This essay documents the transnational circulation of Victorian domestic melodrama and its adaptation to Indian theatrical practice, through the example of The Colleen Bawn, one of Dion Boucicault’s most successful works. Using the historical South Asian newspaper archives, the study traces the introduction of melodrama and modern stagecraft into India via the Lewis Company, an enterprising Anglo-Australian family troupe. The drama’s performance history and reception are charted as it traveled from Calcutta to Simla and Bombay. Its subsequent translation and reworking in the Parsi theater, in the form of Bholi Jan, the Gujarati-language version authored by K.N. Kabraji, reveal the highly productive role of melo-drama in the South Asian environment. From melodrama developed the "social", a distinct genre centered on women, the family, and the tensions of modernity. Domestic melodrama’s shape and meaning were thus recast in the new location, leaving a legacy of great importance to the evolution of modern theater and cinema in Indian languages.
The release of Muktir Gaan in 1995 ended a long, politically induced drought in films about the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. Built by Tareque and Catherine Masud from repurposed "found footage" shot by Lear Levin, the film was received by most Bangladeshi audiences as an exact documentary. The film crew’s more explicit discussion of simulations and the inclusion of a "making of" section in the digital versatile disc (DVD) release a decade later have done little to change audience perceptions. This believing audience derives from a willing suspension of a skeptical eye, due to an absence of a moving image record of the war. The rewriting of story has been a crucial aspect of the documentation of, and debates around, national liberation wars. An initially declarative, and oral, culture around Bangladeshi war memories in the 1970s has been replaced by the search for evidence in the context of recent high stakes war crimes trials. What I want to suggest is that audiences have different modes of viewing specific to narratives that have become sacrosanct. They may be skeptical, rational, and evidentiary audiences for other objects, but with such sacred narratives they transform themselves, again, into a believing public.
This article analyzes the nitrate film fire that took place at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) in 2003 by locating it in the larger schema of nitrate film fires from across the world. It takes stock of the losses incurred in the fire, and the State’s response to the incident, to observe that despite the best of intentions of the people working at the institution, the losses were perhaps eventually inevitable owing to three reasons: the NFAI’s less-than-ideal working through the years, the idiosyncratic functioning of the Indian bureaucratic machinery, and the nitrate film reel’s ephemerality. Dis-cussing the global fetishization of the nitrate film reel as an artifact in and by itself, it observes how for various reasons, the same never became true for the NFAI and India; and analyzing the trends in Indian film scholarship so far, especially on silent cinema, it argues that the losses were less consequential for Indian film historiography than might have been expected, for the Indian film scholar has long moved beyond the nitrate film reel as the "basic source material" toward the writing of imaginative social and cultural histories achieved through mobilizing a host of ancillary sources.
This article focuses on the production and mass circulation of locally produced videos in and across socially marginalized areas of Bengal. It emerges from the research conducted on the video industry located in Purulia District, West Bengal. These videos, known as "Manbhum videos," signifying both place and idiom, are connected to video cultures proliferating across the Global South since the last decade. While new media cultures have become a crucial part of contemporary cinema studies, production of Manbhum videos (and videos produced in other local languages) point toward a new understanding of both cinema in India and categories like regional films. It raises questions regarding the ways in which "regional cinema" has been described so far, and the manner in which it may be redefined in the new media context. Such small-scale and localized video production in West Bengal and its circulation across disparate districts of India and Bangladesh, inform us that frameworks like "Bengali cinema" are deeply fragmented. Therefore, by studying the videos and its growth, this article shows in what way alternative settings and landscapes, narratives tropes, styles of performance and speech become pertinent in these videos, which effectively address a longer history of marginalization and political tussle.
Viewers of South Indian devotional films, female viewers in particular, have been known to offer prayers to the gods on screen and even moved to a state of possession while watching a film. Filmmaking and publicity try to highlight this aspect and explicitly address the spectator as a devotee. How do we understand these intersections between film viewership and religious practice? How do we theorize the figure of the viewer who is both a film viewer and a devotee at the same time? What sort of embodied engagements characterize these overlapping positions? Does affective engagement necessarily preclude critical and rational engagement with the narrative? This article explores these questions through an examination of the practices that surrounded the production and the reception of Telugu devotional films in the period starting roughly from the 1970s to the mid-2000s. I argue that a close attention to the habitus of the film viewer will enable a deeper and finer appreciation of the sensory modes of film appreciation that viewers bring to the cinema. Equal attention to the changing practices and the habitus of filmmaking in South India enables us to grapple with the ways in which a traditional habitus responds and changes with the advent of modern media and modern ways of thinking and being.