This article was downloaded by: [Anustup Basu]
On: 10 October 2011, At: 07:51
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
South Asian History and Culture
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20
The eternal return and overcoming
‘Cape Fear’: science, sensation,
Superman and Hindu nationalism in
recent Hindi cinema
Anustup Basu
a
a
Department of English and Unit of Cinema Studies, University of
Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
Available online: 04 Oct 2011
To cite this article: Anustup Basu (2011): The eternal return and overcoming ‘Cape Fear’: science,
sensation, Superman and Hindu nationalism in recent Hindi cinema, South Asian History and
Culture, 2:4, 557-571
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2011.605299
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation
that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any
instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary
sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
South Asian History and Culture
Vol. 2, No. 4, October 2011, 557–571
The eternal return and overcoming ‘Cape Fear’: science, sensation,
Superman and Hindu nationalism in recent Hindi cinema
Anustup Basu*
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
Department of English and Unit of Cinema Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign,
Urbana, IL, USA
This article provides a genealogical understanding of the tropes of ‘science’ and
‘technology’ as they currently operate within dominant melodramatic structures of
‘Bollywood’ cinema. In recent times, the entry of Hindi film in transnational markets
has perhaps necessitated the upgrading or fresh minting of genres like the superhero
film or the sci-fi film that were either low end or peripheral in Bombay cinema. These
new films deal with inscriptions of science and technology in a manner remarkably different from both, a cautious and calibrated Nehruvian humanism of the ‘third way’ and
a Gandhian anti-modern agrarianism. They develop a novel exhilarated syntax for the
times – a new plane of language – by which signatures of an erstwhile alienating horizon
of techno-scientific development can be advertised or informatized without obligation
to contending grand narratives like that of tradition or modernity. In this auratic ecology of a new India-in-the-world, tradition can be seen to be bolstered with technology,
while technology can be seen to be claimed by a unique Indian spirit and absolved of its
otherwise profane status. This is how a turn of the millennium upper class, Brahminical
nationalist elite seeks to present its life itself as artwork.
Keywords: India; Bollywood cinema; sci-fi cinema; superhero film; third world
modernities; Hindu nationalism; postmodern Hindutva; informatic modernization; film
and information culture
Introduction
In recent years, the popular Hindi cinema industry has been experimenting with the superhero and science-fantasy genres, albeit with mixed box office results. Perhaps only two of
these – Raakesh Roshan’s 2003 film Koi . . . Mil Gaya/I Found Someone and its 2006
sequel Krrish – can be called noteworthy successes, while others like Mani Shankar’s
Rudraksh/The Seed (2004), Harry Baweja’s Love Story 2050 (2008) or Goldie Behl’s
Drona (2008) have been unmitigated commercial and critical disasters. Despite that, the
industry seems poised to speculate further on an assembling template that seeks to combine
a genre form, an American franchise module and its marketing tics with a new, evolving
‘Bollywood’ ecology in the world.1 At the time of writing this essay, several more of such
ventures have been announced or are already in the works. Some of these, like the imminent Ra.One featuring megastar Shahrukh Khan, will have production budgets justifiable
only against massive projected returns from foreign markets.2 In economic terms, the Hindi
superhero/sci-fi film therefore stretches the limits of the traditional, commercially viable
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1947-2498 print/ISSN 1947-2501 online
© 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2011.605299
http://www.tandfonline.com
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
558
A. Basu
top drawer Bollywood production and enters a transnational realm of spectacle in which it
is still heavily underfinanced in comparison to western behemoths. Undoubtedly, the establishment of Bollywood itself as a global brand, the arrival of outsourced and indigenously
developed computer graphics, special effects plus other state-of-the-art technologies and
the corporatization of the Indian film industries create a favourable air for such experiments. And yet, it can perhaps be said that there is an exhilarated and bold sense of
speculation in these adventures; it is perhaps a cultural–industrial investment in the longue
duree, one that is not expected to furnish immediate returns, but is set up with a ‘crossover’, pioneering spirit directed towards breaking new frontiers in the world market. This
speculative stance, I wager, is a relatively novel phenomenon in an industry that was until
recently marked overwhelmingly by fly-by-night producing, dubious funding sources and
what has been called the dictatorship of the domestic distributor class. It seems to draw its
energies from an overall horizon of a new ‘shining India’ in a fast globalizing world.
A crucial question arises if one were to presume that despite increasingly cheaper
access to effects technologies, a differential in capital investment will always result in a
‘spectacle lag’ between Bollywood and Hollywood. If indeed, there is a qualitative difference in textures, definitions and scopes of digitally decorated misé-en-scenes between
the two worlds, if indeed, in relational terms, the universe of the Hindi superhero always
ends up looking ‘tacky’ compared to that of his western counterpart, why would he attract
the attention of a transnational audience? If this techno-specular lag is the reason why the
Hindi film industry has traditionally steered clear of some extravagant genres like the space
adventure or the disaster epic, then why the superhero all of a sudden?3 From a transnational, market point-of-view, what could be the unique selling point of this Indian twist
to the genre? The question becomes especially pertinent because the much talked about
Bollywood song and dance routines should, in the first glance, be peripheral to the core
purposes of the superhero film, at least in relation to a dominant global template. Second,
unlike the wire action choreography of Hong Kong, the Hindi film industry so far has
not been able to forge an indigenous tradition of acrobatic theatricality and martial arts
that can compensate, through human labour, for relatively low-tech filming. In this essay
I will investigate whether this curious phenomenon is a new, emboldened way of writing
out a national destinying in the era of transnational information flows and techno-financial
development.
Let us locate the issue in a genealogical field of problems, beginning with the caped
crusader, who can be considered to be a sort of low-tech antecedent to the superhero/sci-fi
protagonist proper. Masked vigilantes have been an essential part of Hindi cinema at least
since the early twenties, particularly with the rise of the stunt spectaculars that eclectically
combined the attributes of Arabian fantasies, Moorish legend and Parsee theatrical traditions along with western cinematic templates of attraction like Fantomas and Judex. The
early stunt spectacular thus drew from a variegated spectrum of energies that animated
an imperial cosmopolitan bazaar before the organs of a bourgeois nationalist monitoring of culture could be put in place, primarily with the rise of film journalism from the
late twenties. What, amongst other things, was remarkable about the stunt picture was the
relatively candid public presence and sexuality of women. Apart from Nadia in her signature films like Hunterwali (1935), Miss Frontier Mail (1936), Hurricane Hansa (1937)
and Diamond Queen,4 Lalita Pawar in Diler Jigar/Gallant Hearts (G.P. Pawar, 1931),
Sulochana in Madhuri (R.S. Choudhury, 1932), Aruna Devi in Deccan Queen (Mehboob
Khan, 1936), Gohar in Sipahi Ki Sajni/The Sepoy’s Beloved (Chandulal Shah, 1936) and
Sardar Akhtar in State Express (Vijay Bhatt, 1938) played masked crusaders, soldiers or
vigilantes in male drag. Encountering the female in cinema as such was partly the viewing
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
South Asian History and Culture
559
of an unrestful yet sensational picture of transformative modernity and urbanization. That
is, a calibrated regulation of fascination and abomination conjured up by cinematic assemblages of the woman with technology, intrigue, speed, industry and spectacle – Fearless
Nadia versus Signal X, airplanes, trains and mysterious radio messages in Frontier Mail.
With the nationalist feudal-bourgeois recoding of culture and the emergence of the
social from the early thirties, the stunt spectacular was gradually relegated to povertyrow segments of the industry.5 And yet, from time to time, the caped/masked crusader
appeared within the parameters of the top line feudal family romance, in films like Azad
(S.M.S. Naidu, 1955), Jugnu/Firefly (Pramod Chakravorty, 1973), Zorro (Shibu Mitra,
1975), Shiva Ka Insaaf /Shiva’s Justice (Raj N. Sippy, 1985), Khatron Ke Khiladi (T. Rama
Rao, 1988) and, of course, Shekhar Kapoor’s Mr. India (1985) in a certain sense. From time
to time, such productions were accompanied by a more sensationalist ‘B’ or ‘C’ grade vein
that ran parallel to the mainstream, as exemplified by the likes of Superman (B. Gupta,
1987). What is largely common to these films in various degrees is that they affected a
vernacular approximation of a metropolitan language of spectacle in an era of a nationalist
protectionism of the visual space. That is, in a visual dispensation closely monitored by
film censorship, determined by ancillary factors like limited foreign exchange provisions
for Indian films shot abroad, and marked by an abridged presence of Hollywood especially
after the agreement between the Indian government and Motion Pictures Association of
America was allowed to expire in 1971.6 The films mentioned above obviously catered to
domestic markets and had, in comparison to the present era of ‘Bollywood’, negligible or
no presence overseas.
These pre-liberalization era films have certain broad tendencies that can be provisionally earmarked to set up a basis for the primary conversation of this essay. Let me keep the
core issue of science-fantasy suspended for a minute and embark on a wider genealogical
inquiry about the themes of science and technology in and of itself in Hindi cinema.
The inscriptions of the ‘scientific’: technology, gadgets and other perils
If the classical Hindi film narrative has a mythic impelling that sacralizes the order of the
profane and compensates for the ministrations of a weak postcolonial state, this tendency
is also to be found in the vein we are focusing on. Yet, what is perhaps just a little more
pronounced and frequent here is a frontal encounter between restoring powers of mythic
kinds and instruments/inscriptions of a scientific and technological modernity. Despite the
formal triumph of a grand memorializing and destinying of being at the end, there were
lasting effects of alienation and discomfort with the works of the developing world. In contrast to an elegiac, often agonistic unrest with the paraphernalia of modernization that we
see in classic ‘Nehruvian’ films like Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) or Naya Daur
(B.R. Chopra, 1957), feelings in Hindi ‘science-gadget’ films focalized into a spectre of
peril after armed conflicts with China and Pakistan, in a planetary climate of cold war
intrigue that compounded domestic turbulence leading up to the emergency. The manifold
wonders of the space and atomic age spelled allure as well as terror; their presentations
in filmic misé-en-scenes were accompanied by shifting perspectives related to paranoia,
attraction and parody.7 Signatures of technology become increasingly militarized during
this era, representing grave perils to national sovereignty, especially so when a Nehruvian
post-independence consensus was in itself coming apart in the seams. In Night in London
(Brij, 1967), the object of dread is a set of diamonds that also contains in it a formula
that can spell the end of the world. In Inspector (Chand, 1970), it is a poisonous gas
called Agent Orange; the film also has a flying car sequence. The matter of contention
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
560
A. Basu
in Shareef Budmash/Gentleman Cheat (Raj Khosla, 1973) happens to be a set of plans for
a special military aircraft. In Yakeen/Trust (Brij, 1969) it is nuclear secrets. Jerry Pinto
has pointed out some more objects of espionage intrigue that border on the absurd: in
Elaan/Declaration (K. Ramanlal, 1971), a gang of foreign spies plot to acquire an atomic
ring of invisibility developed by Indian scientists, and in CID 909 (Mohammad Hussain,
1967), it is a technological formula for world peace.8 Such nefarious schemes were often
masterminded by psychotic-cartoonish villains of unspecified exotic origins: Supremo
(Parvarish/Upbringing, Manmohan Desai, 1977), Shakaal (Shaan/Style, Ramesh Sippy,
1980), Mogambo (Mr. India, Shekhar Kapur, 1987) or Dr Dang (Karma/Duty, Subhash
Ghai, 1986).
The hideouts of super villains were marked by automatic doors, scanners, computers,
hidden microphones, close circuit televisions, push button trap doors, fearful weapons
of mass destruction, submarines, helicopters, private planes, exotic pets like leopards,
crocodiles or piranhas, and a spectrum of bodies and costumes from across the world.
In Ramanand Sagar’s Aankhen/Eyes (1968), the scene of profane intrusion becomes
complete when foreign spies set up a secret transmitter behind an idol of God Krishna.
Unlike Bond films for instance, this overall spectre of satanic automation comes with
powers of an expressive naturalism rather than realism. The picture of technology bears
a demonic/epic character. Evil is then combated not so much with professional–scientific
administrations of the state or with competing gadgetry and capital as in Bond, but with a
home-grown agrarian physicality that has its own mythic registers. In Manmohan Desai’s
Parvarish, the two heroes stop a moving submarine by tying the propeller up with an iron
chain. In his Mard/Man (1985), an airplane about to take off is lassoed down by a single
man on horseback. In T. Rama Rao’s Watan Ke Rakhwale, a group of patriotic jailbirds –
equipped with bows, arrows and sticks – defeat an evil army with grenades and light
machine guns. The hero Arun, at one point, scales a 50 feet tall watch tower with a series of
vertical leaps and mows down the entire contingent of guards posted there with a machete.
The nation therefore had no realist narrative of state-of-the-art scientific development to
offer as a consistent counteracting phenomenon to these clear and present dangers. It had to
respond with a mythic impelling that would ensure a cosmic renewal rather than a plausible,
earthbound one. Perfectly in tune with this overall narrative method, inscriptions of science
in the comparatively low-budget misé-en-scenes were also more emblematic than realist;
known gadgets were often freely invested with magical or abominable qualities without
apologies. These encounters were marked by strife arising from an almost endemic duality
of the imagination: science and technology had to find a home in a developing India and
yet a spiritual essence of the nation could not be at home with the profane possibilities of
science and technology. Here, for the moment, I am provisionally collapsing the two terms
‘science’ and ‘technology’ together. I will separate them towards the end of the essay.
The temporalities of myth and science
‘Science’ thus is never powerful enough to produce a completely disenchanting world picture that is the expected outcome of a historical process of secular modernization. It is
denied a singular ontology of its own; as a matter of fact, ‘science’ is often decorative in
the classical post-independence popular Hindi film. What is of crucial importance here is
that the paraphernalia of gadgetry and industrialization has to be negotiated with, selectively absorbed or repelled in a deeper invagination of time. The encounters between the
indigenous self and threatening techno-science have to take place in a different temporal
order and not in an abject scenario of uneven development in which the nation is outgunned
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
South Asian History and Culture
561
and out-invested by more powerful enemies on either sides of the cold war. This particular
order is not an empty continuum of progress in the world; I have pointed out elsewhere
that it is a curvature of time in which a linear temporal imagination combines with a cyclic
one.9 The here and now advantages that the enemy enjoys due to his nefarious instrumentation are defeated in the longue duree by an inevitable turn in the cycle of Dharmic justice.
A cosmic picture of mythic restoration mitigates the threats and anxieties resulting from a
‘not yet’ modernity and protects the nation eventually.
We see this curvature of time taking a presiding role perhaps most distinctively in
numerous Hindi film ‘adaptations’ of originally linear Hollywood thrillers. Combating
high-tech, high-financed perils to the nation are hardly ever pure professional or humanitarian activities to be undertaken only in the heat of the moment. Instead, the spectacular
set pieces and fragments of the Hollywood narrative are placed in a grander arc of time
and a wider basin of affects and memories. The latter are powerfully put in place by dead
fathers and despondent mothers as potent symbolic entities. The story proper, in its ‘Indian’
incarnation, therefore has to begin with an original sin that violates a scene of natality
and produces the orphan that has to grow up and exact a historically resonant revenge.
Consider three films picked at random: S.S. Ravichandra’s 1984 film Qaidi is heavily
inspired by the Sylvester Stallone starrer First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), B. Subhash’s
Commando (1989) by Where Eagles Dare (Brian Hutton, 1968) and Ashutosh Gowariker’s
Baazi (1995) in part by Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988). In all the three films, we see the
infusion of a thick, messianic temporality into the lean, chronometric time of the thriller
format by the insertion of a back story of familial devastation, becoming orphan and destitution. The principled heroes are not just citizens, but also legatees of an outraged spirit
of Dharma; they are not only warriors of the state, but also orphans of violated mothers.
Professional activity in the metrical, emergency time of the state is perpetually informed by
a greater pregnance of maturing Dharmic temporality which is beholden only to the spirit
of the nation. The under-resourced state can thus only borrow a son of the nation already
instrumentalized by a mythic arc of reconstitution.
Science and Hindu nationalism
We could begin this elaboration by recalling a key moment in Manoj Kumar’s 1970 film
Purab Aur Paschim/East and West. When the hero Bharat gets ready to leave for England
to pursue advanced studies, his old Guruji notes wistfully that in the nation’s golden past,
students from all over the world came to India for enlightenment. Now, with that glory long
eclipsed, it is Indians who have to go abroad for knowledge. Bharat’s gentle response to
his teacher’s lament is symptomatic; he says that what he will seek in England is not gyan
(knowledge in the true sense), but vigyan (mere instrumental reason) that ‘is needed today’.
What Bharat implies is that in being born in India and bred in its (Hindu-Brahminical)
cultures and traditions under Guruji’s tutelage, he already has the former. The latter is
merely a formal skill that has no power to effect an ontological transformation of values or
of being.
This is where a special imagination of time related to a profound national destinying
separates and distinguishes itself from the less than happy workings of the Indian state. The
story of the latter might proceed in fits and starts; it can throw up stillborn futures and a host
of difficulties and disenchantments in the profane here and now, but what cannot be doubted
is that a deeply maturing tryst of the nation with its own destiny is inevitable in the long run.
But what is the scope of this breathtaking arc of time? What does this Indian resurgence
mean for the world at large? Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, perhaps more than anyone else, has
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
562
A. Basu
provided a critical genealogy of National/Hindu revivalism that marks the phenomenon
as always globally aspiring. Indeed, from its very early articulations in the late nineteenth
century, especially in Bengal, this nationalist discourse bore an awesomely messianic character. The historical resuscitation of the nation as Hindu in the longue duree was imagined
as a process that would not only make the colonized land a free and equal participant in
the durbar of the world, but also make it first among equals. In his essay Punar Bishoye
Punarbibechona (Rethinking the Prefix ‘Re’), Bandyopadhyay elaborates the genealogy of
this line of thinking.10 He demonstrates that it guides Hindu discursive, congregational and
institutional efforts towards defining a unitary peopleness: from the late nineteenth-century
Hindu Mela gatherings in Calcutta, to contemporary formations. Through his reading of
the works of public intellectuals like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894) and
Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), Bandyopadhyay elucidates what can indeed be understood as a tacit historical contract with the west. As per this understanding, the positive
role of the colonial enterprise was to be limited to two principal matters: first, bringing
India out of a medieval portal of time inaugurated by a millennial Buddhist dominance followed by eight centuries of Islamic rule; and second, providing Hindus with the external
knowledge and instrumentation to revive their unique spiritual genius. Once that catalysis
is complete, the tide, as it were, would turn in the Hegelian teleology. The spirit of history
would not reach its end in Prussia or anywhere in the west, but return to where it originally belongs: a reinvigorated Hindu nation in the world. This is because, as Vivekananda
puts it, the Mokhshamarg or the path to salvation exists only in India, and nowhere else.
For Bankimchandra too, the mode of Hindu Anushilan or practice, once strengthened with
material advantages drawn from the west, can only yield a far superior form of humanity
than Arnoldian culture.11 All measures of science and techne borrowed from the world
must therefore converge in a singular project of memory and cognition: a lost, amnesiac
self must see and remember the true self. In global terms, it meant that only the gradual
manifestation of a singular Indian/Hindu consciousness and its assumption of a spiritual
leadership in the world could prevent capital and technology from becoming monstrosities.
This imagination of time was therefore a double binding of the past anterior and the
future imperfect. In his 1887 essay Hindu Bibaho (Hindu Marriage), Rabindranath Tagore
devastatingly parodied this point of view as bringing about an absolute imagined polarization between the shastra (scriptures) of the self and the shostro (weapon) of the west.12 The
point however is that while shostro’s inevitable social maturation in human life would mean
its ultimate submission to the wisdom of the shastra, it also must be noted that ultimately
the dispensation of the former can furnish no insight that is not already in the compendium
of the latter. Everything thus is already contained in the Vedas. It is not within the purposes
of this essay to excavate and scrutinize the many textual instances of this temporal imagination. However, what must be quickly understood is that the question of time and memory
here is inextricably a question of language. If all is indeed encrypted in the Vedas, that
universe of meaning is still not apparent to us because an interregnum of empty historical
time and the unhappy consciousnesses it has fostered separate words from their originary
meanings. And yet the order of things seems to gravitate in a cycle back to the fountainhead; the apparent lineage of progress is an illusion akin to walking the earth without realizing its planetary roundness. Second, when India meets her tryst with destiny, a new realm
of language will be inaugurated by which it is the language of the Vedic twilight and not
of western modernity that will have absolute name giving powers and rights of translation.
It would be pertinent to visit a couple of nodal points in this long discursive terrain to
point out how this project of memory and enunciation operates, searching for a new prose
of Hinduness and a new stance of translation. In 1939, for instance, a series of heated
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
South Asian History and Culture
563
argumentative exchanges between the Pondicherry-based scholar Anilbaran Roy and the
renowned Indian physicist Meghnad Saha were published in the periodical Bhāratbarsha.13
Roy was defending a rather vaguely defined Vedic-Aryan tradition against the rationalist
Saha’s prescription for scientific and industrial development in an age in which nuclear
fission was imminent. We cannot visit this debate in detail, but for our purposes let us
list a few illuminating theorems of a glorious Hindu past, some of which are passionately
affirmed by Roy and some others cited to be rubbished by Saha: Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle points towards a pervasive chaitanya (consciousness) behind cosmic processes
and hence validates Vedic creation theory; it is clearly stated in the Matsyapurāna,
Vāyupurāna and Brahmāndapurāna that the solar system is heliocentric; the theory of
evolution has already been expounded in the Bhagwad Gita and the Upanishads, the
reincarnations of Lord Vishnu in Hindu mythology (from fish to the tortoise, the boar, the
half man-half lion, the primitive man vamana and finally the full grown Rama, Krishna and
Buddha) also approximate the same; the mythological story of Sage Agastya drinking up
an entire ocean is an example of electrolysis, and Bhaskaracharya, the Indian astronomer
of the eleventh century, spoke of gravitational force much before Newton.
For Anilbaran Roy, the devout follower of Rishi Aurobindo – another major spiritual
nationalist thinker of the first half of the twentieth century – the pith of the matter is the realization that it is only Hinduism ‘which can anticipate and assimilate scientific discoveries
and philosophic thoughts alike and triumph over materialism’ (The Scientist in Society,
106). This particular nostalgia for the future has been regularly seen to resonate in Hindu
discourses, up to present times.14 Murali Manohar Joshi, former physicist, former Union
Science and Technology Minister of the erstwhile BJP government and current Hindu ideologue, made a public statement in the summer of 2001 about the apparent discovery of a
9000-year-old ‘Saraswati’ civilization off the Gulf of Cambay; he was challenged by the
scientific communities, particularly by marine archaeologists.15 A few years earlier, in his
address to the World Philosophers’ Meet in Geneva 1998, Joshi had declared that many scientists of the west were using language that approximates the sayings of the (Hindu) sages;
it should be understood that the holographic concepts of holistic reality (be it astrophysics
or neuroscience) were first given to the world by Eastern Philosophy, more specifically
by Lord Krishna in the Bhagwad Gita.16 The three gunas (qualities) of matter – sattva
(light), rajas (energy) and tamas (reified matter or inertia) – described in the Bhagwad
Gita among other sources, have been regularly promoted by the Hindu right as the ancient
Hindu understanding of the three subatomic particles.
Much like the Evangelical debate around creationism in the United States, these discourses have also been sounded in quarters of governance, in state and civil institutions
of science and pedagogy. Meera Nanda’s work of investigating and debunking this line
of thinking has been especially significant in this area. At the beginning of her book
Breaking the Spell of Dharma (2007), Nanda cites an item that appeared in the BBC World
News on 14 May 2002. The piece stated that amidst dangerous military build-up along
the border with Pakistan, the BJP-helmed Indian Government assigned scientists the task
of developing technologies of biological and chemical warfare inspired by Arthasastra, a
Sanskrit treatise on war and governance authored by Chanakya more than 2000 years ago.
The projects included the devolving from a formula of herbs, milk and clarified butter,
a single meal that would sustain a soldier for a month; methods for inducing madness
in the enemy; camel skin shoes cured with serum from owls and vultures that would
enable soldiers to trek hundreds of miles without tiredness; a powder for night vision made
from fireflies and eyes of wild boars; and the manufacture of invisible and indestructible
airplanes.17
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
564
A. Basu
Hindi cinema and the superhero/sci-fi genres in the new millennium
What we have elaborated so far is a habit of Hindu nationalist thought in a historical field
of problems. Let us now bring this discursive diagram into critical proximity with the
comparatively nascent genres of the superhero and science-fantasy in Hindi cinema of
the first decade of the twenty-first century. The central point of inquiry will of course be
whether the relationship between a techno-scientific paradigm of development and Hindu
nationalism has acquired new qualities and new tenacities in the era of globalization. Let
us begin with an elementary question of ‘Supermanship’ without opening a can of worms
about the long rumble of the postmodern. It is not my intention to try and uncover an inbuilt
ideological fulcrum in the superhero film and then diagnose a certain Americanization of
global culture from the genre’s dissemination into other cinematic traditions. Instead, I will
move onto the Bollywood superhero after identifying a problem of temporality in stories
of his western counterparts.
According to Matt Yockney,18 the ongoing story of the superhero, from sequel to
sequel, from one emblematic super-villain to another, stultifies time; the narrative acknowledges the messianic promise incarnated in the figure, and at the same time has a
‘conservative investment in the present that circumvents the realization of utopia’. What
is inherent in this stance is thus a ‘longing for a futuristic past’. In saying this, Yockney
follows Umberto Eco’s early understanding of Superman as a cultural phenomenon that
mixes an eternal imprint of myth with the narratology of the novel, producing a present
that has all other historical potential denuded, apart from the next peril and the next mission on earth, water or the sky.19 There is an arrested Christian allegorical dimension20
to such tales, beginning with original sin (the killing of Bruce Wayne’s parents or Peter
Parker’s uncle Ben), loss of a pastoral ideal (Smallville) and the perpetual deferment of a
final reconstitution of the familial (Clark Kent’s marriage to Lois Lane or Bruce Wayne’s
to Rachel Dawes). The romance of Superman is therefore a wistful one, entrapped in a
serialized present featuring the lure and terror of an atomic, mediatized and industrial
age without any plausible possibility of returning to the idyllic existence of ‘Pa’ and
‘Ma’ Kent. The temporal shifts in the misé-en-scene approximate larger historical transformations in American capitalism, urbanization, the creation of the white middle class
suburbia, the twilight of small town yeomanry and the technologization of the agricultural
sector.
In contrast, what is immediately significant in Goldie Behl’s rather badly made 2008
film Drona is that the story of the protagonist is all about breaking a barrier of arrested
time. Instead of a disenchanting presentism of the present, it invokes an eternal, yet futuristic pastness that absolves the here and now. Drona, according to an initial voice-over,
is a story that begins when ‘time itself was an infant’, with the mythic event of Amrita
Manthan, as depicted in the Bhagavata Purana, the Vishnupurana and the Mahabharata.
When the gods were in imminent danger of losing their immortality due to a curse issued
by the temperamental sage Durvasa, they entered into a diplomatic alliance with the Asuras
or the mythical, non-Aryan demon people of the Puranas. The two parties then embarked
on a momentous project of churning the Kshı̄roda Sagar (Ocean of Milk) for Amrita, the
ambrosia of immortality. When the Amrita was extracted, the gods hoodwinked the Asuras
and drank it all by themselves and then proceeded to defeat their former allies. They hid
other extracts from the churning in different corners of the universe and decided to conceal the remainder of the Amrita on earth itself, appointing the warrior of warriors, King
Veerbhadra to guard the drōne (casket). Veerbhadra was anointed by Sage Dharma himself, who bestowed upon him a bracelet that imparts supernatural powers to the wearer.
Veerbhadra swore that he himself and the sons that will follow him will dedicate their lives
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
South Asian History and Culture
565
to protecting the drōne from evil powers. From that moment onwards, each male member
of that lineage has been known by the title of Drona.
With this grand invocation of a time beyond time, the story proper begins in the present,
in a European city (Prague) unidentified in the story. Aditya, Adi for short, is an orphan
brought up by his father’s friend and his wife. The latter proves to be a wicked foster mother
and the young lad’s life as a grocery store clerk is miserable. Despite the fact that his late
kindly uncle repeatedly assured him that one day he will find out that he is indeed ‘special’,
Adi suffers from despair and low self-esteem. His Cinderella-like moments of sadness
are mitigated from time to time by a wondrous phenomenon: blue rose petals fly in from
mysterious sources and hover around him. Adi’s mundane existence however undergoes
a dramatic transformation when he dons his only noteworthy heirloom from his parents,
an old bracelet that radiates strange vibes. Shortly, Adi finds himself being hounded by
the henchmen of a powerful magician called Raiz Raizada. He is rescued in the nick of
time by a mysterious female warrior called Sonia and brought to a safe hideout. There
Adi discovers that all this while he had been watched over and protected by a motley,
cosmopolitan group of crusaders – covering a spectrum of races, ethnicities and national
origins – who had assumed various identities to be near him. He is shocked to learn that
the kindly Catholic nun who visited his store, a local chef, a friendly delivery man and
even two local mob thugs actually belong to this clandestine sect dedicated to his wellbeing and the protection of a profound secret upon which depends the existence of creation
itself. Sonia, the leader, tells Adi that he is actually the prince of what used to be the Indian
kingdom of Pratapgarh. More than 20 years ago, when the evil Raizada had treacherously
killed his father, the previous Drona, Adi’s mother had sent him away to protect him from
nefarious forces. Now the time had come for Adi to return to India and Pratapgarh, meet
his mother and claim his father’s mantle.
Adi is deeply skeptical, but returns to India with Sonia, primarily driven by the desire
to meet his mother. Even after the emotional reunion, he is not suitably motivated to take
up the cause of his ancestors till Raizada attacks the old palace and turns the royal mother
Rani Jayati into a statue of stone. By then it is clear that the danger that Raizada, in his
pathological thirst for immortality, poses is global in its implications; it pertains to not
just the preserve of righteousness, or the future of humanity, but to the cosmic order in
and of itself. And yet, it is the image of a violated natal scene in the form of the petrified
mother that finally compels Adi to fulfil his destiny and become Drona. Raizada is of course
vanquished in the end and the mother restored, but what closes the film is not the event of
individual redemption and self-discovery, but the continuation of a feudal lineage and a
mythic chronicle already foretold. In the final sequence of the film, we see Drona married
to Sonia and their first born male child, the future legatee of an awesome responsibility,
playing with his grandmother. It is this mark of perpetuation that is important, for Adi’s
transformation into Drona is completed only when he receives a crucial piece of wisdom
in the course of his training: that he has to lose the fear of death itself, including the death
of his mother or wife. It is the divine office of Drona that must continue, not Adi’s mortal
self. Much like the core world view in the Bhagwad Gita, Drona is a state of complete
instrumentalization of the self for a divine intent already fulfilled in the three orders of
time. The modern Indian state does not appear in any form in the milieu of Drona.
The Indian superhero is thus a preserver of a cosmic theodicy and not of fallible human
laws or social contracts. Adi, much like his father, is mortal, but Drona, being the vehicle of
divine will, is not vulnerable to accidental nemeses like kryptonite, for the three temporal
orders are already pregnant with meaning, from the infancy of time itself to its proper maturation. It is interesting to note that unlike western superheroes, Adi’s maturation into Drona
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
566
A. Basu
necessarily involves getting rid of the existential and psychological trappings of bildung,
not negotiating with it, as we especially see in Tim Burton’s or Frank Miller’s perpetually
traumatized Batman. Adi’s initial scepticism and low self-image are matters instantly curable by the knowledge of his lineage and of a timeless calling. The recurring nightmares of
an abyss that had plagued him since childhood turn out to be nothing but seeds of a prenatal
memory that is not individual, but celestial. Becoming Drona and weaponizing the self for
Dharma is therefore getting rid of all forms of historically inflected subjectivity.
Unlike his western counterparts, Drona inhabits an absolutely static time, not a statusquoist one; it is a thick, messianic temporality that had congealed before history came
into being in any conceivable form and has also already transcended the latter. This is precisely why as Adi approaches his mission, the misé-en-scene of the film is evacuated of all
unhappy aspects of history. Pratapgarh is a digitally embellished virtual landscape, almost
completely bereft of labour or production. Situated in what should be the modern dispensation of democratic India, it is a purely decorative, totally interiorized picture of an untimely
high Hindu feudal patrimony. In this site, the serial proceedings of peril and combating peril
are, unlike in the milieux of Superman or Batman, informed by a grander impress of time
that sacralizes and abolishes them simultaneously. It is therefore the scene of a founding
miracle; all other events, including history itself, are merely distant ripples of it.
However, the crucial matter, as far as spectacle is concerned, is that once this mythic
picture of tradition is consolidated, the curvature of time can be wrapped around a multitude of global sensations. Drona gleefully cannibalizes a host of transnational imprints
of style: the Hollywood assembly line musical, the graphic novel, manga, sepia-tinted,
bleach-bypassed pictures of the past, Hong Kong action choreography and of course
copious amounts of digital imaging. The transnational staging of a mythic Indian patrimony and spiritual leadership in the face of a danger that threatens the world from Prague
to Pratapgarh involves, amongst others, the talents of the South African born Hollywood
animatronics director Willie Botha, special effects technician Wesley Bernard and special
effects supervisor David Bush. That, along with location shooting in Europe, Namibia and
India, imparts a global texture to this epic story. In contrast to an earlier ‘protectionist’
order, what is immediately significant about this Indian fairy-tale/superhero scene is that
the stakes have been upgraded in line with a brave new India in an era of globalization.
And yet, once the work of sacralizing is completed, the hero – erstwhile a poor, lonely,
deadbeat Indian immigrant in Europe – is able to return to a pure, spectral space of natality in which only an authentic Brahminical essence of the nation abides, untouched by
techno-financialization or a levelling democracy of profane times.
In an overt sense, there is indeed no ‘science’ or even high-end technology in Drona.
Rather, in this frontal encounter between an originary miracle and the evil sorcery of
Raizada, the scientific is that which has been already transcoded into different clusters
of signs. Raizada is seen to incessantly indulge in what would be a process of genetically cloning his own self. He then takes a perverse pleasure in murdering his clones as
punishment for their debilitating mortality. His den is full of hyper-advanced robotic toys
that he uses to amuse himself while uttering his monologues. The tremendous amount of
resources the sorcerer commands at every step suggests that he is able to field his projects in
a global scene of financialization quite well. The battle between this evil and a nebulously
defined Brahminical/Vedic superheroism is not only staged on a global theatre, but is also
pitched at a particular plane of language. Elsewhere, I have theorized this linguistic mode
as one of informatic or advertised modernization.21 That is, when we consider modernization as a pure techno-financial phenomenon distinguished from modernity as a constitutive
political template (albeit with many variations) of western liberalism and enlightenment.22
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
South Asian History and Culture
567
Modernization, in the form of publicity and mass culture, can follow a style of casual or
functionalist associations between fungible, rootless signs belonging to different orders of
discourse, while modernity, in its classical form, had to be enunciated by setting up proper
accords between nouns and verbs.
It is in an informatic-advertised dispensation of grouping random signs without obligation to grand narratives (history of uneven development or myth of the Vedic twilight)
that Drona can easily cannibalize a world of spectacles and wonders and consign them to
a singular ontology of a purported Hindu being in the world. What is missing in this exhilarated informatic syntax is the agon of dialectical narration, the one that can be detected
even in the classic cases of the Nehruvian paradigm: can the Vedic loom or the Gandhian
charkha really exist in the era of Manchester? Can the horse cart subsist under the auspices of a new passive revolutionary ruling order along with the automobile (B.R. Chopra’s
Naya Daur/The New Age, 1957)? Can one truly hold on to a romantic-agrarian ideal of an
abiding spirit of the nation in the time of dams, tractors and combine harvesters (Mehboob
Khan’s Mother India, 1957)?
There is no novum in the misé-en-scene of Drona. This is because the film’s principle of
continuity is mythic in an absolute sense and not grounded in an articulation of the possible
as historically emergent. Drawing from the work of Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson,23
Dominic Alessio and Jessica Langer describe the novum as ‘a supernatural device that
does not have to be technological or even possible but yet enables the fantastic to happen
since it is grounded in the possible’.24 It is indeed a fine line between the ‘supernatural’
and the grounding of that same supernatural in the ‘possible’. It is one which founds a
workable distinction between say classic science fiction (Lem, Čapek, Asimov, Clarke or
Dick) and populist science fantasies of the mass culture industry (Disney’s 1961 film The
Absent-Minded Professor). The novum, as a ‘heightened’ projection of our ardent desires or
deepest fears, has to be placed between a sober, disenchanted scepticism of modern science
and otherworldly fantasies of a magical imagination. It is therefore tenuously lodged; if the
novum tends more towards magic, it stands the danger of gravitating away from the modern
in a total sense, into a world picture of miracles. The novum in the latter case can no longer
be called as such, for it has aborted its relationship with history and has become purely
onto-theological. Hence, in the advertised spectacular assembling of Drona, ‘technology’
can be magical or mythic precisely because it has, in a total sense, cut off all ties with
‘science’. I will develop this point further towards the end of the essay.
In The Absent-Minded Professor, this difficult state of between being above the state
of science and at the same time embedded in it is weakly achieved through a principle of
narrative continuity: the discovery of ‘flubber’, an anti-gravitational compound, takes place
through a laboratory accident. Let us now turn to a recent popular Hindi film that riffs off
a key sequence from this popular Disney film. In generic terms, Raakesh Roshan’s 2003
film Koi . . . Mil Gaya/I Found Someone is sort of a science-fantasy while its 2006 sequel
Krrish is a superhero film. KMG copies a spectacular basketball sequence from The AbsentMinded Professor, but overall it has greater similarities to Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The
Extra-Terrestrial (1982). This is the story in short: the Indian space scientist Sanjay Mehra
manages to establish contact with space aliens with a home-made computer and a few more
gadgets, but dies in an accident soon after. Years later his mentally challenged son Rohit
chances upon his father’s apparatus and unwittingly invites extraterrestrials once again to
Kasauli, a sleepy Indian hamlet located in the Himalayan foothills. One of the aliens is
left behind by mistake when the party of diminutive visitors hurriedly leaves following an
elephant attack. Rohit finds the solitary tourist from outer space and he and a group of
loyal young friends protect him from the cops and military personnel who comb the area in
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
568
A. Basu
search of the ultimate scientific discovery, much like the task force in Spielberg’s film. And
yet, unlike the 10-year-old Eliot in E.T., Rohit is a fully grown young man with the mental
capacities of a child. His encounter with the alien lovingly called Jadoo alters the course
of his life, for Rohit is bestowed by the latter with wondrous powers of the mind and the
body.
In their insightful discussion of the film, Alessio and Langer point out that the alien
Jadoo (literally Magic), is modelled on the Hindu gods Krishna and Ganesha (with perhaps a bit of Yoda thrown in). The telekinetic powers of Jadoo however are much more
augmented in comparison to Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial; as a matter of fact, they border on animism. Jadoo can not only make kid basketball players jump higher than NBA
champions without the aid of ‘flubber’, or enable bikes to take off into the air, but also
compel shadows to dance and clouds to form themselves into funny shapes in the sky.
He transforms Rohit from being a slow learner to an entity with superhuman athletic and
musical abilities to match an Einsteinian IQ. There are, however, finite limits to Jadoo’s
abilities. His ministrations, which convolute distinctions between the magical and the
supra-scientific, are photosynthetic in nature. Jadoo is ineffectual when there is no sunlight. At a crucial moment in the film, when Rohit’s team of little basketball players are in
the danger of losing against their older, taller and meaner opponents, it is a prayer issued
to Lord Krishna that clears the cloudy skies in an instant and allows Jadoo to switch on his
talents.
Alessio and Langer also point out that it was an axiomatic formulation of Hindu wisdom – one that encapsulates within it the vibes of the entire cosmos – that triggered Jadoo’s
advent on earth in the first place. When Rohit’s father Sanjay Mehra was beaming signals
to the sky, he had finally decided on the Vedic mantra ‘Om’ as the singular resonating message after a series of trials and errors. Where all other signals of a profane world had failed,
it was only Om that had succeeded in eliciting a response from other planets. When an
excited Dr Mehra goes to a Space Research Institute in Canada to report his achievement,
he explains to a group of scientists there that Om is a Hindu word that is truly universal
in a cosmic sense because it contains within it all the vibrations of creation.25 The westerners are however dismissive about his claim, for it is posed neither as a hypothesis, nor
a theory of science. It is a certainty. They mockingly demand to know whether that means
that the aliens are Hindu as well. In Krrish, Roshan’s 2006 sequel to Koi . . . Mila Gaya,
Dr Mehra’s son Rohit seemingly combines astrology, astronomy and technology to construct a computer that enables one to see into the future.26 In these cases, the signifiers
‘Om’, ‘space’, ‘computers’, ‘astrology’, ‘astronomy’ or ‘technology’ operate as evacuated
ones; they are thus no longer subject to the cataloguing powers of the modern and its value
distinctions between science and superstition, or astrophysics and alchemy.
Sanjay Mehra is merely mocked by the west in KMG, but in Krrish, his brilliant son
Rohit is tricked and imprisoned by an unscrupulous entrepreneur who aims to monopolize
and exploit the future. However, the super powers gifted by Jadoo prove to be hereditary.
Krishna, Rohit’s son and the title protagonist of the sequel, becomes a masked superhero
and saves the day. After his mother’s passing due to childbirth and after Rohit was assumed
to be dead in a mysterious laboratory fire, the little Krishna was taken away from civilization by his worried and deeply skeptical grandmother, who chose to remove the surviving
Mehra scion from quarters of public recognition and the precincts of the market. Krishna
thus grew up in an isolated bucolic environment much like his godly namesake and yet
turned out to be proficient in speaking English as well as communicating to animals. The
money- and technology-driven world at large tempts Krishna in a libidinal manner, when
he falls in love with Priya, a tourist based in Singapore. Priya, a television journalist, lures
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
South Asian History and Culture
569
him to Singapore in order to cash in on the exploits of the rustic Indian Superboy. It is
in these foreign shores that circumstances force Krishna to don the mantle of ‘Krish’, the
masked vigilante. Shortly after, his destinying mission is set when he comes to know about
his long-lost father and the evil machinations of Dr Arya, his immensely moneyed and
powerful captor. The film of course ends with the triumph of the righteous, but what is
very symptomatic is the fact that the final return is once again to the abiding spirit of the
nation incarnated in the mother/grandmother and her pastoral repose. Priya too has by then
succumbed to Krishna’s unaffected rural charms and has come to Kasauli after abandoning
her career. Where the principled heroes of a new India trump Superman is that they continue to harbour surplus energy and surplus power to which only the mother, as paramount
incarnation of the eternal, has final claim. The new age Hindu patriarchs fleet smoothly
between discovery and remembrance; they are able to spiritually preside over the kinetic
technologism of the new age because although they are afflicted by the circuits of unitary
value and circulation of cold capital, they are ultimately able to return to a time and space of
the outside, to a pristine seat of natality and temporal womb that is Kasauli or Pratapgarh.
In these sealed off environments not only is the state not present, but troubling questions
pertaining to matters like caste, gender or class are also foreclosed. As long as that return
to the origin is possible, a core ‘Indian spirit’ is never corrupted and innocence is never
lost. Once the return is secure, the world itself is not enough for exemplary journeys and
conquests of the profane, for capital or technology, in relation to that essence of being, can
only be merely decorative.
It can perhaps be said now that this small batch of films constitute among themselves an
extended sphere of male actionist fantasy for a new, globally aspiring Indian caste Hindu
ruling sector. The curvature of the eternal return to an abiding spiritual repose now cuts
across widening global playgrounds of techno-financialization. With breathtaking scope,
such grand navigations of the profane seek to enfold a world of kinetic transformations,
awry information flows, innovations, and rootless, supple markers of metropolitan style,
gadgetry, speed or terror. While this is true about ‘Bollywood’ in general, the freshly textured superhero/sci-fi film perhaps sets itself the task of affecting a much more elemental
confrontation between orders of time and memory, between a Hindu national mythography and the story of techno-financial development in order to create a spectral picture
of a new India-in-the-world. And yet, precisely to advertise signs of technology with the
myth of a steadfast Brahminical patrimony, the Bollywood superhero/sci-fi film has to
effect a telling separation in crucial moments. In these moments, when what is sought is
a groundless, exhilarated collapse between technologism and myth, aspects of technology
cease to be imprimaturs of science. That is, marks of technologism – Rohit’s master computer, Raizada’s genetic cloning, Sanjay Mehra’s interstellar signalling device or the apple
Macintosh that serves as Gananyantra (counting machine) in Mani Shankar’s Rudraksh
– are affectively split from the horizon of ‘science’ in order to be consigned to an ontotheology of a Hindu revivalism. This ecology of informatic modernization is consolidated
in a plane of language that operates through sensational, non-obligatory clusters, particularized memories and fragmentary datum, rather than in the way of punctual enunciation.
The spectacular gnashes and violent juxtapositions that mark semiotic movements in such
forms of cinematic unfolding are symptoms of an ardent desire to reawaken the past by
a groundless resurrection of its paramount powers of translation and absolute name giving. It is a desire to finally render a Brahminical language global and to promote a myth
of vernacular technologism without what used to be the powerful scepticism of modern
‘science’.
570
A. Basu
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
Notes
1. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has argued that top line Hindi cinema as such is only a part of an overall transnational culture industry called ‘Bollywood’. See Rajadhyaksha, ‘Bollywoodization of
Indian Cinema’, 111–37. The latter ranges from star-studded entertainment shows held abroad,
pastiche-like indices in western fashion, music, tourism, installation art, to cell phone ringtones. In an equally insightful article, Madhava Prasad has argued that proper name should be
used to designate a body of films that privilege a ‘back to the roots’ NRI nostalgia, with the
newly emerging urban middle class in India absorbing that as a part of its own self projection
in the world. See also Prasad, ‘This thing called Bollywood’.
2. See http://www.india.com/movies/movies/the-juice-srks-ra-1_6028 (accessed January 13,
2010) and http://www.indiaglitz. com/channels/hindi/article/52926.html (accessed January 13,
2010).
3. The sci-fi and the superhero genres have been a part of Indian comic book and television culture
for quite a while now. The list of Indian superheroes from Raj Comics include Doga, Parmanu,
Super Commando Dhruva, Super Indian, Bheriya (Wolf Man) and Nagraj, with the last two
having mythological origins. During the mid-1980s ‘moonlighting’ superhero comics featuring
movie star Amitabh Bachchan and cricketer Sunil Gavaskar were published. On television,
amongst numerous instances, one could recall the popular 1997 series Shaktimaan and the
late-1990s show Captain Vyom.
4. All directed by Homi Wadia from Wadia Movietones.
5. On the stunt film and this period of transformation as a whole, see Bhaumik, Emergence of the
Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936.
6. The number of foreign films released in India fell from 114 censored in 1972 to 38 in 1973 and
26 in 1974. See Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 26.
7. For a more detailed discussion, see Chapter 2 of my Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The
Geo-televisual Aesthetic. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010.
8. Pinto Helen, 127.
9. See Basu, ‘Mantras of the Metropole’, 25.3.
10. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Punar Bishoye Punarbibechona’, 217–74.
11. See Chattopadhyay, ‘Dharmatattva’, 526.
12. Cited in Bandyopadhyay, Gopal-Rakhal Dwandhosamas, 219.
13. See the exchange in the section entitled ‘M. N. Saha’ in Ray et al., Scientist in Society, 86–154,
especially M. N. Saha, ‘Rejoinder to Rejoinder: 4: It’s All in the “Vedas” ’, 137–44.
14. For an insightful theorization of a new syntax of Hinduness that seeks to conflate prior binaries
(for instance, the Indian game of Snakes and Ladders and Neoliberalism), see Manisha Basu,
Fathers of a Stillborn Past.
15. See the ‘Spotlight’, Frontline, http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1907/19070940.htm
(accessed August 27, 2007).
16. Murali Manohar Joshi, ‘Role of Science and Spirituality for World Peace’. Address of the
Chief Guest at the inaugural session of the World Philosophers’ Meet, Geneva, August 18–21,
1996, http://www.here-now4u.de/ENG/role_of_science_and_spirituali.htm (accessed May 24,
2007).
17. Nanda, Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays, 9–10.
18. Yockney, ‘Somewhere in Time’, 26.
19. See Eco, ‘Myth of Superman’ in Diacritics 2.1.
20. See Kozloff ‘Superman as Savior’.
21. Basu ‘Hindutva and Informatic Modernization’.
22. Fredric Jameson makes a similar distinction in A Singular Modernity.
23. See Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction and Jameson Archaeologies of the Future.
24. Allesio and Langer, ‘Nationalism and Postcolonialism in Indian Science-fiction’, 220.
25. Ibid., 222–3.
26. A technological look into the future is of course not rare in Hollywood, nor is the mixing of science, myth, existentialism and popular religiosities drawn primarily from orientalist tendencies
that accompanied the culture wars of the 1960s. However, the ‘Pre-Cogs’ – three genetically
altered humans who can see into the future and predict crimes – in Steven Spielberg’s Minority
Report (based on a short story by Philip K. Dick) are novelized after being proposed as mythic
South Asian History and Culture
571
entities. The central thrust of the narrative lies in the splitting of the axiomatic unity of their predictions and in the larger suspicion that they might not be correct all the time. Rohit’s computer
on the other hand is marked by absolute certitude.
Downloaded by [Anustup Basu] at 07:51 10 October 2011
Bibliography
Allesio, Dominic, and Jessica Langer, ‘Nationalism and Postcolonialism in Indian Science-fiction:
Bollywood’s Koi . . . Mil Gaya (2003)’. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5.3 (2007):
217–29.
Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. Gopal-Rakhal Dwandhosamas. Kolkata: Papyrus, 1991.
Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. ‘Punar Bishoye Punarbibechona’. In Alibabar Guptabhandar, 217–74.
Kolkata: Gangchil, 2009.
Basu, Anustup. ‘Hindutva and Informatic Modernization’. Boundary 2, no. 35 (2008): 239–50.
Basu, Anustup. ‘Mantras of the Metropole: Digital Inscription and Mythic Curvatures of Profane
Time’. Postscript 25.3 (Summer 2006): 65–78.
Basu, Manisha. ‘Fathers of a Stillborn Past: Hindu Empire, Globality and the Rhetoric of the Trikaal’.
Unpublished PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2008.
Bhaumik, Kaushik. ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936’. Unpublished PhD
diss., Oxford University, 2001.
Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra. ‘Dharmatattva’. In Bankim Rachnabali, ed. Yogeshchandra Bagol,
vol. II, 512–615. Kolkata, India: Sahitya Samsad, 1954.
Eco, Umberto. ‘The Myth of Superman’. Diacritics 2.1 (1972): 14–22.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
New York: Verso, 2005.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity. London: Verso, 2002.
Kozloff, Sarah. ‘Superman as Savior: Christian allegory in the Superman Movies’. Journal of
Popular Film and Television 9.2 (1981): 78–82.
Nanda, Meera. Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays. New Delhi: Three Essays, 2007.
Pinto, Jerry. Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb. New Delhi: Penguin, 2006.
Prasad, M. Madhava. ‘This Thing called Bollywood’. Seminar 525 (May 2003). http://www. indiaseminar.com/2003/525/525%20madhava%20prasad.htm (accessed September 25, 2005).
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. ‘The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema’. In City Flicks: Indian Cinema and
the Urban Experience, ed. Preben Kaarsholm, 111–37. London: Seagull, 2003.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen, eds. Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema: New Revised
Edition. New Delhi: Oxford, 1999.
Ray, P.C. et al., The Scientist in Society. Calcutta: Thema, 2000.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Yockney, Matt. ‘Somewhere in Time: Utopia and the Return of Superman’. Velvet Light Trap 61
(Spring 2008): 26–37.