Vijay Mishra,
Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire.
Routledge, New York and London, 2002.
ISBN: 0415930146
320pp
Au$55 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Routledge)

Indian cinema is becoming incorporated into the global culture of the West. Not only is there an arthouse following for the occasional Indian film like Monsoon Wedding (India/USA/France/Italy 2001) or films of the Indian diaspora such as East is East (UK 1999), but distinctive elements of Indian cinema can now feature strongly in such a popular success as Moulin Rouge (USA/Australia 2001). A certain cult following in Australia for Indian cinema is manifested in events such as the Bollywood in Bondi festival of 2002, while for its part, the Indian film industry returns the compliment by using locations in Australia as exotic background settings for a number of recent films.

The appeal of Indian cinema for Westerners seems to lie in the sheer otherness of its cinematic codes – the melodramatic narrative, the song and dance routines, costume and mise-en-scène. Yet not without a certain condescension: Indian cinema is seen as a camp diversion, a droll mutation of cinema form, not to be taken seriously. The tortured pun which has become the hackneyed epithet by which it is now known says it all: “Bollywood”.

Yet in spite of its main title, it is difficult to imagine a book which treats its subject with more seriousness, nor more respect, affection, and erudition, than this one. Vijay Mishra brings together both his personal involvement with Indian cinema, having grown up with it as his cultural patrimony in Fiji, and his scholarly training as a literary critic. He is thus not only well-placed to explore and explain Indian film as a form of cultural expression, for example in his analysis of filmic manifestations of the tenets of Hinduism, but also to utilize the conceptual apparatus of European film criticism to do so. He thus has produced an important contribution to the study of what he calls “the preeminent art from of modern India”, which, for all its cultural dominance and massive output, “shows critical or scholarly investment inversely proportional to its size” (xviii). He notes, incidentally, that in spite of its North Indian, Hindi-speaking, male orientation, the commercial cinema of Bombay that is called Bollywood is virtually synonymous with ‘Indian cinema’ as a whole, not only for its being the model for the popular regional cinemas, but also for its elaboration of transcendent myths of national unity and belongingness at the level of a “pan-Indian popular culture”.

Mishra has regard to both the political economy of the Indian cinema, as well as its textual features and reception amongst audiences. He sees it as a genre which conveys aesthetically the aspirations of the nation-state, and which has invoked pan-Indian religious epics and folk narratives to affirm, however ambivalently, the ideological polarities of both modernity and tradition. However, while he draws upon the whole corpus of film criticism stemming from Cahiers du cinéma and Screen, the strength of his approach is in its detailed readings of particular films, rather than in any theoretical regime brought to bear on them.

He begins with explaining the continuities of Indian cinema with older cultural forms, notably the character types and spiritual principles found in the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics, as well as the legacy of Parsi theatre and the British proscenium, and the painting of Ravi Varma. He then traces the emergence of the Indian cinema through the key works of various directors, beginning with the founding father, Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913.

Like other genres in popular culture around the world, the Indian film is characterised by its melodramatic narrative form. Mishra reminds us that a ‘melodrama’ originally meant a theatrical performance with song and music, and the genre has certainly been true to its origins in that regard. He presents a chapter on the “Melodramatic staging” of the Mahabharata, including Peter Brook’s stage and television versions of it, and the sub-genre of the “Indian gothic”. Mehboob Khan’s 1957 epic Mother India is given a chapter to itself, giving rein to an analysis of the title role of the woman actor Nargis, especially within the “deep structure” of the discourses of gender and nationhood which Mishra finds in the film, but also in the ideological appropriation of Nargis’s iconic status by Indira Gandhi.

European auteur theory provides the framework for a further chapter on director-stars Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, respectively for their “quite explicit manipulation of the spectator as voyeur”and “self-conscious aestheticizing of the Bombay romance” (122). The star system of Indian cinema is then examined in a chapter on Amitabh Bachchan, the dominant figure of the 1970s and 1980s, who has enjoyed a recent return to popularity as host of the Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire” on cable television. Here, Mishra draws on British film theorists Dyer and Ellis, and the idea of the actor as a “parallel text” to the narrative. Bombay cinema stars have modelled themselves on those of Hollywood, from Charlie Chaplin to Elvis Presley, Mishra notes, but concentrates on characteristically Indian vehicles of starmaking such as the fanzine.

The methodology of segmentation is the major feature of the next chapter, which Mishra applies to the use of raga music in Baiju Bawra (India 1952), and narrative rhythm in Amar Akbar Anthony (India 1977). He also considers the case of Lata Mangeshkar, who defined the sound of the female voice in popular film music for over fifty years.

The last two chapters are more sociological than textual in orientation, dealing respectively with Hindu fundamentalism and cultural globalisation. Mishra takes the view that secular nationalist history has repressed the barbaric excesses of partition, in the same process as nationalist discourse has invoked the myth of Rama in times of crisis, such as the Hindu fundamentalists’ destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) at Ayodhya in 1992. Reminiscent of the epigram from Baiju Bawra (“what is history but legend agreed upon?” 161), Mishra argues that the cinema has become complicit in the need for a redemptive history.

Finally, Mishra turns to what Bombay cinema means for the estimated eleven million Indians who live outside of India, formed by both the colonial and postcolonial diasporas. Rather than in “temples of desire”, these audiences consume films on video and via satellite and cable television. Diasporic consciousness has become incorporated into Indian cinema, Mishra concludes, but once again, in a mythological distortion: “the diaspora becomes sites of permissible (but controlled) transgression while the homeland is the crucible of timeless dharmik virtues” (267).

John Sinclair,
Victoria University of Technology, Australia.

Created on: Friday, 27 June 2003 | Last Updated: Friday, 27 June 2003