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TRANSITIONS, TRANSACTIONS
BOLLYWOOD AS A NEW GLOBAL VERNACULAR

BY POOJA RANGAN

VIRTUAL TRANSLATIONS
The search term ‘Bollywood’ generates more than 24 million hits on Google, when
compared to ‘Indian Cinema,’ which draws a mere three million. Among these hits are a number
of Bollywood-dedicated websites, fanpages, and blogs that contain links to a website entitled
“Bombay TV.”1 This site contains an application that allows visitors to choose from a wide
sampling of brief Indian film clips, and add subtitles of their own to the scenarios depicted, in
any one of five major world languages. The clips are not restricted to films produced in Bombay,
as the title of the website suggests, but are a random selection from a variety of genres,
production contexts and eras, ranging from 1960s Marathi mythologicals, to recent Tamil films,
to 1970s Hindi ‘Westerns’ starring the legendary Amitabh Bachchan. Notably, none of the clips
are from films made since the early 1990s.
The semiotic discourses surrounding this website provide a window onto the status of
‘Bollywood’ today. The activity on the website foregrounds on several levels the cultural and
linguistic translation upon which the international distribution of films is predicated. The clips
themselves are chosen from films dating from the ‘pre-Bollywood’ era, i.e., films from various
regional and language traditions that were not intended for international or even national
distribution, and that are therefore devoid of subtitles. And yet, the website is itself referred to by
most bloggers as “The Bollywood Subtitle Generator.”2 Bollywood films, often described as
‘access-for-all’ films, might then be seen to function as a mediating horizon of sorts, serving as a
universal signifier for the generalized brand of ‘India.’ Both international and domestic
audiences can now encounter, through the portal of Bollywood, a world of Indian cinema to
which their access may have previously been limited for reasons ranging from economic barriers
to distribution on the film productions in question to restrictions emerging from issues of
language, idiom and dialect. Although this new kind of access is in no doubt partly related to the
‘opening up’ of resources in general with web-based digital technologies, the role of Bollywood
in this apparently democratizing impulse is worth attending to.
The actual name of the ‘Bombay TV’ website is of far less importance than the fact that
the site appears in response to a search for ‘Bollywood.’ There is somehow a sense that since the
website has been described as ‘Bollywood,’ that I can go there, whereas otherwise I may have
not. Bollywood appeals to me as a global citizen as something universally meaningful and
therefore not too obscure or far from my world. The fragmented nature of the film texts
contained in the clips may also be instrumental in the invitation to subtitle. Most of the clips
feature either universally recognizable classic film tropes, or song-sequences and other
melodramatic elements including scenes of dancing, eating and colorful celebration popularly
reified as constitutive of the identity of Indian films. This serves as a double-gesture, of

1
“Bombay TV,” http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/index.php?lang=uk (Accessed 20 February, 2007)
2
See for instance “Subtitle your own Bollywood movie,”
http://www.populationstatistic.com/archives/2006/02/04/subtitle-your-own-bollywood-movie/ (Accessed 20
February, 2007)
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advertising what simultaneously differentiates and makes accessible the world of texts now
united by the signifier of Bollywood. Furthermore, the attenuated concentration demanded by the
brief clips mimics spectatorial activity on web communities such as YouTube, the other major
forum for encountering Bollywood films—again, not as unified wholes but as fragments. The
suggestion is that any media-savvy subject can guess at what is being signified by these clips,
and supplementally invest the film text with their own culturally and inter-textually imbued
signification. We might think of these creative subtitles as homologous to verbal captions to a
photograph in that they remain overdetermined in relation to the symbolic content of the clips,
and yet possess the potential to mobilize contingencies beyond the studium of familiar social
meanings. Finally, since the completed subtitled clip can be made public and distributed online
under the name of the subtitler, the spectator becomes not only the consumer of a commodity,
but a producer of meaning, and a visible participant in a complex global economy of meaning-
making.
*
It does not even seem necessary to introduce the subject of “Bollywood.” Bollywood is
ubiquitous today, recognized globally as the mark of India, just as Hollywood may have signified
‘America’ in the 1920s and 1930s. This was not always the case. Film theorists Ashish
Rajadhyaksha and Madhava Prasad have noted that while Indian cinema has been in existence
for over a century, the signifier ‘Bollywood’ only became popular in the 1990s. The emergence
of Bollywood can be traced to the extraordinary worldwide success of Indian film productions
such as Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (“Brave of Heart Wins the Bride,” dir. Aditya Chopra,
1995) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (“Something Happens,” dir. Karan Johar, 1998)—films that
were able to have resonances beyond the domestic audience by virtue of their content, financial
backing, marketing, and readiness for ancillary dissemination. This discovery takes some
excavating, since ‘Bollywood’ has successfully been naturalized as meaning any and all of
cinema having to do with India. A common complaint today is that Bollywood has erased the
history of Indian cinema, that there is literally no looking back from this new breed of ‘access-
for-all’ productions. Others claim that Bollywood represents a break with modernist modes of
cinematic production, and is ushering in a new era of consumption associated with a diffuse
world of cultural activities of which the film industry is only a small part. And yet, while
Bollywood is poised toward the future, its very moorings and foundations seem to gesture back
to older models, allowing it to function as a global vernacular in a very modern sense. What does
Bollywood signify, and for whom? Is it an industry, a cultural practice or simply an idea? What
kinds of negotiations take place globally at the frontier of Bollywood, and what orders of
meaning do spectators generate in engaging with Bollywood films? These are the kinds of
questions that I seek to address in this paper, in a tentative move toward developing new models
for addressing the status of Bollywood as a globally resonant practice.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The activity on the Bollywood Subtitle Generator is symptomatic of the recently
naturalized international use of the name ‘Bollywood’ to designate what was previously (and less
popularly) known as Bombay, Hindi, or Indian popular cinema. Film theorist Madhava Prasad
has suggested that the ‘Bollywood’ tends to be used as an empty signifier applicable to “any set
of signifieds within the realm of Indian cinema.”3 While this might seem to address mainly the

3
Madhava Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood,” Seminar Web Edition no. 525 (May 2003): 1, http://www.india-
seminar.com/semsearch.htm.
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tendencies of those involved in consuming Bollywood, film producers also seem to have a stake
in this nomenclature, being anxious to advertise their films both domestically and internationally
as ‘Bollywood’ products. I would venture to suggest that Bollywood functions today not merely
as an overdetermined signifier but as a highly sophisticated signifying practice, whereby
cinematic orders of a desire to be recognized as modern are made globally available for
negotiating and organizing the postmodern world of commodities.
The contemporary naming of ‘Bollywood’ to designate a global brand of generalized
‘Indianness’ is not without historical antecedents. There is some debate about when the name
Bollywood was first used, but it is difficult to dissociate the name from its links with Hollywood
and modernity. Madhava Prasad traces the origins of the naming of ‘Bollywood’ back to the
paternalistic modernizing impulses of Classical Hollywood Cinema. The name “Tollywood” (a
hybrid derived from ‘Hollywood’ and the location ‘Tollygunge’) was first given to the earliest
concentration of Indian motion picture studios in Calcutta in 1932 to designate the coming of
modernity to India in the image and form of the Hollywood studio production system.4 This
unofficial nickname would remain a sore spot for the film industry in India for over six decades.
For although the Indian film industry is thought to have born its current form since roughly the
1950s, it was not until 1998 that the Indian film industry was awarded industry status by the
government, an economic impetus which Hollywood achieved in the 1930s itself.5 The
popularity of the name ‘Bollywood’ appears to coincide historically with this economic
acknowledgement of the Indian film industry’s parity with the standard of modern industrial
mass production and consumption that Hollywood represented in the 1930s.
Prasad associates the contemporary linguistic turn to Bollywood with a desire of the
growing Indian middle class to identify with an orientalist position, so as to maintain a non-
participatory distance from the popular cinema associated with the vernacular masses. He links
the phenomenon of Bollywood with a number of socio-economic transformations that
accompanied the awarding of industry status to the Indian film industry, and which signaled a
new reflexivity in the relationship of Indian cinema and its audiences of Indian origin with
modernity and modernization. His list of such symptomatic shifts includes those identified by
theorist Ashish Rajadhyaksha—generational changes within the Indian film industries, the rise of
young directors and stars educated in elite or foreign institutions, increasing financial support
from wealthy Non-Resident Indian (NRI) tycoons, and a related global proliferation of activities
surrounding the distribution and consumption of Indian ‘culture.’ Prasad suggests that an
internationally popular ‘access-for-all’ brand of Indian film emerged alongside these shifts,
distinguished by generic and stylistic hybridity, high production values, elaborately
choreographed song-dance sequences, internationally recognized stars, and ‘return-to-roots’
themes.6
Attributing the naming of such films as ‘Bollywood’ films largely to the prevailing “will-
to-name” of the English-speaking classes of India, Prasad offers that these economically mobile
groups wish to reconstitute an existing reality in their own image. For him, this desire to be
recognized as modern is irrevocably linked to the symbolic role that English has historically

4
Ibid., 2.
5
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Bollywoodization of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,”
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies no. 1 (2003): 31-36. Rajadhyaksha’s article is well worth seeing for his detailed analysis
of the Indian film industry’s struggle for governmental ‘industry status,’ and a thoughtful reading of the economic
stakes involved in ‘Bollywood.’
6
Prasad, “This Thing called Bollywood,” 2-3.
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played in constituting India’s structural bilingualism. The film industry, in a moment of

reflexivity, is responding to this desire, which is dialectically related to a desire for emphasizing
the difference that Bollywood represents on a world platform.7
Prasad’s argument suggests that ‘Bollywood’ as a brand mediates a mimetic desire for
the West by permitting identification with an ‘otherness’ that commands a desirable exchange
value in the global political economy. Such a sociological analysis of Bollywood as produced by
the ‘will-to-name’ of domestic and Non-Resident Indian communities is useful in addressing a
certain developmental desire for global recognition as modern in bid to gain market power.
However we need to go further than this explanation in order to address the desires of the diverse
global participants on the ‘Bombay TV’ website, who are certainly not restricted to communities
with a vested interest in Indian modernization and economic power. These users appear to be
involved in a modernist collecting of sorts, by encountering, entering into signifying
relationships with, and ordering commodities branded as ‘India.’ And yet this activity seems to
have been generated in response to a considerably postmodern need, as a means of coping with
respect to the subject’s role of making choices between cultural commodities within strictly
regulated domains that nonetheless appear ‘free.’ The transactions on the subtitle generator are
symptomatic of not just a ‘will-to-name’ but a will-to-trade in commoditized identities. The fluid
functions of ‘Bollywood’ in this economy of signification leads me to suggest that we think of
Bollywood as a reflexive practice in complex tension with notions of modernity and
postmodernity.

BOLLYWOOD AS VERNACULAR MODERNISM

Miriam Hansen’s extensive writings on cinema and the public sphere include her famous
formulation of Classical Hollywood Cinema functioning as a vernacular modernism. Hansen
suggests that the global appeal of Classical Hollywood was based in part on its self-promotion as
a practice on par with “the experience of modernity,” as an industrially produced, mass-based
medium inscribed with the promise of mass consumption.8 Although Hansen’s model is
predicated upon Classical Hollywood’s contemporaneity with a mid-twentieth century modernity
of mass production and consumption, I would venture to suggest that Bollywood’s status today is
not unlike that of a modern global vernacular. My attribution of modernism to Bollywood may
seem idiosyncratic or even misplaced, given that Bollywood tends to be associated with
mainstream patterns of distribution and consumption typical of postmodernist challenges to
modernism. However I make this claim with the utmost caution, and for very precise reasons that
I will outline here. The question that concerns me is whether Bollywood behaves as a reflexive
horizon for a similar order of negotiations as Hollywood offered itself for in the early part of the
century.
Hansen’s designation of Classical Hollywood as a kind of modernism is itself
deliberately provocative, posed as a challenge to political modernist academic traditions derived
from the work of the 1920s-1930s leftist avant-garde, and which are concerned with the rhetorics
of a break with traditional and classicist models. Following Hansen, I take modernism to
encompass cultural practices that both articulate and mediate “the experience of modernity, such
as the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising,

7
Ibid., 3.
8
Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in
Reinventing Film Studies ed. by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 332-350.
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architecture, and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema.” 9 To suggest that
former colonies have overcome the modern would be nothing short of naïve. The desire of the
Indian film industry to be referred to as ‘Bollywood’ is itself indicative of the continuing
function of the West, or the United States in particular, as center. With this in mind, it would
behoove us to consider the products of ‘Bollywood’ as participating in an ongoing negotiation
with the experience of modernity, as a larger set of cultural, aesthetic, technological, economic,
social, and political transformations, informed by contesting forces of development.
Vernacular modernism is also useful in addressing the global appeal of Bollywood.
According to Hansen the key to the global resonance of Classical Hollywood cinema lay in its
ability to generate a reflexive cultural counterpart to technological, economic and social
modernity, at the level of sensory functioning and everyday discourse. Hansen’s coinage of
vernacularity gestures toward Classical Hollywood’s ability to serve as an idiom for mediating
and negotiating the discourses of the common, the everyday, and the quotidian. As a hybridized
idiom amalgamated from heterogeneous cultural traditions, Classical Hollywood had a capacity
for promiscuity, circulation, and translatability that allowed it to cut across barriers of language
and dialect; for this reason it may also have had an increased diasporic and cosmopolitan appeal
abroad. Through this medium, diverse audiences could engage with the experience of industrial
mass society, and negotiate strategies for coping with new urban spaces and modes of work
associated with modern technological change. These reflexive negotiations occurred at multiple
sites, including plot, performance, mise-en-scene and genre. Crucially, they were often
overdetermined by narrative comprehension. The slapstick genre, for instance, may have been a
critical site for engaging the problems and tensions of a multi-ethnic society; moreover, by
propelling the bodies of viewers into laughter, these films may have produced responses partial
to and in excess of the symbolic order. Arguing in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried
Kracauer, Hansen emphasizes that these reflexive negotiations are anchored in sensory
experience, insisting that sensory modes of perception are fundamentally recalibrated by the
continuing impact of modern technology. While she does not precisely outline the manner in
which the senses interact with the frontier of Classical Hollywood for developing strategies to
negotiate modernity, Hansen does state that Classical Hollywood brought into “optical
consciousness” hitherto unperceived modes of sensory perception and organization. We might
think then, of Classical Hollywood generating a new ‘sensorium’ for organizing sensory
signifieds associated with the signifier ‘America,’ such as youth, energy, immediacy, vitality,
and speed. Hansen concludes that Classical Hollywood acted as a particularly modern kind of
public sphere, presenting an aesthetic frontier for individual experience to be mimetically
articulated, and find recognition—and perhaps even produce an anarchic supplement in
disjuncture with modern mass culture.10
Barring the passing of half a century, Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism model
bears an uncanny relevance to the exchanges transacted on the ‘Bombay TV’ website.
Bollywood seeks to substitute the signifier of ‘India’ in place of ‘America’ as an organizing
principle for negotiating everyday experience, thereby instituting a new self-referentiality that
nevertheless seems to be constituted through a “schema of co-figuration” which retains the West
as center.11 The only indication of a shift towards what some might call a postmodern address to

9
Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses,” 333.
10
Ibid., 333-344.
11
Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 48. I borrow the
concept “schema of co-figuration” from Sakai. Though my argument does not take up the details of enunciation and
Rangan 6

the spectator would lie in Bollywood’s textual focalization of moments of spectacular display,
such as those chosen in the clips on the aforementioned website. Nevertheless, this model of
fragmented viewing would still arguably fall squarely within the bounds of Benjamin’s
description of the modern distracted spectator of mass media.12 These moments of
autoethnographic display make available the more elusive sensual qualities associated with
‘India’—such as color, smell, taste, movement, sensuality, and hapticity—within a unique
horizon of otherness.
Hansen has herself pointed to this mimicry of Hollywood on the part of Hollywood’s
“others.” She proposes that other national cinemas also functioned as distinct vernacular
modernisms in the early part of the century, by generating local strategies of negotiating
modernity through processes of cultural translation in a complex relation to American, foreign
and traditional models. Shanghai cinema, for instance, remained a local rather than global
vernacular in the early 20th century on account of various barriers to entry to the global market.
Hansen concludes her essay by wondering what we would find if that process were to extend “in
the other direction, in the form of products that could be exported and circulate
internationally.”13
The phenomenon of Bollywood films poses precisely this challenge. How do we theorize
the ‘other’ cinema in question when it becomes a practice of production fully on par with the
technological, economic and social experience of modernity in the context of postmodern
globalized cultures of consumption? Is Bollywood destined to operate within the confines of the
modern, or is it representative of, as Hansen suggests, a global, postmodern cinema of
“diversities” which is replacing the totalizing and unifying tendencies of Classical Hollywood
Cinema and its representative age of modern mass culture?14 Although a definitive response to
these questions is well beyond the scope of this paper, my hope is that the following comments
on Bollywood will be a productive contribution to the debate.

DEVDAS AND ITS REMAKES

The remainder of this paper is devoted to an analysis of two films: Devdas (dir. P.C.
Barua, 1936) and Devdas (dir. S.L. Bhansali, 2002). Few instances of Indian cinema bear out as
insistent a relationship with the question of modernity as the Devdas films. P.C. Barua’s Devdas
(1936), adapted from a turn-of-the-century Indian novel, is frequently described as one of the
first cinematic texts to formulate an Indian modernity. Barua’s Devdas has been remade over
seventeen times in as many languages, leading many theorists to ponder what about this text
renders it so inexhaustible for the ‘Indian imagination.’ The most recent version of the film is
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2002 ‘Bollywood’ remake. Self-promoted as a “Mega Bollywood
Production,” Bhansali’s Devdas achieved instant international fame despite generating poor box-
office revenues. Much of its success seems to have come from ancillary industry sales and web-

translation that Sakai’s volume is dedicated to, his positing of a mimetic desire for the West developed within a
historically co-figurative schema is compelling for thinking through the position of Bollywood relative to
Hollywood. Those with a further interest in this matter may wish to consult this book.
12
Although this paper cannot serve as a venue for a systematic deconstruction of modes of spectatorship associated
with Bollywood, this is certainly an issue that pertains to my argument, and deserves further attention.
13
Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film As Vernacular
Modernism,” in Film Quarterly vol. 54 no. 1 (Autumn, 2000), 10-20.
14
Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations in the Public Sphere,” in Viewing Positions:
Ways of Seeing Film ed. by Linda Williams (NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 140.
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based exposure, consistent with Ashish Rajashyaksha’s analysis of the Bollywood model.15
‘Devdas 2002’ swept almost every category at India’s 2003 Filmfare awards, was India’s official
entrant for the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category at the 2002 Oscars, and was even chosen to screen at
Cannes in 2002. Allegedly the most expensive production to have been mounted in India up to
the time of its release, and featuring an updated plot of global proportions, internationally famous
stars, choreographed musical numbers of fantastic scope, and state of the art color and
production values, the new Devdas boasts a spectacular display which seems unthinkable in
relation to Barua’s modest 1936 black & white film.
All of the Devdas films follow the same basic plot, which deals with the obstacle posed
by the problem of caste to the union of the two central characters, Devdas and Parvati, whose
families belong to separate and unequal castes. The incommensurability of the caste-system,
representative of the pre-modern, with the democratic ideals of the ongoing project of
modernization in India, forms not only the main narrative problematic of the Devdas films but no
doubt also has something to do with the persistent ‘relevance’ of the Devdas trope across the
span of Indian cinematic history. I have deliberately chosen to narrow my comparison to these
two films, while bracketing all intermediate remakes. On the one hand, the resurgence of the
Devdas trope in the 2002 remake points to Bollywood’s continuity with older models. Secondly,
by focusing on these two films as articulations of historical moments that could be regarded as
bookends to Indian modernity, I hope to reveal the disjunctures and aporias that emerge
regarding Bollywood’s relationship with notions of modernity, particularly in relation to the
experience of caste and consumerism.

AN EARLY VERNACULAR…WITH AN EXPIRY DATE?

Devdas (dir. P.C. Barua, 1936) is an adaptation from a 1907 modernist Bengali novel by
Saratchandra Chattopadhyay.16 A production of ‘New Theaters,’ one of the two first sound
studios dubbed ‘Tollywood’ in the 1930s, and released in Calcutta while India was still under
British rule, Devdas is an early cinematic rendering of an Indian modernity. The film narrates the
story of the indecisive son of a powerful rural landed family. Prohibited from marrying Paro, the
girl he desires, because of caste-differences, the young man finds solace in a city courtesan,
Chandramukhi. Caught in a limbo between the traditional values of his village and the
permissive ethos of the Westernized city of Calcutta, Devdas eschews social life altogether and
chooses to drink himself to death, eventually dying a vagabond.
I read Barua’s film to have functioned very much as an instance of vernacular modernism
specific to the context of urban migration in 1930s pre-Independence India, with the articulation
of ambivalence being central to its operations. The character Devdas is fundamentally inscribed
with ambivalence. His actions embody a ‘mimicry’ that is instrumental in opening up strategic
sites within the film, which may have served as a matrix for the colonial era to articulate and
mediate their contradictory fantasies and anxieties regarding the modern experiences of caste,
class, gender, and migration.17

15
See Rajadhyaksha, “The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema,” 27-31.
16
P.C. Barua made two versions of Devdas. After the enormous regional success of the Bengali version (starring
himself as Devdas) in 1935, he immediately made and released an identical version in Hindi in 1936, starring
playback singer K.L. Saigal. My analysis is based on the 1936 version; to my knowledge, there are no extant copies
of the 1935 Bengali version.
17
See Homi Bhabha’s comments on mimicry and the ambivalence of colonial discourse in Homi Bhabha, “Of
Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 121-131.
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Several historians have performed a nationalist reading of the Devdas character as an

‘epic’ and enduring native archetype, attributing to this the phenomenal number of remakes and
adaptations of Devdas, although Indian cinema’s melodramatic tropes and thematic structures
often tend to be hybridized European imports.18 I am more inclined to read the historical appeal
of the ‘weak hero’ type of the Devdas character and its later re-incarnations in line with
discourses of colonialism and gender insubordination.19 Film historian Ashis Nandy has
emphasized the room for play generated by the hybridity of P.C. Barua, star of Devdas (1936),
whose bicultural, androgynous, and tragic figure was central to early fan-cultures surrounding
Devdas.20
The Devdas character functions within Barua’s film much like a structural analog of
cinema itself. Completely permeable to the effects of not only the city but also the village, his
figure is promiscuously responsive to stimuli, behaving as an indexical medium upon and
through which the experience of modernity is enacted. Upon arriving in the city, Devdas is quick
to imitate the Anglicized dress, manners, and drinking habits of his roommate, Chunilal. At the
same time, the vices of the city become for Devdas a means of dulling his senses against
perception, whether the jostling of the city or the oppression of the village. We could think of
this symbolic act of inoculation as an attempt of corporeal resistance against technological
alteration, with the limit, of course, being death.
Devdas’s oscillation between the village and the city renders both spaces mixed and
hybrid, rather than as discrete, self-contained sites bound to disparate temporalities. Barua’s
cinematography indicates the proliferation of the contradictory new experiences associated with
modernity; loneliness and alienation now pervade the rural sphere in the form of a critical stance
against the caste-related and patriarchal ills of the village. Wipe transitions between scenes of the
village and the city often reveal identical compositions, suggesting that similar transactions take
place in both spaces. Barua also complicates the familiar cinematic depiction of the oppressive
alienation of the ‘crowd’ as a quintessentially urban phenomenon—the village too can generate a
similar experience. Roving, frequently high-angle aerial camera-work in scenes featuring village
life, particularly when Devdas and Paro illicitly meet, convey the constant surveillant perspective
of gossiping neighbors.
Devdas’s non-conformity with the strong, controlling classical male stereotype also
inscribes his female love interests Paro and Chandramukhi with an ambivalence that
problematizes the tendency to read them in binary terms such as the mother-figure and the
whore. Despite the tendency for its being treated as the privileged fetish of male/modernist
projection and stereotyping, femininity is rendered as a strategic site of action that the female
figures explore through performance, masquerade, and fantasy. In his idealist quest for freedom
18
See for instance P.K. Nair, “The Devdas Syndrome in Indian Cinema,” Cinemaya no. 56-57 (2002): 83-91; and
Maithili Rao, “An Outmoded Archetype?” Cinema in India (April-June 2002): 16-23.
19
Those interested in a historical analysis of the hero in Indian cinema should see Ranjani Mazumdar, “From
Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The ‘Angry Man’ and the ‘Psychotic’ Hero of Bombay Cinema,” in Making
Meaning in Indian Cinema ed. Ravi Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 238-266. Mazumdar’s
analysis of the “angry marginalized hero” popularized by Amitabh Bachchan blockbusters in the 1970s and Shah
Rukh Khan’s “psychotic hero” of 1990s Hindi cinema could be read as descendents of the Devdas trope.
20
Ashis Nandy, “Invitation to an Antique Death: The Journey of Pramathesh Barua as the Origin of the Terribly
Effeminate, Maudlin, Self-Destructive Heroes of Indian Cinema,” in Pleasure and the Nation ed. Rachel Dwyer and
Christopher Pinney (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139-160. The fan-discourses surrounding the
historically cyclical emergence of Devdas-inspired male star-personae would be an interesting line of questioning to
pursue—Dilip Kumar, the star of Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955) self-consciously promoted himself as a tragic hero,
while Shah Rukh Khan of Devdas 2002 is often discussed in fanzines with regard to his alleged bisexuality.
Rangan 9

from social sanction, Devdas hits Paro with a stick on her forehead on the day before her
wedding, marking her with blood and insurrecting their own symbol in place of the ‘official’
wedding sindur. This wound is then invested with a telepathic capacity that is overdetermined
and excessive in relation to the cordial relationship Devdas and Paro must maintain in public.
Barua also repeatedly calls attention to the ambiguity of jewelry as a sign of both the
‘fallen woman’ and of wealth, status, and high caste. Following her rejection by Devdas’s family
on the basis of her low caste, Paro is married off to a wealthy landowner-caste man, and is given
jewelry to wear to convey her newly acquired status and role of wifehood. Paro chooses to gift
all of her jewelry to her husband’s daughter, thereby rejecting the system of exchange and
valorization of status that the jewelry represents. By retaining the outward form of her pre-
marital days, Paro allows herself to entertain the fantasy of her continuing illicit love for Devdas.
Devdas’s interactions with the low-caste Chandramukhi also serve to emphasize the
potential for mobility implicit in the courtesan’s position on the margins of society. When they
are together in her bedroom, Devdas destroys a photo portrait of Chandramukhi adorned in her
dancing costume. Once the likeness of the courtesan is destroyed, only the woman Chandra
remains. Plainly dressed, her appearance gestures toward her role as a courtesan as a form of
masquerade that allows her a certain, albeit limited, permeability across the boundary-lines of
patriarchy. Moved to action, Chandra sells all of her worldly possessions and retires to the
village after giving up her profession, only returning to the city to rescue an inebriated Devdas
from the streets, upon hearing of his descent into drink. While Devdas lies unconscious, Chandra
dons fake jewelry and her old courtesan’s costume, and refurbishes her chambers to mimic their
prior splendor, authorizing herself to move between worlds in an bid to re-live the fantasy of
their happier times together.

DEVDAS GOES TO BOLLYWOOD

Although S.L. Bhansali’s Devdas (2002) is based on the same story as Barua’s film, I
want to suggest that Bhansali is not interested in the same project as Barua, and that the
negotiations that the Bollywood Devdas offers itself for are of a different order altogether. In
Barua’s treatment, the central struggle of the 1936 Devdas, of negotiating modern spaces and
modes of being, remains one that resists ultimate resolution. Bhansali refigures this struggle as
the oedipal conflict between a reformist ‘foreign-returned’ Devdas and his overbearing father, a
‘brown sahib’ character whose approval stands in for the absentee white gaze. The tragic
renunciation of the Devdas character neatly sublimates the conflict by making appeal to
nationalistic and patriarchal sentiments.
The enlarged geographic scope of the character Devdas, and the film’s recourse to
ideological conservatisms might incline Madhava Prasad to conclude that Bhansali’s Devdas is
tailored mainly to the displaced Non Resident Indian audience. However, I would insist that the
Bollywood Devdas makes itself available for negotiations that overarch the concerns of the
diasporic population. If Barua’s Devdas articulates strategies for negotiating the problem of caste
through the performance of a constitutive ambivalence, then the new Devdas resolves the
persisting problem of caste with reference to commodities you can purchase and trade, including
commodified identities. The entire film is constructed as an advertisement that makes available
autoethnographic spectacles of a primitivized and mythical ‘India.’ Not unlike the model of
television, consumerism is posited as the answer to a question, and psychologically as the
liquidation of a lack. The discursive connection with television is reinforced by the functioning
Rangan 10

of the central story within a host of melodramatic sub-plots inflected with the feudal sensibilities
and genre-conventions of contemporary television soaps made famous by producers such as Ekta
Kapoor. Like these interminable joint-family sagas, S.L. Bhansali’s hyperbolic plots,
characterizations, climaxes, and catharses relentlessly demand the willing suspension of viewer
disbelief.
More generally, Bhansali’s aesthetic project seems to be to create a spectacle of mythical
‘otherness,’ with no pretense to accuracy of historical detail. While the performances of mimicry
in Barua’s film repeatedly foreground differences of power, the issue of class itself is sublimated
in Bhansali’s film in service of a spectacular display of generalized primitive splendor. Bhansali
expends no effort in visually differentiating the village and the city; Devdas’s high-caste house
from Paro’s low-caste one; or even Chandramukhi the courtesan’s chambers, as discrete spaces.
The spectator is allowed smooth and unrestricted movement through an undifferentiated
landscape of opulent, bejeweled interiors whose mise-en-scene of exotic props, furniture, fabrics,
costumes, and characters all unequivocally signify ‘India.’
The most exotic of these primitive spectacles is provided by the female figure. The
character of Paro is purported in the Bollywood Devdas to be of the same dancer-caste as
Chandramukhi, which provides occasion for two elaborate song sequences, one involving Paro’s
mother, and the immensely popular Dhola re Dhola dance featuring both Paro and
Chandhamukhi. The discursive resonances of this partial interruption of narrative for staging the
fetishistic display of the by-now infamous ‘Bollywood dance-sequence’ is evidenced by the
enormous popularity of such clips on YouTube and other web-hosts. Song-sequences and
spectacles of primitivity may indeed be the privileged site for encountering the India-specific
‘sensorium’ produced and globalized by Bollywood films. Bhansali’s historical detour in his
Devdas is the very condition of possibility for presenting these highly sensual spectacles for the
viewer’s consumption. Historical slippage seems widely accepted as part of the contractual
complicity in participating in the experience of Bollywood. One online reviewer confesses that
he enjoys Devdas despite (or perhaps because of) its “shamelessly commercial” display of
clichés.21
The invention of ethnic details and rituals in displays of contractually delivered spectacle
extend beyond the song-sequences to proliferate throughout the entire film, even in quotidian
scenes. An instance of this is the gratuitous display of Paro painting designs on her feet as a
matter of daily routine, rather than for a dance or festive occasion. As Rey Chow has suggested,
these ethnic details are of a mythological order of signifying. They are not there to “mean”
themselves but are present as a second order articulation, to speak and confess, “I am feudal
India.”22 Bollywood not only produces and displays exotic ethnic ‘primitives’ for Western
consumption, but also allows natives to become foreigners to their own tradition by identifying
with the Western gaze. This phenomenon is entirely in line with Chow’s model of
“autoethnography,” as a practice that seizes upon a culture’s primitives as a means of
modernizing and rejuvenating the image of the culture. On the one hand, such a practice serves
as a means of ordering, or as Chow suggests, “a new kind of organization that is typical of
modernist collecting.”23 But Bollywood is also a transactional practice of ordering oneself as a

21
Kabir Ahamad, “Devdas: A Critical Analysis,” http://www.geocities.com/mamavatu/devdas1.html (Accessed 1
March, 2007)
22
Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 145.
23
Ibid., 145, 179-182.
Rangan 11

subject of consumption, by entering into a relationship of visibility with other commodified

subjects.

STATES OF VISIBILITY
Rey Chow has suggested that “the state of being looked at not only is built into the way
non-Western cultures are viewed by Western ones; more significantly it is part of the active
manner in which such cultures represent—ethnographize—themselves.”24 Several theorists have
written about representation and subjectivity in Indian cinema in terms of darsana, an alternative
mode of looking and being looked at derived from the power exercised by the image of deities in
Hindu religious culture. Film theorist Ravi Vasudevan writes, “…in this practice, the devotee is
permitted to behold the image of the deity, and is privileged and benefited by this permission, in
contrast to a concept of looking that assigns power to the beholder by reducing the image to an
object of the look.” 25 Vasudevan analyzes the scene where Paro first sets eyes on Devdas upon
his return home, in Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955), to demonstrate the principle of darsana. In
Vasudevan’s reading, Roy’s film mobilizes Paro’s subjectivity by representing her point of view,
but simultaneously restricts Paro’s gaze to Devdas’s feet, which are framed in a doorway which
functions as the threshold of a symbolic sanctum.26 Thus Roy’s film cinematically deploys the
practice of darsana to set up a very classical system of gazes. Since the field of the female look
is severely constrained by focusing the male within a discourse of divinity, the only recourse
offered to the spectator is to identity either with a position of objectification or a position of
subjection, so that there is a textual attempt to limit the engagement of the spectator to the
bounds of the narrative economy.
In contrast, I find both the 1936 Devdas and the Bollywood Devdas to be engaged in a
more complex organization of looks, which permits the spectator to reflexively mobilize an
ambivalent subjecthood—to both look and to reciprocally offer him/herself up to be looked at.
The specular economy of these films allows the spectator to enact a transaction not unlike that
engendered by the reflexive economy of the Bollywood subtitle-generator website.
The scene in Barua’s film where Devdas first visits the courtesan Chandramukhi’s dance-
hall articulates rather remarkably this ambivalence of the modern subject. Devdas reluctantly
approaches the hall with his friend Chunilal, who has prevailed upon him to attend. Immediately,
Barua cuts to the space they are about to enter, and gives us a detailed breakdown of the interior
of the dance-hall. The mise-en-abyme of “looks” within the space is quite extraordinary. A
courtesan dances in the center of the room. Twirling around in circles as she dances, the dancer
is at the perfect vantage point for seeing everyone seated around her in the room in rapid
alternation, including herself—there is a single mirror on the wall behind the mattress. In front of
the dancer and to her sides are patrons seated at various distances from her, who look at the
dancer, across the room at each other, and at themselves in the mirror. Behind the dancer, seated
in a semi-circular arc on a mattress are Chandramukhi and the musicians, who look alternately at
each other, the dancer and the patrons. Moreover, the dancer is not even the only subject
presenting a literal performance for view—one of the male patrons has borrowed a courtesan’s
veil, and mimics the movements of the dancer in an androgynous, unsettling shadow
performance. The entire scene is presented in a long shot, from no particular perspective, and

24
Ibid., 180. The emphasis here is Chow’s.
25
Ravi Vasudevan, “The Politics of Cultural Address in a ‘Transitional’ Cinema: A Case Study of Indian Popular
Cinema,” in Reinventing Film Studies ed. by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 134.
26
Ibid., 134-5.
Rangan 12

there is no reverse-shot, so that the scene itself disrupts classical narrative economy. When
Devdas’s entrance interrupts the dance, Barua pans to stop on Devdas, who stands by the door,
staring at the scene before him. Next come a series of reverse-shots, where the dancer,
Chandramukhi, the musicians, and each of the patrons return Devdas’s gaze in turns. We then cut
back to Devdas, who looks back at the spectators before him, presumably also seeing himself in
the mirror. Caught up within this specular exchange, the spectator’s look too becomes one that
can only look by offering itself up for looking; it is engaged in its constitutive ambivalence.
The equivalent scene of Devdas’s return in Bhansali’s 2002 film suggests that the
Bollywood Devdas offers itself for a negotiation of a different, yet related order. Prior to this
scene, Devdas is spoken about very much in terms of the darsanic. In his home, Devdas’s
mother, sister-in-law and grandmother excitedly discuss who will be the first to behold the vision
of Devdas’s form, ever more god-like in his newly acquired ‘England-returned’ status. It is a
topic of some controversy that Devdas goes to see Paro first—that she will be the first to ‘look’
upon him. The scene begins with a shot of Paro decorating her feet when the doorbell rings,
announcing Devdas’s arrival. The next shot is of Paro’s mother answering the door, but the
reverse-shot of Devdas is delayed. His presence is conveyed only by his booming god-like voice
requesting to meet Paro. However, the setting up of Devdas as darsanic is in fact a decoy. The
deferral of the reverse-shot permits the temporary displacement of the darsanic onto the body of
Paro, the exquisite primitive. The sound of Devdas’s voice gives Paro occasion to run up several
flights of stairs and through various corridors of her enormous parental home to bashfully defer
the moment of taking darsana of Devdas. Although we do eventually get the delayed reverse-
shot of Devdas, it is only after Paro’s spectacular marathon, which takes up more than a full
minute of screen time. During this period, not only does the audience have plenty of time to take
in the dual spectacle of Paro, and the bejeweled and brocaded mythical Indian mansion, but Paro
has innumerable opportunities to look at herself reflected in the multiple reflective panes of glass
of the seemingly unending multitude of doors that she runs through and windows that she flings
open in her euphoric trajectory. This specular dialectic of presenting oneself to-be-looked-at, and
looking-at-oneself being-looked-at functions as a matrix for the spectator to negotiate how to
dynamically position him/herself within a state of global visibility—not only how to look and be
looked at, but how to signify and to offer oneself for re-signification, how to consume and to
position oneself as a commodity.
*
Barua’s Devdas (1936) may have functioned as a vernacular modernism in terms of
bringing into ‘optical consciousness’ hitherto unperceived modes of sensory perception for
organizing oneself in relation to the modern context. However in today’s globalized contexts of
consumption, it is quite clear that the 1936 Devdas would not quite possess the same function as
the Bollywood Devdas. The later film functions, we might say, as a vernacular postmodernism
for organizing and mobilizing oneself as both a consumer and a commodity, through an
encounter with a unique sensory-specular horizon of otherness. As a microcosm of the practice
of Bollywood, a film such as Devdas (2002) requires to create and proliferate its own reflexive
economy. The vernacular postmodernism is a signifying practice savvy to the continuing
exigencies of modernity; like capitalism, it must terraform, seeking to resonate everywhere all at
once simply in order to exist at all.
Rangan 13

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this essay has been published as “Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood as a
Signifying Practice,” in The SARAI Reader 07: FRONTIERS, edited by Monica Narula and
Shuddhabhrata Sengoopta (New Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007),
273-285.