A conversation about an essay on future South Asia in Seminar 632, April 201

Ahmed Asif, Manan

Punathambekar, Aswin

Chopra, Rohit

English

HONKAVAARA, IRMA

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Pietarilainen teksti venäläisessä kirjallisuudessa ja Anna Ahmatovan tuotannossa

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S E M I N A R  6 3 2  –  A p r i l  2 0 1 22A conversationA conversation about an essay between three aca-demics of South Asia – Manan Ahmed, who grewup in Lahore, Doha and Chicago; Rohit Chopra,who grew up in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay; andAswin Punathambekar, who grew up in Madras andBangalore. They belong to varied casts, nations,geographies. They were all in diasporic NorthAmerica.*   *   *From: Rohit ChopraSubject: Re:To: Aswin PunathambekarDear AswinHope you’re doing well and your summer is going well!I was wondering if I could bother you with a request,and would be most grateful for any suggestions. Myfriend Manan Ahmed (who also runs the superb blogChapati Mystery) wanted suggestions about journalarticles on bollywood as a language across south asia– whether in its audience or in its composition – Cin-ema creating a community type of work. I have sug-gested your book and some other readings but thoughtI would take your guidance as an expert. Any sugges-tions would be very welcome.Rohit Chopra*   *   *From: Aswin PunathambekarSubject: Re:To: Rohit ChopraDear Rohit,It’s good to hear from you.Re Manan Ahmed’s query, I’m afraid there isn’tmuch by way of good Ethnographies. In terms of thefilms themselves, Vijay Mishra’s work comes to mind(his book, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire,and an overview essay titled ‘Bollywood Cinema:A Critical Genealogy’). I’ve attached the article.When it comes to thinking about Bombaycinema across South Asia, I like some of Ashis Nandy’swritings (a few throwaway lines, actually, in someessays (like the bit about a hijacker singing a filmsong, in ‘The discreet charms of Indian terrorism’).And there are some interesting ideas in an interviewhe did with Chris Pinney (attached). Then there is anessay by Phil Lutgendorf (‘Is there an Indian way offilmmaking?’), which may be of interest if he’s think-ing about this in terms of aesthetics (I’ve attached thisas well).In terms of cinema creating a community, workon fandom is one way to go. You can tell him to look upS.V. Srinivas’ work on Telugu cinema and fan cultures(he has a book on Chiranjeevi). And I’ve written anessay that goes beyond the fandom-south Indianpolitics link (on Rahman, it’s in the Global Bollywoodanthology).I’m not sure if any of this is helpful. If youcould ask him to say a bit more on what he’s lookingfor, perhaps I can come up with better suggestions.Also, academic writing aside, it might be worth lookingat films themselves (I am reminded of a scene in KabulExpress when everyone breaks out into a film song –the Indian journalists, the Pakistani taxi driver, and theterrorist figure).best, Aswin*   *   *From: Rohit ChopraSubject: Suggestions from Aswin and articles onBollywoodTo: Manan AhmedCc: Aswin Punathambekar* The essay was completed in due time.3S E M I N A R  6 3 2  –  A p r i l  2 0 1 2Dear MananFurther to my earlier email, here is Aswin’s mailand some articles. Feel free to email him ataswinp@umich.edu for more suggestions as hementions below. He’s the nicest guy and both of youwill get along fabulously and will have much to discuss.CheersRohitAttached: Vijay Mishra: ‘Bollywood Cinema: A Criti-cal Genealogy’, Chirstopher Pinney: ‘Hindi Cinema andHalf-Forgotten Dialects: An Interview with AshisNandy’, Philip Lutegendorf, ‘Is there an Indian Wayof Filmmaking?’*   *   *From: Manan AhmedSubject: Re: Suggestions from Aswin and articles onBollywoodTo: Rohit ChopraCc: Aswin PunathambekarDear Aswin, Rohit,Thank you so much for these insights and the articles.So very helpful. Aswin, it is really funny that you quotedthe Kabul Express scene since it lies at the root of myquestion. Both of you might have heard about the con-troversy banning Tere Bin Laden in Pakistan and theresulting editorials written all across the Pakistanimediascape decrying censorship and ham-headednessof Pakistani state – including tweets by the Governorand CM of Punjab showing grave concern and regretabout an Indian movie getting banned in Pakistan.We have come a long way.The impetus for my writing a shortish piece is thatI have been asked to imagine a future for South Asiafrom a cultural perspective. I wanted to tease out thetask of Bollywood as constituting a public across SouthAsia. This isn’t necessarily analogous to Bombaycinema across Tamil or Kannada publics within India,either. Pakistan’s film industry is largely moribund –though the art continues in other forms. So, in a wayBollywood operates in a vacuum across Pakistan,Afghanistan (to a lesser extent across Sri Lanka,Nepal, Bangladesh, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey). I wantto see how does it enable the creation of new culturalreferents, provide a common vocabulary, and most cru-cially, maintain long-standing historical and culturalthematics within living memory.Songs, drawing on the Ghazal form, of course, butI am also looking at historical romances such as JodhaAkbar which place in the past working models ofcohabitation. But I am not speaking merely of syncreticmodels – for my purpose Mission Kashmir would bejust as valuable a reading as Jodha Akbar since it alsoshowcases the capacity to imagine the Other – how-ever demonically. My sense is that it is not the specif-ics of what the public imagines but that they imagineat all. Not precisely intuitive here, maybe, but my gistis that the nationalist discourses in Asia have workedhard to erase all consciousness of mutuality or differ-ence for decades and it is to realms such as Bollywoodthat we need to turn to, in order to perceive perception.I think back to the movies of the 40-60s and my motherlistening to Doordarshan radio in our kitchen in Lahore(we were close enough to the border to catch a signal)and singing along to Sahir and Majrooh, etc.All this is rambling – but thank you so muchfor the articles and I will read them quickly and thinkthrough this more.cheers,Manan*   *   *From: Aswin PunathambekarSubject: Re: Re: Suggestions from Aswin and articleson BollywoodTo: Manan AhmedCc: Rohit ChopraDear Manan,Glad to play a part in what sounds like a very interest-ing experiment! It’s easy enough for anyone to look toBombay cinema when thinking about South Asia, butvery difficult to come up with convincing explanationsas to why. And I think you’re on to something veryinteresting.I agree with your argument re films like JodhaAkbar and Mission Kashmir. And I’m really interestedin hearing more about your point that it’s not the ‘spe-cifics of what the public imagines but that they imagineat all.’ I’ve been chatting with Rohit about somethingsimilar but in relation to the work that reality televisionsometimes does in spaces like northeast India. Whenwe think about the implications of a ‘public’ that comestogether around a contestant on a show, it’s not abouthow long it lasts or whether it reshapes long-standingconflicts. At one level, it’s about the struggle for theordinary – to be able to imagine coming together as a‘public’ in the first instance. I feel we, at least mediastudies folks, don’t take this aspect seriously enough.S E M I N A R  6 3 2  –  A p r i l  2 0 1 24And hearing about your mother listening to AllIndia Radio/Doordarshan (and I’d guess Radio Ceylonas well? Ameen Sayani and Binaca Geet Mala?) andsinging along raises some very interesting questionsabout *how* a ‘South Asian public’ coheres aroundBombay cinema.So in addition to issues of cultural referents andlong-standing historical and cultural thematics thatyou’ve mentioned, I would also make a case for tech-nology – all the way from radio sets equipped to receiveshortwave signals to VCRs to current pirate networksand a range of online spaces.I’d even go so far as to say that until recently (the’70s, say), we could have traced Bombay cinema’sinfluence at an oceanic scale and not just the subconti-nent. Radio Ceylon’s film music programmes (producedin Bombay, flown to Colombo) were broadcast onshortwave and reached audiences across South Asiaand as far as parts of east Africa and southeast Asia.How wonderful it must have been to listen to Sayanireading a letter from someone in Madras followed byone from Jhumri Tilaiya followed by one from Nairobi!Let me know if this sounds interesting – I can send youa transcript of an interview I did with Sayani recently.Contemporary pirate networks that enable Bom-bay cinema’s cross-border flows are all the moreinteresting now given the Indian state and ‘corporate’Bollywood’s (with help from LA) struggles to imposestrictly national boundaries on media flows.best,Aswin*   *   *From: Manan AhmedSubject: Re: Re: Re: Suggestions from Aswin and arti-cles on BollywoodTo: Aswin PunathambekarCc: Rohit ChopraAswin,Thank you for raising the technology issue, since it isalso something very central to how I am constructingthe piece. However, I did not think of the radio/shortwave in that regard. Man, maybe you shouldco-write this piece with me. Since we are so on the samewavelength. Ahem. Please do send me the Sayani tran-script, I would love to read it for all sorts of reasons.The story of my Mom’s love affair w/AIR is actuallyweirder still. In 1974, we all moved to Doha Qatar formy Dad’s engineering gig. Doha, back then, was basi-cally a tent-city, and my parents (young couple barely5 years into marriage) made friends within the largerDesi diaspora. Their closest friends were this couplefrom Bombay who held weekly film screenings in theirhouse. First on projectors/reel and then bootleggedVCR tapes (movies were banned in Doha). So therewas a healthy ‘illegal’ traffic across Sri Lankan, Indian,Pakistani families of Betamax and VHS videos.m*   *   *From: Rohit ChopraSubject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Suggestions from Aswin andarticles on BollywoodTo: Aswin PunathambekarCc: Manan AhmedLovely discussion. I’d say there’s a book here aboutthe cultural memories of consuming Hindi cinema. Forme the imaginary of Ceylon has a life of its own beyondSri Lanka, and while Binaca became Cibaca, BinacaGeet Mala is forever…CheersRohit*   *   *From: Aswin PunathambekarSubject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Suggestions from Aswinand articles on BollywoodTo: Rohit ChopraCc: Manan AhmedRohit – agreed. There really is a book waiting to be writ-ten. The story about film screenings that Manan hasabout desi life in Doha is very similar to stories I’ve re-corded from families in North America (in fact, one ofthese families used to get prints from India, circulatethem across north America, and they even began or-ganizing film star tours).And Manan – very kind of you to suggest co-writ-ing. But to be honest, I’m not sure I’ll be able to addmuch to what you’ve already outlined. Do send me thepiece when you have a draft done, and I’ll let you knowif I have more/anything new to say. Would that work?And here are 2 pieces – one is the transcript of aconversation with Sayani, and the other is my essayabout Bombay cinema & broadcasting that’s going tobe published in a journal called Bioscope: South AsianScreen Studies.5S E M I N A R  6 3 2  –  A p r i l  2 0 1 2cheers,aswin*   *   *From: Aswin PunathambekarSubject: one more thing (on film music)To: Manan AhmedCc: Rohit ChopraI’ve been thinking about the song sequence in KabulExpress that we were talking about, and can’t help won-dering about the song they pick – main zindagi kasaath nibhata chala gaya. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sagi0o-d7XUIt’s a brilliant choice, given the setting, and seemsall the more appropriate when Imran Khan Afridi be-gins singing. What kind of affect does it produce? Doesit remind us to think about the ordinary and pleasurablein the face of intractable conflicts? Of just going on withlife as it unfolds?And here, I’m also reminded of Lalitha Gopalan’snotion of Indian cinema being a of interruptions, musicbeing one element. Do moments like the one in KabulExpress then interrupt the story to take us onto an ethi-cal plateau of sorts where the two Indian journos, theAfghan driver, the Pakistani soldier, and viewers cansuspend doubts and suspicions and be reminded ofshared experiences?This is the ‘inexpressible dimension of experi-ence’ that Bhrigu Singh talks about while recalling hismother singing aa chal ke tujhe, main leke chalun inan ambulance taking her husband’s body from the hos-pital to the ghat. (http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525/525%20the%20problem.htm)I thought you’d find his essay interesting and useful.cheers,Aswin*   *   *From: Manan AhmedSubject: Re: one more thing (on film music)To: Aswin PunathambekarCc: Rohit ChopraBeautifully put Aswin. I too read the Singh essay re-cently and was stuck with that deeper relationship be-tween the cinematic and the social. One that I think isprofoundly ‘lifelong’, to use a rather clumsy phrase. Thatis, it is the viewer/listeners engagement with the mo-tifs, the sounds, the looks, the dialogues, the lyrics of(shall we say) urdu/hindi cinema across the time/spaceof 1947 onwards that writes a very different type of his-tory of the subcontinent than one visible through battlescars of 48, 65, 71, so on. I think there is a generationalityto this, surely – where everyday poetics is both createdand disseminated across a broadly varied ethno-linguis-tic terrain. So, to imagine a pakhtun-khwa conversantin Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics (through Dev Anand, ofcourse) is to recognize that there already exists a cul-tural space where such a translation can happen effort-lessly. And the creation of that terrain, since it is not inthe hands of ‘the state’ is the work of communalmemory aka ‘constituting a public’. (?)The brief with a political or strategic lens on SouthAsia in the last 60 years is that it conflates high politicsfor everyday life. And it restricts the latter to theformer’s narrow imagination. Clearly, the work of thevarious states in demonizing the other is well-docu-mented through these decades (not just Hindu-Muslimbut ethnically Pakhtun- Sindhi – Punjabi – Mohajir etc)resulted in bloodshed across these geographies. YET,in every bus driven by every Pashto speaker in Lahore,you could always count on M. Rafi to come on afterEssa Khailwi. Always. In Lahore, in fact, the illicit cin-ema audience (of both Bombay cinema and ‘blue films’)were the day labourers – comprised of Afghans,Pakhtuns, and southern Punjabis. What I find notableis that the ‘translation’ in practice is so little noted intheory. I mean the translation of hindi/urdu idioms out-wards into punjabi/pashto which is facilitated preciselybecause the idioms are couched in cultural symbols/communal stories that are extremely legible to all view-ers. Can I say that there is a particularly South Asianimagination of Love, of Jealousy, of male friendship, ofpratfalls and one that we can trace back to the folk ep-ics of (at the least) seventeenth century.yeah?mPs. Also, Hum Dono is The Return of MartinGuerre before The Return of Martin Guerre!*   *   *From: Rohit ChopraSubject: Re: Re: one more thing (on film music)To: Aswin PunathambekarCc: Manan AhmedWonderful conversation, sparking off so many ideas andthoughts. You’ll should post this thread on your respec-S E M I N A R  6 3 2  –  A p r i l  2 0 1 26tive blogs. I was watching the song ‘Sandese aate hain’from Border this morning on ‘Namaste America’, ashow about Bollywood on San Francisco public TV, andI started thinking about the Tim O’Brien collection ofVietnam stories The Things They Carried. The memo-ries of-– and around – the act of viewing films are re-ally a lens through which one apprehends so much,without even consciously thinking of it.Some twenty years ago, the writer AmitChaudhuri had visited St. Xavier’s College Bombaywhere I was a first year undergrad. He made a remarkabout R.K. Narayan saying that we did not possess anadequate critical vocabulary to appreciate his work. I hadoften thought that the same argument might be appliedto Hindi cinema for much of the ’90s, barring a fewworks, but in the last decade a supple, rich theoreticalapparatus to talk about Hindi cinema has been takingshape. Right now is a particularly exciting moment.It is remarkable, the way communities suddenlymaterialize around a shared appreciation for Hindi filmsand music. I have, online and in person, just had to men-tion being a Kishore Kumar fan, and have discovereda common world of memories and connections withvarious people.BestRohit*   *   *From: Aswin PunathambekarSubject: Re: Re: Re: one more thing (on film music)To: Manan AhmedCc: Rohit ChopraYes!Can’t wait to read the essay!And while I’m sure you can come up with count-less other examples, your point that there already ex-ists a cultural space for this exchange and that we cantrace the south asian-ness of imaginations of mohabbat,yaari, etc. to the 17th century reminded me of FarinaMir’s book on punjabi qissa that just came out (The So-cial Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in Brit-ish Colonial Punjab).Hir-Ranjha FTW!And oh, here’s another YouTube clip (not to takeus farther afield, but you’ve got to see these Moroccanfans of John Abraham): http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=13BIy16Y-VU&feature=player_embeddedcheers,Aswin

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