Output details

Friction, collision, and the grotesque: the dystopic fragments of Bombay cinema

The experience of globalisation since the 1990s brought about many shifts in the nature of the relationship between cinema and the urban experience. Globalisation grew rapidly, transforming daily life through the circulation of delirious signs of prosperity, lifestyle images, commodities and new forms of visual culture. The language of urban renewal – shop signage, branding and the power of light – has created an intoxicating sensorium. This new landscape also feeds off the powerful presence of “Bollywood mania”, now a part of international events, Indian diplomacy, special investment pages of financial papers, theme restaurants and corporate branding in South Asia and the world. This commissioned and peer-reviewed article looks at the dystopic imagination present in a small body of “fringe” Bombay films that have emerged in the 21st century to haunt globalisation’s visual culture of brightness through an alternative language of space. This is a cinema that exists on the periphery of Bombay’s cinematic excess, foregrounding a new, melancholic, sometimes sinister imagination where Bombay is explored and slowly rendered strange for the spectator. A critic for the Indian Express, a major English language daily, labelled these films, “India’s off-mainstream urban cinema”. In these films, urban life is draped in an architectural mise-en-scene that is marked by friction and collision. In a context where “Bollywood” has emerged as a chapter in Indian diplomacy and an advertisement for India’s global rise, these films suggest a very different world. Globalisation's wave of land and financial speculation sweeping South Asian cities may have unintentionally opened its doors for a disruptive aesthetic, which also seems to speak a global language. This article has been translated in Chinese for a collection of essays on Indian Cinema titled You Don’t Belong: Pasts and Futures of Indian Cinema ed. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, January 2012 ISBN:9787208103597