Free flow of culture is not always fair flow of culture. A recent spate of copyright suits by Hollywood against Bollywood accuses the latter of ruthlessly copying movie themes and scenes from America. But claims of cultural appropriation go far back, and travel in multiple directions. The revered American director, Steven Spielberg, has been accused of copying the idea for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s 1962 script, The Alien. Disney’s The Lion King bears striking similarities (...) to Osamu Tezuka’s Japanese anime series, Kimba the White Lion. Neither Ray nor Tezuka’s studio sued the American filmmakers and this Article is by no means an attempt to revive any particular legal case. Rather, this Article considers copyright’s role in promoting free cultural exchange, albeit on fair terms in a global marketplace of ideas marked by sharp differentials in power, wealth, and knowledge. (shrink)

This essay deals with the manner in which Salman Rushdie’s works engage with the heterogeneous logics of ethics and aesthetics. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Rancière it is argued that Rushdie neutralizes the two by introducing what Rancière calls a dissensus in the ethical-aesthetic hierarchy. The dissensus works on a principle of ‘excess’ so that within the domain of aesthetics the ethical is pushed to its limits. The order of desire (aesthetics) and the order of knowledge (ethics) are no (...) longer seen as hierarchical and mutually exclusive categories. By examining two versions of an unpublished novel by Rushdie (‘Madame Rama’) it is suggested that Bollywood cinema functions as a mode in which the two orders come together. In this early and mercifully unpublished novel, one finds the beginnings of Rushdie’s belief that works of art are sites of ideological and ethical contestations. (shrink)

This essay examines reflexive strategies in three contemporary Hindi-language feature films directed by women, Om Shanti Om, Luck By Chance, and Dhobi Ghat/Mumbai Diaries. These Mumbai-set films, directed and written by Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Kiran Rao, respectively, offer insider industry perspectives and a variety of outlooks on Bollywood and Indian society more generally. I introduce the concepts of “selective reflection” to critically examine self-conscious representations of the excessively star-driven world of Bollywood filmmaking in an age of (...) globalization, directing styles and strategies of image-making, and the blurred boundaries between reality and artifice. This article presents a close analysis of narrative tropes, filmi references, casting, spectator dynamics, and gendered agency in films that represent a taxonomic range from commercial blockbuster to art cinema. (shrink)

This paper takes up the somewhat neglected work of one of the earliest pioneers of modern European aesthetic theory, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos. It aims to correct views in which Du Bos is pigeon-holed as a ‘sentimentalist’, dismissed as a radical subjectivist, or, at best, acknowledged as an influence on the more important work of David Hume. Instead, it presents Du Bos as an original thinker whose highly intuitive approach to the arts is still relevant to contemporary concerns, and can be (...) favourably contrasted with the tradition of disinterested, universalist aesthetics that rose to such strong prominence in the century following his work. It highlights several of his ideas that have not received sufficient attention, including his emphasis on boredom as a motivation for turning to artifice, his notion of the ‘artificial emotions’ that can result from such encounters, his community-based conception of taste, his faith in the general public as legitimate judges of artwork, and the importance he places on different forms of interest when thinking about art. In the course of this discussion, Du Bos’s work is presented as presciently questioning clear cut distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural spheres, as well as exploring contemporary questions about the constitution of ‘the public’ and the legitimacy of its judgement. It also argues that the vocabulary of ‘artificial emotion’ can be as helpfully applied to the increasingly sophisticated world of mass entertainment as it can be to the world of contemporary art. (shrink)

Popular Indian cinema provides a test case for examining the limitations of Gilles Deleuze's categories of movement-image and time-image. Due to the context-specific aesthetic and cultural traditions that inform popular Indian cinema, although it appears at times to be both movement- and time-image, it actually creates a different type of image. Analysis of Toofani Tarzan (1936) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) demonstrates how, alternating between a movement of world typical of the time-image, and a sensory-motor movement of character typical (...) of the movement-image, popular Indian cinema explores the potential fluxing of identities that emerge during moments of historical complexity. (shrink)

In today’s age, we see the increasing influence of technology on people, which begs to raise the question: “Is society determined by technology?” Rising up within the constraints of each society, technology had its limitations, as it catered to the needs and interests of the masses. As society evolved, so did its requirements. We are at a stage where dependence on technology has gone through the roof with new innovations coming up in the sector, the rise of artificial intelligence, for (...) instance. Technology has replaced the concept of being a mere tool and is creating/demanding space of its own. With advancements in various fields like robotics which churn out machines that can mimic human behaviour and are equipped with anthropomorphic features, it has become rather difficult to view them as mere commodities waiting for one’s (human master’s) command. Keeping this in view, the paper primarily focuses on the relationship between society and technology, with special emphasis on artificial intelligence, through an analysis of the films Ra One (Bollywood), Android Kunjappan (Mollywood), and Ironman 3 (Hollywood). Secondarily, an experimental study was carried out to know the perception of the Engineering students, the future technologists, who are the stakeholders of the 21st-century technological world, with an aim to know their perception of technology and bring an awareness of the limitations of technology and its role in the creation of utopian and dystopian world. Finally, the paper examines the consequence of technological determinism and autonomy from a colonial perspective and intends to bring preparedness among the students to perceive technology conscious of its limitation and bring harmony between society and technology that leads towards building a utopian world. (shrink)

This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US, European and Indian audiences. The result is a directing style that puts together ‘East’ and ‘West’, Bollywood and Hollywood, in an in-between space that has been radically reconfigured through hybridization. This happens in particular through her use of music and soundtrack, from the documentary I’m (...) British but..., up to the recent Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. Here, many and diverse musical languages are put together through the representational strategies of parody and kitsch, deconstructing the idea of cultural identity in the very gesture that creates it. (shrink)

As the dominant media institution in South Asia, Bombay cinema's cultural production of narratives, images and spectacle plays a crucial role in the effort to consolidate and project definitions of the nation. Moreover, such images are exported to the South Asian diaspora worldwide as part of the processes associated with the globalized cultural product referred to as Bollywood. This discussion examines the production and reception of the 2008 film Jodhaa Akbar both as process and product of complex historical, cultural (...) and political nation-building projects in which gender plays a central role. (shrink)

India’s global proximities derive in good measure from its struggle against British imperialism. In its efforts to become a nation, India turned modern in its own unusual way. At the heart of this metamorphosis was a "colourful cosmopolitanism," the unique manner in which India made the world its neighbourhood. The most creative thinkers and leaders of that period reimagined diverse horizons. They collaborated not only in widespread anti-colonial struggles but also in articulating the vision of alter-globalization, universalism, and cosmopolitanism. This (...) book, in revealing this dimension, offers new and original interpretations of figures such as Kant, Tagore, Heidegger, Gandhi, Aurobindo, Gebser, Kosambi, Narayan, Ezekiel, and Spivak. It also analyses cultural and aesthetic phenomena, from the rasa theory to Bollywood cinema, explaining how Indian ideas, texts, and cultural expressions interacted with a wider world and contributed to the making of modern India. (shrink)

A l'heure où l'on souligne l'émergence indienne du post -colonialisme, Bollywood et ses films à grand budget se penchent sur le passé colonial. Héritière d'une littérature romanesque et tributaire des exposi­tions universelles, la guerre des images livrée entre la Grande-Bretagne et l'Inde à travers le support du cinéma, traduit un décalage. Tandis que la machinerie hollywoodienne s'est emparée d'un regard sur l'Inde à travers de grandes fresques d'aven­ture et de guerre, la riposte indienne s'est focalisée sur les répercussions psychiques (...) intimes de la domina­tion. Mais des fondements communs cimentent ces deux traditions. La guerre des images renvoie-t-elle au règlement de compte d'une déconstruction post-moderne, ou apporte-t-elle, comme l'induit Ashish Nandy, l'indice supplémentaire d'une culture partagée, celle de la colonisation?With India's emergence from the post-colonial age coming under the spotlight, Bollywood's big-budget films are turning to the country's colonial past. In the war of images being waged through the cinema between Great Britain and India, the two sides are out of phase. While the Hollywood machine views India through epic stories of war and adventure, India' s riposte focuses on the intimate psychological repercussions of domination. And yet, the two traditions are bonded together by their common foundations. Does the war of images echo scores being settled over a post-modern deconstructing trend? Or, as Ashish Nandy deduces, is it a new indication of a shared colonial culture? (shrink)

Daniel Raveh's book consists of four chapters, each dedicated to a certain narrative, retold and analyzed vis-à-vis Pātañjala-Yoga, and through the writings of contemporary philosophers such as Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, Pandit Badrinath Shukla, Daya Krishna and Mukund Lath. The narratives discussed are from the Upaniṣadic lore, the Mahābhārata, the pre-modern Śaṅkara-digvijaya, and finally the script of a recent Bollywood movie, Ghajini.There are several layers to the book, all interesting in and of themselves, but their interconnection is the heart of this (...) unusual work. The thread that binds these layers and connects a myriad of themes and texts--classical and... (shrink)

The radical Islamist regime of the Taliban affords an extensive view of the logic of Muslim fundamentalism regarding the public and private spheres. I argue that the Taliban de-privatized several life-spheres, "publicizing" religion and the body. The Taliban performed power as public spectacle, employing public executions, amputations and whippings. Religion, too, was to be completely public, as Habermas argues it was in Europe before the 18th century. As soon as they took Kabul, the Taliban insisted that all residents had to (...) say their five daily prayers, the men in mosques. Likewise, men were given six weeks to grow out their beards to a hand's length and to trim their moustaches in accordance with a literal reading of sayings about the Prophet Muhammad's appearance. The young female memoirist of life in Taliban Kabul, Latifa, reported that her middle class father complied with the new rule, but insisted, "My beard belongs to the Taliban, not to me!" The rendering public of religion made public property of every religious act. His body had a choice, of being conformed to the movements and shaping of religion, or of being tortured because of lack of compliance. This publicization of the believer's body resulted in an alienation from individuals of parts of themselves. Likewise, the gendered character of the public and private spheres, with women being confined to the private, is as visible in Taliban thinking as it is in Hegel. The expansion of the public realm of religion and morality by the Taliban had the effect of shrinking the private sphere and so constraining women further. Girls' schools were shuttered and many war widows were reduced to begging and risking sanctions for being in the street without a male guardian. Posters of Bollywood actresses were forbidden, and Kate Winslet was condemned to death in absentia for portraying a fornicator in The Titanic. It is argued that the goal of perfectly privatizing the female body lay behind these Draconian measures. (shrink)

The death of Bal Keshav Thackeray, in November 2012, has led several Indian journalists and intellectuals to think over the legacy of the supreme leader of the Shiv Sena to the Indian society. The present article means to identify the reasons which have let the Indian journalists describe the bequest of Thackeray to the Indian society in terms of a legacy of fear. The article deals with Thackeray's use of fear as a tool to arise consent around his social, cultural (...) and political thinking first and, secondly, to legitimize and justify the existence and the modus operandi of the Shiv Sena. The author dwells on the way Thackeray has been able to arise and feed social and cultural fear in order to give a meaning and a sense to his political enterprise. The article argues that the most scaring aspect of Thackeray's political discourse doesn't lie in the aims pursued and in the ways they have been pursued but in the idea of social and cultural identity it is based on. (shrink)