Abstract
In a recent symposium held at Columbia University in New York, renowned artist and activist, Sheba Chhachhi presented some thoughts on her long career in image-making (South Asia Institute, 2024). Tracking her move from a documentary mode to staged collaborative portraiture to multimedia photo installations to interactive video, Chhachhi reflected on the materiality of the photographic image in the age of deep fakes. Aptly titled ‘Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me?’, citing from that urtext on recursive phantasmal realities – Don Quixote – Chhachhi opened up a provocative conversation on how the contemporary artist as well as the scholar might revisit longstanding debates on indexicality and truth claims. It was fitting that Chhachhi made these comments as a spectral presence herself, projected to a live gathering via a recorded Zoom presentation. This latest issue of BioScope picks up some of these threads of provocation with essays, interviews and translations that focus on phantasmatic remediations of celebrities and media platforms, language and music.
Ishani Dey explores an intriguing relay between cinema and TikTok. She presents two case studies to illustrate the ways in which cell phones, social media apps and diegetic film worlds triangulate to produce a new kind of star. The TikTok star cannot match the film star in longevity or income, but ephemeral viralities generate new material possibilities for the manufacture and monetisation of celebrity. The essay analyses a 2019 film, Bala, as an intertextual study of the phenomenon of TikTok stardom and its nostalgic dependence on Hindi film music. Dey then extends the intermedial feedback loop to study the case of a real-life person, Sonali Phogat, whose TikTok virality led to ambitions of a political career. Phogat’s campaign videos drew on her followers’ assumed familiarity with iconic film songs, with a few well-chosen lyrics often doing the work of political satire. The remediation of TikTok into cinema and vice versa thus comes full circle in this innovative study. Some readers will know that the Indian government banned TikTok in 2020. Nevertheless, given the sharp velocity with which the world of social media constantly renews itself, such relays between film and short-form video apps will continue to be significant. Further, the comparative scope of this essay, with its focus on virality, stardom and the staying power of film music, makes it an article that can be read beyond a specific platform or brand.
Ravinder Singh takes us back in time to an era before smartphones and considers another mode of real–reel stardom: The spectacular popularity of the militant revolutionary Bhagat Singh who was hanged to death by the British colonial state in 1931. Much has been written about Bhagat Singh over the years, his ideological genealogies and his political strategies, though less attention has been paid to the role of print media, lithography and cinema in sustaining his phenomenal public status. In 2017, BioScope published a very suggestive and deeply researched piece by Daniel Elam (2018) that took seriously the legendary martyr’s love for cinema. This new article by Ravinder Singh takes a different route into the Bhagat Singh–cinema connection by trawling the censor archives for a history of Bhagat Singh biopics, many of which have a spectral status as lost, unfilmed or unfinished films. The essay focuses on a 1954 biopic, now considered lost, titled Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, directed by Jagdish Gautam and starring Prem Adib. The key point of interest here is the controversy that erupted during the film’s production and subsequent censor certification. Several parties converged on the film text to contest ideas of historical accuracy, the line between fiction and reality, the proper posthumous treatment of a political personage – as sacred and distant or as familiar and public, and who owns the rights to narrativise such a beloved figure. From Bhagat Singh’s family members to filmmakers working on competing Bhagat biopics, to government-appointed censors, multiple stakeholders weighed in on the film; film scholars today can read these opinions as significant articulations of vernacular film theory, where the big questions of the field about genre, history, reality and stardom are debated. Of special interest will be the many exhortations in a newly independent India for the state to boldly occupy the place of the gatekeeper of national history, the ultimate arbiter of who has a claim to said history, its representation and dissemination. This question appears to have been definitively resolved in contemporary India, as the state tightens its control over national history and historiography.
The Archive section revisits one of the early ambitions of BioScope – to publish primary sources in translation. South Asia, however, we choose to define its contours, is a place of many languages. Media scholars necessarily have to work with Tamil, Bhojpuri, Urdu, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi and scores of other languages in which South Asian films, television, news and social media are made. It is much more challenging, however, for the lone scholar with her limited linguistic capacities to consult textual historical sources in more than two languages. The result, often, is an overreliance on a combination of an English archive and, perhaps, primary sources in one Indian language. In recent years, we have seen new archives being produced by scholars actively seeking out print materials in languages that have not been adequately explored, offering the possibility of research across several Indian language archives. Sarah Niazi’s (2023) work on 1930s Urdu film magazines, Ranita Chatterjee’s (2014) recuperation of Bengali studio papers from the silent period, or C. Yamini Krishna’s (2024) deep dives into Telugu print archives of the 1940s and 1950s, suggest new possible futures for a polyglot film history.
Moving beyond South Asian languages, we present a text in German – an excerpt from the memoirs of the Czech–German screenwriter and critic, Willy Haas. Translated by Xan Holt, the excerpt offers a rare glimpse into the professional networks that sustained the eastward migration of Jewish exiles during Hitler’s fascist takeover of Europe. Haas fled from Prague to Bombay, with the help of his friend Walter Kaufmann, a music composer who was already well-entrenched in Bombay’s cultural scene. Holt’s translation offers up both technical and sensory detail about this other ‘passage to India’, one of desperate exile rather than colonial adventure. Along the way, we get a textured view of screenwriting techniques and logic during the early phase of Bombay’s talkie transition.
The Fieldwork section keeps up BioScope’s commitment to oral history with a long interview featuring the intrepid, but enigmatic, ‘Hamraaz’, known to Hindi–Urdu film song enthusiasts as a master of compilation lists. Acknowledging Hamraaz’s signal contributions to the record of cinema history, Isabel Huacuja Alonso interviews him across Lucknow and Kanpur to probe the connections between film fandom and film memory. You will hear echoes of Ishani Dey’s discussion of fandom as we reminisce with Hamraaz about the fluid travels of film songs across medium and time, from the radio to the internet into personal memory, as a song returns again and again to send a shiver of sensory memory into an embodied present.
BioScope has a new Book Reviews editor, Samhita Sunya, and we are delighted to share reviews of three exciting new works. Amanda Weidman’s monograph, Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India, offers a historical and ethnographic account of Tamil-language public culture, alongside broader meditations on gender, voice, embodiment and technology. Weidman (2021, p. 8) argues that in public cultures that have aggregated around South Asian cinemas, perhaps the voice/body split that playback makes evident has emerged as an ideal, in contrast to which the embodied voice has emerged as an artifice. This artifice ‘provokes anxieties and thus requires careful management’ (8). Pavitra Sundar’s review highlights Weidman’s attentive ethnographic approach, with the specificities of her observations shedding novel insights on Tamil cinema and public cultures. Sundar also notes the book’s theoretical insights for scholars of sound, voice and cinema both in and well beyond South Asia.
Charting an arc of another ‘regional’ cinema is Anugyan Nag and Spandan Bhattacharya’s monograph Tollygunge to Tollywood: The Bengali Film Industry Reimagined. The book provides an account of the Kolkata-based Bengali film industry through a focus on its political economy and shifts therein, from its emergence and associations with the Tollygunge locality of the city to its post-liberalisation form signalled by the reclaimed moniker Tollywood. Reviewer Soumik Pal applauds the book for attending to the specificities of the Bengali industry and finds that, as a result, ‘never does the telling of this history seem inevitable or teleological’. Pal notes that the book raises several issues that invite further close analyses of films and the ideological relationship between Bengali parallel and commercial cinemas; a valuable addition to the scholarship both on Bengali cinema and on culture industries.
Salma Siddique’s monograph Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940-1960 places cross-border migration as a methodological intervention in the histories of both cinema and partition. As Anupama Arora notes in her review, the book is remarkably original for the material and the history that it puts forward. She commends the range of English, Hindi and Urdu sources Siddique unearths in following the cross-border journeys of film personnel, capital, genres and political discourses between the Bombay and Lahore industries. Arora concludes that the book is not only ‘essential reading’ for scholars of South Asia, partition and transnational cinema but also an engaging account that would find an audience among non-specialists.