Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1965318
A. Nandakumar
ABSTRACT Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popularity in the 1980s, this paper argues that ‘youth’ bears within itself the desire to transcend the gender barrier and fashion a shared sensibility and subjectivity that reaches its peak in the neoliberal moment, thus signifying a new metrosexual, even androgynous, subject who is able to speak for the aspiring global citizens of the region. Rahman signifies a break in the traditional, hegemonic imagination of South Indian masculinity that is rooted in the region, and instead stands for the new configuration of cosmopolitan youth that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the migration to the Persian Gulf and the inflow of money and consumer goods from there – a category of youth whose self-fashioning was inflected in a significant way by their consumption practices. Certain representational techniques also resulted in a queering or androgyny of the youthful figure that he personified, suggesting the liminality of gendered identity in youth. Apart from textual analyses of a selection of his films, I also draw on popular reportage around his stardom in the form of news reports and gossip columns published in the leading Malayalam film weekly, Naana, in the 1980s. While the former helps to outline the representational function of Rahman’s body in film narratives, the latter supplements this with data on how the ways in which his figure was imagined and received, both within the industry and among fans, contributes to fashioning a new youth subjectivity.
{"title":"The feminisation of youth: Rahman’s stardom in Malayalam cinema of the 1980s","authors":"A. Nandakumar","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1965318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1965318","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popularity in the 1980s, this paper argues that ‘youth’ bears within itself the desire to transcend the gender barrier and fashion a shared sensibility and subjectivity that reaches its peak in the neoliberal moment, thus signifying a new metrosexual, even androgynous, subject who is able to speak for the aspiring global citizens of the region. Rahman signifies a break in the traditional, hegemonic imagination of South Indian masculinity that is rooted in the region, and instead stands for the new configuration of cosmopolitan youth that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the migration to the Persian Gulf and the inflow of money and consumer goods from there – a category of youth whose self-fashioning was inflected in a significant way by their consumption practices. Certain representational techniques also resulted in a queering or androgyny of the youthful figure that he personified, suggesting the liminality of gendered identity in youth. Apart from textual analyses of a selection of his films, I also draw on popular reportage around his stardom in the form of news reports and gossip columns published in the leading Malayalam film weekly, Naana, in the 1980s. While the former helps to outline the representational function of Rahman’s body in film narratives, the latter supplements this with data on how the ways in which his figure was imagined and received, both within the industry and among fans, contributes to fashioning a new youth subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"289 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41352303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1965321
Sudhir Mahadevan
ABSTRACT Badnam Basti (Prem Kapoor, 1971) has a legendary reputation as a lost queer classic from India. The movie was located at the Arsenal Film Archive in Berlin in late 2019 and has been seen by a wider audience only a few times (all online). This essay offers a close analysis of the movie. I argue that Badnam Basti depicts a distinctly local and regional culture of North-Indian homosociality in which the movie’s same-sex relation is only one component of erotic and kinship ties that include prominent space for a female character and encompass the gamut of gender roles. As such it has a unique place in histories of South Asian queer cinema. Stylistically, the movie departs from Hindi commercial cinema as well as the long take/long shot oriented, (neo-)realist-influenced Indian art cinema, forging a challenging film style with an allegiance to Hindi literary modernism, and to the ‘new wave’ experiments of its time. I conclude that Badman Basti invites the prospect of a new research agenda centered around several Hindi films released between 1969 and 1971, at the time referred in shorthand in film criticism simply as the ‘new cinema’. These films included those made with a commercial intent as well as those now canonized in histories of the Indian new wave as formally innovative Together these films constitute an interstitial moment in Hindi cinema criticism and practice when definitions of art, commercial and new wave cinema, were all in flux.
{"title":"Badnam Basti (1971): A small-town milieu in a ‘new cinema’ style","authors":"Sudhir Mahadevan","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1965321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1965321","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Badnam Basti (Prem Kapoor, 1971) has a legendary reputation as a lost queer classic from India. The movie was located at the Arsenal Film Archive in Berlin in late 2019 and has been seen by a wider audience only a few times (all online). This essay offers a close analysis of the movie. I argue that Badnam Basti depicts a distinctly local and regional culture of North-Indian homosociality in which the movie’s same-sex relation is only one component of erotic and kinship ties that include prominent space for a female character and encompass the gamut of gender roles. As such it has a unique place in histories of South Asian queer cinema. Stylistically, the movie departs from Hindi commercial cinema as well as the long take/long shot oriented, (neo-)realist-influenced Indian art cinema, forging a challenging film style with an allegiance to Hindi literary modernism, and to the ‘new wave’ experiments of its time. I conclude that Badman Basti invites the prospect of a new research agenda centered around several Hindi films released between 1969 and 1971, at the time referred in shorthand in film criticism simply as the ‘new cinema’. These films included those made with a commercial intent as well as those now canonized in histories of the Indian new wave as formally innovative Together these films constitute an interstitial moment in Hindi cinema criticism and practice when definitions of art, commercial and new wave cinema, were all in flux.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"315 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42345934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1965312
Debashrita Dey, P. Tripathi
ABSTRACT For several decades now, the incidental category of ‘woman’ has been systematically analysed through a pluralistic lens where race, class, and sexuality have cohesively positioned women as discursive subjects. Yet, age persists to be one such integral variable, which women across all cultures strive to cope with as it emerges as a potent threat to the Other’s subjective identity, her embodied experience and feminine desirability. In the Indian context, the body of an aging woman is usually situated within a contested and complex nexus, where senescence is a multi-layered experience often getting shaped by the dynamics of power. The old female selves find themselves reduced to a sheer condition of abjection and are often displaced from their former state of belonging and engulfed by the socially scripted embrace of denial. Indian cinematic discourses often represent the aged woman as a pathologised body surfacing as familial/societal burden, forcing us to address the double marginalization associated with gender and age. This paper analyses how in two Bengali films- Pather Panchali (1955) and Sonar Pahar (2018), the directors focus on the social predicament of sexageism and subvert the dominant narratives treating feminine age as a ‘crisis’. The select films attempt to deconstruct the aged ‘problem body’ through an alternative lens and refigure it as an agentic identity with an embodied presence.
{"title":"Reconceptualising the (in) visible aging self of women in select Bengali films","authors":"Debashrita Dey, P. Tripathi","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1965312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1965312","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT For several decades now, the incidental category of ‘woman’ has been systematically analysed through a pluralistic lens where race, class, and sexuality have cohesively positioned women as discursive subjects. Yet, age persists to be one such integral variable, which women across all cultures strive to cope with as it emerges as a potent threat to the Other’s subjective identity, her embodied experience and feminine desirability. In the Indian context, the body of an aging woman is usually situated within a contested and complex nexus, where senescence is a multi-layered experience often getting shaped by the dynamics of power. The old female selves find themselves reduced to a sheer condition of abjection and are often displaced from their former state of belonging and engulfed by the socially scripted embrace of denial. Indian cinematic discourses often represent the aged woman as a pathologised body surfacing as familial/societal burden, forcing us to address the double marginalization associated with gender and age. This paper analyses how in two Bengali films- Pather Panchali (1955) and Sonar Pahar (2018), the directors focus on the social predicament of sexageism and subvert the dominant narratives treating feminine age as a ‘crisis’. The select films attempt to deconstruct the aged ‘problem body’ through an alternative lens and refigure it as an agentic identity with an embodied presence.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"261 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48221716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1965313
Vikas Pathe
ABSTRACT The foundation of the post-colonial development model was based on the concept of modernization of the socio-economic and political growth of third world countries. This development model also led to advanced communication technology in media such as print, radio, television, and cinema; also known as development communication. Cinema acts as a catalyst for the promotion of the concept of nation-building in third world countries. Since the development model ignored the voices of marginalized sections of the underdeveloped nations, cinema helped to portray the unheard voices. In the Indian context, the Hindi film Naya Daur (1957) as a voice of resistance posited a strong critic of the top-down approach of the development model. A critical reading of Naya Daur (1957) attempts to examine the narratives of development and the portrayal of development through industrialization and westernization as a part of nation-building. Since the film raises the question of development politics in the post-colonial Nehruvian era, the paper tries to examine the junctures of resistance against the development process and the nationalist narratives construed in the film. It attempts to analyze the characterization of resistance and struggles of the local villagers against mechanization. Thereby, it attempts to encapsulate the contesting ideas of development and nation-building and the role of cinema in development communication.
{"title":"Communication, development and Hindi Cinema: Reading of Naya Daur","authors":"Vikas Pathe","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1965313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1965313","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The foundation of the post-colonial development model was based on the concept of modernization of the socio-economic and political growth of third world countries. This development model also led to advanced communication technology in media such as print, radio, television, and cinema; also known as development communication. Cinema acts as a catalyst for the promotion of the concept of nation-building in third world countries. Since the development model ignored the voices of marginalized sections of the underdeveloped nations, cinema helped to portray the unheard voices. In the Indian context, the Hindi film Naya Daur (1957) as a voice of resistance posited a strong critic of the top-down approach of the development model. A critical reading of Naya Daur (1957) attempts to examine the narratives of development and the portrayal of development through industrialization and westernization as a part of nation-building. Since the film raises the question of development politics in the post-colonial Nehruvian era, the paper tries to examine the junctures of resistance against the development process and the nationalist narratives construed in the film. It attempts to analyze the characterization of resistance and struggles of the local villagers against mechanization. Thereby, it attempts to encapsulate the contesting ideas of development and nation-building and the role of cinema in development communication.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"277 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43737641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1965309
Sai Diwan
ABSTRACT The 2013 recriminalization of homosexuality in India after the Delhi High Court had read down the anti-sodomy law in 2009. The verdict cannot be simplistically seen as a backward move. To say that it moves the country backwards or that the country is going back in time because of the said step is to fall into the trap of heteronormative prioritization. The recriminalization of homosexuality has to be seen as a violent erasure and disabling of queer narrativization of time in India. This paper presents an analysis of Sudhanshu Saria’s film, Loev (2015) to examine how queer citizen-subjects navigate the politics of invisibilization and hyper-visibilization in post-2013 India. The paper proposes the lens of Probability to examine the queer experience of how ‘now’ is occupied differently by way of structures of ambiguity. Probability can be said to be the space of slippages where heteronormative performances are used to temporarily and repeatedly hoodwink society to make possible a queer ‘now’. The paper explores the concept of Probability in relation to temporality and visibility.
{"title":"Probability and queer expression in Sudhanshu Saria’s post-2013 Loev in India","authors":"Sai Diwan","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1965309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1965309","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 2013 recriminalization of homosexuality in India after the Delhi High Court had read down the anti-sodomy law in 2009. The verdict cannot be simplistically seen as a backward move. To say that it moves the country backwards or that the country is going back in time because of the said step is to fall into the trap of heteronormative prioritization. The recriminalization of homosexuality has to be seen as a violent erasure and disabling of queer narrativization of time in India. This paper presents an analysis of Sudhanshu Saria’s film, Loev (2015) to examine how queer citizen-subjects navigate the politics of invisibilization and hyper-visibilization in post-2013 India. The paper proposes the lens of Probability to examine the queer experience of how ‘now’ is occupied differently by way of structures of ambiguity. Probability can be said to be the space of slippages where heteronormative performances are used to temporarily and repeatedly hoodwink society to make possible a queer ‘now’. The paper explores the concept of Probability in relation to temporality and visibility.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"247 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44638161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1965320
Sreerupa Sengupta
ABSTRACT This article focuses on Pakistani director, Sabiha Sumar’s, debut film, Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters, 2003). The article argues that Sumar’s film, by screening the never-ending impacts of politically motivated ethno-religious and ethno-national disasters, like 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, shows that female sufferers of one such disaster become more vulnerable to additional trauma caused by future disasters having similar roots. An examination of the film reveals that politically motivated ethno-religious and ethno-national calamitous events like the partition and Islamization program of Zia regime are gendered. These events solidify the sufferers’ status as the inimical Other who need to be discarded/controlled for the wellbeing of the concerned community or nation to which they belong. Through a detailed analysis of the film, the article examines how women have to bear the maximum brunt of ethno-religious calamities that exploit their bodies as archives of violence by perennially damaging their sense of self. Instead of finding agency in voice, Sumar’s film shows superficiality of words in communicating acute trauma caused by politically galvanized ethno-religious disasters.
{"title":"Verbalizing silence: Disasters in Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (Sient Waters)","authors":"Sreerupa Sengupta","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1965320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1965320","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article focuses on Pakistani director, Sabiha Sumar’s, debut film, Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters, 2003). The article argues that Sumar’s film, by screening the never-ending impacts of politically motivated ethno-religious and ethno-national disasters, like 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, shows that female sufferers of one such disaster become more vulnerable to additional trauma caused by future disasters having similar roots. An examination of the film reveals that politically motivated ethno-religious and ethno-national calamitous events like the partition and Islamization program of Zia regime are gendered. These events solidify the sufferers’ status as the inimical Other who need to be discarded/controlled for the wellbeing of the concerned community or nation to which they belong. Through a detailed analysis of the film, the article examines how women have to bear the maximum brunt of ethno-religious calamities that exploit their bodies as archives of violence by perennially damaging their sense of self. Instead of finding agency in voice, Sumar’s film shows superficiality of words in communicating acute trauma caused by politically galvanized ethno-religious disasters.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"303 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48790058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-10DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1965514
E. Dawson Varughese
{"title":"‘Automatic guns singing death verses’ and Swachh Bharat rainbows: Layered messaging, cultural citizenship and public wall art on Maharshi Karve Road, Mumbai","authors":"E. Dawson Varughese","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1965514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1965514","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47049800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1940549
S. Chatterjee
ABSTRACT Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (dir. Shelly Chopra Dhar, 2019) is touted as the mainstream commercial venture that cemented Bollywood’s journey from creating queer homosocial and homoerotic moments on screen to representing a queer relationship between two women for the first time. This paper tries to understand how the film’s liberal messaging about queer acceptance and anti-discrimination, through the coming out narrative of its queer protagonist, is made possible through the embodiment of sanitized class and caste markers, how Indian queer femininity is encoded in the film and what its relationship with the heteronormative biological family reveals about the film’s messaging. It also tries to explore the figuration of Sweety, an upper-class feminine queer woman in small town Moga (in the North Indian state of Punjab), who is portrayed as the quintessentially ‘good’ queer woman. Even though Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga offers a queer visual and imaginative landscape, it limits itself by constructing discursive, narrative, and visual terrains where Sweety’s dissidence is deemed acceptable on grounds of her class privilege, her reverence for her family, her respectable femininity, and the embeddedness of her queer subjectivity in the family and culture. This paper interrogates the nature of queer representation in the film, how it tackles anxieties around acculturation, queer opposition to the nation-state and the visual and narrative means by which it domesticates queerness by sanitizing and inviting it into culture, family, nationalism and the nation-state.
摘要Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga（导演Shelly Chopra Dhar，2019）被吹捧为主流商业企业，巩固了宝莱坞从在屏幕上创造同性恋和同性恋时刻到首次代表两个女性之间的同性恋关系的历程。本文试图理解这部电影关于酷儿接受和反歧视的自由主义信息，通过其酷儿主人公的出柜叙事，是如何通过净化的阶级和种姓标记的体现而成为可能的，印度酷儿女性气质是如何在电影中被编码的，以及它与非规范生物家庭的关系揭示了电影的信息传递。它还试图探索斯威蒂的形象，她是印度北部旁遮普邦小镇莫加的一位上层女性酷儿女性，被描绘成典型的“好”酷儿女性。尽管Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga提供了一个酷儿的视觉和想象力景观，但它通过构建话语、叙事和视觉环境来限制自己，在这些环境中，Sweety的异见被认为是可以接受的，因为她的阶级特权、她对家庭的崇敬、她受人尊敬的女性气质，以及她酷儿主体性在家庭和文化中的嵌入。本文探讨了电影中酷儿形象的本质，它如何解决围绕文化适应的焦虑，酷儿对民族国家的反对，以及它通过净化和邀请酷儿进入文化、家庭、民族主义和民族国家来驯化酷儿的视觉和叙事手段。
{"title":"The ‘Good Indian Queer Woman’ and the Family: Politics of Normativity and Travails of (Queer) Representation","authors":"S. Chatterjee","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1940549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1940549","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (dir. Shelly Chopra Dhar, 2019) is touted as the mainstream commercial venture that cemented Bollywood’s journey from creating queer homosocial and homoerotic moments on screen to representing a queer relationship between two women for the first time. This paper tries to understand how the film’s liberal messaging about queer acceptance and anti-discrimination, through the coming out narrative of its queer protagonist, is made possible through the embodiment of sanitized class and caste markers, how Indian queer femininity is encoded in the film and what its relationship with the heteronormative biological family reveals about the film’s messaging. It also tries to explore the figuration of Sweety, an upper-class feminine queer woman in small town Moga (in the North Indian state of Punjab), who is portrayed as the quintessentially ‘good’ queer woman. Even though Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga offers a queer visual and imaginative landscape, it limits itself by constructing discursive, narrative, and visual terrains where Sweety’s dissidence is deemed acceptable on grounds of her class privilege, her reverence for her family, her respectable femininity, and the embeddedness of her queer subjectivity in the family and culture. This paper interrogates the nature of queer representation in the film, how it tackles anxieties around acculturation, queer opposition to the nation-state and the visual and narrative means by which it domesticates queerness by sanitizing and inviting it into culture, family, nationalism and the nation-state.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"177 - 192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14746689.2021.1940549","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43203893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1940546
A. Joshi
ABSTRACT The paper evaluates the use of the escape motif in Ritesh Batra’s 2019 film Photograph, with respect to its modernist tendencies of fragmented psyche, nostalgia for the past, and aesthetics. It studies the sense of increasing isolation within the protagonists of the story, Miloni and Rafi, and relates the same in the sociological context of the urban hub of Mumbai city. The identities of the characters are further analysed with respect to their socio-economic privilege in the society and the paper argues that the social conditioning of, and expectations from, the characters play an instrumental role in creating two different approaches to their aforementioned need for escapism. The longing for human connection, as represented in the setting and use of the meta-narrative technique in turning to old Bollywood films and music, is one of the prominent approaches seen within the characters and the film in coping with the modern escapism from their private and public selves.
{"title":"Lost in translation: Evaluating modern escapism in Ritesh Batra’s Photograph","authors":"A. Joshi","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2021.1940546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2021.1940546","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The paper evaluates the use of the escape motif in Ritesh Batra’s 2019 film Photograph, with respect to its modernist tendencies of fragmented psyche, nostalgia for the past, and aesthetics. It studies the sense of increasing isolation within the protagonists of the story, Miloni and Rafi, and relates the same in the sociological context of the urban hub of Mumbai city. The identities of the characters are further analysed with respect to their socio-economic privilege in the society and the paper argues that the social conditioning of, and expectations from, the characters play an instrumental role in creating two different approaches to their aforementioned need for escapism. The longing for human connection, as represented in the setting and use of the meta-narrative technique in turning to old Bollywood films and music, is one of the prominent approaches seen within the characters and the film in coping with the modern escapism from their private and public selves.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"119 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14746689.2021.1940546","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46536800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2021.1940552
J. Luther
ABSTRACT This paper critically contextualizes the open secret of Karan Johar’s sexuality as a key marketable commodity in the neoliberal framework of the ‘KJo’ brand. It examines the cultural legibility of the open secret of his sexuality. It argues that the juxtaposition between the ubiquity of his open secret and his maintained silence on identifying his sexuality serves as an incitement that enables a study of his role in incrementally making space for a depoliticized and individualized upper-class male same-sex sexuality. By mapping the textuality of his open secret in the culture industry surrounding the Hindi film industry, this paper offers a nuanced critique of the co-option of male same-sex sexuality by Karan Johar and its deployment as a gimmick.
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