Peer Reviewed Published Articles by Meraj A H M E D Mubarki
Social Semiotics, 2020
Gastronomically, Hindi cinema deals with its culinary "Otherness" by either denying its presence,... more Gastronomically, Hindi cinema deals with its culinary "Otherness" by either denying its presence, or by relegating it to the "off-screen" spaceaway and beyond the examining gaze of the camera and the spectatorship. The cinematic aesthetics of the erasure of meat
Feminist Media Studies, 2022
The debate on film censorship in colonial India is rife with assertions that censorship was intro... more The debate on film censorship in colonial India is rife with assertions that censorship was introduced to empty Indian films of their nationalist content. But the examination of the Bengal Board of Film Register shows that for the period between 1920-1928, indigenously produced films counted for much less than American films, and film censorship during the silent era was more focused on female sexuality rather than nationalism and politics. Most of the cuts affected in films exhibited in Bengal Presidency were sexual rather than explicitly political in nature. And by the end of the 1920s, the discourse of film censorship in India would metastasize around the moral need to protect the white woman.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2020
Each cinematic adaptation of the novel Dracula transcends the novel’s text and begins to unfold i... more Each cinematic adaptation of the novel Dracula transcends the novel’s text and begins to unfold into a shifting relationship to discourse both to the novel’s context and to the news ones into which it has been relocated. Each of these cinematic texts makes references to the novel but also borrows into other fields of references. If the 1920s’ Germany produced a Dracula pejoratively modelled on the threatening figure of the Jew, and the Black Civil Rights Movement fostered a Blackula, the post 9/11 Dracula adaptations find him fighting Islam and Muslims.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies , 2018
Sanjay Srivastava’s rational, scientific hero, who emerged in the immediate post-colonial Hindi c... more Sanjay Srivastava’s rational, scientific hero, who emerged in the immediate post-colonial Hindi cinema of the 1950s, was strongly linked to the Indian government’s Soviet-style Five-Year Plans. Rigorous town planning and large-scale socio-urban experiments created the conditions for the cosmopolitan, Westernised filmic hero to acquire a hegemonic position within the discursive practices of the Nehruvian state. However, he was by no means the only embodiment of masculinity on offer. Employing narrative analyses of two key Hindi films of the period, I posit that there were competing visions of masculinity, not aligned with, but rather opposed to, the hegemonic discourse of metropolitan culture and cosmopolitan outlook of Nehruvianism.
This article focuses on a corpus of Hindi films that, from a variety of ideological and generic v... more This article focuses on a corpus of Hindi films that, from a variety of ideological and generic viewpoints, articulate Hindi cinema's presentation of India's Partition trauma. It asserts that the cinematic mediation of this trauma appears symptomatic of the vicissitudes of larger discourses at work, and can be categorized into three phases with definite trajectories; wherein Partition first appears as a “denial,” where the traumatic episode becomes a Barthesian absence in the immediate aftermath of the Partition. Later, Partition reappears as “supracommunal trauma” transcending established national boundaries or spheres of sectarian interest in deference to the national conciliation project of Nehruvian secularism. In its third trajectory, the Partition narratives chnage from collective consciousness of experiences into a purely sectarian phenomenon.
Contemporary South Asia , 2016
This paper posits that the contemporary (re)configuration of the generic white woman of Hindi cin... more This paper posits that the contemporary (re)configuration of the generic white woman of Hindi cinema solely as a spectacle was produced by the nationalist discourse during the colonial encounter. This essay explores both the textual analyses and aesthetic strategies employed in the construction of national imagery of white female subjectivities. My approach is twofold: (i) to chart the historical specificities of the representational construct of the white woman through discontinuous changes occurring across Bombay cinema, and (ii) to explore the white female subjectivities across specific historical and cultural milieu. This paper probes the historicity of the ‘Otherness’ of the white woman in Hindi cinema reviews and re-examines how Hindi cinema constitutes female whiteness. I posit that the representation of the white woman in Hindi cinema as promiscuous and sexually available was constructed within the nationalist discourse of the colonial era and is a continuation of the white memsahib in her absence. It is my position that all that was ‘repressed’ in the Hindu woman resurfaces in the white woman – the racial, sexual ‘Other’, onto whom everything repressed within the self could be projected.
Bombay cinema has remained largely aloof from the science-fiction genre. The indigenous Indian sp... more Bombay cinema has remained largely aloof from the science-fiction genre. The indigenous Indian space program in the 1970s did not spark the invasion/mutation sub-genre in Hindi cinema the way it had done for Hollywood in the 1950s. Pakistan's scientific endeavors did not prompt national anxieties in India. Yet Hindi cinema has presented viewers with monstrosities begotten by science. This article reconnoiters the Monster/Creature narrative in Hindi cinema and contextualizes the historically specific monstrous visions in two pioneering monster narratives of the 1980s. The horror-inflected Hindi science-fiction genre with its “moral tales of scientific excesses” remains essentially an anti-science discourse.
While the monstrous feminine of Hollywood is available transhistorically over much of cinema acro... more While the monstrous feminine of Hollywood is available transhistorically over much of cinema across the world, the female monster of Hindi horror cinema remains ignored and merits serious academic exploration. Much of the widely accepted modern art-horror theory as applied to the horror genre is predicated upon Julia Kristeva’s notion of the
‘abject’ and the Freudian notion of the ‘return of the repressed’. While Creed (1993, 2002) exemplifies that horror texts indeed serve to illustrate abjection, her work reduces all forms of the monstrous feminine in the horror genre to fear of the abject mother. I posit that there is no universal archetype of the abject mother, and the maternal as an abject figure does not find resonance in the Hindi horror genre. Instead, I propose that a sub-genre, which I term the ‘Monstrous “Other” Feminine’ narrative, within the Hindi horror cinema engendered in the 1980s, presents an interstitial phantasmal female monster with wanton sexual
desire and gaze as the abject ‘other’. Through narrative closures, traditional gendered perspectives are reinforced, normative femininity is deified and the monstrous other feminine, commanding sovereign female desire and controlling gaze, is annihilated. Exorcism becomes the means
not only of expelling the interstitial phantasmal being but also of punishing and disciplining the female body for unrestrained desire and look.
"The aim of this paper is to explore Hindu–Muslim relations through the cinematic register of on-... more "The aim of this paper is to explore Hindu–Muslim relations through the cinematic register of on-screen inter-faith marriages, and critique the under-currents of ‘Otherness’ that undergirds most of these narratives in the post-Hindutva milieu. Since the Hindu female embodies the (Hindu) nation in popular imagination, Muslim males gain access to Hindu females only within narrations of perfidy and ‘inappropriate appropriation’, signifying their perceived ‘Otherness’. The cohabitation of the Muslim female with a Hindu male, on the other hand, is framed within quotidian love narratives and marks her homecoming or gharwaapsi. Even as it offers national integration as its central motif, Jodhaa Akbar (JA) offers a narrative in which Akbar must be sufficiently indigenized and homogenized to merit absorption into the nation. JA both participates in and responds to the construction of this ‘Otherness’,as I shall demonstrate. While charting a new cartography of cinematic terrain where the
faith of a minority group occupies the centre stage, JA nevertheless presents a Hindutva polemic aware of accusations of self-aggrandizement and thus amenable to hegemonic concerns."
While Hindi cinema has often been critically engaged as a narrative form while ‘writing’ the nati... more While Hindi cinema has often been critically engaged as a narrative form while ‘writing’ the nation, the role of Hindi horror genre in imagining this nation is under-explored. Hindi cinema itself emerged in a charged environment of nascent nationalist politics, and early Indian filmmakers saw themselves and their on-screen projections as part of the patriotic scheme. However Post-Independence wars with Pakistan and China, and the eruption of various separatists’ movements in the North-East, Sikh’s Khalistan movement and Kashmiri Muslims engendered narratives and counter-narratives to the state-sponsored scientific secularist discourse. In this article I trace how the Hindi horror genre with its evolving narrative strategies has itself been an area of conflicting ideas and ideologies in imagining the Indian state. Lying at the intersections of myths, ideology and dominant socio-religious thoughts, the Hindi horror genre reveals three major strands: the secular conscious, the traditional cultural and the Hindutva ideological, roughly corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in Post-Colonial India. Moving beyond establishing theoretical framework, I intend to demonstrate how the Hindi horror genre with its sub-sets provides us with the means to contemplate the nation and its representation.
Media Asia: An Asian Communication Quarterly, 2012
The aim of this study was to examine sexual content in Indian TV commercials. For the purpose, a ... more The aim of this study was to examine sexual content in Indian TV commercials. For the purpose, a
content analysis was carried out and 888 Indian TV commercials were recorded from 15 TV channels
available across India over two phases with a gap of three months in between. After repetitions were
weeded out, the remaining 365 TV commercials were coded and measured for sexual content. Results
show that a quarter of all Indian TV commercials contain sexual information. Sex or sexual content
is not limited to advertisements where the dominant advertising appeal is sexual. On the contrary,
sexual content has spilled over on TV commercials where the dominant appeal of the advertisement
is emotional or argumentative. Data shows that women play more leading roles than men in TV
commercials with sexual content. The most preferred operationalisation of sex in TV commercials takes
place through body display, followed by sexual behaviour and sexual referents. English TV commercials
have higher sexual content compared to Hindi TV commercials. Sexual content was not just limited
to the ‘usual suspects’ like beauty- and appearance-enhancing products, but was also found in a wide
range of products categories such as those of household, electronic, housekeeping, food, automotive
and accessories product and services, etc. This article provides several implications for policy makers,
as TV commercials with sexual content are often shown throughout the day, exposing the content to a
young audience.
Book Reviews by Meraj A H M E D Mubarki
Contemporary South Asia , 2012
Censorship in South Asia offers an expansive and comparative exploration of cultural regulation i... more Censorship in South Asia offers an expansive and comparative exploration of cultural regulation in contemporary and colonial South Asia. These provocative essays by leading scholars broaden our understanding of what censorship might mean―beyond the simple restriction and silencing of public communication―by considering censorship's productive potential and its intimate relation to its apparent opposite, "publicity." The contributors investigate a wide range of public cultural phenomena, from the cinema to advertising, from street politics to political communication, and from the adjudication of blasphemy to the management of obscenity.
review of the book Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies by D.Ray published in EPW
Contemporary South Asia 2014
Conference Presentations by Meraj A H M E D Mubarki
The relationship between the text and the printing press established by the German innovator Joha... more The relationship between the text and the printing press established by the German innovator Johannes Gutenberg has survived for close to over four hundred years now. His innovation liberated word and text from the short-lived wood-engravings and the constraints of precarious human hands. Publishing could be done on a mass scale. The print media created in Jurgen Habermas’ term ‘a public sphere for political debate’, and helped crystallize the notion that public opinion must be the basis of governance. But censorship notwithstanding, the first substantial threat to the print media came through the medium of the radio set. Signals travelled through the air-waves and brought news directly to the listener. Television followed soon after. In the late 90s, the US Defence Department run-Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) a system of inter-connected computers was de-shackled from governmental control and the World Wide Web was born. Since the 90s, some quarters have seen a steady decline of the print newspaper in favour of the online source of news. But low levels of internet penetration in India coupled with computer illiteracy makes newspapers still the preferred choice. Online newspapers do not present an ‘existential’ threat to the print media. What the print newspapers can learn is the advantages of ‘interactivity’ and ‘democratization’ of content.
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Peer Reviewed Published Articles by Meraj A H M E D Mubarki
‘abject’ and the Freudian notion of the ‘return of the repressed’. While Creed (1993, 2002) exemplifies that horror texts indeed serve to illustrate abjection, her work reduces all forms of the monstrous feminine in the horror genre to fear of the abject mother. I posit that there is no universal archetype of the abject mother, and the maternal as an abject figure does not find resonance in the Hindi horror genre. Instead, I propose that a sub-genre, which I term the ‘Monstrous “Other” Feminine’ narrative, within the Hindi horror cinema engendered in the 1980s, presents an interstitial phantasmal female monster with wanton sexual
desire and gaze as the abject ‘other’. Through narrative closures, traditional gendered perspectives are reinforced, normative femininity is deified and the monstrous other feminine, commanding sovereign female desire and controlling gaze, is annihilated. Exorcism becomes the means
not only of expelling the interstitial phantasmal being but also of punishing and disciplining the female body for unrestrained desire and look.
faith of a minority group occupies the centre stage, JA nevertheless presents a Hindutva polemic aware of accusations of self-aggrandizement and thus amenable to hegemonic concerns."
content analysis was carried out and 888 Indian TV commercials were recorded from 15 TV channels
available across India over two phases with a gap of three months in between. After repetitions were
weeded out, the remaining 365 TV commercials were coded and measured for sexual content. Results
show that a quarter of all Indian TV commercials contain sexual information. Sex or sexual content
is not limited to advertisements where the dominant advertising appeal is sexual. On the contrary,
sexual content has spilled over on TV commercials where the dominant appeal of the advertisement
is emotional or argumentative. Data shows that women play more leading roles than men in TV
commercials with sexual content. The most preferred operationalisation of sex in TV commercials takes
place through body display, followed by sexual behaviour and sexual referents. English TV commercials
have higher sexual content compared to Hindi TV commercials. Sexual content was not just limited
to the ‘usual suspects’ like beauty- and appearance-enhancing products, but was also found in a wide
range of products categories such as those of household, electronic, housekeeping, food, automotive
and accessories product and services, etc. This article provides several implications for policy makers,
as TV commercials with sexual content are often shown throughout the day, exposing the content to a
young audience.
Book Reviews by Meraj A H M E D Mubarki
Conference Presentations by Meraj A H M E D Mubarki
‘abject’ and the Freudian notion of the ‘return of the repressed’. While Creed (1993, 2002) exemplifies that horror texts indeed serve to illustrate abjection, her work reduces all forms of the monstrous feminine in the horror genre to fear of the abject mother. I posit that there is no universal archetype of the abject mother, and the maternal as an abject figure does not find resonance in the Hindi horror genre. Instead, I propose that a sub-genre, which I term the ‘Monstrous “Other” Feminine’ narrative, within the Hindi horror cinema engendered in the 1980s, presents an interstitial phantasmal female monster with wanton sexual
desire and gaze as the abject ‘other’. Through narrative closures, traditional gendered perspectives are reinforced, normative femininity is deified and the monstrous other feminine, commanding sovereign female desire and controlling gaze, is annihilated. Exorcism becomes the means
not only of expelling the interstitial phantasmal being but also of punishing and disciplining the female body for unrestrained desire and look.
faith of a minority group occupies the centre stage, JA nevertheless presents a Hindutva polemic aware of accusations of self-aggrandizement and thus amenable to hegemonic concerns."
content analysis was carried out and 888 Indian TV commercials were recorded from 15 TV channels
available across India over two phases with a gap of three months in between. After repetitions were
weeded out, the remaining 365 TV commercials were coded and measured for sexual content. Results
show that a quarter of all Indian TV commercials contain sexual information. Sex or sexual content
is not limited to advertisements where the dominant advertising appeal is sexual. On the contrary,
sexual content has spilled over on TV commercials where the dominant appeal of the advertisement
is emotional or argumentative. Data shows that women play more leading roles than men in TV
commercials with sexual content. The most preferred operationalisation of sex in TV commercials takes
place through body display, followed by sexual behaviour and sexual referents. English TV commercials
have higher sexual content compared to Hindi TV commercials. Sexual content was not just limited
to the ‘usual suspects’ like beauty- and appearance-enhancing products, but was also found in a wide
range of products categories such as those of household, electronic, housekeeping, food, automotive
and accessories product and services, etc. This article provides several implications for policy makers,
as TV commercials with sexual content are often shown throughout the day, exposing the content to a
young audience.
The book argues that Hindi horror cinema, which lies at the intersection of myths, ideology and dominant socio-religious thoughts, reveals three major strands of narrative constructs, each corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in post-colonial India. Moving beyond establishing the theoretical framework of horror cinema, the book intends to demonstrate how this genre, along with its subsets, provides us with the means to contemplate the nation and its representation.