The Magic of Cinema

Light of Asia: Indian silent cinema, 1912-1934, 1994

Crossings: A Journal of English Studies

In Salman Rushdie’s Shame the narrative epicenter is a mysterious town called Q where three mysterious sisters give birth to a son called Omar Khaiyam who, rather accidentally, goes on to meddle in the military affairs of Pakistan. The magical son of a-unit-of-three-mothers, Omar keeps claiming himself as a peripheral man, yet finds himself in the political mire notwithstanding the aesthetic reputation of his Persian namesake. While the blurring of boundaries between fantasy and reality is common in texts that espouse magic realism, seldom do we get to find serious academics adopting a “fantastical” approach in their critical analysis of real life phenomena. Anjali Gera Roy’s search for an Arab-Persian tradition in Hindi films exemplifies one such attempt.

The current study looks at early silent films and explores extant clips to decode the complex and multiple communication modes that combine to create a larger meaning. Using the framework of the theory of multimodalities (Kress 2001), this article acknowledges that the spoken word is merely one way to communicate stories and demonstrates how multimodalities are used in film narratives. But other theories could also be applied to decode the communication technique in silent films. The origin of films in India is universally acknowledged to be rooted in classical and folk theatre practices. This link with traditional performances justifies the use of the same aesthetic norms for films, that is the Natyashastra (Ghosh 1957). The theories posited in that ancient text on dramaturgy provide an alternate way to understand silent films made in India. This article picks two concepts in particular out of the elaborate analysis of performance in the Natyashastra: (I) The categorisation of Abhinaya (modes of performance) and (II) the Rasa-Bhava Theory (the purpose and impact of performance). Moreover, rather than dismiss the theory of multimodalities, this article attempts to align that theory to the one described in the Natyashastra. The objective of this article is to offer fresh insight into the technique of Indian films in the silent era by using norms of the Natyashastra and to demonstrate that Western and Indian theories of non-verbal communication can co-exist and be understood similarly.

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 2021

The Western image of India has traditionally been based on the attraction of stereotypes like the exotic, the mystical or the spiritual; if this imaginative construct is evident in literature, with examples like Paul Scott’s The Jewel in The Crown and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. I suggest that this recreation could also be applicable to cinema through stereotypcal visions that originally appear in films about India. In this article I aim to explain the evolution of Indian cinema as a genre of its own, using postcolonial concepts like ‘mimicry’, ‘hybridity’ or ‘liminality’ discussed by H.K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), and through the threefold perspective developed by Priyamvada Gopal in The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009).

Screen, 2017

Drawing on canonical Marathi films directed by V. Shantaram, Kunku/Marital Marks (1936) and Manoos/A Man (1939), this paper seeks to complicate an opposition between melodrama as vehicle of pathos, and genres of popular action. It shows that there is action of different sorts even within a narrative of suffering and pathos, and an inventive, media aware self-reflexity on display.

Wide Screen, 2014

Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2010

The thematic and formal difference between Hindi cinema and other cinemas is predicated on its being structured by the principles of oral narrative traditions. South Asian film scholars have convincingly located its origins in indigenous narrative and performing arts. Their examination of Indian epic, narrative, visual and theatrical traditions underpinning cinematic texts has elevated Hindi cinema from a bad copy of Euro-American cinema to an alternative cinematic genre with a distinctive visual and narrative grammar derived from a diversity of ancient and modern sources. While these studies engage in great depth with the ancient legacies of the epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and with more recent ones such as Parsi theatre and calendar art, which reveal a certain intermediality, their privileging of the Hindi film's Hindu Sanskritic sources over others marginalizes those producing a homogenous discourse of indigeneity. While acknowledging the contribution of the dominant Hindu Sanskritic tradition to the shaping of popular Hindi cinema, this article aims to explore the alternative narrative streams that have irrigated storytelling in Hindi films, particularly the alternative Perso-Arabic legacy that has been erased or marginalized in the studies of Hindi cinema. Through tracing the imbrication of the Perso-Arabic heritage with the Hindu Sanskritic, it aims to show that its inherent syncreticism makes a diverse variety of cinematic audiences identify with the narrative conflicts in Hindi cinema. SAFM_2.1_art_Roy_41-56.indd 41 SAFM_2.

boundary 2, 2006