Mela: festival scenes in South Asian cinema

ABSTRACT

This article examines a recurrent film motif across a number of South Asian films, mostly called Mela. It also offers some observations on melas, actual and allegorical, as represented in films but often seeming to exceed their containment in context so as to say more about the conviviality of life, where this is at issue, where life is at a juncture in need of resolution within the cycle of becoming. The issues of violence, loss, national identity, politics of interpretation and repetition in ideology are canvassed. While the essay is focused upon Mela films themselves, and South Asian film more broadly, it has of course been important to note work by scholars such as M. Madhava Prasad, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Anjali Gera Roy, Tejaswini Niranjana, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the help of my students, some of whom are named below.

KEYWORDS:

• Festival
• South Asia
• film
• violence
• partition
• colonialism
• neoliberalism
• mela

Notes on contributor

John Hutnyk Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He is the author of several books including The Rumour of Calcutta (1996), Critique of Exotica (2000), Bad Marxism (2004) and Pantomime Terror (2014). Global South Asia on Screen will come out in 2018.

ORCID

John Hutnyk http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4826-8949

Notes

1 If male desire (naagor is male lover) and back and forth movement (dola) are resonant in the meaning of the Bangla word for Ferris wheel (nagardola, hat tip Abhijit Roy) then this film has an appropriate symbolic icon for a story so poignantly delaying gratification.

2 This is the theme of a future book and an initial effort to map the concerns is forthcoming in the chapter “Marx Reading India Sources” in Goswami (forthcoming).

3 The film is also a “remake” of sorts, and was originally going to be called Calcutta 90 (Mukhopadhyay 2009, 200) as a follow-up to the documentary-like film about the violent death of a Naxalite in Calcutta 71 (Sen 1971). The latter film was plundered for the newsreel footage shown in Mahaprithibi.

4 This again raises the ongoing cultural importance of Pakistan for Bollywood, since it cannot be disregarded that the economic interests of distributors can trump the ideological agendas of governments. Despite banning films, border controls, restrictions and so forth, Bollywood and especially the music of Bollywood, owes much to Lahore and Karachi from its earliest years, and beyond. Certainly the name Shah Rukh Khan might not have the same resonance if, as noted by Gera Roy (2015, 1), so many families hailing from Peshawar or Faisalabad – for example those of Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, the Bachchans – had not entered the movies.

5 I thank all those referred to in the text for their work, which has been so influential on how I view films. The most influential person in all this will have been Abhijit Roy, but he has expressed his embarrassment at my constant refrain of deserved praise. Here it is again. Thanks. The initial ideas for this paper were worked out in a class in Film Studies at Jadavpur University, and then developed with the fantastic support of my Bengali film studies course students at the Institute for Cultural Research, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu City, Taiwan in 2015.