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"Within a rapidly growing body of sophisticated work on Indian cinema, media, and popular culture, "Untimely Bollywood" stands out not only for its originality but also for its audacity. Its deft coordination of what at first would seem wildly heterogeneous topics is simply dazzling. There are wonderful discussions throughout that involve themselves in surprising but consistently illuminating topics, including art deco theatres, DJ culture, and Dolby sound in India. The movement through these topics is as often fun as it is enlightening."--Corey K. Creekmur, co-editor of "Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia"

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UNTIMELY BOLLYWOOD

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................xiIntroduction: India and the New Nonlinear Media Assemblage.................................................................1ONE "First Day, First Show": Bollywood Cinemagoing and the New Sensorium..................................................23TWO Contagious Multiplicities and the Nonlinear Life of the New Media.....................................................55THREE "The Best Quality Cinema Viewing ... Everywhere, Everytime": On the Malltiplex Mutagen in India.....................133FOUR "With You Every Moment in Time": On the Emergent Ittafaq (Chance) Assemblage.................................179Conclusion: Clinamedia.....................................................................................................211Notes......................................................................................................................221Bibliography...............................................................................................................275Index......................................................................................................................291

Chapter One

"First day, first show." It's a common phrase throughout India, sure to bring a smile to both speaker and interlocutor: a recognizable coding of one of South Asian cinema's singular events. It conjures up images of Bollywood faithfuls gathering, struggling, and scrambling to be one of the elect few to say, coolly, "Dekhli [saw it]-first day, first show." In this quintessentially Indian experience, one that is being re-created by new media practices and global consumerist habituations, we can see how fans from economically and socially diverse communities are renegotiating older structures of film and media culture today. Over the past six years, I have had the privilege to explore this film culture in various sites in India (Bhopal, Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi), the United States (Times Square and Jackson Heights in New York, and Artesia in California), and the United Kingdom (Birmingham, Manchester, and London). The chapters that follow build on these site-specific encounters, drawing most heavily from my extended research into new media assemblages in Bhopal-the City of Lakes and the capital of Madhya Pradesh. Bhopal is a city that was torn through by a rampaging death-gas secreted by a Union Carbide plant in December 1984, which killed thousands and thousands of mostly poor Muslim people within hours, and which continues to claim the lives of fifteen people each month. It is also the city of my birth and home to my father's extended upper-caste, middle-class Hindu family. Historically it was a walled-in city ruled for over a century by the Begums of Bhopal, the Muslim descendants of its founder the Afghan Dost Mohammed Khan. Today, Bhopal is a segregated city: the old gated city, home to the now minority Muslim population, is overwhelmingly poor and overcrowded; the new Bhopal, Hindu dominated, is home to politicians, state legislators, landowners, businesspeople, and Dominos Pizza (and the Dalit workers who service them).

Of the thirteen movie theaters in the city (all owned by Sikhs or Hindus), only three of them are in new Bhopal. The rest are all in the Muslim-majority areas of the erstwhile walled city. The difference is not only in location but can be seen in terms of numerous factors such as accessibility (quality of roads, density of traffic, availability of parking, etc.), regular programming clientele ("family" or soft porn genres, all-male clientele or gender mixed; single teenagers or families; poor, middle class, or rich; day or night crowds; Muslim or Hindu), services (box office, types of intermission snacks, ushers and "crowd control," cleanliness of toilets, lighting, drinking water), and theater "attractions" (Dolby sound, star and director visits, faade design, MTV-style digital advertisements and billboards, date of construction, style of architecture; condition of balcony, dress circle, stall seats; climate control via fans vs. water-cooled air, privatized dedicated power generators, etc.). This spectrum of differences indexes the emergence of a new kind of connectivity across the multiple dynamic thresholds of media technologies, cultural forms, subjectivities, neighborhoods, regions, nations, ideologies, and perception; it indexes as well the complex relationship between the new media and the changing strategies of India's globalizing elites.

Very simply, all these new connectivities imply a fundamental shift in the sensations of cinema. Certainly today cinematic practices, not just the cinematic image, are indissociable from the Internet, Dolby sound, or satellite TV as folds of each other. And certainly the form of bodily attention-exteroception, proprioception, interoception; in short, affect-produced through the cinematic sound-image and its constitutive intervals (practices, institutions, sensori-motor circuits, and spatiotemporalities) has fundamentally changed in being folded into the new media. Thus, if a qualitatively different human-media interface is coming into dominance through these technologies and the active bodies of media consumers, then the thought of cinema itself must change. We chart these becomings through diagramming the body's sensations in and through the nonlinear dynamics of this new media assemblage.

But whose body? And which media technologies? In response, two initial "method" problems present themselves. First, does this suggest that all bodies, regardless of gender, religion, class, caste, race, sexuality, etc. are equally implicated in this new dynamic threshold? Second, does this assume that satellite, Internet, and cable, etc. have transformed the totality of film-media culture in postcolonial India where access to and knowledge of such technologies are themselves technologies of social and economic exclusion and control?

To my mind these two questions should be reposed as: How can we think of the transformation in Bollywood cinema's ecology of sensation in the era of its new media assemblage as a qualitatively different kind of solicitation of the body's essential creativity, its openness as a center of indetermination-in short, its virtuality? Simultaneously, how can we think of the assemblage's specific form of power-as a violent machining, as the reproduction and containment, or reframing of deeply entrenched and repeatedly produced inequalities, clichs, and habituations across heterogeneous populations, a human multiplicity structured in dominance? Throughout this study I attempt to hold these lines of critique in productive tension: namely, Bollywood's global media assemblage as a historically specific unfolding of virtualization-containment, the unpredictable but patterned emergence of new media habituations. This approach follows through on Bernard Stiegler's startling suggestion that a "people"-ethnic, racial, national, regional, populational-is not defined by its past (memory, culture, traditions, "genius") but by its future; that is, by the line of mutation that orients it to a technologically constitutive outside, by its assembling along a machinic phylum. I will return to the question of...