The problem

THIS issue of Seminar attempts to explore the question of cinema and what might be termed the historical imagination. Being a publicly available archive, and publicly accessed structure of affect, cinema is in some ways the largest and most comprehensive interpretative document of the twentieth century. As a new technological form of recording the present, cinema emerged, from its earliest years, as a means of documenting history in the making. In India, like in other colonies, the arrival of cinema was part of a cluster of larger attendant transformations in the wake of colonial modernity’s transformations of the public sphere. By 1910, an indigenous film industry had emerged, and by 1920, most major cities could boast of a cinema theatre.

The ubiquitous public presence of cinema, however, is belied by the paucity of critical writing on cinema. This is not to say that writing on cinema, and on films in India, does not exist. Rather, that cinema as an object of serious critical or scholarly reflection has mostly been confined to the, by now established, discipline of film studies. As a nation that loves films there is also a huge range of writing on cinema which ranges from journalistic accounts, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of important actors, lyricists and directors, to film criticism, industry journals, reports on the state of the industry in the press, and so on. However, there has been surprisingly little notice taken of cinema itself as a possible resource to re-imagine the writing of Indian history.

The focus of this issue is on the decade and a half just prior to, and after independence (i.e., the late ’30s to end ’50s), by all accounts a turbulent time, which straddles the pre-colonial and post-colonial moment in the making of a new nation. Political developments of the time – the post-war restructuring of the economic sphere, the forging of a ‘national’ territorial unit and the push towards a homogenizing ‘national’ culture, partition and the linguistic reorganization of states – are reflected in a concomitant restructuring of film industries across the country.

This period saw the decline of the existing studio system in Bombay, the coalescing of production facilities and the emergence of the main Presidency towns of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras as centres of film production, the emergence of all-India distribution chains, the growth of regional film journals addressing particular audience configurations and, as far as the Bombay film industry was concerned, a migration of film personnel between the new nations of India and Pakistan.

Certainly there were significant regional variations in this process, and so it would be difficult to speak of a unified or singular history of the film industry in India. This begs the question of whether histories of cultural formations and material practices, such as cinema, enable us to re-imagine the writing of Indian history itself. For instance, today, it is almost impossible to think of the contemporary outside of the media. Television, the internet, advertisements, cheap digital technologies of copying and circulation, DVDs, VCDs, CD and cassette culture, all come together to produce a dense media ecology, heralding the entry of branded commodity capitalism and the glitter of new commodity spaces.

With the advent of globalization, cities in India have seen the emergence of new consumption spaces such as shopping arcades, nightclubs and pubs, hotels and restaurants, and retail spaces dedicated to shopping and leisure. The contemporary city is characterized by a new visual landscape marked by the proliferation of visual signage, an increasingly dense media landscape composed of the internet, 24 hour news television, satellite TV, and a massive expansion of telecommunications. Neon lights, electronic advertisement hoardings and billboards herald the new commodity economy, and multinational retail franchises make incursions into primarily neighbourhood market dominated spaces.

Confronted with an increasingly differentiated and dense urban ecology constituted by new spaces of the production and circulation of media ware, as also an increasing visualization of the coordinates of everyday life, we have been forced to develop new ways of thinking and encountering this moment. The new media do not simply represent, but determine and constitute the fabric of everyday life, and this recognition has meant a search for vocabularies through which to comprehend and describe the mediatized nature of our contemporary realities.

At moments such as this, as chroniclers of the contemporary, we need to radically revise our understandings of what constitute our ‘sources’. If the state archive and conventional historical sources seem impoverished when confronted with the bewildering array of forms, sites, spaces and circuits through which information travels, and to which one must turn when attempting to navigate the current landscape, how then can we fashion new ways of looking at the ‘past’? What does this say both about how we think of the contemporary, as well as our received wisdom about how we have been accustomed to approaching the past? To state more sharply, what would it mean to do a history refracted through the contemporary?

A major concern in this issue is to see how this commonsensical recognition of the social effects of the media in the contemporary might impel a rethink of the place of cinema at an earlier moment of historical transformation. Could it serve to open up the manner of situating studies of cinema and cultural artifacts within historical writing, as well reformulate what are considered to be valid historical ‘sources’ in studies of ‘Indian’ history? There are two sets of issues at play when thinking of cinema as a possible archive. The first have to do with thinking of cinema as a set of discursive formations, as texts/documents. Here, by tracing continuities and ruptures across issues of form, language, representational formats and narrative structures, it is possible to deploy cinema as a resource that distills or comments on (in the form of themes, plots and narrative devices) particular issues of a time.

Thus the decline of a particular genre of Bombay cinema consisting of fantasy films set in fictive Orientalist settings derived from subcontinental story traditions such as the Arabian Nights and the Amir Hamza story cycles, which dominated the Bombay film industry in the ’30s, only to be replaced by the social family melodrama by the mid-1940s, gestures towards a larger shift in the polity – namely the decline of an Islamicate cultural milieu in which this production was located.

The other set of issues have to do with thinking of what we might call the ‘social life’ of cinema – of cinema as a set of spectatorial sites/contexts, industrial practices, technology and distribution circuits – the exploration of which enable the writing of cultural and material histories. For instance, the coming of cinema theatres in colonial cities was part of a cluster of larger attendant transformations which in turn signalled wide-ranging transformations in social and political life. The attendant controversies over the location of theatres, debates on the status of cinema as a representational technology and conflicts over who the audiences of cinema were/could be, must thus be read as struggles over the definitions of modernity itself. In India, for instance, even as the entry of Parsi women actresses in the cinema was opposed by sections from within the community, Sabita Devi went on record exhorting women from ‘respectable backgrounds’ to join the industry, whereas in Nigeria, as Brian Larkin notes, even going to the cinema was taboo for respectable women. These contradictory attitudes to the cinema must be read as attempts to define, regulate, conserve and re-fashion bodies and selves in the face of the threats and promises of this new form.

By approaching cinema itself as a circulating form that emerges at the intersection of these two registers, i.e., at the level of texts and the level of industrial practices, viewing contexts and so on, it is possible to arrive at descriptions which lay out different trajectories of historical transformation, outside of chronologies of pre and post. The different essays in this issue approach the question of cinema and history from diverse vantage points. In doing so they move considerations of cinema away from an exclusive concern with narrative towards not only locating cinema as a set of representational codes, but also industrial practices and spectatorial contexts. Histories of form then, are equally considerations on the making of a historical moment in general. In this sense, a history of Indian cinema is simultaneously a meditation on the making and writing of ‘Indian’ history. Overall, this issue makes an argument for the inclusion of mass cultural media forms like the cinema in the study of South Asian modernity as much for engaging interdisciplinary methodologies when attempting to understand cinema.

AARTI SETHI