Professor
Priya Joshi
Fall
2000
English
203.5, Film 240.4
Tu,
Th 9:30-11, 234 Dwinelle
Screenings:
Tu, 5-8pm, 105 Dwinelle
Office
Hours: Tu, 3:30-4:30;
Th,
11:15-12:30; & by appointment
Office:
451 Wheeler Hall
Phone: 510-642-2377
Email:
pjoshi@socrates.berkeley.edu
The Course
Nationalism, Benedict Anderson has famously argued, can best be understood by aligning it alongside the large cultural systems that preceded it–out of which, as well as against which, it came into being. Using India as a case study, we will examine the extent to which popular Hindi film exerted, diverted, and contorted the many impulses toward nationalism preying upon and purveyed by the country that annually produces the most films in the world. Within months of the cinématographe's debut, the Lumière brothers' invention arrived in Bombay in 1896 inaugurating an ongoing romance between film and India, one that saw the rise of the anti-colonial movement, the nationalist movement, Independence, Partition, and the almost daily recreation of modern India, that place that Salman Rushdie has called "a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street." In a country where full literacy is still a distant dream, we will examine the extent to which popular film is Anderson's "cultural system" par excellence that deployed and addressed the social, cultural, and political myths of the modern nation. Focusing on films from the Golden Fifties, the Angry Seventies, and the Saccharine Nineties, we will explore how Bollywood movies construct and critique the grand narratives of Indian nationalism; ask what fantasies and illusions they elicit and project; and interrogate their relationship to the persistent problems of sex (gettin' it), gender (definin' it), and poverty (stuck in it). Theoretical readings on public and popular culture, consumption, nationalism, and genre will help frame our viewings and our discussions.
The Requirements
Course requirements include regular attendance and participation in discussions and the weekly film screenings, 2 short concept papers (2-3 pages), a 12-15 page essay, an oral presentation.
The short concept papers do not have to be fully realized essays, but rather generative, speculative inquiries into one or more of our written or visual texts attending to the narrative workings, or looking into potential implications for author/auteur, genre, period, critical or theoretical conceptualizations, and so on. You should be working from one or more (hypo)theses for these pieces, but it will not be necessary to draw conclusions. I will comment on these assignments, but I will not assign them formal grades.
Your longer essay (12-15 pages) due on week 15 may jump off from or extend the explorations of your previous written or oral work for the course or it may develop a topic or film germane to our work this term.
Schedule of Readings
8/29 Welcome and Introduction
8/31 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film ("Beginnings," "Empire," "Studio," "Industry," "Wide World")
Appadurai and Breckenridge, "Public Modernity in India"
Rajadhyaksha, Encyclopedia of Indian Film, pp. 1-10; 17-32
9/5 Anderson, Imagined Communities
Screening: Awara (The Vagabond, 1951; dir. Raj Kapoor)
9/7
9/12 Renan, "What is a Nation?"
Nehru, "Tryst with Destiny"
Kakar, "The Cinema as Public Fantasy"
Screening: Shree 420 (The Gentleman Cheat, 1955; dir. Raj Kapoor)
9/14
9/19 Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, chs. 1-3
Nandy, "Introduction," The Secret Politics of Our Desires"
Screening: Mother India (1957; dir. Mehboob Khan)
9/21
9/26 Concept paper #1 due
McCabe, "Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses"
Screening: Naya Daur (The New Era) OR Pyaasa (The Thirsty One)
9/28
10/3 Mulvey, "The Melodrama's Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory"; and "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama"
Screening: Bobby (1973; dir. Raj Kapoor)
10/5
10/10 "Indian Cinema: Shading out Reality"
"Fundamental Blunder" and "Flaming Success" from India 50: The Making of a Nation
Screening: Sholay (Flames, 1975; dir. Ramesh Sippy)
10/12
10/17 Hobsbawm, "Inventing Traditions"
Premchand, "The Chess Players"
Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, "The Chess Players"
Screening: Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977; dir. Satyajit Ray)
10/19
10/24 Gramsci, "Popular Literature"
Screening: Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977)
10/26
10/31 Concept paper #2 due
Inden, "Transnational Class, Erotic Arcadia, and Commercial Utopia in Hindi Films"
Screening: Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Lover Steals the Bride, 1995; dir. Aditya Chopra)
11/2
11/7 Vasudevan, "Bombay and its Public"
Kazmi, "Towards a Theory of Popular Cinema"
Screening: Bombay (1995; dir. Mani Rathnam)
11/9
11/14 Screening: Satya or Sarfarosh
11/16
11/21 No Screening
11/23: Thanksgiving Holiday, No Class
11/28 Open Days
11/30
12/5 Concluding Discussion
12/7: Papers due; end of class festivities