Selves made strangeViolent and performative bodies in the cities of Indian cinema, 1974-2003

Curatorial noteThis curation is an attempt to address our contemporary times through a particular reading of cinema history. The cinema has been a crucial modeof experience, generating worlds of narrative meaning, sensory perception, and the very conditions of how we perceive reality. My aim is to understand how one organisation of subjectivity, centred on relatively coherent definitions and prescriptive agenda relating to India as a project of nationhood, to the normative structures of family,and the nature of individual subjectivity, have given way, and what has replaced these. From the 1970s, such coherence seems to dissipate, and aset of orientations emerge, conjuring up more messy viewpoints cruciallyrelated to Indian urban experience. Here, the curation emphasizes questions of violence and the performativity of screen personality as salient vantage points on this transformation. The body, as a vehicle and object of violence, located in the city but redefining other spaces as well, articulates a new vocabulary of the cinema. But the body is duplicitous, and is offered for the pleasures of the appearance it may fabricate rather than the realism it evokes. If the impacted and impacting body, and the body as performance afford one set of reflections, then a sense of decentering and dispersal provide another. Against the integrity of narrative emerges narrative as a format to access a scattering of the social world. These dispersals creatively refuse the old boundaries, between city and countryside, tradition and modernity, the nation and its outside. They re-invent our sense of a pertinent geography, and assert the mutability of personality, against coded or sanctioned identity grids and cognitive frameworks. Such a sense of performativity and self-scattering perhaps provides an emergentcritical vocabulary for the reinvention of our time, redefining its coordinates, and providing a more generous sense of inclusiveness. I have tried to suggest a number of different ways of accessing this transformation through the variety of practices that must compose our sense of the cinema. While India has many cinemas, I have by and large focused on Bombay for mainstream productions, while the art and documentary practices are culled from a wider canvas. I should stress that this curation is very specifically organised to highlight a particular logic of argumentation, and is not in any way meant to be comprehensive or canonical it its aims.

Ravi Vasudevan is a film historian and theorist. He works at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, where he co-directs Sarai, the Centre's research programme onmedia experience and urban history. Vasudevan is guest faculty at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and the Film and Television Institute of India at Pune. He is on the editorial advisory board of the British film studies journal, Screen, and an advisor to

the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, India. He has taught and lectured on Indian cinema at universities in Britain and the USA, and his articles have been widely published and anthologized. Vasudevan is part of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series, andhas edited Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (Delhi, Oxofrd University Press, 2000).

Fr 10.10. Inauguration

Bombay: New truths for old : 1930: Satya/Truth, Ram Gopal Verma, 1999, 156' Bombay mainstream

Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas A certain consensus, about social justice, the structures of the family, and the values attached to the experience of the city were codified in the post Independence Indian cinema of the 1950s. When we look at the contemporary epoch, much of this consensus appears to have been challenged or dispersed. In this opening section of the curation, we look at a variety of filmmaking practices from 1974-84 which address the break up of this original constellation of images, values and meanings, inaugurating a process of re-evaluation that is critical to our understanding of the times we are living through.

Sa 11.10. 20:00 + 22:00 2000: Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron/Leave it alone, guys, Kundan Shah, 1984, 130' Bombay parallelcinema 2200: Jukti Takka arr Gappo, Ritwik Ghatak 1974, 119' avant-garde/art cinema

So 12.10. 18:00 + 20:00 1800: Kabhi kabhie/Sometimes…, Yash Chopra, 1976, 177' Bombay mainstream

2000: Jana Aranya/Middleman, Satyajit Ray, 1976 art cinema

Mi 15.10. 20:00 2000: Jukti Takka arr Gappo, Ritwik Ghatak 1974, 119' , art/avant-garde cinemaDo 16.10. 20:00 2000: Tarang/The Wave, Kumar Shahani, 1984, 171' , art cinema

Our violent times: the morphology of bodies in spaceA dramaturgy of revenge is repeatedly, almost nauseatingly invoked as a key motivational energy in the contemporary cinema. A visceral drive released by the cinema of the 1970s, from the mid 1980s, vengeful and violent imaginings connect the body to the city, and other spaces, in distinctive ways. We have the intimations here of a new cinematic vocabulary about the neighbourhood and

streetcorner, the bazaar and even the rural landscape. But different narratives emerge on the ground of this new imagination. And the cinema, in forms ranging from the documentary through the art film and the popular work also provide us with the possibilities of reflecting on this violence.

Fr 17.10. 20:00 + 22:00 2000: Nayakan/The Hero, Mani Ratnam 1987, 155' Tamil mainstream2200: Ankush/The Goad, N. Chandra 1986, 149' Bombay mainstream OR Tezaab/Acid, N.Chandra 1989, 173' Bombay mainstream

Sa 18.10. 20:00 + 22:00 2000: Zakhm/The Wound, Mahesh Bhatt, 1998, Bombay mainstream

2200: A Season Outside, Amar Kanwar, 1998, 30', Documentary, AND Maachis, Gulzar 1994, 158' Bombay mainstream

So 19.10. 18:00 + 20:00 1800: A Season Outside, Amar Kanwar, 1998, 30' Documentary + Maachis, Gulzar 1994, 158' Bombay mainstream

2000: Aman aur Jung/War and Peace, Anand Patwardhan, 2002, 145' Documentary

Intimations of dispersal : the poetry and anxiety of a de-centred worldIf narratives of violence concentrate energy and attention furiously, focusing themes of terror, injustice, oppression and victimhood, both everyday experience and certain types of cinematic exploration suggest another way of thinking about our times. Dispersal, rather than providing an integrated sense of the world, is a thematic which displacesviolently decisive responses as well as older economic and political certitudes. From the dispersed nature of contemporary work practices, through the decentred narrativeof the city, to a new, expressive power for a mobile folk form, this cluster of films confronts us with the anxiety and poetry of a dis-aggregated universe, where meanings and values are no longer transparent and new connections must bemade.

Mi 05.11. 20:00 11 Miles, Ruchir Joshi, 170', Documentary

Do 06.11. 20:00 Dahan, Rituparno Ghosh 145' Art cinema

Fr 07.11. 20:00 Jari Mari - Of Cloth and other stories, Surabhi Sharma, 74', Documentary 22:00 Dahan, Rituparno Ghosh, 145' Art cinema

Social transvestism and the open-ended seductions of performanceOne of the fascinating dimensions of stars is their performative virtuosity. We are intrigued not only by their trademark, signature style, but how it can be used for startlingly variegated screen personalities. Sometimes a screen image radically departs from the history of the star in the world, the star on the screen. This mutability of theon- screen personality may conjure up a dynamic of social transvestism, performing something radically different from what you are and have been. But it may be just for fun, for variety, the open-ended seductions of performance as a kind of screen magic. In putting a question mark over the identity of the star's screen personality, the performative offers us the pleasures of disturbing the drive to fix identities in the contemporary epoch, and opens up more generous possibilities of interpretation.

Sa 08.11. 20:00 Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye/ Let's have a bit of romance Amol Palekar 1990, 160', Bombay mainstream22:00 Ghulam e Musthafa/Musthafa, the loyal servant, Parto Ghosh, 1998, 165', Bombay mainstream

So 09.11. 18:00 Ghulam e Musthafa/Musthafa, the loyal servant, Parto Ghosh, 1998, 165' Bombay mainstream20:00 Four Friends, Rahul Roy, 2000, documentary, 43' And Dil Chahta hai/Heart's desire,Farhan Akhtar, 2001, Bombay mainstream

Fr 14.11. 20:00 Rangeela/Colour, Ram Gopal Verma, 1995 Bombay mainstream22:00 Four Friends, Rahul Roy, 2000, documentary, 43' And Dil Chahta hai/Heart's desire,Farhan Akhtar, 2001, Bombay mainstream

Inside/Out: Migratory practices and the re-definition of the contemporary

Where do people come from, how do they re-make their lives in newsettings, what new languages do they fashion, what are the tragic, and comic dimensions of this experience of migration, re-settlement, home-making? India has had a long modern history of migrations in and out of the subcontinent, and perhaps it is onlyrecently that boundaries are being so strictly enforced for some,and stigma assigned to the so-called `other'. Part of the creativity of the contemporary arises from the unsettling of cultures, and an investiture of new spaces with a self-conscious history of mobility. This section does not dwell on the much-exhibited Bombay family film catering to diaspora markets. Instead, it will look at movements in and out of a more contentious sort, including a narrative of the criminal rather than the legitimate diaspora. Taking the example of the British experience, we will look at a new confidence in speech forms and self-satire. And, by way of a coda, we will return to the narrative of the mobile folk as they open up our sense of the world through their celebration of an existential state of unrootedness.

Sa 15.11. 20:00 Fearless: the story of Hunterwali, Riyad Wadia, 1993, 62', Documentary AND My Mother India, Safina Uberoi, 2002, 52', Documentary22:00 Company/Ram Gopal Varma, 2002 Bombay mainstream

So 16.11. 18:00 Goodness Gracious Me!, BBC TV 1998-2000, 2 episodes, 60' and Bhaji on the Beach,Gurinder Chadha, 1994, 101', British mainstream20:00 11 Miles/ Ruchir Joshi, 1991, 170' Documentary

Notes on Key Directors and Actors(acknowledgements to Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encylopedia of Indian Cinema, London, BFI, 2001, for information about credits. I have also used in part or whole synopses generated in a range of internet publications too diverse to detail here.)

Amitabh Bachchan, 1942-The biggest Indian movie star ever. Son of noted Hindi poet Harivanshrai, Amitabh acted onthe stage, tried out his wonderful voice as radio announcer and even made a gesture to a conventional career, as a freight company executive. When success finally arrived, with the incessant flow of box office successes of the 1970s, a new series of types emerged: marginalized cop, dockworker, construction worker, railway station coolie. Bachchan introduced new, sophisticated performance codes, constructing a brooding persona within more standard action hero dynamics. These codes even inflect performances for the domesticmelodrama, as in Kabhi Kabhie, 1976. where his repression of romantic desire sits sullenly on his personality. A mass outpouring of sentiment attended his near fatal accident duringthe shooting of Coolie, 1983 (capitalized on by a remarkable freeze frame in the released film), leading thereafter into a short and controversial political career at the service of Rajiv Gandhi's Congress party. A subsequent downturn of box office fortunes, somewhat resuscitated in films by Mukul Anand (Agneepath, 1990, Hum, 1991, Khuda Gawah, 1992), was

followed by a bid to cash in on the star image as corporate leader. The Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited sought to break into filmmaking, television software, advertising and event management, but collapsed, leaving the star's company in massive debt. In a remarkable turnaround, Bachchan capitalized on his image and charismatic presence to anchor the Indian version of the international franchise, Who wants to be a millionaire. Still much in demand as cinema actor, the star has a pervasive presence on television, in reruns, and in ad campaigns.

Mahesh Bhatt, 1949-Son of filmmaker Nanabhai Bhatt, and assistant to well known Hindi director Raj Khosla, Bhatt showed an unusual engagement with the intense personal trauma and psychological damage arising from the infringement of social norms. The director has been a knowing self-publicist, highlighting personal narratives of illegitimate birth and extramarital romance to factor into the public reception of films such as Arth, 1982, Janam, 1985 and Naam, 1986. These films achieved a certain psychological intensity, and provided challenges of psychological characterization to their actors, which included both paralleland mainstream stars. The standout film of the earlier period is Saaransh, 1984, Bhatt's exploration of an old couple's anxieties and fears in a universe governed by arbitrary violence. The city functions as anarchic universe, confronting an eerily upright Anupam Kher as retired schoolmaster with unruly street violence and a malevolent and intrusive politics. Bhatt's remarkable last film, Zakhm, 1998, had to be returned to the censor board because of right wing pressure critical of its references to the Bombay riots of 1993. Bhatt's characteristic narrative of personal illegitimacy and mixed parentage, here Hindu and Muslim, is deployed movingly. In both films Bhatt works with low budgets to generate a minimalist mise en scene, employing melodramatic effects against eerily emptiedcity spaces and institutional settings to pare the world down to its manichean essence.

Gurinder ChadhaThe output of Anglo-Indian director Gurinder Chadha up until her first feature "Bhaji on the Beach" (1993) consisted primarily of TV documentaries as well as film and video shortson Anglo-Asian themes. Among Chadha's early work, with which she began her fruitful alliance with British Film Institute and Channel 4 as producers, was the 30-minute documentary, "I'm English But..." (1989), which followed young English Asians who, unlike their parents, listen to Acid Bhangra, a mix of Punjabi bhangra and rap. Her first dramatic film short was the 11-minute "Nice Arrangement" (1990), about a British-Asian wedding. After Bhaji on the Beach, Gurinder made a short, "What Do You Call an Indian Woman Who's Funny?" and made a cameo appearance in friend John Landis' "The Stupids" (1996). Chadha returned to features with "What's Cooking?" (2000), selected as the openingnight film at the Sundance Film Festival. Following four ethnically diverse families as they prepare for a Thanksgiving celebration, the movie took a comic look at the trials andtribulations of the holidays in an urban setting. In 2001 Gurindered direct the huge box office hit, `Bend it like Beckham', about a young Punjabi girl's passionate involvement infootball.

N. Chandra 1952-Chandrashekhar Narvekar, Hindi director born in Bombay, and a key figure of the late 1980sHindi mainstream. Chandra apprenticed under Gulzar as assistant and film editor. His breakthrough film was Ankush, 1985, often seen as a propaganda vehicle for Maharastra's chauvinist, sons of the soil Shiv Sena movement. However, the film also offers a new lexicon of Bombay in the cinema, with its strong sense of neighbourhood, streetcorner culture, and of distended time and irruptive violence in the circumstances of unemployed youth. His capturing of the Ganesh Chaturti as a cultural and political site for assertionand contestation was also to recurrently appear in the representation of Bombay. By and large Chandra uses a gritty, jagged, fast tempo editing style and a garish, realistic miseen scene. Pratighaat, 1987, carries on Chandra's focus on extreme cruelty and violent revenge, this time in a small town setting where a married woman has to contend with a devilish opponent. His major hit to date, Tezaab/Acid (1988) replays the Ramayana narrative

of unjust exile to narrate the situation of a criminalized youth, Munna (Anil Kapoor) who has to contend with a Muslim mafioso, and the extraordinary malevolence of his beloved's father. Thereafter, Chandra seem to lose his way. While holding on to some of his earlier engagement with urban violence, as in Tejaswini, featuring the Telugu female action star Vijayashanti, lack of success pushed Chandra to greater diversity, as with his recent film, Style, a college campus romance cum mystery film.

Yash Chopra, 1923-Hindi director and producer born in Jullundur, Punjab. Initially made films for the company of elder brother BR Chopra, including important work relating to the traumatic partition of British India in 1947 eg Dharmaputra, 1961 and, more allusively, Waqt, 1964. After forming his own production company in 1973 he was associated with urban revenge melodramas centred on estranged, socially subordinate protagonists as in Deewar, 1974 and Trishul, 1978. But he simulteneously directed romantic melodramas such as Kabhi Kabhie, 1976 and Silsila, 1981. It is the latter `biographical legend' Chopra cultivates, so romantic hits such as Chandni (1989) and the new `virtual' romance films such as Dil to pagal hai, 1998, located in a nowhere place, tend to be highlighted in his directorial profile. Focuson the romance genre extended to the new diaspora melodrama centred on the emotional reintegration of migrant Indians to the homeland, as in his son, Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Chopra's earlier interest in rather more fraught melodramas nevertheless persists, as in the exploration of romantic psychosis in Darr (1994). Chopra is identified with the current cultivation of external markets for Indian cinema, and investments in fashion, glamour and elaborate publicity and marketing strategies.

Ritwik Ghatak 1925-76Major avant garde film maker, born in Dhaka, settled in Calcutta from early life. Associated with the key left wing Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) and many of its key productions, eg Bijon Bhattacharya's legendary play Nabanna, about the 1943 Bengal famine. Ghatak was influential in IPTA's film productions as well, including the landmark Chhinamul (Nemai Ghosh, 1949), about the Partition of Bengal and peasant migration to Calcutta. His own first effort, Nagarik (1951, release 1977), while of the genre of agit prop social realism, nevertheless exhibits a concern with shot scale, disjointed cutting, and an alertness to the powers of the soundtrack, that were to be explored in subsequent work. His stint with the Bombay film industry in the mid 1950s suggests his willingness to work with popular entertainment conventions; a trait reflectedin his creative engagement with melodramatic motifs and expressive techniques in film suchas Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) and Subarnarekha (1962, released 1965). These two films, along with Komal Gandhar,1961, constitute his meditations on the partition of Bengal and displaya remarkable capacity to create a cinematic space that could incorporate mythic, tribal and modern motifs in an epic rendering of the contemporary. Ghatak went on to become vice principal of the Film and Television Institute of India, where he exercised a major influence on early alumni Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul and John Abraham

Gulzar, Samporan Singh, 1936-Hindi-urdu director and writer born in Deena, Jhelum district, now in Pakistan. Associatedwith IPTA as a poet, and became a film lyricist and scriptwiter who worked with Bimal Roy (Bandini, 1963), Hirishikesh Mukherjee, Asit Sen, Basu Chatterjee, Buddhadev Dasgupta and Kumar Shahani, amongst others. Films he directed include Mere Apne, 1971 (a remake of Tapan Sinha's Apanjan, 1968), and several derived from Bengali literary material: Khushboo, 1975 (from Sarat Chandra Chatterjee), Kiitaab, 1977 and Namkeen, 1982, from Samaresh Basu. Gulzar has published three anthologies of poetry and several books for children. His better known films include Aandhi, 1975, a sympathetic account of the travails of a woman politician avowedly modelled on Indira Gandhi, Koshish 1972, about a deaf couple, and Maachis, 1994, perhaps one of the key films on the experience of state terror in Punjab.

Aamir Khan

Aamir Khan started his career with Raakh (Aditya Bhattacharya, 1988), in many ways a deconstruction of the male revenge sagas so long a staple of the Bombay industry. However,he swiftly moved into standard industrial groove, featuring as a strutting, confident, macho teen hero in films such as Qayamat se qayamat tak (Mansoor Khan, 1988), and Dil (Indra Kumar, 1990), both major box office successes. Other films suggested a slightly more complicated screen persona. Dil Hai ke Manta Nahin (Mahesh Bhatt), Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (MansoorKhan) and Andaz Apna Apna (Raj Kumar Santoshi), all suggested a playfulness verging on a perverse, manipulative disposition. A slump in the mid 1990s signalled a time for reinvention of persona. Aamir essayed the yokel in the city (Raja Hindustani), with great success, and then went on to try on a tapori (street conman) mask, again with good successin Varma's Rangeela 1995and Vikram Bhatt's Ghulam, 1998. Just when the urban street mask seemed to have settled in rather well, Aamir assumed the role of the educated, middle class patriot, a policeman pitted against terrorists from both within and beyond India's borders in John Mathew Mathen's Sarfarosh, 1999. Both here and in the tapori films, the Aamir persona appeared to grapple with the reassertion of a secularist legacy under threatfrom the Hindu right, if in rather ambivalent ways in the case of Sarafarosh. Aamir's urbane screen persona contributes a certain darkness to the innovations of Farhan Akhtar'sDil Chahta Hai (2001), which the director says was consciously aimed at a sophisticated, `yuppie' audience, whose attitude to love, work and friendship are different from those constructed by mainstream cinema convention. Finally, of course, Lagaan, 2001, the much touted foreign oscar nominee, and Aamir Khan's own production. This rural saga, avowedly about a peasant encounter with British imperialism through the medium of a cricket match, draws upon the national passion for a game in which India is a world player, thus in a sense addressing globalization rather than earlier historical experiences in the life of the nation. It is the image of the nation which is arresting here, composed as it is of a highly inclusive representation of social groups and types, if in sometimes patronising ways (as in the case of an `untouchable' character). There is a distinctive way then, in which this star persona continues to deploy his cinema to revive older, more generous forms of national self-perception.

Amol Palekar 1944-Actor and director born in Bombay, where he attended the JJ School of Arts (1965). Noted director on Marathi exprerimental stage with Satyadev Dubey and with his own Aniket groupsset up in 1972, whose productions included work by Sadanand Rege and Badal Sircar. Introduced theatre of the absurd and involved in street theatre work. Palekar was working as a bank clerk when director Basu Chatterjee saw him in a play, leading to his casting inChatterjee's Rajanigandha, 1974, a key film of the middle class cinema of the time. Many similar roles, of the ordinary, bumbling small man followed, in Chhoti Si Baat, 1975, Chitchor,1976, and Golmal, 1979. There were also more ambitious characterizations, as for example the manipulative industrialist in Kumar Shahani's Tarang, 1984 and the exploitative manager husband of Smita Patil's film star heroine in Bhumika, 1976. Like other significant actors in the parallel cinema, Palekar became part of an alternative star system, becoming well known in Bengal as well, where he featured in in Narayan Charaborty's Mother, 1979, Dinen Gupta's Kalankini, 1981, and Abasheshe, 1985 and Pinaki Choudhury's Chena Achena, 1983. He also starred in one Malayalam film, Balu Meahedra's Azhiyzda Kolangal, 1979. He shifted into film direction with the Marathi films Aakriet, 1981,Bangarwadi, 1995 and Kairee, 2000, and, in Hindi, Ankahee, 1984, Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye, 1990and Daayra, 1996.

Nana Patekar, 1951-Hindi/Marathi actor, originally Viswanath Patekar. Studied at JJ School of Arts and performed menial jobs while acting in amateur theatre with the Avishkar group in Vijay Tendular's and others plays. Brought a new performance idiom into mainstream cinema, with his tautly controlled body, and bravura, staccato dialogue delivery that functions as verbal assault. He lashes his opponent with a cascade of ironic comment and irreverent wit, the whole laced with a mordant, gallows humour. Intriguingly, this peformance style has been deployed in very different ways. While Patekar has increasingly come to be

associated with a machismo regional and national right wing politics (of the chauvinist Maharashtrian party, the Shiv Sena, and more broadly with a Hindu right politics at the national level), the actor's screen persona is not so straightforward. Thus while films such as Ankush, 1986, Prahaar, 1991 and Krantiveer, 1994, would appear to confirm this political characterisation, his roles in Salaam Bombay (1988) and Disha (1990) are of the mould of the social realist genre. Others, such as Parinda, 1989, Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye, 1990, Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, 1992), and Ghulam e Mustafa, Partha Ghosh, 1998, suggest a tapestry of types. These include the psychotic gangster, the emissary of the monsoon and romance, a sutradhar retailing scathing social critique for the `small man' of an earlier socialist imagination, a Muslim gangster who sends up Hindu middle class mores. Thankfullyfor admirers who are revolted by the brutish nationalism of recent years, there are intimations here of a will to performance, of actorly exploration and re-invention, that complicates any clearcut identity, at least for the actor's screen persona.

Mani Rathnam 1956-Major commercial Tamil director, born in Madras, the son of the producer `Venus' Gopalakrishnan. Studied at Madras University, after which he made a brief foray into management consultancy; perhaps these are skills which he drew into the running of the reputedly transparent and well managed film companies he has been associated with, including his brother G Venkateswaran's GV Films, and his own Aalayam. His film directorial career took off with Mouna Ragam, 1986, but acquired national attention with his Nayakan, 1987, his adaptation of Coppola's Godfather (1972) into the world of Tamil slumdwellers in Bombay. While Ratnam made another gangster film, Dalapathi, 1991, he is perhaps best understood for his working with melodramatic conventions in a way that facilitates the co-presence of musical sequences with Hollywood cause-effect, character centred narration. While earlier work deployed musical scenes in a looser format, melodrama provides the unifying force in the nationalist melodramas of the 1990s, with Roja, 1992 (moblizing a Tamil identity hitherto remote from pan-Indian nationalism into theKashmir issue) and Bombay, 1995 (again pitching a `southerner' into the national trauma of the Hindu Muslim riots in Bombay in 1993), achieving huge popularity. The former signalleda returned viability of the dubbed `regional' film in the national market. Rathnam's essays here were controversial, with a leftwing public taxing him for an uncritical middleclass patriotism that ignores the identity and social conflicts of the issues he addresses. Other important work includes Iruvar, 1997, avowedly about the Karunanidhi-MG Ramachandran relationship central to the transformation of Dravidian politics.

Satyajit Ray, 1921-92For many years considered the only Indian film artist. Ray brought a powerful heritage into the cinema. His forebears included a grandfather, Upendra Kishore, an important literary figure, his father Sukumar, a well known satirist. Ray was educated in Shantiniketan, Rabindranath's Tagore's experiment to return Indian sensibilities to the world of nature and artisanal crafts. But he was also swiftly absorbed in the world of modern advertising, taking up a career as a copyrighter. His cinema is seen as carrying onthe great rationalist tradition of 19th century Bengal. This is evident enough in a host of critical realist works that questioned traditional superstition and paternalist authority eg Devi, 1960, Kanchenjunga, 1962, Mahanagar, 1963, Charulata, 1964, narratives invariably centering, like the 19th century reformers, on the subordination of women.. However, his work is shot through with an almost mystical project of discovering Bengal inalliance with its literary cultures, as in the Apu trilogy. Futher, for a modernist intelligence, there is the surprising instance of Jalsaghar, 1958, where the an aesthetics of decadence is counterpointed to an emergent petty capitalist culture. An aesthetics of being crucially mediates Ray's modernist sensibility (the same has often enough been notedfor Nehru as well). Pleasurably, and often within the same work, so too does a high popular caricatural sensibility inherited from his satirist forebears. In the 1970s, when his humanism and sense of aesthetic precision and harmony seemed increasingly out of step with turbulent transformations in the Calcutta of the naxalite movement, the power of

social observation and caricatural sensibility could still provide the vivid insight, as in Jana Aranya, 1975

Kundan Shah 1947-Hindi director. Shah studied commerce at Sydenham College, Bombay(1968). He was employed in educational publishing at Popular Prakashan, and joined the Film and Televsion Institute of India, where he took a special interest in silent comedy. After graduation in1976, he did some documentaries for the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad. His debut feature, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, 1983, introduced slapstick comedy into the new Indian cinema. Shah then worked in TV, introducing the situation comedy to state television with Yeh Jo HaiZindagi, 1985. As partner in Iskra, the company founded by Saeed Mirza, Aziz Mirza, SudhirMishra and others, he directed alternative episodes of the popular serial Nukkad, 1987, about the everyday life of small folk at who meet up at a street corner. His series, PoliceStation, 1987, ran intro censorhsip trouble over its depiction of police brutality, and wasfinally broadcast as a TV film using the footage shot for the series. His serial Circus wasthe launching pad for current superstar Shahrukh Khan, with whom Shah later made the quirky love story Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, 1993. Now directing mainstream films, Shah achieved a surprise box office success with his Kya Kehna , 2001, a story about unwed motherhood ina censorious small town with the star Preity Zinta.

Kumar Shahani 1940-Born in Larkana, Sind, now in Pakistan, Shahani's early life was marked by the experience of Partition. He was educated at the University of Bombay (1962) and the Film and Television Institute of India (1966), where he came under the influence of Ritwik Ghatak. Shahani also studied with the major Marxist historian, DD Kosambi. Further film education took place in France, as an assistant to Robert Bresson on Une Femme Douce (1967). His first film, Maya Darpan (1972) was supported by the National Film Development Corporation,but the director had to wait 12 years before getting any further financial backing from the state institution. During 1976-78 he held a Homi Bhabha fellowship to study the epic tradition of the Mahabharata, Buddhist iconography, classical Indian music and the Bhakti movement. This research fed into his next film, Tarang (1984). His other films include Khayal Gatha (1988), investigating the north Indian classical Khayal music, Kasba (1990), derived from an obscure Chekhov short story, Bhavantarana (1991) on the Odissi dancer guruKelucharan Mahapatra, and Char Adhyaya (1997), from the Tagore story on revolutionary nationalism. Shahani has also directed actress Alaknanda Samarth in two stage plays, La Voix Humaine and Kunti. The director's writings on cinema have been collected in the third cinema oriented film studies journal, Framework.

Ram Gopal Varma, 1962-Like another maverick, Tarantino, Varma, a civil engineer by education, ran a video library. Hollywood certainly rubbed off, and often in very inventive ways. The urban action film Shiva, 1989, provided a sensational start to the 28 year old director's careerin the Telugu film industry, and he tried his hand at a number of genres, including comedy. Uneven success made him turn more permanently to Bombay, where he came to be increasingly identified with visceral genres, the gangster (Shiva, Satya, 1998, Company, 2002), road (Daud, 1997) and horror movies (Raat, 1991, Kaun, 1999, Bhoot, 2003). While theoutput was uneven, the risk taking was impressive and so too was his support to younger directors through his Varma Corporation. Often knowingly pitting himself against the glamorous side of Bombay's narrative worlds - especially the new breed of syrupy family movies catering to a diaspora audience - Varma notably picked up themes of ordinariness, monotony and routinized work even when he chose glamorous subjects: thus a male fan's adored female star is victim of a repressive domestic situation in Mast, 1999, and the young female extra's rise to stardom in Rangeela, 1995, matter of factly highlights her working girl persona.

DocumentaristsRuchir Joshi

Ruchir Joshi was born and brought up in Calcutta. He is a film-maker and writer who hasmade several award-winning documentaries including Eleven Miles, 1991 and Tales from PlanetKolkata, 1993. A regular contributor to The Telegraph, Sunday and The India Magazine,Joshi's first novel The Last Jet Engine Laugh was published in May 2001 by Flamingo, Britain.

Amar KanwarAmar Kanwar is an independent documentary film maker who won the Golden Conch - Best Film Award at the Mumbai International Documentary Film Festival in March 1998 for his film A Season Outside He is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for 1998 to work on a film about masculinity and sexuality as part of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. A post graduate in Mass Communication , Film and Television from Jamia Millia Islamia, Amar Kanwar has been working as an independent film maker for ten years now. He has directed over 40 documentaries in this period (all of which have been broadcast ) and has consistently worked on issues of health, ecology, philosophy , labour , law , politics , art and education.

Anand PatwardhanDocumentarist born in Bombay. After an early involvement in rural education, Patwardhan went on to study at Brandeis University, Boston, where he made his first film, Business As Usual. He worked for the JP movement in Bihar, making a super 8 film about the period. During the emergency Patwardhan secretly made Prisoners of Conscience, which was exhibited after democracy was restored. He continued to track urgent social and political transformations in the country, as in his film Hamara Shahar, 1985, on the move to evict Bombay pavement dwellers, Ram Ke Naam, 1992, on the Hindutva movement, Pitru, Putra aur Dharamyudh/Father, son and holy war, 1994, on the cultural contexts of masculine aggression inthe subcontinent. His films have been confronted with political opposition recurrently, the latest instance the attempt by the censor board to ban War and Peace, a move annulled by the high court just recently.

Rahul RoyRahul Roy did his MA in Film and TV production at the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 1987 and has worked as an independent documentary filmmaker since graduation. Over the years, films like Dharmayuddha, Nasoor, Invisible Hands Unheard Voices, Khel, When Four Friends Meet... and The Performance have focused on issues related tocommunalism and gender. He is currently working on a series of documentaries on the theme of masculinities under the MacArthur Fellowship. Besides making documentaries, has been writing and conducting workshops on masculinities in the South Asian region

Surabhi SharmaSurabhi Sharma is an alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune with specialization in Film Direction. Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories is her first film after passing out of the FTII. The film was invited to the New Asian Currents' at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Japan, 2001, and has been awarded the third prize at 'Film South Asia', Kathmandu, Nepal, 2001.

Safina UberoiSafina Uberoi studied filmmaking initially in New Delhi and later at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. Her films include the award winning short Guru (1994) and several documentaries including Faith (2000) and The Brides of Khan (2001) for SBS. She has extensive experience in the theatre as an actor and director and has also been active in promoting Indian cinema to Australian audiences. My Mother India, her most recent film, has won many awards including the Rouben Mamoulian awards at the Sydney Film Festival, and thespecial jury award at Hawaii.

Riyad WadiaRiyad Vinci Wadia is an independent filmmaker-writer-gay activist who resides in New York City and Bombay. He is best known for three films that made their mark internationally:

Fearless: The Hunter Wali Story (1993), A Mermaid Called Aida (1996) and BOMgAY (1996). He is currently producing Naked Rain, a gay feature set in India.

The Films

Bombay: new truths for old

Satya/Truth, Ram Gopal Varma, 1999, 155', HindiDirection/Production: Ram Gopal VarmaProduction Company: Varma CorporationScript: Anuraag Kashyap, Saurabh ShuklaCamera: Gerard Hooper, Mazhar KamranLyrics: GulzarMusic: Vishal Bhardwaj

Cast: Chakravarthy, Manoj Bajpai, Paresh Rawal, Urmila Matondkar, Saurabh Shukla, Govind Namdeo

Satya comes from nowhere. He is present time, sheer being and instinct. There are no origins, no nostalgia for idyllic former times, not even a sense of past indignities whichmust be redressed. This man without a past appears, fully formed, emerging, like a myriad others, from the Victoria terminus, the mass portal for Bombay. He is beaten, knived, jailed… and he finds a friend, Bhiku. Bhiku, the gangster ruled entirely by emotions, finds a partner who is like cold steel. There are wives, girlfriends, allies, enemies, bosses and, of course, the police - all of whom are remarkable, inducting a variety of affective intensities into the world of the film - but at the centre of it all are Bhiku and Satya, brothers in blood. Through these two, and the armature of the gangster film, Varma fashions a new language for the Bombay cinema, and, through the cinema, a mode of apprehending and making sense of the contemporary: its heightened tempo, intensified surveillance, communicative immediacy, a society networked through technology. There are even intimations here of ourselves as hyperlinked spectators, privy to the simultaneous existence and impending, violent interpenetraton of differentiated spaces - of the public,the domestic, and the underworld. This is a gangster film, a genre which captures experiential dimensions of modern life for the cinema in very distinctive ways. So this isfirstly a film about the cinema, of going to the cinema, living it, reinventing it for yourself. At crucial junctures, Varma make his Bhiku and Satya traverse the time of cinemato annex the cinematic space produced by Friedkin, Coppola, and especially Scorsese. But he will use cinema experience more close to home, as when he inducts references to a catastrophic cinema fire in Delhi to say something about the nature of the state and the inhumanity of its apparatuses of regulation. For Varma cinema means world cinema, and he would be least bothered about charges of imitation or copy, because this kind of filmmaking is motivated sheerly by an energy, a drive, to annex in order to make new meaning. Meanings which implode in this space, the here and now, where truth lies in the very act of mediation, where the cinema is truth.

Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron/ Leave it alone pals, Kundan Shah, 1983, 143', HindiDirector/screenplay: Kundan ShahProduction: National Film Development CorporationCo-screenplay: Sudhir MishraDialogue: Ranjit Kapoor, Satish KaushikCamera: Binod Pradhan

Music: Vanraj Bhatia

Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapoor, Satish Shah

Two bumbling photographers, Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra are employed by Shobha, the editor of a scandal sheet. They have to spy on a millionaire property dealer, Tarneja and the police commssioner D'Mello. They uncover dirty business involving Tarneja and his competitor Ahuja. The commissioner is killed by one of the builders who then wins the contract to build a flyover that collapses shortly afterwards. The heroes get hold of D'Mello's corpse as proof of his murder, and the corpse becomes a trophy in a mad chase where everyone chases everyone else. In the end, the photographers are framed for the collapse of the fly-over. The Film Institute graduate Kundan Shah composes this inventive slapstick comedy as a treasure trove of references. Figures and film references from the new Indian cinema of the time and to international cinema abound. Builders, cops, scandal sheet editors, urban catastrophes, all of these refer to real characters and events. This energetic film communicates something of the irreverence and cynicism of a new generation immersed in the dross of the contemporary city rather than the myth of a principled and virtuous nation.

Jana Aranya/Middleman, Satyajit Ray, 1975, 131', BengaliDirection/Screenplay/Music: Satyajit RayPr: Subir GuhaPC: IndusC: Soumendu Roy

Cast: Pradip Mukherjee, Lily Chakraborty, Utpal Dutt, Robi Ghosh, Aparna Sen

The final film in Ray's Calcutta trilogy (Pratidwandi, 1970, Seemabaddha, 1971). A graduate, Somnath, unfairly assessed in his graduate examination, cannot get a job. Under the tutelage of Bishuda he becomes a corporate middleman or dalal (also the word for pimp). This includes arranging women for prospective clients, and necessitates a different, darker mentor in the form of Mitter. In a conventional melodramatic denouement,Somnath finds himself procuring the services of a prostitute who turns out to be the sister of a friend. Ray deploys various effects to capture a sense of contemporary transformation. These includes freeze frames in the opening credit sequence, an anecdotalevocation of popular practices as in the aftermath of a football match; witty documentary procedures in tracking the movement of an application in the post; deft caricatural etching of a gallery of wheeler dealers; and a capturing of the virtual nature of middleman business, composed of telephones, a letterhead, a postal address and a contact network. The film showcases a great dexterity of story telling skills, and a glittering performance by Robi Ghosh as Mitter.

Jukti Takka arr Gappa/Reason, Debate and a Story, Ritwik Ghatak, 1974, 119', BengaliDirection/Production/Story/Music: Ritwik GhatakProduction company: Rit ChitraCamera: Baby Islam

Cast: Ritwik Ghatak, Tripti Mitra, Shaonli Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya, Utpal Dutt, Saugata Burman

Ghatak's last film featured himself as the drunken and spent intellectual Neelkantha who undertakes a picaresque journey through Bengal in a bid to reconcile his estranged wife. He is accompanied by the youth Nachiketa and Bangabala, a young refugee from Bangladesh. On the way they are joined by a Sanskrit teacher, Jagannath. The episodic narrative also includes encounters with Shatrujit, a once noted writer who now devotes himself to pornography; a vociferous trade union leader; and Panchanana Ustad, who makes masks for Chou dancers. Jagannath is shot by a landlord when the group stumbles upon a land-grab action. The film ends with Neelkantha meeting a group of Naxalite students, (the extreme leftist revolutionary movement of those years) wanted by the police. He argues politics

with them and is shot in a police ambush the next morning. Ghatak weaves different styles and images together, ranging from gross calendar art, kitsch popular film romance, an abstract, modernist dance of death, an elaborate Chhou performance, leader footage, a baulsong. The effort is to engage in a critical discourse of the contemporary layered through a series of vantage points and historical and cultural materials. Kabhi Kabhie/Sometimes… Yash Chopra, 1976, 177', HindiDirection/co-screenplay: Yash ChopraProduction Company: Yash-Raj FilmsStory: Pamela ChopraCo-screenplay/dialogue: Sagar SarhadiLyrics: Sahir LudhianviCamera: Kay Gee, Romesh BhallaMusic: KhayyamCast: Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Rakhee, Waheeda Rehman, Rishi Kapoor, Neetu Singh

In their college days Amit (Bachchan) and Pooja (Raakhee) are in love, but Amit decides that they must give up their love to respect their parents' wishes. Pooja's arranged marriage with the architect Vijay Malhotra, (Shashi Kapoor) an effervescent soul, proves raucously happy. But Amit, we later discover, still carries the sullen weight of unrealized desire into his arranged marriage. Vikki, (Rishi Kapoor) Pooja and Vijay's son,inherits his father's personality, throwing himself into dances, horse racing and flirtatious pursuit. He and Pinky (Neetu Singh) fall in love. Pinky's parents are good friends of the Malhotras, and all the parents are united in applauding the excellence of the match. However, this harmonious universe of parental love and romantic bliss is abruptly unsettled with the revelation that Pinky is an adopted child. This throws Pinky into crisis, and a desire to recover her past, and to find her mother. The resulting narrative vortex brings all the characters together in a bubbling cauldron of suppressed personal histories. The full arsenal of the melodramatic repertoire is unleashed, tapping domains repressed by social convention, releasing sexuality as almost random energy, even resorting to a hysterical staging of the last minute rescue. Douglas Sirk would have approved.

Tarang/The wave aka Wages and profit, Kumar Shahani, 1984, 171', HindiDirection/co-script: Kumar ShahaniProduction Company: NFDCCo-script: Roshan ShahaniDialogue: Vinay ShuklaLyrics: Raghuvir Sahay, GulzarCamera: KK MahajanMusic: Vanraj Bhatia

Cast: Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Shriram Lagoo, Girish Karnad, Om Puri, Jalal Agha, Rohini Hattangadi, Kawal Gandhiok, MK Raina, Sulabha Deshpande

The film analyses capitalist power in contemporary India: debates about foreign investmentand indigenous enterprise, labour welfare and trade union politics, and the forms of familial intrigue and succession politics that under gird it. Capitalist and working classlives intersect when Janaki, (Smita Patil) widow of a worker activist, is taken into the household of the capitalist patriarch Sethji. She is subjected to the sexual desires of son-in-law Rahul, (Amol Palekar) and becomes unwilling accomplice in his machinations to succeed his father in law. Shahani designs the parallels and overlaps with a lush, often languorous eye. His use of wide screen compositions and calibrated camera movement generates absorbing passages despite a certain awkwardness in constructing narrative and formal transitions. The film also has an extraordinary performance by Kawal Gandhiok, as the Seth's beloved daughter, a mysterious entity who flits past, is not quite of this world, and whose suicide Shahani renders through the imagery of the doomed Ophelia.

Our violent times: the morphology of bodies in space

Nayakan/Hero, Mani Rathnam, 1987, 155', TamilDirection/screenplay: Mani RatnamProduction Company: Sujatha Films, Mukta filmsDialogue: BalakumaranCamera: PC SriramCo-lyricist Pulamai Pithan, Co-lyricist, music Ilaiyaraja

Cast: Kamalahasan, Saranya, MV. Vasudevan Rao, Nasser

Mani Ratnam's version of The Godfather (1972) models its protagonist, Velu Naicker, on the life of the Bombay gangster, Varadarajan Mudaliar. Naicker emerges as the protector of themarginalised Tamil community in Bombay. Much of the narrative logic of the Coppola film isreplayed, if through different character constellations. The film is notable for the charismatic performance of Kamalahasan in the lead role, a skilled condensation of the work of Brando and Pacino in the original source. However, the staging of Naicker's authority suggests a different aesthetic: Thotha Tharani's art work and Sriram's camera render Naicker's house and inner sanctum in the manner of the court. Space is blocked frontally, as if positioning people in a different manner of supplication than the secret inner world of Don Corleone. Perhaps there is a meditation here on the public dimensions of much that is defined as legally impermissible. There are suggestive implications here for how public political life is constituted, the rhetorics it must deploy to acquire legitimacy, and the constituencies it must pander to in order to consolidate authority. Ankush/The goad, N. Chandra, 1985, 149', HindiDirection/screenplay/co-dialogue writer: N. ChandraProduction Company: Shilpa moviesStory: Debu SenCo-dialogue writer: Sayyad SultanLyrics: AbhilashCamera: H. LakshminarayanMusic: Kuldeep Singh

Cast: Madan Jain, Nana Patekar, Arjun Chakraborty, Suhas Palshikar, Nisha Singh

Four young men eke out their time at the street corner. They are unemployed youth who havefallen foul of a society where you can only rise through graft, how well you are connectedand the willingness to turn a blind eye to the corruption of others. Much of their energy is channeled into gang face offs, as in who will command the right of way in the processions for the Ganesh Chaturthi, a major public and religious event in Bombay for a century and more. Otherwise they make ends meet as gang for hire, undertaking brutal evictions on behalf of landlords. An angel comes into their bleak world, a young woman social worker who listens to them, and urges them to employ their energies differently. The angel is raped by a bevy of vicious businessmen, the law will not listen to her, she takes her own life. The reformed young men irrupt in a frenzy of revenge, kill the oppressors, and accept their guilt. Their execution is akin to martydom.

Ankush has often been seen as a propaganda vehicle of the Shiv Sena, a chauvinist regional, sons of the soil, political movement that drew much of its power through influence exercised at the level of the locality, in neighbourhoods, bazaars, at street corners. While this is probably correct, it is worth attending to how the film opens up a new sense of Bombay: the neighbourhood and street corner, a sense of distended time, and the space of the Ganesh Chaturti as vehicle of public power. All of this is caught with a rough, realist aesthetic. It also showcases the first of Nana Patekar's signature roles, offering a new dimension to the performative repertoire of the Bombay cinema. The film

introduces an urban cinematic lexicon which would be drawn upon by a host of films, often with very different political dispositions.

Tezaab/Acid, N. Chandra, 1988, Hindi, 173'Direction/story/production: N. ChandraProduction Company: Aarti Ents Bombay, N.Chandra productionsLyrics: Javed AkhtarCamera: Baba AzmiMusic; Laxmikant Pyarelal

Cast: Anil Kapoor, Chunky Pandey, Madhuri Dixit, Anupam Kher, Kiran Kumar, Suresh Oberoi, Annu Kapoor, Mandakini

N Chandra, director of Ankush, had his first hit with this Bombay crime movie. Munna (AnilKapoor) is in love with the dancer Mohini. (Madhuri Dixit) Mohini's father (Anupam Kher) is an alcoholic gambler who lives off his daughter's earnings. To prevent the lovers marrying, he helps Lotiya Khan, (Kiran Kumar) a criminal hostile to Munna. Lotiya Khan's brother tries to rape Munna's sister and Munna kills him, and is sentenced to a year in jail. On his release, Munna is persecuted by Lotiya Khan, Mohini's father and the police. Forced by his bail conditions to remain outside Bombay's city limits, Munna becomes a noted criminal. Mohini's father and Lotiya Khan quarrel and Mohini is kidnapped by Khan. Munna rescues her and defeats the villains.

As with Ankush, Tezaab is notable for its use of recognizable Bombay locations. But it is peppered with more conventional popular film spaces, as with the romantic scenes staged ina college campus; and the rock concert style setting for Madhuri Dixit's famous Ek Do Teennumber. Deploying a flashback structure starting from Munna's situation of crimiinal exile, the film tracks back over the romance, and, before it, to an earlier moment when Munna is an eager, patriotic cadet who intervenes in a bank robbery (Chandra ripping off Brian de Palma's rip off of Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence in The Untouchables, 1987!).It is as if an earlier moment in the history of nationalist investments has to be stated in order to establish a distance, and a new social and political setting. The narrative also strongly echoes elements of the Ramayana epic, where the virtuous Ram must suffer unjust exile, and ultimately has to save his wife, Sita, from the evil Ravana. Here Munna must enter a criminal township ruled over by the villainous Muslim hoodlum to rescue Mohini. It is a place replete with all sorts of unsavoury activity, including the flesh trade, and, perhaps, workshops for the terrorist destabilization that became a staple of later movies.

Zakhm/The Wound, Mahesh Bhatt, 1998, HindiDirection: Mahesh Bhatt Producer: Pooja BhattCo-Producer: Mukesh BhattStory: Mahesh BhattScreenplay: Tanuja Chandra, Mahesh Bhatt Music: N.M. Kreem Lyrics: Anand Bakshi Dialogue: Girish DhamijaCamera: Nirmal Jani

Cast: Ajay Devgan, Pooja Bhatt, Sonali Bendre, Kunal Khemu, Akshay Anand, Sharat Saxena, Avtar Gill, Ashutosh Rana, Madan Jain, Saurab Shukla, Nagarjuna.

Zakhm is set against the backdrop of the 1993 communal riots in Bombay. It is about an unnamed Muslim woman (Pooja Bhatt) who has had two children by a film-maker (Nagarjuna). She keeps hoping her man will marry her, but he ties the knot with another because his mother would never tolerate a union with a Muslim. The unwed mother has a very strong bondwith her elder son Ajay (Ajay Devgan), the only one with whom she shares her humiliation

of being an unmarried mother and a closet Muslim. His younger brother (Akshay Anand) is kept in the dark about it though. Later, the younger boy joins a Hindu political group andthe mother is burnt alive by a Muslim mob. The dying woman has one last wish, that she be buried according to Muslim rites since that is the only way she can attain heaven. The elder son strives to fulfil the wish while the younger brother, with help from an ambitious leader of the group, tries to get her cremated the Hindu way.

A Season Outside, Amar Kanwar, 1998, 30', Documentary, EnglishDirection/script : Amar Kanwarcamera : Dilip Varmaediting : Sameera Jainsound : Uma Shankarmusic: Susmit Senresearch consultant : Dilip Simeon

There is, perhaps, no border outpost in the world quite like Wagah, where this film beginsits exploration about conflict, violence and non violence. An outpost where everyday, divided people are drawn to a thin white line, a fait accompli bequeathed to them by history. In this sense and for this reason this is a very Indian film, whose nuances and symbolism Pakistanis will certainly understand, those who remember Checkpoint Charlie might be able to relate to.... probably anyone in the eye of a conflict may find themselves here.

A Season Outside is a personal and philosophical journey through the shadows of past generations, conflicting positions, borders and time zones. a nomad wandering through lines of separation, examining the scars of violence and dreams of hope scattered among nameless people, communities and nations.... The documentary is in the form of an analytical essay about the ambivalent dimensions of conflict... with many characters but without interviews it is a story which looks outside and within, as it embarks, with the viewer, upon a search for the wisdom that could prefigure peace of a different kind...

Maachis, Gulzar, 1994, Hindi, 158'Direction/Script/Lyrics: GulzarProduction: R V PanditCamera: Manmohan SinghMusic: Vishal Cast: Chandrachur Singh, Tabu, Raj Zutshi, Jasjit Shergill, Ravi Gosain, Om Puri, Kanwaljeet, Kulbushan Karbanda

The narrative's unstated, but tacit background is the Indian army's attack on the holy Sikh Gurudwara, the Golden Temple, the subsequent assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Sikh bodyguards, and the large scale attacks on Sikhs in Delhi in the aftermath of the assassination. Kirpal's (Chandrachur Singh) close friend is detained and brutally tortured by the police on suspicion of being involved in an attack on a politician in Delhi. A bitter and angry Chandrachur meets others who have undergone traumatic experiences, and comes under the influence of a militant sent from across the border (Om Puri). Subsequently, Tabu, Chandrachur's girlfriend, arrives at the militant camp, and looks after the group. Events unravel with a sense of dark pre-destination, but not without a strange sting in the tail.

Gulzar experienced India's devastating Partition in 1947, and he communicates a feeling ofdesolation to the verdant Panjabi landscape which has borne witness to a pervasive terror.The film arrived over a decade after the catastrophic events of 1984 and their aftermath, and when normal governmental functions had been restored. It was received with anxiety by a spectrum of political parties, from the Congress through to the communists. While the Congress, who oversaw the anti-Sikh atrocities of 1984, had obvious reasons, perhaps an

uncritical national security reaction more generally motivated the political response to sympathetic treatments of terrorist insurgency.

Jang aur Aman/War and Peace , Anand Patwardhan, 2002, 148', documentaryDirection: Anand PatwardhanProduction: Anand Patwardhan

Filmed over three years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the United States, after the 1998 nuclear tests on the Indian sub-continent, War and Peace documents the journey of peace activism in the face of global militarism and war. The film is framed by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Patwardhan believes the significance of this act of violence to beundiminished 50 years later. A visit to Pakistan shows Indian delegates showered with affection, not only by their Pakistani counterparts in the peace movement, but by ordinarycitizens who declare without caution that "hate is the creation of politicians." The film goes onto examine the militarization of India, and the human cost extracted, from the plight of residents living near the nuclear test site, to the horrendous effects of uranium mining on local indigenous populations. Going beyond the story of South Asia, the film follows the extraordinary visit of Japanese Atom Bomb survivors after the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. Their visit becomes the impetus for a re-examination of events that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. American historians who recently curated an exhibit about this issue for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC were amazed to find their voices suppressed. Shifting from its analysis of homemade jingoism, the film focuses on how an aggressive United States has become a Foreign Relations role model for aspiring Third World elites. The film argues that, as we enter the 21st century,enemies are being re-invented, economies are inextricably tied to the production and sale of weapons, and Gandhi seem like a mirage that never was, created by our thirst for peace and our very distance from it.

Intimations of dispersal: the poetry and anxiety of a de-centeredworld

11 Miles, Ruchir Joshi, 1991, 170', documentaryProduction Company: Hit FilmsDirection: Ruchir JoshiCamera: Ranjan PalitEditor: Mahadev ShiSound: Suresh Rajamani

`Eleven Miles is a cinematic song inspired by the Baul folk musicians of the Bengal delta.It is a film made in the context of their philosophy, and their contemporary realities. The Bauls are wandering singers who keep alive a tradition of music, performance and talk that goes back over a thousand years. On the simplest level, the Bauls sing of love as being the only real religion, and of the human body and nature as the only temples of worship. Cutting across barriers of different religions, caste, gender and class the Baulsare formidable cultural guerrillas. In their songs they use metaphors of the land, the river, the tree and the sky, and more recently, the bicycle, the electric generator and the flashlight. Their songs carry a search for a spiritual oneness as well as a sharp social critique that is leveled at their audiences in the villages and cities of Bengal. With each generation the Bauls have been obliged to maintain their marginal position in society. Every so often they have had to re-invent their tradition of subversion. In responding to these subversions we ourselves have been obliged to try and subvert the ethnographic, explanatory forms of film-making.' Ruchir Joshi

Jari Mari - Of cloth and other stories, Surabhi Sharma, 2001, 74', documentaryDirection: Surabhi Sharma Camera: Setu Pande

Sound: Gissy Michael Editor: Jabeen Merchant Sound design: D Wood, Vipin Bhati Organisational support: CEHAT, HIVOS

Jari Mari is a sprawling slum colony adjacent to Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport. Its narrow lanes house hundreds of small sweatshops where women and men work, without the right to organise. Their existence is on the edge - their illegal dwellings could be demolished at any time by the airport authorities, and jobs have to be found anew everyday, from workshop to workshop. This film explores the lives of the people of Jari Mari, and records the many changes in the nature and organisation of Mumbai's workforce over the past two decades.

Dahan, Rituparno Ghosh, 1998, Bengali, 145'Direction/Script: Rituparno Ghosh Producer: Bijay Agarwal, Kalpana Agarwal Music: Debajyoti Mishra, Poroma Banerjee Camera: Hari Nair Editor: Arghyakamal Mitra Production design: Sudesna Roy, Surya Chatterjee Sound: Chinmay Nath

Cast:: Suchitra Mitra, Indrani Haldar, Rituparna Sengupta, Abhishek Chatterjee, Sanjeev Dasgupta, Aditi Chatterjee, Mamata Shankar

Dahan is based on a well known incident, subsequently novelized, where a woman reporter observed and intervened in a case of sexual harrassment outside a Calcutta metro station. Ghosh takes the incident as a critical intersection of a number of lives: the intrepid citizen, in the film a school teacher; the victim, a woman who has married into a conservative, lower middle class family; and the girlfriend of the attacker. The last is the most fleetingly captured of these different narratives; the attacker too comes from a well to do family, and his girlfriend, while appalled at what he has done, is neverthelessborne down by the pressures internal to her space. None of these women meet, and a particularly fragmented image of the city emerges from the secluded spaces in which each woman confronts the constraints of her own positioning. Ghosh interweaves testimony from passersby, and delineates micro-social pressures - extending to outright sexual aggression- at home and in the work place, with a fine sense of detail. At times, the form suggests the complex, serialised television film, indicating the emergence of new dynamics in the intersection between art cinema and the new televisual space it how inhabits. Social transvestism and the open-ended seductions of performance

Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye/Let's have a bit of romance, Amol Palekar, 1990, Hindi, 160'Direction/production: Amol PalekarProduction Company: DoordarshanScript: Chitra PalekarCamera: Debu DeodharLyrics: Kamlesh PandeyMusic: Bhaskar ChandavarkarCast: Anita Kanwar, Vikram Gokhale, Nana Patekar, Dilip Kulkarni

Palekar's musical derived from Joseph Anthony's The rainmaker (1956) featuring Binny (Kanwar), an unmarried woman whose condition is reflected by the barren and rainless town in which she lives with her family. A stranger arrives, bringing rain and romance into herlife. The film uses music extensively, often weaving spoken words into songs. It has fine ensemble performances, and a remarkable performance by Nana Patekar, his demeanour

suffused with the radiance of romantic desire, in the character of the rain bearer, or baarishkar.

Ghulam e Mustafa/ Mustafa, the loyal servant, Parto Ghosh, 1998, Hindi, 165'Direction: Partha GhoshProduction: P.G. SrikkanthStory: PrasannaScript: Prasanna, Mangesh Kulkarni, Imtiaz HussainDialogue: Mangesh Kulkarni, Imtiaz HussainLyrics: Anand BakshiMusic: Rajesh RoshanCamera: K.V. Ramanna

Cast: Nana Patekar, Paresh Rawal, Raveena Tandon, Monish Behal, Aruna Irani

The orphaned Mustafa (Nana Patekar) is taken in by a powerful mafioso (Paresh Rawal), and grows up to be his main henchman. Invariably attired in magnificent raiment, he is a ruthless, invincible servant to his master. His attitude to life changes due to two events. He notices the incorruptibility of a government servant, a modest Hindu family manwith a wife and two grown up children. And he falls in love with a cabaret dancer who diesin an attack targetting him. Dispirited at having lost the only person who loved him, the gangster renounces his ways and determines to protect and support the Hindu familly against the mounting pressures they face from a corrupt government investigator. Mustafa moves in with the bemused family, and there follows a comedy of social anxiety as the Muslim gangster's presence confronts the family, in particular the mother, with their worst fears of ritual pollution. Inevitably, Mustafa has to give up his life for his new principles. Very much of the genre of the hyper violent action film, Ghulam e Mustafa is nevertheless quite astonishing in terms of its comedy treatment of Hindu mores, and identification with its rather fantastical Muslim hero. That Patekar, associated with a rather different screen image in films such as Ankush, Prahaar, Krantiveer and Agnisakshi, shouldplay this role is a revelation. Of what? Difficult to say; but he is magnificent, deploying his ferocious intensity and scathing wit in entirely unexpected directions.

Rangeela/Colour, Ram Gopal Varma, 1995, Hindi, 175'Direction, production, script: Ram Gopal VarmaDialogue: Sanjay ChelCinematography: WB RaoLyrics: MehboobMusic: AR Rahman

From its opening titles, this is a film about cinema, about the city. As the credits role,we are presented images of film stars of yesteryear, and sounds of street traffic. The credits move onto a dance staged against city backdrops, with the heroine, Milli (Urmila Matondkar), dancing in a skimpy dress. A call from her mother wakes her out of her satisfying dream, the dream not only of her own spectacular staging, but of the cinema, then and now. Later, we see that Milli's childhood friend, Munna (Aamir Khan) hawks black market tickets outside a cinema hall, both true to life but also a cinematic image dating back to the 1950s. Milli is an extra in a film shoot directed by a dude who believes he isSpielberg in the making (a sly reference to Vidhu Vinod Chopra). The film's star, Jackie Shroff, happens on her at the beach where she is doing exercises, raising a visible sweat.Rangeela is about the movies, but it's also about working in the movies. When it dawns on Munna that he is falling in love with Milli, he takes her to a sound stage, and they are digitally transported into exotic locales, including a flight over New York; it's Singin' in the Rain updated… and so on. Varma parades a love for cinema with great vivacity, a love which, through the tapori and the working girl, spills over into the city, into the street, into everyday life. The driven director of visceral genres pulls off something of the light fantastic here.

When Four Friends Meet, Rahul Roy, 2000, 43 minutes, Hindi, documentary

Directed by Rahul Roy Editor: Reena Mohan Sound: Asheesh Pandiya Script: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy Camera: Rahul Roy

When four friends meet they share with the camera their secrets, sex and girls; youthful dreams and failures; frustrations and triumphs. Bunty, Kamal, Sanjay and Sanju, best of friends and residents of Jehangirpuri, a working class colony on the outskirts of Delhi are young and trying to make their lives in an environment which is changing rapidly girlsseem to be very bold stable jobs are not easy to come by sex is a strange mix of guilt andpleasure families are claustrophobic and the blur of television the only sounding board

Dil Chahta Hai/Heart's desire/Farhan Akhtar, 2001, Hindi

Direction: Farhan Akhtar Production: Ritesh Sidhwani Camera: Ravi K. Chandran Music: Shankar, Ehsaan, Loy Lyrics: Javed Akhtar Cast: Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Akshaye Khanna, Dimple Kapadia, Preity Zinta, Sonali Kulkarni, Suhasini Mulay & Ayub Khan

Dil Chahta Hai is woven around the love and life discovering experiences of three young friends. Sameer (Saif Ali Khan) is the sort of chap who wears his heart on his sleeve, andlets the ladies walk all over him, dominating each and every aspect of his being. Siddharth (Akshaye Khanna) is an introverted artiste bottling up himself, his dreams and aspirations for that one true person who's willing to understand all that he is about. AndAakash (Aamir Khan) is the mandatory non-believer in hard-work and love.

Director Farhan Akhtar, son of the legendary Javed, has fashioned a film that pitches itself to `a cool yuppie audience', to use his own words. Akhtar used a carefully written script, a rarity in Bombay mainstream cinema. Relying on the cadences of a particular typeof intimate group sociality, the film gives the appearance of spontaneity and the songs were apparently put together with a spirit of improvisation. The film finally acquires gravity through the narrative of the playful, cynical Aakash, with Aamir Khan capturing a sense of the difficulties of character transformation, and the loneliness of growing up, settling down and taking responsibilities for others.

Inside/Out: migratory practices in the re-framing of the contemporary Fearless: the Hunterwali story, Riyad Vinci Wadia, 1993, 62', English, documentaryDirection: Riyad Vinci WadiaProduction company: Wadia Movietone

From 1935 to 1959, Fearless Nadia was the whipcracking, pistol-packing, singing, dancing, daredevil queen of the Indian screen. Riyad Wadia's biography of India's legendary stunt actress captures the unique persona of the Australian-born femme-firecracker who thrilled audiences with her daring portrayals of fearless, rough-and-ready heroines, from her firststarring role as Hunterwali (The Lady with the Whip), through such hits as Diamond Queen, Lady Robinhood, and Jungle Goddess.

My mother India, Safina Uberoi, 2001, 52', documentaryDirection: Safina Uberoi

Producer: Penelope McDonaldWriter: Safina UberoiCinematographyer: Himman DhamijaMusic: Miroslav Bukovsky

`My Mother India is a daughter's reflection on her mother's journey from Australia to India as well as her own journey, as the daughter of a fair skinned foreigner in India. The story travels between India and Australia, between the past and present as it explores theheritage of a multicultural marriage, and the personal and political forces that shape a family over the past 50 years'. Safina Uberoi Writer/Director

Company, Ram Gopal Varma, 2002, HindiDirection: Ram Gopal Varma Production: Varma CorporationMusic: Sandeep Chowta Lyrics: Nitin Raikwar Camera: Hemant ChaturvediCast: Ajay Devgan, Manisha Koirala, Mohanlal, Antara Mali, Seema Biswas, Vivek Oberoi. Isha Koppikar, Urmila Matondkar

Company is the second Varma film to be set in the underworld. It focuses on the relationship between two figures, Malik and Chandu. Malik (Ajay Devgan), head of an underworld gang, happens to observe Chandu (Vivek Oberoi) and is impressed by his killer instincts. He immediately appoints Chandu as his right hand man, much to his associates' annoyance. Chandu's mother (Seema Biswas) knows about Chandu's line of work, and treats itlike any other profession. One moment she is scolding him for coming home late, the next she is falling all over herself to welcome Chandu's bosses into her home. This is very much how Kannu (Antara Mallli), Chandu's girlfriend looks at matters too. Here Varma sees the gangster universe as necessarily composed of a certain normalcy, in a fashion similar to the wrangling of Bhiku Mhatre and his wife in Satya. In Company, he also expands the geography of his story, in line with the extensive international network through which gangs operate today. Malik and Chandu undertake a shift to Hong Kong when matters become too rough in Bombay, controlling operations from afar. Everything runs smoothly until there is a difference of opinion, and this is compounded by a fatal misunderstanding. Chandu, believing Malik is out to get him, guns down one of Malik's close associates and escapes to Kenya where he starts up his own gang network. Thereafter the two men's main objective is to destroy each other. Srinivasan (Mohanlal), the cop commissioned to end gang power takes advantage of this situation… While the film lacks the riveting coherence of Satya, telescopes transitions and strives for too much `attitude', MTV style, it has passages of great visual intensity, and an innovative piece of characterization in the role assigned to the very fine Malayali actor, Mohanlal, the cop as avuncular confessor figure. Above all, it offers a welcome antidote and counterpoint to the usual thematic framing of the diaspora experience.

Goodness Gracious Me, British television, 1998-2000, 2 episodes

The well known comedy show that could send up pretty much everyone, starting with the British Indian community. The series was composed of sketches performed by the four main comedians, Meera Sayal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia. The show originally started on radio, and when its potential was realised it was transferred to television.. Brilliantly performed sketches include a man who insists everything is Indian(including William Shakespeare); the backpackers from india (they started haggling over a price of a newspaper!); the Mr-check-please-guy; and Indian takes on western songs to round of each show, including 'Punjabi Girl', a very comic parody of Aqua's no.1 hit, 'Barbie Girl'. The show finished after 3 series but opened doors to the quartet, with guest appearances in such mainstream shows as 'Holby City', 'Room 101' and 'At home with

the Braithwaites'. Meera sayal is now starring in her own sitcom, and along with Sanjeev Bhaskar hosts the successful 'The Kumars at no.42'

Whilst studying at Manchester university, Meera Syal won the National Student Drama Award for her play One of Us. She appeared in the Sammi And Rosie Get Laid during the late 80s. A role in Band Of Gold followed. It was sketch show The Real McCoy that first introduced Meera as a writer and performer. A very funny look at multicultural Britain, it also introduced her to Kulvinder Ghir. Meera and Kulvinder would go on to collaborate on Goodness Gracious Me, along with Sanjeev Baskhar and Nina Wadia.

Bhaji on the Beach, Gurinder Chadha, 1994, 101', EnglishDirection: Gurinder ChadhaProduction: Nadine Marsh-Edwards Story: Gurinder ChadhaScreenplay: Meera SyalCast: Lalita Ahmed, Jimmi Harkishin, Sarita Khajuria, Shaheen Khan, Mo Sesay, Kim VithanaCamera: John Kenway

After being commanded to "Have a female fun time," a busload of Asian women arrive at the British seaside resort of Blackpool for a very unusual day at the beach. The passengers visiting the boardwalk comprise a cross-section of attitudes and ages, from conservative elders who know the sting of racism first-hand to young professionals who think nothing ofadopting the lifestyles of the status quo. Before the sun goes down, Gurinder Chadha's heartwarming ensemble discovers romance, finds time for reflection and makes some important personal discoveries in this lighthearted examination of England's changing society.

11 Miles, Ruchir Joshi, 1991, 170', documentaryProduction Company: Hit FilmsDirection: Ruchir JoshiCamera: Ranjan PalitEditor: Mahadev ShiSound: Suresh Rajamani

The remarkable 11 Miles takes as its subject the baul singers of Bengal, a folk tradition which celebrates a condition of unrootedness. The film meditates on the resonance of baul philosophy in a number of different settings and through a variety of voices and practices. Baul self-reflection and musical performance, the latter caught with a mesmerising sense of integrity and duration, co-habit in this film with other, outsider voices. The itinerary of the Baul expands from countryside into a cityscape, that of a Calcutta made strange and open to different ways of seeing. One cannot but think of how the film departs from earlier traditions of representing the folk form, as fixed ethnographic object. Here the existensial restlessness of the form affords us a de-centering experience of how we order location, perspective, a rhythm of being in a fascinatingly open format for the documentary form.

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