratic identity and turn him into a revolutionary. The reformist bureaucracy whose worldview is represented in the film was committed to the passive revolution and not to a radical challenge to the political order itself. As such the brief vision of a reformist utopia at the end is a reassurance to the spectator that the reformist impulse has been communicated to the bottom rung and that a slow developmentalist trajectory has been put in place. The panic created by the vision of anarchy in Nishant is assuaged here by the assurance that everything is under control.

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^{[36] See Screen, 17 January 1975, p. 2.}

^{[37] Ray was later to try his hand at the New Cinema style of realism in Sadgati
(981), a film made for television. In 1974, however, he refused to see anything new
in the FFC-inspired aesthetic or Senegal's reworking of it.}

^{[38] Benegal himself attributed the success of the New Cinema to the existence of
a demand. 'Political cinema will only emerge when there i.g a need for such a
cinema,' he observed. 'We have to realise that whatever films are made can only be
shown if there is a need for such films latent demand that is tapped' (Rizvi and
Amlad 1980: 7-8).}

^{[39] The fact that Khotey Sikkey, an indigenized 'cowboy' film of the Sholay type,
employs the same structure is no accident. In the Indira Gandhi era, the two armies
of reform were the bureaucracy and the lumpen Youth Congress led by Sanjay Gandhi.
The urban petty criminals who are recruited to protect the village in Khotey Sikkay
are agents of reform hut unlike the bureaucrats in Manthan, they do not hold the
position of authority. They relate to the village as a place of their salvation. But
otherwise the relations between the intervening urban team and the village unfold
with remarkable similarity. Thus, in both Khotey Sikkay and Manthan the first
opportunity for the intruders to demonstrate their usefulness comes in the form of a
medical emergency, which requires the presence of a doctor. In Khotey Sikkay, the
uneducated lumpen reformers hijack a bus and bring a doctor from the town to the
village by force. In Manthan, Dr Rao, a veterinarian, transgresses the ethics of his
profession by treating a human patient.}

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9. Towards real Subsumption?: Signs of Ideological reform in Two recent Films

The present moment in the history of Indian cinema is, as suggested earlier, a moment of transformation. In the midst of the ongoing 'liberalization' campaign, cinema is acquiring new skills and technologies, new ideological tasks, and facing new challenges to its established modes of representation. Some cracks in the consensual ideology of the Bombay film are widening and new entrants into the field are bringing new skills and ambitions into play. One of the signs of this changing field of force is the sudden vanguard position achieved by one or two southern film makers who, unlike their predecessors, have become nationally popular without making films directly in Hindi. A new capital base, the adoption of management techniques, Hollywood styles, and new aesthetic strategies have played a part in this transformation. This emerging segment of the industry (focussed around Mani ratnam in Madras but also, nationally, consolidating its position slowly through the activities of the Amitabh Bachchan Corporation and other players) promises (or threatens, depending on your viewpoint) to establish the industry on a new basis. A nexus between directors of repute, cultural corporations, managers and other agents is emerging to shore up the achievements of the last few years.

Although behind the new developments, the vast majority of films continue to be made in the old style, the emerging formation is growing in strength and has achieved national Visibility. It is bound to have a central role in shaping the future of the industry nationally.

From this complex, multi-faceted, changing field, two films from the early nineties are considered in this chapter, as instances of an ideological shift attempted by the emerging formation as a complement to its still evolving mode of production. They are subjected here to a symptomatic reading, to reveal processes of ideological reform underway in contemporary Indian cinema. The change in question is not in content, but in form, or the content of the form. The intention is not to suggest that the work of re-form in these two films is emblematic of the current transition. They represent only one of several different directions taken by the current flurry of experimentation in Indian commercial cinema. ^[40] However, they are of special interest in the context of the preceding analysis in that they try to constitute a new representational space which includes and overcomes the dominant form. As such they provide a glimpse into a process of transformation that, instead of coming in with alternative modes, and trying to establish parallel, competing segments, works on and appropriates the existing mode, bidding to replace the dominant rather than to wrest a space beside it.

We have noted (Chapter 4) how a redundancy of resolutions in the feudal family romance can be read as a symptom of the ideology of formal subsumption at work. To recapitulate, in the 'classical' Hindi film, two resolutions to the narrative crisis would follow in quick succession, one enforced by the traditionally given authority of the exemplary subject(s) of the narrative; the other, following immediately after, and comically redundant in appearance, enforced by the agents of modern law. The laughter evoked by this redundancy should not distract us from the ideological necessity of this doubling. If the first resolution was dictated by long-established narrative conventions, which emerged in a different social context than ours, the second one was necessary in order to assert the final (though not pre-eminent) authority of the law. Here the law has the 'last word' but this is as yet only a formality, an observance of form. The terms and relations of the preceding narrative are not reconstructed in anticipation of the finality of the word of the law; rather, the terms and relations and their modes of combination as already established are merely supplemented by the law's gesture of recognition.

This relationship of complicitous supplementarity was seriously disrupted in the early 1970s when, in the midst of a national crisis, the cultural economy of cinema underwent something of a transformation. After much groping and fumbling, a new dominant form emerged (Chapters 5 and 6), in which the law was no longer a supplement but the most important stake of narrative conflict and resolution. Whether as agents of the law or as its enemies, the characters around whom these narratives turned were initially defined by their expulsion from the familial utopia of the earlier dominant form. Disinherited, marginalized, and thrown into the world of law and criminality, their stories brought the state to the centre of the narrative, and while not eliminating the feudal family romance, relegated it to a subordinate status, where it sometimes served as an object of nostalgia, a lost object, the desire for whose repossession is the driving force behind the action. In spite of the dramatic entry and consolidation of this new form, however, there was no decisive turn away from the previous form. rather, they co-existed as irreconcilable or very weakly reconciled forms.

We will have occasion to return to these instances later on, but for the time being the point of this brief recounting is to call attention to the existence of a problematic of form that is at least tendentially independent of the particular narrative content of individual texts. It is now time to turn to the two films in question, to see what kind of work of narrative re-formation they undertake. What follows is not meant to be taken as suggesting some kind of unique and irreversible turn. Indeed, it is possible to identify, throughout the history of post-independence cinema, similar instances of formal innovation which mayor may not have proved to be significant. My purpose is to make a case for the existence of the formal problematic as a real and significant issue and to demonstrate that the critique of the ideology of form can give us insights into cultural processes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Fredric Jameson and, more recently, Slavoj Zizek are among the few critics who have dealt with the question of the ideology of form. Jameson (1981), in his book on the 'political unconscious' has offered one of the most comprehensive accounts of the possibilities held out by Marxist cultural analysis. His theory of interpretation distinguishes between three related horizons or 'concentric frameworks' of textual analysis, each with its own specific object. These three horizons are identified by reference to their field of pertinence, the ground in which the interpretive act specific to these horizons places the textual object. The first, and narrowest, is the ground of political history. the yearly turnover of events; the second horizon is society, in its appearance as 'a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes'; and the third, and most comprehensive, is the ground of history, 'conceived in its vastest sense of the sequences of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations' (Jameson 1981: 75). These semantic horizons are not just different contexts in which 'the same' textual object is to be placed-they differ from each other in the way they construe or reconstruct their object, the text.

Of these the third-historical-horizon, is where the idea of the content of the form is elaborated. Transcending the other two horizons, on the historical plane the analytical focus is on the historicity of the unity-the appearance of coherence---effected by a master code whose terms determine the discursive form taken by ideological conflict. It is the concept of mode of production that provides the 'organizing unity' of this horizon. Jameson does not employ this concept in order to develop a typology of cultural forms in which any text can be placed in one or another 'stage' of historical evolution. Such a permanent solution is ruled out by the fact that a mode of production is, strictly speaking, a theoretical rather than an empirical object. In other words, any social formation, as Poulantzas (1978: 22) has argued, is characterized by the structured co-existence in specific combinations, of several modes of production.

Thus, situating the textual object in the ground of mode of production need not result in a typology, since every social formation will have its own specific combination which will have to be discovered, and every text will be 'crisscrossed and intersected by a variety of impulses from contradictory modes of cultural production all at once' (Jameson 1981: 95). The same combination of modes also argues against the assumption of a homogeneous synchronicity or the permanence of the features of a social formation since the interaction of the elements of the combination is always open to change. This point finds support in the Althusserian argument against the empiricist notion of the synchronicity of the present and in favour of a structure where time is itself divided up into a combination of temporalities with a distinct and changeable character of its (the combination's) own.

What would be the object of study in such a horizon? In the second horizon, class contradiction was the object, understood in its relational aspect and not class as a group. Here, similarly, we cannot take any particular mode of production as the object. Jameson then proposes 'cultural revolution' as the object and defines it as 'that moment in which the co-existence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the center of political, social, and historical life' (ibid: 95). However, the task of analysis under this programme will be the study not only of moments of crisis when contradictions attain visibility, but also the 'normal' time when such contradictions are dormant.

Having thus identified the horizon as consisting of the cultural revolution, the next step involves specification of the 'textual object', the equivalent, in this horizon, of the 'symbolic act' in the first and the 'ideologeme' in the second. The text here is conceived as 'a field of force in which the dynamics of sign systems of several distinct modes of production can be registered and apprehended' and this dynamics is termed 'the ideology of form' (ibid: 98). In this horizon, form itself undergoes a re-conceptualization, appearing not as the bearer of content but as itself content. The formal processes, when found in combination, can be understood as 'sedimented content'.

The primacy of form has also been asserted by Slavoj Zizek (1989) in his study of the discovery of the symptom by Marx and Freud. Parallel to the triple division of interpretive labour proposed by Jameson, we find in Freud the distinction between three elements of the dream: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought, and unconscious desire. Of these, the third is the most difficult to discover because it is 'on the surface' rather than hidden from view, serving as the mode of articulation of the latent dream content into the manifest text: the work of the unconscious lies in 'the form of the "dream" (Zizek 1989: 13). Similarly, Marx goes beyond the classical political economists when he focusses not on some 'secret' hidden behind the commodity form but on 'the secret of this form itself (ibid: 15). However, Zizek's understanding of the relation between social reality and what he calls the 'ideological fantasy' differs from Jameson's in one important respect. On his reading, it is the fantasy that supports and organizes social reality and gives it coherence. Structured in this way by ideological fantasy, reality itself is a shield against any direct encounter with the real the antagonism that resists symbolization. The different social formations, the modes of production, etc. are on this reading, so many ways of organizing reality against the threat of the real-the fundamental, irresolvable antagonism.

It is against this horizon that I propose to situate the following analysis of two recent films, Rajkumar Santoshi's Damini (1993) and Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992). It stands to reason that these texts can also be reconstituted as objects within the other two horizons, or even, indeed, approached through a combination of these and other theoretical tools. In fact one of them, Roja, has been the object of a number of interpretations which can be construed as employing, either separately or in conjunction, approaches specific to the first two horizons. ^[41] The ideological analysis I undertake here takes the 'content of the form' as its primary focus. The aim is to discover a new object, a different level of semiosis, with very different, and perhaps more durable, cultural consequences.

The reason for bringing together these films, from two traditions of film-making (Hindi and Tamil) which, while sharing a common history, have also developed along fairly independent trajectories, is simply that they both manifest the same global formal construction which can be represented as follows:

/___fB_____/_______A_______/_______________B_________________/

where A and B represent the two principal narrative segments, and jB a fragment that is metonymically linked to B but separated from it by segment A; or, to put it differently, segment A is sandwiched between segment B and its brief, enigmatic premonition.

What are the effects produced by this formal organization of the text?

Let us note, first of all, that the transition from fB to A comes as a rupture, a sharp discursive break which leaves something unexplained until segment B retroactively absorbs the enigmatic fragment into its order of narration and thereby infuses it with meaning. Secondly, it is only because of the isolation of fragment B from its proper narrative habitat that we are at all able to identify a second break in the narrative, since the transition from A to B is relatively smoother. Thus the fragment serves, in the overall organization of narrative flow, as (1) an enigma which hovers over the action of segment A, a premonition of things to come, of which the figures of the narrative are themselves blissfully ignorant; and (2) a cue which enables us to identify the second break.

It should be obvious by now that this segmental analysis bears little resemblance to the more famous one that is associated with Christian Metz's construction of the 'grande syntagmatique' of the units of film language in his search for the master code of cinematic narration, as well as its variants, notably that of Raymond Bellour (Bellour 1986). The Metzian segmentation is intended to provide a general table of all possible units of filmic narration. As such, beyond the basic filmic unit of the shot (recognized by the cut that separates one shot from another), the identification of syntagma depends upon the coincidence of shot changes with other indications of shifts in time, space, motif, theme, etc. that form part of the narrative content. As Metz himself put it, 'all the units I have isolated are located in the film but in relation to the plot' (Metz 1986: 58). In our examples, however, the segmentation is discovered not by scanning the units of narration from the smallest upwards or the other way round, but through a narrative device whose function is to signal the division. As such it has an ideological function that far exceeds its convenience as a way of breaking up the narrative. The segments discovered here signal a formal break, the insertion of an 'alien' body into the larger body of the film text, rather than a categorical separation or grammatical punctuation.

As mentioned above, the fragment serves as a warning about the future and enables us to identify the second break. But its narrative function is not limited to these two effects. This becomes clear if we speculate for a moment about the change that might come about if the initial fragment is removed altogether. In terms of narrative content, hardly anything is lost since in both cases, the informational content of the fragment is (i.e., will be) already contained in B. What will be lost, however, is the masking effect that conceals the break between two narrative trajectories that each have their own resolution. At the threshold that separates A from B, there is every possibility that the spectator will perceive, not the transition to a new stage of the same narrative, but the cessation of one plot and the beginning of another, entirely different one. Two stories instead of one, which would mean a fragmentation of the narrative. But the fragment, whose meaning remains a mystery until the beginning of B, has already served to re-define the action in segment A as a prologue to what will follow. It has already served to subordinate the action in segment A to that of segment B.

Thus (3), the organization of the textual sequence, while enabling the recognition of the break, also serves to mask the fragmentation that this would imply. It would then appear that B is the dominant segment. the main concern of these films (this is confirmed by the primacy accorded to segment B in discussions of Roja), but that they are nevertheless dependent on the subordinate segment A for ... what? Why do these texts reject the easier solution for achieving unity, that is to say the exclusive concentration on the action of segment B, or even the subsumption of all narrative elements into the spatio-temporal framework of narrative B? (Mani Ratnam has been asked this question, in a slightly different form, by an interviewer.) Why, instead, do they put the very possibility of narrative unity at risk and then try to re-unify the text by deploying fB as a sort of 'secret agent?

On first glance this textual organization may seem no different from other familiar instances where a part or all of the narrative is recollected in flashback. But in those instances, continuity is established by the flashback device itself, with an individual character's memory serving as the link. In the two films in question, the juxtaposition of segments, lacking any such diegetic motivation, brings into play an authorial intention, an act of deliberate separation and reorganization of segments that produces effects beyond those deriving from the plot itself. This is important not because authorial intention is itself new or unprecedented but because it makes visible the absence of such a disjuncture, such a supplementary work of signification, in the dominant narrative film. Not only does it bring such absence into focus, it also indicates that that dominant form cannot be re-formed internally, through the substitution or supplementation of its content by a reflexive layer of meaning. Instead, the method adopted here can be described as an act of laying siege to the dominant form, of harnessing its pleasures to another narrative project and staging, in the process, an ideological rehabilitation of its narrative elements. The delegation of a fragment to an outer zone, its separation from its proper metonymic chain, enables the constitution of a syntagmatic chain marked by arbitrary juxtaposition, which is its true function. Thus, the potentially metaphoric relation between the two segments is pre-empted and the first segment is integrated into a new syntagmatic order as a subordinate element. Let us take a closer look at the segments themselves. In Damini, the opening fragment shows a woman in a state of absolute terror, in a nightmarish sequence in which we see her running away from unseen pursuers and finding herself trapped. Her predicament is highlighted by the interrogation that a doctor conducts. At first the questions are hurled at her by a voice located somewhere behind the camera---the voice of the Other-while the terror-stricken woman is trapped in a paralysed state in front of the camera, as if by the camera. For a moment it looks as if we in the audience are the collective Interrogator. The tension created by the invisibility of the interrogator approaches breaking point before we get relief in the form of a reverse shot of the doctor, who now looks benign, and appears to be doing no more than his duty. When the next cut brings the woman back into the frame, her terror has already been redefined as the result of her own unstable mental condition, a hallucination. Our spontaneous identification with her has been deprived of its rationality. The transition from this fragment to segment A is startling: from paranoid hallucination and terror we cut to a close-up of the same woman's face whence the camera pulls back to reveal a stage on which she is dancing. From madness to the innocence and romance of youth. ^{(see clip)} The mise-en-scene in particular conveys a strong suggestion that the whole sequence fB is a nightmare, in which case it would fall within the diegetic framework of the narrative delineation of character psychology. Such an instance can be found in Rajnigandha where the heroine has a nightmare in which she dreams of being 'left behind'. However, the difference between these two sequences is that in the latter, we see the dreamer wake up and acknowledge the preceding sequence as an element of her own subjectivity, whereas in Damini the contrast between the woman's state of terror and the matter-of-fact look of the doctor and other indications argue against the reading of the sequence as a nightmare. And in any case, subsequent events prove that the fragment was not a representation of a psychic event. The change of scene also, in its abruptness, does not allow any scope for reading a subjective link, since in A the woman is introduced to us in a stylized space where her performance is emptied of subjectivity. In both these films, the psychic dimension is far removed from the 'psychological' approach of the middle-class cinema and is inscribed in the objective formal features of the text.

The same contrast between terror and innocence is conveyed by the parallel transition in Roja. Here, however, there is no scope for even the suspicion of a subjective link since the two scenes are completely different from each other in content, the only link between them being that they (presumably) succeed each other in time, since the dawn that breaks on the capture of the Kashmiri militant also illuminates the Tamilnad countryside. Fragment B in Roja shows the capture of the militant by troops combing the forests of Kashmir just before daybreak and cuts to the Tamilnadu village, as the sun rises on a beautiful landscape and the heroine is introduced, singing a song about her 'small desires'.

Beginning thus, with a conventional representation of feminine innocence, suggestive of the anticipation of romance and conjugality, segment A reaches its own local (and of course, 'incomplete') resolution well before the midway point in the text. In Damini, the 'hero' Shekhar (played by Rishi Kapoor) watches the eponymous heroine performing a dance number with Aamir Khan (playing himself and serving as a reminder of the proximity of the 'romance' to follow to the conventions of the world of Bombay cinema) and falls in love, this event witnessed, again in keeping with conventions of film romance, by a male assistant/friend.^{(see clip)} He meets her again near her home, when she is out shopping, in order to pursue the romance. Here we get a glimpse into the distinction of Damini's character: she is a compulsive truth-teller. A quotation from Gandhi which serves as the epigraph has prepared us to expect an 'experimenter with truth' but at this point in the narrative, Damini, after publicly announcing the dishonesty of a merchant, is shown talking aloud to herself, as Shekhar follows her. This scene pathologizes the truth-telling subject, at least for the moment locating the origin of this compulsive honesty in her hysteria. This is because while in segment B her honesty will acquire a central role in the movement of the narrative, in segment A the independence of character that this implies would work against the requirements of the conventional family romance. As they walk together, they encounter Damini's father. On the spot, Shekhar asks him for permission to marry his daughter, and Damini expresses surprise but does not resist this abrupt turn. Shekhar leaves, to inform his family of his decision.^{(see clip)}

Damini's family, consisting of parents and an elder sister, is in crisis. Just before Shekhar's family arrives to 'see' Damini, her sister runs away with a boyfriend. In front of the guests, Damini, against her parents' wishes, reveals this incident and wins Shekhar's father's heart with her honesty.^{(see clip)} The wedding takes place quickly. In her husband's home, Damini resides in splendour, but as if in captivity until a reconciliation takes place between her and Shekhar. The segment concludes with the symbolic freeing of a caged bird, a present from Shekhar. What we get in segment A can be described as a highly compressed version of the feudal family romance which typically ends with the integration of the romantic pair into the politically autonomous order of the propertied joint family.^{(see clip)}

In Roja, the resolution of segment A is similar in so far as it also concerns the reconciliation of a couple bound together in matrimony in great haste, but the movement towards this conclusion takes a different route. Roja's marriage to Rishi Kumar (Arvind Swamy) in this segment occurs as a result of an unexpected hitch in an earlier plan by which Rishi was to marry Roja's sister. Rishi's declaration of his liking for Roja is received by the diegetic audience (except the sister) as a serious transgression and Roja is unforgiving even after she has moved to the city with her husband. But when he discloses the fact that it was her sister who rejected him because she wanted to marry another man in order to bring about a reconciliation between their feuding families, Roja is finally reconciled to her marriage.

To turn now briefly to the level of the 'latent content': In both films, the couple has already gone through two stages; first, a conventional union, legitimate in the eyes of society but as yet lacking its own internal unity; second, a moment of clearing of doubts and exchange of assurances which seems to fill the vacuum. But even after this second moment, in spite of the appearance of fullness and harmony, something is left over, an excess that provides the principal motivation for the continuation of the narrative drive. The movement into segment B and its specific resolution can be described as a movement from reconciliation (a local event) to rehabilitation or regrounding of the couple (a global change). To anticipate one of the conclusions of this analysis, the reconciliation is a sufficient resolution for the narrative movement of segment A but its 'insufficiency' has been ensured in advance by the arbitrary-and once introduced, compelling, unsettling-glimpse of another world, an alien threat, in fragment B.

As segment B unfolds, however, it becomes clear that the very self-sufficiency of the narrative of segment A is a threat to something else, to the existence of another ground. The closure that 'comes naturally' to the romance narrative cannot be breached, cannot be opened up to the experience of an alien reality (i.e. a reality alien to its conventions, to its congealed ideological discourse) except through the subterfuge of an unexpected juxtaposition which produces for the spectator the effect of incompleteness that will justify the prolongation of the narrative. The difficulty made visible here is a measure of how deeply the conventions and ideology of the dominant film form are entrenched in culture. At the same time, we should remember that the aesthetic project of these films does not simply encounter the resistance of the dominant form in the world at large but itself produces the (foreshortened) image of that resistance and, in the interior of its own body, stages a confrontation with it. This is important to note because it is perfectly possible-and there are many instances of films that try to realize this possibility-to produce a new aesthetic as an alternative, occupying another site, addressed to another audience, where the conflict with the dominant is staged, if at all, not inside the limits of the narrative but outside, in a segment of the industry. The desired result of this latter approach is a segmentation of audiences, since such films appeal to the audience's desire for distinction, and promise a pleasure that only the discerning can enjoy.

In Damini, it is the Holi celebration scene that clearly marks the beginning of segment B, while in Roja this is signalled by the transfer of the Kashmir assignment to Rishi in the hospital scene. During the Holi celebrations, the hero's brother and his friends rape the servant maid Urmi. Damini and later Shekhar are both witnesses to the rape but as an autonomous political unit, the feudal family resolves to administer its own form of justice, which would consist of bailing out the family member by compensating the victim and her family for the loss.^{(see clip)} Shekhar, in spite of being a witness, goes along with this, but Damini refuses to hide the truth. She insists that the law of the Indian state alone has the legitimate power to render justice in the case. Although she goes along with the family's wishes for a while when they falsely assure her that Urmi is well and being looked after, this compromise is represented as a temporary suspension of her truth-telling character. Telling the truth thus acquires here a very precise definition. In the epigraph, Gandhi speaks of the conscience as an authority that transcends all human laws. The question underlying the truth-teller's dilemma is: tell the truth to whom? Who must listen in order for the truth to have been told? If honesty is merely a compulsion, then it would be satisfied by any telling, any declaration, anywhere, before anybody. The Gandhian dictum is that the conscience is the authority that insists on the telling of the truth. But who is the addressee of the truth? Unless the addressee is specified, the injunction loses all meaning. And if conscience itself (or God as its objective form) is the addressee, the truth need never be declared in public. For the truth involved in Damini, however, the issue is clear: it will not have been told until it is told to the state. Damini's honesty is a hysterical symptom because the problem that it represents for the narrative will not have been solved until the Other who listens to her truth and the demand implied in it, does not appear: 'what is hysteria if not precisely the effect and testimony of a failed interpellation?' (Zizek 1989: 113). It is through the invocation of this larger entity that the narrative succeeds in subverting and delegitimizing the moral-political authority of the state-within-the-state, the politically autonomous khandaan. ^[42] Within this framework, the process of rehabilitation of the nuclear couple is also set in motion, which ends with the couple's relation re-grounded in the state's range of vision, with Shekhar's public declaration of his love for his wife, under the aegis of the law. It is only now that the relation achieves full closure and permanence.

On the formal plane, this segment achieves its effects through a process of combination of filmic genres which ends in a new synthesis. In a Hegelian perspective, Damini can be read, on this level, as a synthesis that subsumes the feudal family romance and the post-70s narratives of disidentification with the state. Through the agency of the 'unhoused' female subject, the film breaks open the dosed economy of the feudal romance and invokes the state as the sole legitimate authority. The state, however, is itself rotten, as the films of the seventies showed time and again. Like the innumerable rebels who walked out of the system, confronted it as criminals or militant transgressors of the code (in the service of the code), the lawyer Govind (Sunny Deol) lives as a recluse, having quit his profession after the law failed to render justice in a case relating to his wife's death. The casting also reflects the generic combination: Meenakshi Seshadri and Rishi Kapoor as the romantic couple and Sunny Deol (known for his action-hero roles in the genre inaugurated by the Bachchan films) as the disillusioned lawyer. In the seventies films, these heroes pursued their own desires, nostalgic for a lost harmony. Here Govind, who has abandoned all his own battles, enters the picture as a disinterested agent through whom the state will be reformed in order to produce the space where the romantic couple can be rehabilitated. As such on his very first appearance, there is a complete transfer of agency from Damini to Govind. Before this scene, Damini's honesty has led to a situation where she has been confined to a mental hospital by court order. Overhearing a plot to kill her, she runs from the hospital and is pursued by the group of killers. The entire scene conveys an overwhelming sense of helplessness, complete exhaustion, physical as well as subjective, before the relay of agency to Govind is accomplished (and Visually represented) when Damini grabs him by the shoulder and pleads for help.^{(see clip)}(As if to compensate in advance for this impending loss of agency, the chase is preceded by a dance again of ambiguous status: dream or extra-diegetic interpolation? in which Damini is transformed into the all-powerful Kali.)^{(see clip)}

Having invoked the Hegelian dialectic, we should note that the synthesis accomplished here is not without remainder. At the end of the narrative, Govind remains excessive. At the same time this surplus leaves no trace of disruption in the closure achieved by the narrative. His role has been that of what Jameson calls the 'vanishing mediator' whose agency enables a transformation that destroys its own grounds for existence.

Turning to Roja, we find, not surprisingly, a similar narrative movement. This film has come to be received by the public as a film 'about Kashmiri separatism'. But this aspiration to 'about-ness', i.e. an aesthetic of topicality, is still only tendential, subordinated to the film's preoccupation with the allegory of transpatriarchal migration. One of the stakes of the struggle in which the film is engaged is precisely to wrest a space for staging the present, to break out of the timeless frame of conventional narrative.

Unlike Damini, Roja does not stage its narrative within the terms and terrain of the history of film genres, although it is possible to read the village segment as a reprise of narrative films set in the countryside, of which there is a steady output in the cinemas of the south, and which often reaffirm the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the village as a social unit. ^[43] As we have seen, the village segment ends with the reinforcement of the conventional union by a union of hearts made possible by the late revelation of Rishi's innocence in the matter of Roja's sister's 'betrayal'. That some obstacle nevertheless remains is made clear in the scene following the reconciliation when Rishi, as he prepares to leave for Kashmir, tells Roja to go back to her village even as she insists on accompanying him.

The story that unfolds subsequently is well-known: arriving in Kashmir, Rishi gets down to the work he has been sent there to do, deciphering the enemy's intercepted communications and, in his free time, showing Roja the sights of Kashmir. At the very moment when Roja is sending a message of thanks to her personal village deity through divine courier, her husband is kidnapped by militants. The plot then weaves together the parallel stories of Roja's encounter with the state and Rishi's with the militants. Finally, when the state agrees, at the risk of losing its advantage in the fight against secessionist militancy, to submit to Roja's demand that her husband's freedom should be purchased by releasing the arrested militant, rishi, in a parallel move, saves the state's honour by escaping from captivity and, with the help of a reformed militant, returns to Roja, thus preventing the return of the captured leader.

At the conclusion of the second segment, the couple has been rehabilitated, rescued from a situation of terror and re-settled under the aegis of a new patriarchal authority, the state. In both the films, the couples move out of a pastoral world-the Village and the genre of family romance--only to encounter terror. From the perspective of this overarching narrative, the perils of the outside world signify above all the acutely felt absence or suspension of Authority. In Damini, before the moment of transfer of narrative agency to Govind the lawyer, the terror of the moment derives precisely from the impending encounter with the trauma of what psychoanalysis terms the 'hole in the Symbolic' (Zizek, For They Know Not 1991), the terrifying encounter with the truth that there is no Other guaranteeing the consistency of the Symbolic order and the meaningfullness of the world. The image of the woman hounded by merciless killers intensifies the anticipation of the traumatic glimpse into the real and then. at the very last moment of this intolerable tension, produces, (not out of nowhere but precisely from that one place where bodies have pre-assigned meaning: the star system) a male rescuer whose provisional function is to fill the hole in the Symbolic until the law is ready to take over. Indeed, the entire scene of the chase can be read as a tendentially tableau-like representation of woman's state of in betweenness, in a 'no-man's' land between the representatives of a discredited traditional phallic power and an emergent alternative, the patriarchal authority of the modern state. Now the scene of Damini's apotheosis, when she assumes the form of the phallic mother-goddess, which preceded the chase, can be retrospectively read, not only as a compensatory gesture to pave the way for the transfer of narrative agency, but also as a forewarning of the (terrifying) alternative prospect that might arise if the transfer of phallic authority from one patriarchy to another is not accomplished swiftly.

In Roja, such a glimpse into an unpleasant alternative to patriarchal authority is woven into the village segment itself. Apart from the hierarchical relation between two formally autonomous units of narrative that is common to both these films, Roja is distinguished by the repetition of key narrative and thematic features across the two segments. These two segments can in fact be read as mirror images of each other. A close reading of the first segment is required in order to reveal this parallelism. The comic episode of the man who wanders through the village in search of his lost goats and is ridiculed by a group of women is linked, by the metonymic relay of the goats' cries, to the scene in which, having commandeered the goats, Roja sets up an ambush at a spot that calls to mind similar scenes in dacoit films: a bend in the road, a cluster of rocks providing natural cover. The overt purpose of this trap is to catch a glimpse of the man who is arriving by car to 'see' Roja's sister. Roja's declared intentions are altruistic but for the spectator, the entire scene is so constructed as to invest her glance with a desire of which she herself is as yet unaware or which she is unwilling to acknowledge.^{(see clip)} The split here between conscious purpose and unconscious desire defines Roja too as a hysteric, creating the space for the narrative of re interpellation to follow in segment B. It is not by coincidence that beginning with this incident, until the moment of his declaration of preference for Roja, Rishi finds himself besieged, a captive of the collective will of the village. Key elements of the second segment are prefigured in the first: abduction (by Roja), captivity, the 'exchange' proposal (Roja's sister wants Rishi to be an object of exchange in an operation that will restore to the family its greater unity by bringing an alienated branch back into the fold), the pre emption of exchange by a counter-move: escape with another captive (Roja in the first segment, and the 'humanized' militant in the second). As for the last feature, there is, of course, a difference: what Rishi pre-empts is not the reunion desired by the sister, but his own neutralization as a pure object of exchange. His abrupt and scandalous declaration of interest in Roja makes possible the reunification of the family but at the same time successfully breaches its will to autonomy from another flank.

Through these parallels, the film establishes a strong connection between two kinds of resistance to the national-modern project: the anti-national and the pre-modern. The village's autonomy is not the result of a conscious disidentification with the modern state, unlike the separatism of the militants. Nevertheless, the modern state encounters both the pre-modern enclave and the separatist movement as challenges to its will to hegemony. The village threatens Rishi's and the modern state's project (his desire to marry a(ny) village woman symbolizes the state's need to subordinate the village/region/ clan, in short the pre-modern, to itself) by imposing its own laws on him-first by attempting to absorb him into its independent social circuit, and again by trying to use him as an instrument for its own purposes. The women of the village are thus figured as castrating, as phallic mothers who jealously guard their domain. Roja demonstrates that she participates in this collective protection of phallic authority when she stages the ambush.

From the detour, this film 'about Kashmir' equips itself with a 'voice'. The autonomous village is a threat because it will not legitimize the state by demanding its existence. It is a structure that enforces its own laws on those who enter its domain. It is not in a dependent position vis-a-vis the state. The wedding and the second stage reconciliation, however, change everything. Henceforth, the Village figures as a voice, expressing a demand that only the state can respond to. Voices emerge from the ruins of a structure. This process is completed only when the demanding subject participates in elevating the state to absolute dominance by surrendering her own personal source of phallic power. In the case of Damini, this is accomplished when the Gandhian conscience is dissolved into the objective apparatuses of the state and truth-telling is equated with telling the truth to the state. For Roja, this shift involves a transfer of loyalties from her personal village deity (with whom she has a secret liaison, to whom she confesses and who grants her all her wishes) to the state: this is accomplished when she explicitly names the state as her saviour during her meeting with the central minister. This scandalous subordination of religious authority to the secular authority of the state is only one element of a long process: by making unreasonable demands, by fully assuming the position of a hysteric, Roja actively provokes the state to respond to her call. The state, figured as a neutral place of pure altruism, obliges and even indulges the demanding subject.

The gulf between two patriarchal zones is bridged in both films by the figure of the woman. It is through her agency that it becomes possible to allegorize historic transformations. The 'homeless' woman is the bearer of the phallus, which she must pass on to the emerging power. The doubling of the plot in Roja enables the allegorization by importing Roja from one domain into the other. The primary antinomy of the plot is subdivided into a series of oppositions, as shown below.

Master antinomy:

State vs autonomous segments

The call that Roja addresses to the state is its most important source of legitimacy. As a demanding woman, her role is to provoke the state into existence, to free her of the unbearable narrative function of phallic authority. The relief attendant upon the transfer of this authority to an agent of the law is much more vividly represented in Damini but it is there in Roja too. In Damini, the split that we have noted in Roja is neither necessary nor possible. However, both texts manifest the anxiety created by the phallus-in transit, and in both, the object of the female figures' crusade, not capable of narrative resolution in itself, is subsumed under the more manageable resolution by which their individual desires are fulfilled. Thus Damini's concern for justice, which seemed to exceed her personal interest, is redefined within the terms of her desire for conjugal rehabilitation. Whereas in Roja the hysteric's demands are deployed in another scenario of hegemony vs autonomy, in Damini the hysteric'S demands focus back on the world she left behind. In one, the siege of the pastoral enables the invention of the topical film with a window to reality; in the other, the same assault on the pastoral romance leads to the invention of the modern women's melodrama.

The narrative process thus achieves its completion only when the subject posits the state as the external embodiment of its Self. Of course, the state in its objectivity pre-exists the subject's positing of it. But this state of affairs is intolerable, it provokes a movement of narrative resolution precisely because there is a gap between the subject and this external substance, a disjuncture which ·only arises when, having exited another structure and become 'voice', the subject comes face to face with what Zizek terms the 'pre-Symbolic reality'. The resolution of this crisis is arrived at when the subject 'posits the big Other, makes it exist' (Zizek 1989: 230). This positing is an empty gesture, a purely formal act which transforms what is already there, as external reality, into a subjectively posited, symbolized reality. It is this act that completes the subject's re-grounding: 'subjects are subjects only in so far as they presuppose that the social substance, opposed to them in the form of the State, is already in itself a subject (Monarch) to whom they are subjected' (ibid: 229).

One of the problems that the formal structure of these films brings to the fore is that of narrative enunciation. The fragment B causes unease in part by displacing the enunciative function of the narrative, putting this function into crisis precisely by emphasiZing it, by foregrounding it as a problem through the conflicting and unexplained juxtaposition of sequences. The fragment hovers menacingly over the pastoral segment A, inscribing a lack at its centre, robbing it of its customary naturalness and self-identity. The spectator's attention is thus divided, so that it is impossible to fully identify with the pastoral narrative. In both films, the pastoral segment reinforces this distraction in scenes that demonstrate the split between the principal character's conscious assertions and unconscious desire: Roja directs an altruistic gaze at Rishi but we know that there is more to it; Damini always tells the truth but there is something else that speaks another truth: her hysteria. The narrative stages a 'war of position' (P. Chatterjee 1986: 48-9), robbing the pastoral discourse of its fullness and self-identity, creating the need and the space for another agency that will take on (indeed, has already taken on) the function of enunciation and narrative control. Segment B thus appropriates the position of subjective pre-eminence by demonstrating its capacity to commensurate the seemingly incommensurable content of fragment B and segment A. The resolution of the thematic conflicts-between the state and the militants, between Damini and a bunch of criminals-is secondary to the more important resolution that tackles the dissonance of incommensurate worlds co-existing in the same narrative/national space.

Everything depends on fragment B. What exactly does it do? We have seen how it helps to embed the feudal family romance in a new syntagmatic order, a symbolic register in which the principal figure of the romance enters and becomes Subject. Thus in both these films, the imaginary relation between husband and wife as represented at the end of segment A is subjected to a disruption in order to break the imaginary fullness and force the subject to enter the Symbolic network, where a final resolution will have to be achieved. This precise allegory of real subsumption has, however, proposed at the very beginning a solution to the disruption that it will enforce. The fragment B, as noted above, brings to the fore the question of narrative enunciation. Indeed, in a field (of popular cinema) where the enunciative function was non-existent as a problem, the wilful juxtaposition of fB and A abruptly produces the problem. In the process, it also posits an enunciator, invisible but not insignificant. The fragment that menaces the pastoral segment thus also contains the supreme ideological reassurance: that there is an Other who directs the unfolding of the new order. Not just the director, Santoshi or Mani ratnam; nor even the efficient army which captures the terrorist in Roja's fB or the benign doctor of Damini but one for whom they are all surrogates: the Other in whom we trust when we trust in capitalism.

It would be premature to say that a new popular film aesthetic is signalled by the work of ideological reform that these films manifest. Nevertheless, one can speculate on the significance of the strategic deployment of form, the struggle waged, within the framework of the text for enunciative pre-eminence: the imperative for this struggle arises from the ambition to occupy the same place that is now occupied by an older dominant form. In this effort, these films may deploy the resources of alternative/middle cinema, but they aspire, not to take the place of the alternative, but to conquer the larger market.

For a more comprehensive picture of the nature of ongoing transformations to emerge, we will need to examine several other dimensions of the process, such as the emergence of culture corporations, signs of monopolistic tendencies, the new bid by Hollywood to expand its market beyond Anglophone frontiers, etc. (Of these one of the most visible, and for speculations about the future of narrative film form, extremely important dimensions is that which concerns the film song as a sub-commodity. In this segment of the cultural market, the emergent(· of music video as an autonomous form, supported by a vast televisual system that is still expanding and experimenting with old and new materials and formats, can be expected to challenge the narrative film's role as the pre-eminent host of musical spectacle, forcing it towards new experiments as a means of survival.) This process can be defined as constituting a re-commodification, or re-invention of the cultural commodity.

Until these processes are clarified, we can only speculate on the significance of stray events like the coincidence of a formal structure in the two films we have chosen for analysis. One speculative proposition of this essay is that the formal structure of these texts is a trace of the work of the 'political unconscious'. In the moment of arrival of real subsumption (that we are living through), capital is breaking out of the impasse of the ruling coalition, emerging into complete dominance. It is no longer necessary to artificially prolong the life of 'tradition', that alleged entity which was modernity's own invention, its preferred rendering of the adversary's profile. The ideology of formal subsumption, which insisted on the difference between the modern and the traditional, and the need to protect that difference, resulted in the protection given to the feudal family romance as the appropriate form of entertainment for the masses. This difference and the apparatuses that are meant to preserve it are no longer sustainable. While the ideologues of formal subsumption stubbornly cling to their superannuated posts, the remaking of Indian ideology goes on apace.

It would nevertheless be a mistake to see these films as simply reflecting the changes that are under way, of being superstructural representations of what is happening in reality. These texts are works of ideology, not mirrors of reality. The changing realities are, no doubt, one of the conditions that make these films possible and necessary, not in order to reflect these conditions, but to construct ideological resolutions for the contradictions that accompany these changes.

_______________________________________________

^{[40] Another significant trend has been discussed in Dhareshwar and Niranjana
(JAI 1996)}

^{[41] See Niranjana (1994), Chakravarthy and Pandian (1994), Bharucha (1994), and
Vasudevan (1994).}

^{[42] See Pathak and Sundar Hajan (1989) for a discussion of the state-within-the state as a structural feature of modern India.}

^{[43] See Ravichandram (1997) for a discussion of this genre, known in the industry
as 'nativity films'.}

_______________________________________________

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