Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema

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Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema

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Leadership Insights from Jaina text Saman Suttam 129

Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema

Ranjani Mazumdar

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Abstract

In the history of Bombay cinema, the 1960s is a peculiar world marked by a reworking of nationalist anxieties, sovereignty, the place of the woman, and the world of location and mobility. India’s defeat in the border war against China in 1962 jolted the Nehruvian consensus of the 1950s. This was followed by food shortages, currency crisis, and the eventual turn to the United States (US) for grants to purchase food grain. It was as if the vast control regime set up in the 1950s, whose most visible signs were the Five-Year Plans, national sovereignty, and self-sustainability, started to crack. The wild abandonment of the 1960s seemed to lift this mood for the middle class, acknowledging their dreams of travel. This article returns to the cinema of the 1960s to track both the opening of the global and a fascination with urban infrastructure, tourism, fashion, and consumption. The arrival of color, the widespread circulation of travel imagery, the promotion of railway tourism, and the explosion in aviation congealed in creating a kind of cinematic tourism that was unique in the history of Bombay cinema. Many of these films traveled to spectacular global cities like Paris, Tokyo, London, Rome, and Beirut (An Evening in Paris, Sangam, Love in Tokyo, Around the World). Through this mobility the films encountered the global currents of the 1960s and also played out anxieties around questions of love, marriage, and erotic desire.

Keywords

Aviation, tourism, eroticism, infrastructure, aerial views, cinema

In the history of Bombay cinema, the 1960s was a peculiar world marked by a reworking of nationalist anxieties, sovereignty, the place of the woman, and the world of location and mobility. This engagement was negotiated through sites of travel, a fascination with infrastructure, and the mobilization of spatial desire. The arrival and use of color, lighter cameras, and new technologies of sound created a desire to break out of the physical confines of the studios. Travel across India’s landscape became a recurring feature in films, with trains and automobiles as the chosen mode of transportation. Thus, the hill station emerged in the 1960s as a picturesque space for romance. Exploration narratives abound in this decade, with picnics, holidays, and other journeys forging an entirely new imagination of space. The presence of Kashmir, its lakes, ravines, boathouses, mountains, and people was spectacularly highlighted in films like Shakti Samanta’s Kashmir ki Kali (1964). The fascination with landscape became critical to a new

Article

BioScope 2(2) 129–155

© 2011 Screen South Asia TrustSAGE Publications

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Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/097492761100200203

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Ranjani Mazumdar is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. E-mail: [email protected]



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130 Ranjani Mazumdar

conception of the “outdoor” that looked distinctly different from earlier films.1 While the train and the automobile were mobilized for travel across India earlier in the decade, by the mid 1960s, we see the emergence of a cluster of films that showcased travel to foreign cities like Paris, London, Tokyo, and Rome. The most well known of these films are Sangam (Raj Kapoor, 1964), Love in Tokyo (Pramod Chakravarty, 1966), An Evening in Paris (Shakti Samanta, 1967), and Around the World (Pachi, 1967). These were box office successes which inspired other lesser known films remembered today only for their songs, including Night in London (Brij, 1967) and Spy in Rome (B.K. Adarsh, 1968). This article returns to Bombay’s global travel films of the 1960s to unpack the “postcard imagination” that brought jet age aviation, tourism, consumerism, color film stock, fashion, and music into a distinct cultural configuration.

As an icon of modernity, the picture postcard made its entry in Europe and the US during the second half of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, its widespread circulation across the world was enabled con-siderably by developments in twentieth century tourism. As a collectible souvenir, as a gift, and most importantly as a form of communication between people placed in different parts of the world, the postcard has served many functions, both concrete and symbolic. Some refer to it as an entangled object, layered by sediments of traces, memories, and times (Rogan, 2005). While the technological advancements in printing and photography shaped the aesthetic form of the postcard, the cultural and social markers of the different times in which it was produced, have drawn historians to it (ibid.). The picture postcard is an evocative form and the fascination with geography, fashion, architecture, celebrities, leisure sites, infrastructure, and more can be tracked through the medium. However, in its classic and original function, the postcard exists primarily as a communication between two or more people, known to each other. Postcards that circulate between friends and family members contain the imagination and memories linked to travel. What we see in Bombay’s global travel films of the 1960s is the emergence of what I call the “postcard imagination” into a vehicle of symbolic transactions between people not known to each other. The frozen image of the postcard is transformed into a kinetic force that invites the anonymous spectator to touch and experience the sites on display. This force field of touch and sight in cinema is usually defined as haptic visuality, a form of vision where the eyes are deployed as organs of touch. Haptic visuality allows the spectator the opportunity to experience the multi-sensory dimension of cinema (Marks, 2000). As I will argue in the course of this article, the cinematic traversing of particular sites enabled forms of cultural and sensual exchange, making the images more than just the ideal tourist destination.

Perhaps the most significant social and cultural change in the 1960s was the move away from the overwhelming Nehruvian paradigm that had shaped the iconography of the post-independence decade (Ghosh, 2001). India’s defeat in the 1962 war against China was critical to this moment, since it was the first public shaming of the nationalist state (Maxwell, 1999). This was followed by other issues—the failure of state planning, food shortages, the crisis of foreign currency, and the eventual turn to the US for grants to purchase food grain. It was as if the vast control regime set up in the 1950s, whose most visible signs were the Five-Year Plans, national sovereignty, and self-sustainability, started to crack (Kaviraj, 2010). Internationally the Nehruvian regime had pushed for Third Worldism through non-alignment and through Asian and African solidarity generated by the Bandung moment (Chakravarty, 2005). At the political/national level the space of the global got bracketed and filtered through these prisms. In cinema however, consumerist imaginations of excess held sway and sought to break free from the Nehruvian language of developmental consciousness. The nationalist limits on consumption, which had dominated the 1950s, faced pressure from all around. The failure of the second Five-Year Plan and



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Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema 131

India’s defeat in the 1962 war seemed to signify a loss of the national morale and a public mood of turn-ing away from the more frugal economies of the 1950s.

The wild abandonment of the 1960s seemed to lift this mood of the middle class, acknowledging their dreams of travel. While the visual display of wealth and consumption was always present in cinema, the decisive entry of color in the midst of an acute economic crisis reframed the sphere of consumption. Despite the devaluation of the rupee, foreign exchange was released for the shooting of the international travel films on the condition that three times the money spent on the production would be brought back to India. All the filmmakers signed bonds with the Reserve Bank of India for the release of currency.2 Foreign locations were incorporated into the narratives of the films as tourist site, as the place of romantic possibility, and as the space of encounter with new forms of urbanism. In Around the World, the crisis of foreign exchange was deployed as a narrative device to initiate a journey across the world. At a party, Raj Kapoor is asked by a family friend to visit him in Tokyo. Kapoor responds with a moral problem about using the country’s shrinking foreign exchange. The family friend promises Kapoor that his expenses in Tokyo will be taken care of. The departure from India is staged to show Kapoor drawing only eight dollars at the airport’s foreign exchange counter. Though Around the World was responding quite directly to the 1966 devaluation of the rupee, the sequence makes clear that even the crisis of foreign currency could not suppress the desire for travel.3

The international tourism industry in the 1960s overwhelmed the visual culture of the time.4 1967 was declared the international tourist year by the United Nations with the slogan “tourism, passport to peace.” This had been recommended by the Economic and Social Council on the basis of a request made by the International Union of Official Travel Organizations (IUOTO), an NGO that had members from more than 100 countries.5 In India, tourism influenced popular advertising, and travel became a recurring motif in the marketing of various products. An advertisement for Hakoba saris shows a woman posing in the foreground with a stationary plane behind her. The caption says “make a safe landing” (The Illustrated Weekly, September 15, 1966, p. 61). Wills Navy Cut, a cigarette brand, sponsored a “made for each other” contest, in which English-speaking married couples were asked to mail their photographs to the tobacco company. The selected couple was then offered a holiday in Rome. The advertisement carried three images placed in one row. The first shows a couple inside an aircraft, the second shows Sophia Loren and Paul Newman in MGM’s Lady, and the third has a woman in a sari offering a Wills cigarette to the Hindi film actor, Feroze Khan. The headline says “Win Fabulous Holiday in Rome, Spend 7 Days in Rome—Visit Sophia Loren’s Dream Villa” (The Illustrated Weekly, October 9, 1966, p. 14). Travel was also the primary visual motif in the advertisements of the View-Master which I will come to later. Central to this imagination of foreign travel was the explosion in air traffic.

Aviation, Tourism, and the Cinema

In his history of global air travel, Marc Dierikx captures the imaginative force of aviation in the twentieth century (Dierikx, 2008). Aviation, says Dierikx, drew into its fold international and domestic geography, politics, trade, culture, arts, literature, music, and most importantly a mobile population. Aviation went beyond the infrastructure of airports and aircrafts to operate most of all as a highway for the generation of new encounters, adventures, and thrilling experiences (Boyer, 2003; Dierikx, 2008). How did this



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highway produce novel perceptual regimes, specifically in the context of India? What were the intersecting forces that drew cinema into this regime of sensations? How did the context of the 1960s impinge on this experience? These are ques-tions that need some excavation and I will begin this with an introduction to India’s premier airline industry, Air India, which in the 1960s emerged as a major player and inspiration for Bombay cinema’s global travel (Image 1).

Air India was founded in 1932 by J.R.D. Tata as Tata Airlines and became a regular commercial service after World War II. In 1946, the airline became a public limited company named Air India. In the post-independence period, 46 percent of the airline was acquired by the Government of India and, in return, the airline was granted status to operate international services under the name Air India International. In 1953, the government

Image 1. Air India’s mascot.

Source: Author’s personal collection.

nationalized the carrier (Kohli, 2010).6 The first Boeing 707 arrived in 1960 and two years later, in 1962, Air India became the world’s first all jet airline (Air India Ninth Annual Report, 1961–62, p. 10). Unlike its situation today, in the 1960s Air India was one of the most dynamic airlines in the world. J.R.D. Tata was keen to have the airline operate as a cosmopolitan and modern infrastructure for the country (Kohli, 2010). Even after the airline was nationalized, Nehru asked J.R.D. Tata to continue as the head of the company (ibid.). The airline was also recognized for the aggressive campaign it had launched in the print media to advertise its expanded services and routes.

The global travel films openly endorsed Air India either with exterior shots of the airline taking off or announcements played on the soundtrack over interior shots of the aircraft. For instance, Shakti Samanta’s An Evening in Paris opens with a narrator announcing “Ye Air India ki Boeing 707 Udan Hai jo Delhi se Paris ja rahi hai” (This is Air India’s Boeing 707 carrier which is flying from Delhi to Paris.). The voice-over continues and we are introduced to a diverse group of passengers. The voice is humorous and light. The camera rests on Sharmila Tagore’s face and we are informed by the voice that she is disillusioned with her experiences with love in India and is now on her way to Paris in search of romance. This extra-diegetic voice is suddenly interrupted by an official airline announcer informing the passengers that they are just about to land at Orly airport, in the world’s most romantic city. We transition to Paris by night via a now well-known song from the film picturized on Shammi Kapoor. The credits roll over the song sequence with Kapoor walking around the city directly facing the spectator as he sings:

Arre aisa mauka phir kahan milega, Humare jaisa dil kahan milega, aao tumko dikhla ta hoon Paris ki ek rangeen shyam, dekho dekho, dekho dekho dekho, An evening in Paris



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Hey where else will you get the chanceWhere else will you fi nd this heart?Come let me show you one colourful Paris eveningCome and look, come and look, come and lookAt an evening in Paris7 (see Image 2)

Paris is introduced by night as it glitters with life. Paris emerges in Kapoor’s performance and in the lyrics as a city of possibilities, mystery, and de-sire.8 Crafted along with the opening introduction to Sharmila Tagore, this opening sequence em-bodies the tourist consciousness of airborne travel and desire for European images of modernity. The reference to Air India’s Boeing 707 places the air-line within this network of travel as the generator of cosmopolitan identity. A similar introduction to

Image 2. Shammi Kapoor introduces Paris by night in An Evening in Paris, 1967.

Source: DVD frame grab by the author.

Tokyo can be seen in Pramod Chakravarty’s Love in Tokyo where we arrive in the airline and the first aerial perspective is offered from the point of view of the aircraft.

The radical transformation of commercial aviation in the 1960s has been acknowledged and docu-mented by Dierikx. The combination of fast, large aircrafts and the reduction in fares turned air travel into a much wider phenomenon over the course of the 1960s. This was also the decade when flight attendants were adorned with designer clothing and airports transformed into new display havens. Dierikx writes that the world of flight became attractive as a setting for advertising. Along with publiciz-ing travel destinations, air transport imagery was mobilized to sell modern luxury goods such as cars, perfumes, tobacco, drinks, and fashion (Dierikx, 2008, p. 74). Central to this assemblage was the emerg-ing link between aviation and tourism. Dierikx’s account describes a new force-field of consumption, eroticism, and lifestyle aspirations linked to air travel, a moment that was distinctly different from air traffic prior to the 1960s. The jet magic was everywhere and Air India became an active participant in this new world. Though a national airline, Air India was unique in its lack of nationalist anxiety. Nowhere was this more visible than in the airline’s most successful mascot—the figure of the irreverent Maharaja.

The Maharaja first made his appearance in 1946 when S.K. Kooka, the commercial director of Air India, along with an artist named Umesh Rao, created the Maharaja as a cartoon figure (Karkaria, 1971; Kooka, 1966). Air India’s own publicity documents of the 1970s say of the Maharaja

What began as an attempt to design for an in-fl ight memo pad grew to take Air India’s sales and promotional messages to millions of travelers across the world. Today, this naughty Maharaja of Air India has become a world fi gure. He can be a lover boy in Paris, a sumo wrestler in Tokyo, a pavement artist, a Red Indian, a monk... he can effortlessly fl irt with the beauties of the world. And most importantly, he can get away with it all, simply because he is the Maharaja!9

The Maharaja was obviously one of the world’s least inhibited air travelers, whose distinctiveness was acknowledged by the American Society of Travel Agents in 1959 which voted Air India first place in a



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400-entry travel poster contest (Time, September 26, 1960). The range of posters and advertisements of Air India available today testify to the unique and inventive promotional strategy adopted by the airline. From a simple Maharaja in simulated miniature paintings to playboy images—the Maharaja had many faces. In a series of print advertisements published in various magazines of the 1960s, the Maharaja appeared as an unselfconscious and irreverent figure.10 One image shows him being irreverent about the 1942 Quit India movement, while in another he boasts about the five female dates who are hanging out of his pocket. Other images show the Maharaja dancing with a Russian ballerina, flirting with a fashion-able Londoner, impishly providing us with 12 good reasons to leave India, and as a family man, with his wife and children, who cannot take his eyes off a fashionably dressed woman walking by (Images 3, 4, 5, and 6). Many of the Air India advertisements in Blitz mention the “P” form which travelers had to fill out to get foreign exchange as they were allowed exchange only once in three years, testifying to the acute currency crisis of the time. The advertising strategy, in fact, was to show the Maharaja as an in-vincible figure who found ways to transcend different kinds of restrictions, like that of the “P” form. Tourism was a potent and intoxicating force, which the airline tapped into through its advertising strategy.

Image 3. Air India advertisement 1967.




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The official posters of Air India were equally dramatic. In one poster the Maharaja is being painted by Mona Lisa herself. Another poster shows him as a tourist in Paris displaying pictures of the Maharaja icon hidden inside his overcoat. The caption says, “pssst naughty pictures.” The most striking one is a poster advertising travel to London where the Maharaja dressed as playboy bunny is waiting on an English couple (Image 7).

Air India’s mascot was clearly distinctive and displayed a confidence that allowed the figure to carry a blasé, irreverent and flirtatious iconography, quite distinct from the way national icons were represented. In a context such as India the Maharaja as a cartoon figure with his burlesque masculinity could embody transgression and eroticism in a way that was perhaps not easy with representations of the air hostess. The irreverence often got the Maharaja into trouble particularly when a specific country was involved.





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In 1967, a letter to Air India from the head of the French Department at Osmania University complained about a poster advertising travel to Paris which showed the Maharaja’s face floating above a set of dancing female legs. The letter stated:

Your poster introduces travel to Paris by Air India. The word Paris is drawn in such a way that it represents female legs in different dancing positions. As a Frenchman, I was deeply shocked by this limited way of summing up my capital. This poster was not meant to be insulting, but it is not uncommon to associate France with a sort of amorous France background. It would be better to avoid stressing the myth of France, the country of love and of gay Paris. I would appreciate it if you could help destroying (sic) myths by deciding to discard this poster on Paris. (Kooka, 1966)

Image 7. Air India Poster from the 1960s.




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The posters and printed advertisements of the Maharaja had squarely linked air travel with an irreverent and erotic charge. The Maharaja displayed the confidence of the airline, charting a particular relation-ship between tourism, eroticism, and exoticism. The airline’s strategic play with curiosity and the desire for the magic of distant lands became the symbolic base for the full play of a tourist imagination in cinema. In the global transformation of air traffic, Air India became firmly ensconced. It was not long before the Maharaja’s fascination with cinema became known to the world. In 1966, Blitz carried a humorous story on the introduction of in-flight entertainment. The article said the Maharaja had become depressed because there was nothing new for him to experience. The courtiers tried to cheer him to no avail and finally went out to find ways to make the Maharaja happy. They came back later to announce the introduction of in-flight movie entertainment. The Maharaja, the article said, was very pleased. He responded with “Excellent! An in-flight movie, a capital idea; I beg your pardon, a socialist idea! That makes me an in-flight movie moghul! Ha Ha! And he clapped his hands in great glee” (Blitz, September 10, 1966, p. 19).11

The Maharaja subsequently appeared as a figure in cinema. Shakti Samanta’s An Evening in Paris constructs an elaborate sequence in which the Maharaja appears as a sign, a cartoon figure, and a target of jokes. A Frenchman expresses interest in Deepa (Sharmila Tagore) who is disillusioned with Indian men. The Frenchman dons the clothing of the Air India Maharaja to propose marriage. Shyam (Shammi Kapoor), the protagonist of the film, plays a trick and gets the upper hand when he persuades some chil-dren to run to the Frenchman and call him “daddy.” Deepa is infuriated and walks away from the Frenchman. The use of the Maharaja in the film is telling, not as a literal brand endorsement but as a device that works through humor, jokes, and a side plot. This comic moment in the film leads up to a visually spectacular song sequence simulating a ride through Paris—a ride that mobilizes cinema’s ability to display, showcase, and carve out the wonders of the modern city. As Shyam sings “Diwane ka Naam to Poocho” (Won’t you ask for the name of the love-struck one?), the city opens out like a map of photographs and postcards. We walk, travel by car, and by tourist buses to see boulevards, lampposts, bridges, and heritage architecture. Here is a panoramic vision that draws us into its circle and into cinema’s sightseeing journeys and spatio-visual desire for circulation (Bruno, 2002, p. 19). The camera strives for diverse viewing possibilities, and a series of tableaux shots creates the pleasure of travel. Paris emerges as a space in motion within which romantic possibilities are enhanced through music and choreography. D.N. Nadkarni was one of the few reviewers to recognize the powerful use of space in the film. Nadkarni wrote of the film’s design as a strategy where

[…] the camera does not become a recorder of a routine travelogue but is used to be in, behind, under and above things. It is basically a search for the new of what have you in the very heart beats of the world. Photographic material is used to show life clearly and show it whole. (Blitz, November 4, 1967, p. 22)

Nadkarni’s account clearly recognized the role of the camera in evoking a postcard imagination for the spectator through sensuous experiences of touch and sight.

Spatial Transgression, Regulation, and Indianness

An Evening in Paris is a simple story of a rich woman disillusioned with love in India who goes to Paris to see what is possible. There she encounters Shyam, gets embroiled in a crime plot linked to a



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villain (Pran) and discovers her long lost sister, Suzy, who appears in the film as her look-alike (also played by Tagore). Suzy is a fashionably dressed nightclub dancer in Paris in contrast to Deepa who invariably wears a sari. The plot is thin and quite marginal to the drama of space in the film. Reviewers scoffed at the film’s “escapism.” Filmworld wrote “abounding in generous doses of exotic western locales… an out and out escapist blues chaser made by a commercially conscious filmmaker, Shakti Samanta” (Filmworld, January-April 1968). Most of all the same review referred to Sharmila’s performance as “Sexciting” (ibid.). Blitz gave the film three out of five stars even as the review branded it “pointless and plot less” (Blitz, January 20, 1968, p. 22). A pre-release story in Blitz said “Sultry sex kitten Sharmila Tagore … seen for the first time in barest of attire, teams up with Shammi Kapoor in An Evening in Paris” (Blitz, August 15, 1967, p. 30). Star and Style referred to the criminal waste of foreign exchange and the plot’s inability to match the luxurious and picturesque locales of the film (Star and Style, October 9, 1968, p. 31).

The use of foreign locations in An Evening in Paris was discussed widely in the film press. The most significant pre-publicity move was the 1966 August issue of Filmfare which carried a bikini-clad photo-graph of Tagore on the cover (Filmfare, August 19, 1966). Inside the magazine there were other photographs of her in the same attire and the caption said “Before she flew out for the filming, Sharmila gave us a preview of the costume—some beachwear and a lot of Sharmila. How did she feel in this outfit? Rather unconventional for an Indian film star? ‘Oh rather like a pioneer’ she said (She respects conservatism but is against prudery)” (Filmfare, August 19, 1966, p. 9). While Sharmila did not actually wear a two-piece suit in the film, the image is now part of folklore, with most assuming the bikini was in fact worn for An Evening in Paris; the first time an Indian film actress had taken such a step (Image 8).

Image 8. Sharmila Tagore on the cover of Filmfare, August 1966.

Source: National Film Archive of India (NFAI).

The Filmfare spread was followed by con-troversy (Ghosh, 2006). Tagore recalls how she was warned by people in the film industry to change track immediately. They were shocked at how far she had gone.12 The sudden outburst of opinion against the use of a bikini by a leading actress had a profound impact on Tagore herself. She never wore a two-piece suit again in public and, in fact, in several subsequent interviews apologized for her earlier act (The Hindu Metro Plus, Monday, April 3, 2006). But the “bikini fiasco” or publicity made one thing obvious—that travel to foreign locations in An Evening in Paris was tinged with a particular kind of desire and boldness not common in the films of the time. This is highlighted in an advertisement published in Filmfare which shows Tagore in a nightclub dancer’s attire, both in the foreground and in the right-hand corner of the image, while Shammi Kapoor’s smiling face dominates the rest of the frame. Right on top we have the caption “A film full of sex, songs and sensation” (Filmfare, January



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looks meaningfully at Deepa, his desire written on his face. A playful repartee between them takes place as they lean against the railing, the city vis-ible in the background. Deepa responds to Shyam’s desire for a kiss with the statement “Indian girls do not kiss before marriage.” Shyam mocks this state-ment with a feigned look of disappointment and then takes out a ring to propose marriage to Deepa. The entire sequence has a light-hearted, almost ironic quality and “Indianness” appears like a symbolic set of values that the film is unable to cross (Image 10). The sequence in Sangam, made three years earlier, is very similar except that the couple is married and in Paris for their honeymoon. Sundar (Raj Kapoor) and Radha (Vyjantimala) have gone up the Eiffel Tower and are now looking at the city from their privileged vantage point. They see a young couple kissing on the floor below them. Sundar looks meaningfully at Radha, clad in a white sari. She smiles at Sundar but does not relent. Suddenly some women look at the couple and ask, “are you from India?” Sundar nods his head and the women clap. Radha with her head covered looks meaningfully at Sundar as if to reiterate the boundary identified with “Indianness” which in this case is about the display of the kiss. There are two things happening in these sequences:

Image 9. Advertisement for An Evening in Paris.


Image 10. Deepa (Sharmila) and Shyam (Shammi Kapoor) in An Evening in Paris, 1966.


1968, p. 3) (Image 9). This advertisement encap-sulates what the producers had hoped to achieve with the film. It was as if foreign lands had enabled an expressive charge to the body, circumscribed by national sovereignty. Despite Tagore’s retraction, the photographs circulated both before and after the film, marking its genealogy through this potent image of a bikini-clad cover girl.

The Filmfare photographs need to be placed within existing discourses of female iconicity and the desire for change unleashed by post-Nehruvian expressions of consumption. In both An Evening in Paris and Raj Kapoor’s Sangam, romantic mo-ments are staged at the Eiffel Tower to make the couples encounter white lovers kissing. An Evening in Paris shows Shyam and a very fashionably adorned Deepa walking up the Eiffel Tower and finding a newly married couple kissing. Shyam



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first, Indianness is distinguished from Western values, but more importantly intimacy and desire pervade the frame, bypassing the unwritten ban on the kiss in Indian cinema. The Indian couples witness the foreign couples; they are clearly drawn to the idea and yet mark out their differences in terms of perceived Indian values.

Madhava Prasad has argued that, in popular Bombay cinema, a prohibitive logic frames the presence of the kiss for spectators but does not allow them to see it enacted literally on screen. Prasad elaborates on different narrative techniques deployed to imaginatively evoke the kiss (Prasad, 1998, pp. 88–113). The Eiffel Tower moment in An Evening in Paris is one of the sequences Prasad offers as an example of how prohibition is thematized as cultural truth and duty. He argues that “the contrast provided by foreign location, with its alien mores, serves to highlight the uniqueness of the national culture and the re-sponsibility of the characters to uphold it” (Prasad, 1998, p. 90). Prasad argues that this presence of the private in the public domain not only signals the formation of the modern couple outside of feudal authority, but reinstates the role of the state in regulating the private (1998, pp. 98–113). For Prasad, the threat of transgression is sidestepped by a counter assimilation strategy in which the family, the institution of marriage, and the woman become the terrain on which the nation is provided with a unique identity (Prasad, 1998, p. 90). It is possible to take Prasad’s argument in another direction. His analysis of the kiss is staged against the backdrop of a report submitted by the Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship set up by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1968. A former chief justice of Punjab, G.D. Khosla, was appointed chairperson of the committee which submitted its findings in 1969 in a document known widely as the Khosla Committee Report. But this was the culmination of a decade long debate.

While the Khosla Committee pondered on what was suitable for Indian audiences, the subject of screen kissing pervaded film magazines. Star and Style carried a story titled “Kiss Kiss say the Producers, Kill Kill say the Censors” (Star and Style, August 15, 1967, p. 34). This is followed up with “To Kiss or not to Kiss” (Star and Style, October 31, 1969). The film critic, Kobita Sarkar, defended the use of the kiss, while B.G.R. Krishnama, a resident of Secunderabad, wrote in a letter to the editor “apart from being a foreign custom, kissing is a most unhygienic habit. It can spread germs” (Filmfare, August 18, 1967, Filmfare, September 15, 1967, p. 53). In the summer of 1968, actress Sadhna was quoted as saying “kiss, kiss, kiss, but not on screen” (Star and Style, August 15, 1967, p. 35). But there were counter opinions voiced by filmmakers like Shammi Kapoor, I.S. Johar, and Vijay Anand, who saw nothing wrong in the use of the kiss (Star and Style, August 15, 1967, pp. 34–35).13 The debate on censorship and obscenity had been going on since the silent period of cinema, but had acquired a particular intensity in the 1960s around the kiss. Filmfare ran several editorials on the issue and articles appeared regularly in other places like in Blitz, The Illustrated Weekly, and in the national dailies.

The atmosphere was clearly charged through the 1960s and formed the backdrop for the constitution of the Khosla Committee which submitted its report with innumerable suggestions and recommendations based on perceptions about what should or should not be screened in a country like India. The report displays its own set of prejudices and latent conservatism but on one issue the committee’s recommendations came as a surprise. This was related to the kiss. The committee explicitly stated that there was actually nothing wrong in the depiction of the kiss if it suited the story. The committee also recognized that nudity had a place in art and should not be curtailed blindly (Report of the Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship, 1969, p. 93). The Film Industry, always critical of censorship norms, suddenly turned away from this freedom, with many saying it would not be good for Hindi cinema.14 Thus, on behalf of a reader of the magazine, Mother India, the editor Babu Rao Patel, who was then a member of the Rajya Sabha, asked Mr I.K. Gujaral, the then Minister for Information and Broadcasting, a provocative question about



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Sangam’s overseas release. Patel insisted that “as many as 113 passionate kisses between Raj Kapoor and Vyjantimala” had been shown along with “many semi-nude and suggestive lust laden bedroom scenes.” The assumption here was that for its international release, Sangam had skirted censorship requirements. Patel felt this portrayal was detrimental for the nation’s image abroad and wondered why the government had not acted to censor such representations (Mother India, 1970, p. 34).15 It is indeed intriguing why Babu Rao Patel was so agitated about Sangam in 1969 when the film was released in 1964.

The two moments in An Evening in Paris and Sangam discussed earlier appear as ironic and playful, clearly encapsulating the divided opinion on the future of the kiss on screen. Both films were made before the Khosla Committee was constituted but perform their ironic response to regulation, self-imposed or otherwise, through a perceived encounter between two supposedly different cultural trad-itions. With the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of technological modernity, both sequences generate an ambivalent disposition—drawn to issues of desire, and yet working within a paradigm of Hindi cinema’s notions of national culture. The foreign locations hold the possibility of adventure and new ways of expressing desire. Rather than reading these moments as coherent, ideologically moored articulations of the nation, I see them as cultural maps of a specific kind where a “narrative geography of emotions” attaches eroticism to space, actively engaging in the seduction of architecture and what Giuliana Bruno refers to as topographical architectonics (Bruno, 2002, p. 234). A filmic visit results in a filmic evocation of passion and desire. It is the language of space that produces disturbance, reinvention, and a hybrid map of conflicted emotions. This erotic charge cannot be easily subsumed within a settled ideological reading for it is the mobilization of the senses in the course of a geographic encounter that defies such logic. Tagore’s appearance in a bikini on the cover of Filmfare before the shooting of An Evening in Paris and the deflection of the kiss and reiteration of “Indianness” in the Eiffel Tower sequence of the film, need to be viewed in their combined articulation. What Prasad reads as an ideological need to establish the uniqueness of the national culture, emerges as a deeply ambivalent space, working creatively to generate alternative maps for the articulation of desire.

Such alternative maps of desire acquired many forms in the global travel films. In Love in Tokyo Joy Mukherjee and Asha Parekh encounter a nightclub in the course of their romance where non-Indian couples are shown in passionate embrace, close dancing to soft music. It is the sight of passion in an alien land that triggers sexual desire in the couple. Since the couple is not married, sexual desire is staged, obliquely expressed, and then deflected. As Mukherjee sings of the passion igniting the two, a sudden burst of rain drives all the couples to seek shelter, with our two protagonists free to experience the rain with their romance. The lyrics are charged and looks of deep desire exchanged. The sequence ends with the hint of a kiss blocked off by the camera panning across a tree. Almost the same strategy is deployed in An Evening in Paris which uses the Moulin Rouge nightclub district to stage the desire for physical union. The camera moves across the club facades glittering with neon lights as fire crackers explode against the night sky. Tagore and Kapoor sing a duet, expressing their passionate desire for each other. The camera moves under a water tunnel, shows a neon advertisement for tours to the Eiffel Tower, then introduces a young Parisian boy playing the guitar in a boat. Kapoor and Tagore are now languorously lying in the same boat; the song continues and ends with the couple moving towards a kiss just as the camera tilts down to the water reflecting the lights of the city. While Hindi cinema has always negotiated the realm of sexual desire through songs, in the global travel films of the 1960s, foreignness and know-ledge of sexual transgression associated with certain sites played a pivotal role. Tokyo and Paris are sites of desire, erotic love, and mobility, curtailed or even enhanced by the narrative’s push to mark out Indianness as different.



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The imaginative power of spatial encounters is also staged through forms of masquerade. In Sangam, Vyjantimala performs a cabaret to seduce her husband and prevent him from going to see a cabaret. In An Evening in Paris, the masquerade is literalized through the figure of the double, the long lost sister who is a cabaret dancer in a Parisian nightclub. In Love in Tokyo, Asha Parekh dresses up as a Sikh boy for most of the film. In a scathing review published in Filmfare the critic said, “Love in Tokyo could more truthfully be titled ‘Sex change in Japan or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bearded lady’” (Filmfare, September 2, 1966, p. 33). What I am trying to suggest is that spatial exploration also gen-erated a play with identity, sexuality, and the body. Performatively charged moments drew attention to the way the female figure could discard set identities and either take on the gestural economy of the forbidden or underplay gender through cross dressing. In an environment that is removed from habitual diffusion, significant things can be achieved because uncommon space becomes the site of immense possibilities.

In her exploration of corporeality, feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz shows how architecture and the body are mutually constituted to rework presumptions and habitual understandings of time and space. This is particularly relevant for architecture, urban planning, and geography. To highlight the spatial dimension of corporeality, Grosz employs a reading strategy in which scattered thoughts and images are drawn into unusual linkages and alignments, thereby rethinking how architecture might be located within a constitutive coupling of the body and space (Grosz, 1995). The appeal and power of desire, says Grosz, lies in its capacity to rearrange and re-organize the body’s forms and sensations, to make the body dis-solve into something other than the rhythms of habit (Grosz, 1995, pp. 204–205). Desire can produce unknown sensations, untapped energies, unthought of alignments, and encounters with regions not known (ibid.). In these encounters with distant and foreign lands, such as in the global travel films of the 1960s, we witness both an optic and a haptic reinvention of space. The spectator is invited to experience the encounter and corporeality is reaffirmed through the sensuous force of cinematic travel. The nego-tiation of the kiss, the performance of masquerade by the female protagonists, the use of architectural sites to mediate sexual desire, and the production of scandalous spectacles as extra-cinematic discourse, combined to rewrite the affective map of the nation with a different and complex plane of desire and emotion.16

The Color of Cinematic Cartography

The complex channeling of desire as cartographic possession of modern space is worked out explicitly in Raj Kapoor’s Sangam. Like Mehboob’s Andaaz made in 1949, Sangam showcased a love triangle between two men and a woman. Sundar (Raj Kapoor) and Gopal (Rajendra Kumar) are best friends in love with the same woman, Radha (Vyjantimala), who ultimately marries Sundar, the man she does not love, because of circumstances beyond her control. Unlike An Evening in Paris which used Paris as the backdrop for its romantic encounter, Sangam drew on foreign locations for its honeymoon segment which in many ways proved to be critically transformative for the narrative. A series of advertisements published in Filmfare prior to the release of the film highlighted the triangular story. One version carried the caption “These Three Shared Immortal Love” (Filmfare, November 23, 1963). All three stars are present in the advertisement and travel is highlighted through sketched impressions of either snow-capped mountains, boat rides, or the Eiffel Tower. Another poster had the Saanchi Stupa built in the third



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century (located in the state of Madhya Pradesh) placed on the left and London’s Big Ben, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Eiffel Tower on the right. The three protagonists stand at the center and the caption says “Ageless as Asia, Exciting as Europe” (Blitz, June 27, 1964, p. 23). Here ancient civilizational iconography is placed alongside the iconographic imaginary of Western modernity, generating a sensory map using architectural forms. Sangam was one of the biggest hits of the decade earning a huge amount of foreign exchange from its release in the overseas market (Screen, Friday, July 2, 1965).

In a detailed analysis, Madhava Prasad locates Sangam as a text that aspires to settle questions of marriage, love, and domestic discord by ironing out the central conflict between male friendship and romance (Prasad, 1998, pp. 81–87). Sundar, as an army man, is placed as a representative of the state whose control over the woman foregrounds the enmeshing of the private with the public. Through this enmeshing the state acquires an absolutist position, which anchors the film ideologically. Prasad in fact sees the use of foreign locations in Sangam as irrelevant to the central narrative drive of the film (ibid.). However, it is this segment that transforms Radha’s interior world as she begins to fall in love with her husband. I want to concentrate on this honeymoon segment of the film as this is where travel is deployed for a specific purpose.

Radha and Sundar’s marriage is followed by a passionate wedding night scene which transitions to a long shot of an Air India plane against blue sky and then we are in Europe for the couple’s honeymoon. The sequence begins in Rome with panoramic images of the city overwhelming the frame. Radha throws a coin at the Trevi Fountain, a major tourist spot in Rome, to make a wish—happiness for Sundar and peace for herself. They are constructed as a couple against this architectural panorama, their intimate world of love nurtured by these wanderings. The physicality and passion of the relationship is displayed during a boat ride in Venice, when a sudden movement of the boat makes Radha literally fall into Sundar’s arms. He asks her “are you happy” and she replies with “very much.” When Radha asks Sundar the same question, the reply is “top of the world,” a spatial metaphor that soon gets attached to the Eiffel Tower. A woman deeply in love with another man now begins to fall in love with her husband against the backdrop of this European cityscape. The language of love and desire becomes the language of tourism and the cartographic possession of spectacular sites (Image 11). This moment transitions to Gopal in his home reading the happy account that we have just witnessed, captured in a letter sent to him by his

Image 11. Sundar (Raj Kapoor) and Radha (Vyjantimala) in Sangam, 1964.


friend. We hear Sundar’s voice spilling out of the letter pleading with his friend to join them either in Paris or Switzerland. The postcard landscape ex-perienced by the couple metamorphoses into the tourist’s descriptive language. A traveler’s imagina-tion is evoked here as Sundar’s voice expresses his excitement at the prospect of going up the Eiffel Tower. The love for his wife goes hand in hand with his excitement with the foreign landscape. The sequence ends with Gopal smiling at a typical honeymoon color photo showing the couple in a boat, mailed to him by Sundar. In many ways the sequence mobilizes both the desire for travel and the need to possess the memory of travel. Sundar’s language of love collapses the city and the woman into one.



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Sangam’s Europe serves as a convenient shorthand that reinvents a loveless marriage into one consumed by passion. Radha is susceptible to the illusions of the city and it is in the course of this spatial seduction that the past is exchanged for the spectacle of tourism. There is a hedonistic aspect to this transition in Sangam, since Radha trades her pain for the pleasures offered by the city. In the language of philosophy, hedonism is described as a worldview drawn to the idea that pleasure is the “greatest good” (Feldman, 2002; Heathwood, 2006; Mendola, 2006). In ethical terms, hedonism sees productive pleasure as the “correct” way to be and distances itself from pain. Grief, anguish, and despair are identified with pain and with forms of action that are perceived as “wrong.” In Sangam such transference of experience is articulated through an embracing of ecstasy, eroticism, and the delights associated with travel. Radha’s relationship to the idea of marital duty unfolds within a landscape of pleasures—the “good wife” also finds peace and happiness in the sensorial world of global travel. Her act of “goodness” is bound up with the pleasures of tourism and the object world that it offers for sensual and visual enjoyment. The wanderlust aesthetic is the mode through which Sangam explicitly lays out the Parisian shop windows, mobilizing the tourists’ gaze for commodity spectacle. Touristic strolling is framed against glass window displays as the couple walks through a dazzling world of offerings—bags, fashion, household gadgets, cafes, and musical instruments (Image 12). A little tiff over what should be bought leads to a discussion about the financial pressures faced by tourists. A turbulent interiority is transformed into wish images of desire, romance blooms in this universe of tourist sites, and plot gives way to traveling pleasures. Travel in this context operates as a metaphor that involves a voyage of the self (Bruno, 2002, p. 81). From the panoramic sweep that marked the first encounter with Europe to the wondrous experience of being at the Eiffel Tower and then the street level view of city walkers—what emerges is the incorporation of spatio-visual desire. The painful memories of the past slowly fade as new objects and technologies of pleasure enter the frame.

Sangam explicitly links desire to photographic imaginations of sites and spaces. This is conveyed evocatively in the use of the honeymoon photograph as an archive of memory. Equally the film uses the photograph to destabilize normative domestic relations and gender identity. This is staged in the couple’s hotel suite. Sundar is shown skimming through a glossy photo catalogue that lists the city’s nightlife. Photographs of cabarets and revues stoke Sundar’s imagination (Image 13). Radha emerges from the

Image 12. Radha window shopping in Sangam.


Image 13. Sundar (Raj Kapoor) skimming through a photo catalogue in Sangam.Source: DVD frame grab by the author.



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bedroom ready to leave with Sundar but he turns to her and says that only he will go, as the revue is not meant for “decent” (shareef ) women. What follows is a playful argument as Radha walks into the bed-room and locks the door so Sundar cannot leave. A few minutes later we hear the sound of bagpipes and the door opens to show Radha dressed like a cabaret artist. She sings the now well-known song from the film “main kya karun Ram mujhe Buddha mil gaya”—Hey Ram, what can I do, I am stuck with an old man. Radha’s provocative masquerade is performed to prevent her husband’s visit to the revue. The hotel suite turns into an erotically charged space where the photograph of the revue stokes the masquerade and the passion that follows (Image 14). The imagination of a life outside the hotel at night is mediated by its impression conveyed by a photograph in a travel guide and it is this impression that produces sensual experiences of space. The sequence ends with the idea that the couple has sex, not displayed directly on screen but alluded to through the use of off-screen space. Both the photograph mailed by Sundar to Gopal and the catalogue image appear in color, a rare event given that color photography was still not available widely in India.

Image 14. Radha masquerading as a cabaret artist in Sangam.


The importance of color in Sangam did not go unnoticed. One reviewer said, “extraordinary length, spectacle, lush color, eye filling décor, handsome parade of top notch stars and a story of the widest possible appeal with a good sprinkling of sex and romance go to make a blockbuster” (Filmfare, July 10, 1964, p. 7). Sangam was Raj Kapoor’s first color film and while the reviewer is talking of celluloid, Sangam’s release takes place in the midst of widespread advertising for still photography’s slow passage to color. Agfa had started advertising color film within India since the mid 1950s but the prohibitive costs limited its use to the publishing world and professional photo-graphers.17 By the mid 1960s, the advertising for color had increased along with the consolidation

of tourism discourses. Agfa was renamed ORWO and the advertisements constantly referred to the magic of color. In a sense Sangam carries a preview and a trace of the world to come in the 1970s when color photos would become more widely available for consumer use. While the honeymoon color photo of the couple exists in Sangam as a record of personal memory, the glossy travel catalogue references certain sites of the nocturnal city. The images provide the sensory connection that is then imaginatively embodied in Radha’s playful performance of the cabaret to seduce her husband. The viewer is drawn into a spectacle of pleasure and desire. In moving away from her past as the site of anguish, Radha is supported by the hedonistic pleasures offered by the arrival of color. Color introduced a new sensation, a new kind of cartographic imagination, and a new expanded horizon for the articulation of consumption practices. The use of color photographs in Sangam clearly marked the celluloid moment as significant and was also strikingly present in the changing design strategies of all kinds of print advertisements.

In an advertisement of Paachi’s Around the World, five box-like frames are brought together with the largest and most prominent showing Raj Kapoor’s smiling face behind a globe, the Indian subcontinent



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displayed in the foreground (Star and Style, July 15, 1967). The smaller boxes are advertised in different colors—red, yellow, purple, and mustard. Each color frame carries a city title and an iconic monument, London Bridge for London, the Eiffel Tower for Paris, the Colosseum for Rome, and an impression of the Kyoto mountain peak with a woman dressed in a Kimono for Tokyo (Image 15). The main caption of the poster says “Great for Going Places.” The combined effect of colors, destinations, and the thrill of visual conquest, mediated via the globe, foreground the powerful affinity between tourism and cinema that emerged in the 1960s. In this poster, the postcard imagination is recognized; its promise of access to a place that can only be dreamt of is guaranteed and rendered imaginatively to the viewer via the use of the map and color. In a single frame the language of cartography is highlighted to mediate the universe of the film.

The poster of Around the World was also coded quite explicitly to reference the style used for ad-vertising the View-Master, a device invented in 1939 as a substitute for the postcard, which gave viewers the illusion of three-dimensional scenes. View-Masters were available at camera stores and later at stationery and gift shops.18 The View-Master went through a series of revisions and finally became more widely available for consumer use in the 1950s. In India, the View-Master was displayed as a magical guarantor of the experience of color, even as the early advertisements were printed as black and white images (Image 16). From the early 1960s, the View-Master advertisement also started appearing in

color. Initially marketed as a device that allowed people the chance to possess their favorite stars, animals, and monuments, the View-Master be-came increasingly enmeshed in the accelerated touristic fascination of the 1960s. In one of the advertisements, the tagline says “Your Passport to the World” (Filmfare, April 2, 1965, p. 46). On the right side we see monuments identified with certain sites—the Taj Mahal in Agra and the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy are imaginatively placed as a series of photographic images available in the View-Master show reels. The caption on the left side of the image says:

Experience the thrill of travelling through the realism of 3-dimension stereo pictures. View the lands you have wanted to visit. Bring back memories of far away spaces. Let View-Master full colour stereo pictures be your passport to the world. View-Master reels on Travel, adventure, children’s subjects are available. (ibid.)

While this was a black and white advertisement, the language of color, of travel, and of the symbolic transactions, enabled by picture postcard forms, is encapsulated here in a virtual navigation of tourist

Image 15. Advertisement for Around the World, 1967.




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sites. Another advertisement printed in color said, “Pictures come startlingly and colourfully alive in the magic realism of 3D” (The Illustrated Weekly, March 26, 1962, p. 48). The View-Master was aggressively marketed during the 1960s through advertising in magazines such as the Illustrated Weekly, Filmfare, and others. But what made the View-Master significant was its photographic language of color, performing the role of a sign that addressed the difficulties involved in Indian cinema’s transition from black and white to color. Unlike Europe and the US, India had to depend on imported color stock for its films which in the context of a serious foreign exchange crisis exerted tremendous pressure.19 It was this con-solidation of color photography, new technologies of image viewing, and the insatiable desire for travel and tourism that came together in the advertisement for Around the World. There was absolutely no desire to evoke the story; rather the sensuous language of adventure and thrill framed the imaginative world of the advertisement. Film became the ideal place for 3D enhancement of spatial cartography. The cinema, as Tom Conley suggests, foregrounds issues of mental geography (Conley, 2007). While this may be true for most cinematic experiences, the global travel form highlighted a particular thrill that traversed the imaginative landscape of cinematic cartography in color.

Aerial Visions, Infrastructure

In an engaging discussion on Le Corbusier’s fascination with aviation, Christine Boyer maps the inter-relationship between aerial photography and cartography (Boyer, 2003). The aerial view allowed for a

Image 16. Advertisement for the View-Master, 1965.




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spatial imaginary to play over the surface of the map. One could then “trace out routes to follow, dream about places to inhabit, or project specific visions onto the lay of the land” (Boyer, 2003, p. 103). For Corbusier, aviation linked up with the idea of a future plan, a poetic engagement with buildings and infrastructure. Aviation meant the opening up of new horizons, shaping the future of technology, forging new links and forms of exchange between nations. Corbusier used the term “epic of the air” and saw aviation as the harbinger of a new world. The aerial view held a combination of fear and desire for mastery, a mastery that could only be achieved through the power of machines. Human sentiments such as fear and panic had no place in this scheme; they existed only to enhance the desire for mastery. Thus, for Corbusier the aerial route emerged as a force to carve out a technologized and planned future (Boyer, 2003, p. 115). Since the 1950s the aerial vision became established as a widespread form of looking at technological urbanism where buildings and infrastructure were privileged. The postcard imagination in Pramod Chakravarty’s Love in Tokyo draws from this model (Image 17).

Image 17. Aerial view of the city in Love in Tokyo, 1966.


An Evening in Paris and Love in Tokyo were both written by Sachin Bhowmick. Love in Tokyo is the story of a runaway woman played by Asha Parekh who is trying to avoid a marriage that is arranged by her uncle. Joy Mukherjee is also in Tokyo in search of his missing nephew. A light comedy, Love in Tokyo brings together an as-sortment of characters to create comic encounters. Above all the film displays everything about Tokyo—from its hypermodern architecture to its urban infrastructure, its costumes, playgrounds, technological achievements, and even its Geisha quarter. Since Asha Parekh is a runaway woman, she masquerades as a young Sikh boy for a sub-stantial part of the film. The poster of the film said, it was the first Hindi film to be shot in Japan and

carried the headline “They were both Indians but they met in Japan and found love in Tokyo” (Filmfare, August 5, 1966, p. 2) Another poster published in Blitz said, “Pramod films take you on a joyride to Japan to see world’s most fascinating city Tokyo” (Blitz, August 8, 1966, p. 22). The film was rich in its navigation of Tokyo’s urban form and displayed a particular fascination with aerial views. As in An Evening in Paris, Air India was highlighted as the vehicle for new encounters introducing spectators to escalators, bullet trains, malls, cars, and the television. The Maharaja appears in the film as part of an Indian Emporium’s display of artifacts in Tokyo.

The script of the film mobilized gags and chase sequences primarily to provide a tour of the city. Sachin Bhowmick recalls how he was taken to both Paris and Tokyo before he wrote the scripts of An Evening in Paris and Love in Tokyo. The locations had to be woven into the structure of the story and Bhowmick worked with the impressions he had gathered during his trips.20 The stories were then secondary to the spatial dynamic of the films. Bhowmick’s account explains why Love in Tokyo kept introducing devices and strategies to mount its kinetic spatiality and aerial perspectives. The aerial view



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is deployed first to enter the city of Tokyo. The sequence starts with interior shots of an aircraft and then we see spectacular aerial views of the city with the airline attendant’s voice introducing us to the “Land of the Rising Sun.” The camera view from the aircraft literally swims over the sinuous lines of Tokyo’s overpasses. Similarly the title song of the film begins with an aerial view of the Tokyo tower and then moves to capture the romantic pair through street-level movement (Image 18). In a comic sequence Mahesh (Mehmood), a friend of Joy Mukherjee, accidentally collides with a scientist working in his lab, overturning a large test-tube with black liquid. Mahesh finds himself standing on the liquid and suddenly discovers that he can fly. This primitively mounted trick photography sequence takes the spectator on a flying tour of Tokyo as Mahesh simulates a very basic and primitive superman vision, defying the laws of physics. Mahesh witnesses the city’s traffic, its trains, and even saves a child from being run over

Image 19. Mahesh (Mehmood) flying in Love in Tokyo.Source: DVD frame grab by the author.

Image 18. Asha Parekh and Joy Mukherjee in Love in Tokyo.Source: DVD frame grab by the author.

(Image 19).21 Finally, the aerial vision is also linked to a fight in the air between the hero and the villain towards the end of the film. This is when the pro-peller of the copter slices off the villain’s arm and allows the hero to land safely. The thrill of being close to danger and yet having the pleasure of looking down at the city weaves in the dialectic of collapse and transcendence that is so central to the aesthetics of the aerial view.

The obsessive desire for aerial mapping in Love in Tokyo was geared to showcase a planned city and its infrastructure and technological achieve-ments. While the aerial view is also used to some extent in An Evening in Paris and Around the World, it is travel and spectacle viewed from the sky that overrides the discourse of infrastructure present in Love in Tokyo. The film’s aerial im-agination was to a large extent framed by Japan’s own position in the global arena of the 1960s. The miraculous economic recovery of Japan in the post-war period is now something of a legend (Flath, 2000). A country devastated by bombs and loss of human lives had by the mid 1960s become the most powerful capitalist economy in Asia. Japan’s presence outside its own territory was identified to a large extent with electronic goods and cars. Japanese women were used in advertise-ments for transistors and toasters that were pub-lished frequently in several magazines in India. Sachin Bhowmick recalls how Japan’s meteoric rise and power in the 1960s had played on his mind during the writing of the script.22 The framing of space in the film was clearly governed by this



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desire to project the idea of an invincible force. Japan in the 1960s was what China is in the twenty first century. It is not difficult to see why Tokyo emerged in Love in Tokyo as an infrastruc-tural dream, a spatial imaginary of inspiration and projection. Japan was what India wanted to be, which the film enacts via a symbolic transaction with Tokyo’s urban form and technological world. The aerial view in Love in Tokyo encapsulated a postcard frame with bullet trains, highways, the television, the helicopter, and the Tokyo Tower (Image 20).23

The longing for colorful images in the 1960s set in motion a powerful perceptual economy. The assemblage of tourism, air traffic, film technology,

Image 20. 20 Aerial fascination in Love in Tokyo.


film gossip, advertising, photography, currency crisis, and censorship created a template for symbolic transactions across these different domains. The result was a global configuration that would transform cinematic experiences of space and time. Through an examination of the workings of this imagery, I have aimed to raise questions about the way travel iconography was deployed to destabilize cultural contexts. If the Maharaja playfully provided irreverence to the nationalized infrastructure of aviation in India, the film industry responded to the desire for tourism with the pleasure induced by color and music. The multiple conduits of exchange and intersection in an economy going through a serious crisis produced a tangled web—a collision of infrastructures, bodies, and spaces. The cinematic event constituted by this assemblage contained within itself sexual and erotic play as well as aspirational desires for infrastructural consolidation and control. Despite the crisis of foreign currency and the expenses involved in air travel for most Indians in the 1960s, the cinematic imagination evoked heterotopic fantasies. Sex, drugs, counter culture, and music swept the big European and American cities in this decade. This is not a world that we see in the travel films from Bombay, but it is an imagination that lurks in the shadows, fuelling both the fantasy and the anxieties marked in the films. The decade, marginalized for its hedonistic desire for pure sensation and spectacle, remains the most unstable in its iconography and its mythologies. We need to return to the decade afresh, to that moment when the postcard imagination takes a full-blown cinematic form.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ravi Sundaram, Shikha Jhingan, Sabeena Gadihoke, Shohini Ghosh, Shaswati Mazumdar, Neepa Majumdar, Debashree Mukherjee, Corey Creekmur, Kalpana Ram, Goldie Osuri, and Philip Lutgendorf for their comments and suggestions. Priya Jaikumar and Vanessa Schwarz gave me valuable references that helped with the research. I must thank Christine Gledhill for suggesting that I look at the haptic elements of the fi lms discussed here. Mrs Joshi, Lakshmi Iyer, and Aarti Karkhanis at the National Film Archive of India (Pune) were exceedingly helpful with pointing out sources. I am grateful to Ankur Khanna for his invaluable help in Bombay. I would also like to thank Richard Allen for letting me present the fi rst version of this article at New York University in 2009. Ravi Vasudevan and Rosie Thomas provided excellent editorial suggestions.



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Notes

1. Throughout the 1960s the “outdoor” appears as a news item. Most films had an outdoor shooting stint which was announced in the studio news beat section of Screen, Movieland, Filmfare, and Star and Style.

2. Interviews with Ashim Samanta and Sachin Bhowmick, Bombay, January 2010. Ashim Samanta is the son of the late director Shakti Samanta and is currently running his father’s company. Sachin Bhowmick is a scriptwriter who wrote the scripts of both Love in Tokyo and An Evening in Paris.

3. For information on the devaluation of the rupee in 1966, see “Devaluation: Pros and cons, report of a symposium” in The Illustrated Weekly, August 14, 1966, pp. 10–19, 34–35. Also see Sen (1986).

4. For an interesting account of tourism as cultural practice, see Frow (1991). 5. See the website of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) (unwto.org/en/about/history). The UNWTO is a

specialized agency of the United Nations and serves as a global forum for tourism policy. The UN also released stamps as a gesture to mark the International Tourist Year. See The Illustrated Weekly, July 30, 1967, p. 61.

6. JRD: As Air Indians Remember is a compilation of essays, letters, and photographs relating to J.R.D. Tata’s relationship to the airline industry set up by him. The collection is compiled by M.S. Kohli. For information on the Jet Fleet, see Air India Ninth Annual Report 1961–62. Marc Dierikx’s (2008) account provides information on how Air India was granted a loan by the World Bank to purchase its Jet Fleet.

7. Translation of song by Shohini Ghosh. 8. In her analysis of this sequence, Sumita Chakravarty refers to the way Shammi Kapoor is positioned as a tour

guide for the audience. See Chakravarty (1996, pp. 210–211). 9. “The Maharaja”, retrieved from http://home.airindia.in/SBCMS/Webpages?The-Maharajah.aspx?MID=19610. All the advertisements have been collated from Blitz, Illustrated Weekly, Star and Style, and The Times

Annual.11. For information on in-flight entertainment and modern air travel, see Govil (2004).12. In conversation with Sharmila Tagore, Delhi, February, 2011.13. Star and Style, August 15, 1967, pp. 34–35; Johar (1969).14. See Wadia (1970, cited in Rashmi, 1970). Also see Rashmi (1970). Both articles provide an account of the

industry’s reaction to the Khosla Committee recommendations on the use of the kiss.15. Sixth session of the Fourth Lok Sabha, August 21, 1969–August 29, 1969, published in Mother India, “The

Answers they gave Me”, February, 1970, p. 34.16. This is what Bruno refers to as the “atlas of emotion.”17. For an account of issues related to the transition to color, written during the 1960s, see Johnson (1966). Johnson’s

account is based on color debates in European and Hollywood Cinema. Also see Monaco (2001). See editorials and reports in Filmfare, April 29, 1966; Filmfare, July 6, 1966; Movieland, Friday, October 3, 1969.

18. The View-Master was invented by William Gruber. It was marketed first by Sawyers, a postcard and greeting card company. The View-Master was known for its ability to view stereo images using Kodak’s color transparencies. For a comprehensive account of the View-Master, its history and changing models, see Ann and Sell (2000).

19. The transition to color in India was slow since the country did not produce color film stock at the time. The currency crisis made the import of raw stock extremely difficult, an issue that was the subject of much debate in the film press. Filmmakers depended on international companies like Technicolor and later Eastman Color for raw stock. The tussle with the government on taxation and relief for imports was widely discussed in Screen, Movieland, and Filmfare.

20. Interview with Sachin Bhowmick, Bombay, January 2010.21. Shanti Lal Soni’s Mr X in Bombay (1964) has sequences that resemble the one in Love in Tokyo. 22. Interview with the author, January 2010.23. Throughout the 1960s, cinema remained the dominant entertainment form since television as a domestic con-

sumer item made its presence felt only in the early 1970s. Yet, during the decade, discussion on the arrival of television appeared in several magazines. Television was introduced as part of the fourth plan and it was the



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economic crisis linked to devaluation that delayed its entry. Newspapers and magazines were expressing a general curiosity and fascination with television even as the earliest advertisements for television as a consumer item were available only from the 1970s. So television was still a wonder for most people in India and it was this fascination that fueled the introduction to the television in Love in Tokyo. The staged fascination with television drew on the affective force field generated by its arrival, available in the press in India.

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Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema

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