COMMENTARY

The New Marathi Film

Aarti Wani

As the global trafc of ideas, images and objects lter into the Marathi sensorium, the new Marathi lm constitutes the surface that registers, absorbs and reects its effects. Emerging alongside the mainstream, these lms tap into middle-class anxiety about changing lifestyles, urban unrest, an excess of choice, disparities and rural distress. Through this they attempt a different, almost edgy engagement with the everyday in order to manufacture an archive of the contemporary.

This article was presented in the Association of Social Anthropologist of the UK and Commonwealths Annual Conference on Arts and Aesthetics in Globalizin g World held at JNU, New Delhi in April 2012. A version in Marathi translation has been published in a regional magazine Watsaru, November 2012. Aarti Wani (aartiwani@gmail.com) is an Associate Professor in the Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce, Pune. She is one of the co-editors of the peer-reviewed journal Studies in South Asian Film and Media.
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s distances reduce, boundaries get erased and the textures of our daily lives transform in the wake of a constantly revolutionising mediascape and the complex uptake of digital technologies, we should not forget that the contemporary affects and effects people and places in different ways. The sudden transformation and explosion in the practice and experience of the regional cinema in Maharashtra is one such effect. If since the beginning of cinema in India, Marathi cinema was one of the major regional ones, its production had dwindled to become inconsequential by the end of the 20th century. Shwaas made in 2004 marks a new phase in Marathi lm production and reception that has seen a remarkable array of lms, which are thematically unusual even if not always formally innovative. Within half a decade we see lms like Dombivali Fast (2005), Valu (2008), Gabhricha Paus (2009), Jogwa (2009), Natrang (2010), Vihir (2010), Tingya (2008), Harishchandrachi Factory (2009) and many others creatively exploring hitherto ignored subject matters, constituencies and spaces. Aiming to unravel the multiple strands, thematic and material, of this moment of the new, this article attempts to locate the emergence of the new Marathi lm early in this century within a rapidly transforming experiential context concurrent with the economic and cultural changes brought in by globalisation. As the global trafc of ideas, images and objects lter into the Marathi sensorium, the new Marathi lm, I argue, is the surface that registers, absorbs and reects its
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effects. The new spaces of the multiplex, the proliferation of the DVD culture, and the burgeoning cinephilia bringing the two together in lm festivals produce a tangled web of events, sites and modes of production, circulation and reception of the new Marathi lm that I seek to read in the textual strategies and tropes that have persistently surfaced on screen. The New Turn When the low budget Shwaas modestly explored the relationship between a grandfather and a little boy, Parshuram, who is about to lose his eyesight from a rare cancer, its sentimental realism struck a chord. As Indias ofcial entry in the 2004 Oscars, it stepped into the global circuit of information and imagery, marking the moment of a clear shift in Marathi lm practice. Amidst its resounding success at home and a guarded response from the western media, stories about monetary support from celebrities like Sachin Tendulkar and Amitabh Bachchan as well as government bodies, municipalities and temples in promoting the lm at the Oscars circulated in an anxious frenzy in print as well as on the internet. One such story particularly nails the complex network of sites and effects brought into play by the lm. On the day the lms producer-director team left for Los Angeles for the promotional tour, a cybercaf in Mumbai was raided for illegally screening the lm on computer terminals to a packed audience who had each paid Rs 15. The print is said to have displayed the name Sadaf, a Pakistani video company. If the Maharashtrian sense of arrival on the global cinematic scene requires this context of the proliferation of the DVD culture and its transnational networks of distribution, the multiplex as site and image is equally implicated in the moment.
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The inauguration of the new turn in Marathi cinema by Shwaas is within a few years of the establishment of the multiple screen theatres in most big cities and towns of the state. The multiplex, which made space for a niche audience of low-budget, non-mainstream and regional lms, also ensured that this audience belonged to the middle and higher classes with upmarket tastes and incomes to match. It is signicant that in this inaugural lm, the multiplex as a space of consumption and sight is diegetically inscribed on the screen. In a climactic scene of the lm, on the day of his operation (when Parshuram will permanently lose his eyesight) his grandfather escapes with him from the hospital in order to give him a last glimpse of the city. The multiplex along with the other places of leisure and consumption, like restaurants and malls, is the site that the boy must etch and store in his doomed eyes. Even as Parshuram loses his sight and returns to his village with the memory images of these new facilities now dotting the urban landscape, the lm seems to visually install and underscore the spatial conditions of its own possibility even as it records the limits on its access. Exposure to Global Cinema Energising this new cinematic economy are young lm-makers trained either in lm schools or in allied elds of commercial art, advertising and theatre. Exposed to global cinema, their own lms have travelled to foreign lm festivals, earning critical acclaim and awards. In the context of the neo-liberal changes that affect daily life, a rapidly transforming media culture and a public domain marked by the politics of gesture and performance, many of these lms emerge as sites engaging with the promises and anxieties of a global culture of consumption and lack, and with the possibilities of manufacturing new selves and identities. Emerging alongside the mainstream, the lms tap into middle-class anxiety about changing lifestyles, urban unrest, an excess of choice as of disparities and rural distress to attempt a different, almost edgy engagement with the everyday in order to manufacture an archive of the
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contemporary. Most interestingly, this cinematic articulation of the local, the marginal and the everyday is also at the same time an interaction with the relay of ideas and images owing through global networks of information. For instance, starting with Shwaas, a surprising number of lms, like Girni, Tingya, Vihir and Shala, move into the spaces of childhood to explore the vulnerabilities and struggles of young children as they spatially negotiate the physical and mental dynamics of an adult world. The inuence of Iranian lms on the new Marathi lm-makers is a critical common sense among cinephiles rather than a well substantiated argument. In their use of authentic locations, realist narrative strategies and stories based on the experiences of childhood, many of these lmmakers do seem to draw on the language of Iranian cinema. A case in point is Tingya, a lm that details its eponymous sevenyear-old heros heart-wrenching but wilful struggle to keep the family bull from being sold to the butcher. The lms director, Mangesh Hadawale, successfully focuses his lens on a remote, near tribal terrain in the states interior to discover, through Tingyas heroic efforts, a world of peasant immiserisation and hardships. Farmer suicides have been one of the most visceral effects of the neo-liberal policies on agriculture in Maharashtra, and lms like Gabhricha Paus have

explored its affective ecology with sardonic dark humour. However, in Tingyas story, rural poverty and distress is the background environment for a little boys childish efforts to save his bull. Therefore, not only in the authenticity of location and performance, and the use of nonactors, but also in the way the child becomes a matrix of historic transformations in lifestyle and perception, there is much in Tingya to alert us to the inuence of Iranian cinema. Indeed a scene where Tingya travels across a mountainous terrain to reach a neighbouring township to fetch a doctor for his bull is clearly reminiscent of a similar search for a friend in Abbas Kiarostamis, Where Is the Friends Home? (1987). At the same time, it is essential to note that a serious engagement with the aesthetics and politics of resistance of Iranian cinema is not to be expected. Instead, these new lm-makers seem to display a cinephiles playfulness as they pick and choose from the various genres and cinemas available to them. In a video interview found online, Hadawale credits lms like Mother India, Lagaan, Taare Zamin Par, Life is Beautiful and Children of Heaven for inspiring his lm practice.1 To be sure, this eccentric selection of inuences has its corollary, equally powered by the transnational travel of the cinematic, in straightforward borrowings, as in the case of Nishikanth Kamats

Survey
August 11, 2012

Econophysics: An Emerging Discipline

by

Sitabhra Sinha, Bikas K Chakrabarti Contemporary mainstream economics has become concerned less with describing reality than with an idealised version of the world. However, reality refuses to bend to the desire for theoretical elegance that an economist demands from his model. Modelling itself on mathematics, mainstream economics is primarily deductive and based on axiomatic foundations. Econophysics seeks to be inductive, to be an empirically founded science based on observations, with the tools of mathematics and logic used to identify and establish relations among these observations. Econophysics does not strive to reinterpret empirical data to conform to a theorists expectations, but describes the mechanisms by which economic systems actually evolve over time. For copies write to: Circulation Manager, Economic and Political Weekly, 320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013. email: circulation@epw.in
March 16, 2013 vol xlvIiI no 11
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Dombivali Fast. A highly successful adaptation of the Michael Douglas starrer Falling Down (1993), Dombivali Fast s dystopic vision of the city of Mumbai is staged through a spectacle of masculinity in crisis. Signicantly, although the lm utilised a Hollywood template for articulating the experience of metropolitan alienation, it did so by drawing on local anxieties and pressures of the turbulent citys geography and politics. Geotelevisuality It is crucial to note, however, that along with cinephilia, which assumes a relationship with specic genres, auteurs and cinematic traditions, the practice of the new Marathi lm needs to be seen as embedded in, to use Anustup Basus inspired formulation, geotelevisuality. Dening our age of information, geotelevisuality, according to Basu, is the projection and reception of images, sounds and words through worldwide distances, across territorial, cultural, linguistic, and religious frontiers (2008: 157). It is only in such a context of the geotelevisual that one can imagine a radical break with tradition as form and practice, but without the measured, mediated story of the break, without a sense of the momentous. The force of the planetary movement of images and ideas infusing the atmosphere, I suggest, drives the casual transformation of even the remote, the parochial or the regional. I have in mind two lms, Natrang and Jogwa, the rst is a spectacular popular hit, using the traditional genre of the tamasha lm with its song and dance, the other is akin to the social realist lm of the 1970s parallel cinema. Both lms foray into two diverse sites of tradition, to visually and performatively put in play ambivalent and uid masculine identities. Natrang revisits the hyper-masculine tamasha genre centred on women performers, to focus on the marginal effeminate male character, nachya, who accompanies women performers. The lm tells the story of a land labourer, Guna, his arduous struggle and rise to fame as a shahir (poet) and as nachya of his own tamasha troupe. Giving a visual and performative charge to Gunas transformation, from a hypermasculine farm labourer to a performer
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with distinctive feminine traits, the lm makes space for an ambivalent and uid masculinity. Jogwa, directed by Rajeev Patil, enters the fringe world of the devotees of goddess Yellamma, a cult still existing in parts of Karnataka and Maharashtra. The devotees of the goddess effectively impose sexual slavery on selected members, girls and boys. Strangely, boys are even denied their masculinity by being forced to wear a sari for the rest of their lives and like their female counterparts are essentially expected to be sexually available to men. By investing its protagonist, Tayyapas sari-clad body with meaning Jogwa makes the male body the site of its critique of patriarchys manipulative mechanisms. Clothes are repeatedly removed or put back on his writhing, resisting body as he seems to squirm in his very skin, not knowing who he is. Both lms loosen, expand and make uid the masculine of Marathi cinema, one, by weaving Gunas pleasure in performance with his performance of femininity, and the other, by locating, through a melodramatic excess, family, community and tradition in opposition to individual aspirations and desire. In executing this radical departure from the cinematic idiom of popular Marathi cinema invested in machismo and bawdy humour, both lms are enabled, I suggest, by inhabiting geotelevisuality. These cinematic explorations of masculine ambivalence must be read in the context of the global circuits of images linked to alternative sexualities and gender politics. News and images of worldwide legal and political struggles for samesex marriage, gay parades, and homophobia via the print and internet, lms and videos have produced an alternative geography of gender and sexuality. This geotelevisual ow of information produced a context that allowed our lms reconguration of tradition and the indigenous self (ibid: 158) without a sense of shock or break. It must be said, however, that the lms have been unable to go so far as to advocate homosexuality, indeed both protagonists in their own diegetic spaces are seen to ercely resist homosexual overtures. Nevertheless by investing in the performative and liberating
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possibilities of cross-dressing and transgender imagery, they instantiate a new visual regime. The most striking example of this is the song Jeev dangla gungala from Jogwa. All the other songs in this lm are strictly controlled by its narrative logic and are realistically picturised, rough, folk performances in praise of the goddess Yellamma. However, this song, playing out as background score to scenes of intense intimacy between the lead couple, mounts a spectacle of romance, which unsettles the normative constructs of gender as it layers and blurs the visual index of heterosexuality. Although the couple in question is heterosexual, the male, like his female counterpart is dressed in a saree. The stunningly lit, strange and near impossible places the couple inhabit as they caress and kiss are captured with a camera, that with extreme close-ups, dizzying tilts, cranes and zooms draws the eye through space in dream-like liquidity. However, what gives the song its affective charge is not only this extraordinarily courageous picturisation of sensuous lovemaking, but also its ability to afford the pleasure of viewing same-sex intimacy even as the audience knows of the couples heterosexuality. More importantly, dissociated from the lms narrative space and location of raw rusticity, and by drawing on a transnational pool of images produced by advertisement, tourism, and photography, the song partakes of the geotelevisual as it in turn enters its global ows. Will It Be Momentary? However, there were demonstrations against the lm by the womens wing of the Hindu Janajagruti Manch and skirmishes outside cinema halls exhibiting it over obscene kissing scenes that were allegedly against Hindu culture. This alerts us to not only the persistence of fears of contamination but also ssures in and resistance to the access and acceptability of the global ows and networks of knowledge and pleasure. Additionally, it is essential to remember that because access to this new techno-material object world is unequal, reecting, in many ways, entrenched hierarchies of power and privilege, its cinematic negotiations are not always liberating and free from the
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burden of these very inequities as is evident in the lm Deool, winner of this years national award for the best lm. Critiquing the commodication of religion and worship, the lm focuses on a rural community that seems to save itself from socio-economic stagnation by inventing a powerful deity and by building a temple that quickly becomes a popular pilgrimage destination. Staging a spectacle of greed and power that involves almost everyone in the village in a mad race to get a piece of the pious cake, the only voice of sanity in the lm is that of one Master Kulkarni, a now retired school teacher. Kulkarni, irked by his fellow villagers crude and short-sighted attempts to improve their lot, ineffectually advocates the building of a hospital, and in the end, disillusioned, leaves the village. Interestingly, for my argument, Kulkarni is the only person in the village with a

computer. While the local politician and his henchmen are seen with mobile phones, and television sets and DVD players are the visual register of the contamination of the pristine village culture, Kulkarnis computer on which he chats with his son living in Bangalore on skype, accrues to him an ethical modernity. Thus, the lms moral vision distributes values along established classic lines of caste and privilege-wisdom and virtue to the techno-savvy brahmin master and raw self interest to the rest of the lower caste uncouth villagers. Finally, Marathi lms exploration of new spaces and identities endures. Balgandharva, Shala and Deool, all released in 2011 to critical acclaim, illustrate that the complex economy of the regions encounter with the global has been liberating but also constricting. Additionally, it needs to be mentioned

that the force of the moment has also seen a slew of mainstream releases in recent years. The impact of technomateriality, geotelevisuality and global ows of capital on the economics and practice of the mainstream needs urgent examination. Whether or not the new in the material practice of Marathi lm proves to be momentary, or continues to open windows to a transnational sky as it turns a probing lens on the vernacular self is an open question.
Note
1 http://wn.com/Mangesh_Hadawale accessed on 25 March 2012.

Reference
Basu, Anustup (2008): The Music of Intolerable Love: Political Conjugality in Mani Ratnams Dil Se in Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (ed.), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Film Song and Dance (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press).

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