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Abstract
This article provides a genealogical understanding of the tropes of ‘science’ and ‘technology’ as they currently operate within dominant melodramatic structures of ‘Bollywood’ cinema. In recent times, the entry of Hindi film in transnational markets has perhaps necessitated the upgrading or fresh minting of genres like the superhero film or the sci-fi film that were either low end or peripheral in Bombay cinema. These new films deal with inscriptions of science and technology in a manner remarkably different from both, a cautious and calibrated Nehruvian humanism of the ‘third way’ and a Gandhian anti-modern agrarianism. They develop a novel exhilarated syntax for the times – a new plane of language – by which signatures of an erstwhile alienating horizon of techno-scientific development can be advertised or informatized without obligation to contending grand narratives like that of tradition or modernity. In this auratic ecology of a new India-in-the-world, tradition can be seen to be bolstered with technology, while technology can be seen to be claimed by a unique Indian spirit and absolved of its otherwise profane status. This is how a turn of the millennium upper class, Brahminical nationalist elite seeks to present its life itself as artwork.
Notes
1. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has argued that top line Hindi cinema as such is only a part of an overall transnational culture industry called ‘Bollywood’. See Rajadhyaksha, ‘Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema’, 111–37. The latter ranges from star-studded entertainment shows held abroad, pastiche-like indices in western fashion, music, tourism, installation art, to cell phone ringtones. In an equally insightful article, Madhava Prasad has argued that proper name should be used to designate a body of films that privilege a ‘back to the roots’ NRI nostalgia, with the newly emerging urban middle class in India absorbing that as a part of its own self projection in the world. See also Prasad, ‘This thing called Bollywood’.
2. See http://www.india.com/movies/movies/the-juice-srks-ra-1_6028 (accessed January 13, 2010) and http://www.indiaglitz. com/channels/hindi/article/52926.html (accessed January 13, 2010).
3. The sci-fi and the superhero genres have been a part of Indian comic book and television culture for quite a while now. The list of Indian superheroes from Raj Comics include Doga, Parmanu, Super Commando Dhruva, Super Indian, Bheriya (Wolf Man) and Nagraj, with the last two having mythological origins. During the mid-1980s ‘moonlighting’ superhero comics featuring movie star Amitabh Bachchan and cricketer Sunil Gavaskar were published. On television, amongst numerous instances, one could recall the popular 1997 series Shaktimaan and the late-1990s show Captain Vyom.
4. All directed by Homi Wadia from Wadia Movietones.
5. On the stunt film and this period of transformation as a whole, see Bhaumik, Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936.
6. The number of foreign films released in India fell from 114 censored in 1972 to 38 in 1973 and 26 in 1974. See Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 26.
7. For a more detailed discussion, see Chapter 2 of my Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010.
8. Pinto Helen, 127.
9. See Basu, ‘Mantras of the Metropole’, 25.3.
10. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Punar Bishoye Punarbibechona’, 217–74.
11. See Chattopadhyay, ‘Dharmatattva’, 526.
12. Cited in Bandyopadhyay, Gopal-Rakhal Dwandhosamas, 219.
13. See the exchange in the section entitled ‘M. N. Saha’ in Ray et al., Scientist in Society, 86–154, especially M. N. Saha, ‘Rejoinder to Rejoinder: 4: It's All in the “Vedas” ’, 137–44.
14. For an insightful theorization of a new syntax of Hinduness that seeks to conflate prior binaries (for instance, the Indian game of Snakes and Ladders and Neoliberalism), see Manisha Basu, Fathers of a Stillborn Past.
15. See the ‘Spotlight’, Frontline, http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1907/19070940.htm (accessed August 27, 2007).
16. Murali Manohar Joshi, ‘Role of Science and Spirituality for World Peace’. Address of the Chief Guest at the inaugural session of the World Philosophers’ Meet, Geneva, August 18–21, 1996, http://www.here-now4u.de/ENG/role_of_science_and_spirituali.htm (accessed May 24, 2007).
17. Nanda, Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays, 9–10.
18. Yockney, ‘Somewhere in Time’, 26.
19. See Eco, ‘Myth of Superman’ in Diacritics 2.1.
20. See Kozloff ‘Superman as Savior’.
21. Basu ‘Hindutva and Informatic Modernization’.
22. Fredric Jameson makes a similar distinction in A Singular Modernity.
23. See Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction and Jameson Archaeologies of the Future.
24. Allesio and Langer, ‘Nationalism and Postcolonialism in Indian Science-fiction’, 220.
25. Ibid., 222–3.
26. A technological look into the future is of course not rare in Hollywood, nor is the mixing of science, myth, existentialism and popular religiosities drawn primarily from orientalist tendencies that accompanied the culture wars of the 1960s. However, the ‘Pre-Cogs’ – three genetically altered humans who can see into the future and predict crimes – in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (based on a short story by Philip K. Dick) are novelized after being proposed as mythic entities. The central thrust of the narrative lies in the splitting of the axiomatic unity of their predictions and in the larger suspicion that they might not be correct all the time. Rohit's computer on the other hand is marked by absolute certitude.