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Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent Bollywood Cinema

2011; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2011.596383

1545-5866

Meheli Sen,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For a discussion of the implications and valences of the label “Bollywood,” see Prasad. The Ramsay films are finally receiving much-deserved critical attention from cult cinema fans as well as film scholars. See, for example, Tombs. Although this newer crop of films were certainly made and circulated in a transformed industrial environment, filmmakers, especially Varma, continue to cite and pay homage to the Ramsay films through mise-en-scene and iconography. Examples abound and including Dark Water (2002), Whispering Corridors (2003), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), and Acacia (2003). First and especially last names in South Asia clearly indicate what caste, community, and religion an individual belongs to. It is virtually impossible to disguise these markers of social belonging once a person has been officially named. Exceptions to the rule: Mrinal Sen's Kharij (1983) represented the exploitation of young rural children as domestic workers and Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par (2007) invokes a different kind of child labor—the enormous burden put on children by the arguably harsh scholastic systems in India. Although male children are most often represented, curiously, many of the actors playing little boys are actually girls—a tendency that has fallen somewhat out of vogue in recent years. Much scholarly work has recently focused on the emerging middle classes in pre- and post-liberalization India. See, for example, Fernandes. For a discussion of the Multiplex boom and attendant transformations in distribution and exhibition of films, see Sharma. This immersion within a larger space of consumption is so crucial to understanding the spectatorial experience of the viewer that Amit Rai has coined the term “Malltiplex” to describe the textured and sensate world of the urban multiplex. For a theorization of Indian cinema through the trope of interruptions, see Gopalan. Style in Vaastu—and the other films discussed here—remains highly self-conscious. The filmmakers clearly speak to an audience that is competent in reading, or is at least relatively familiar with, formal conventions typically deployed by the horror genre in Hollywood and beyond. It is this “knowing” spectatorship that Philip Brophy gestured towards when he wrote, “The contemporary Horror film knows that you've seen it before; it knows that you know what is about to happen; and it knows that you know it knows you know. And none of it means a thing, as the cheapest trick in the book will still tense your muscles, quicken your heart and jangle your nerves.” The undead in Vaastu look very similar to those in Takashi Shimizu's global hit Ju-on; the children in particular seem to have been modeled on those in the earlier film. The emphasis on a cursed home where inhabitants die mysteriously is also resonant with the plot of the Japanese film. One possible explanation for Vaastu's open-ended closure is that the producers may have had plans for future sequels. The director's untimely death in 2010, however, makes this possibility unlikely. This division—and particularly Rajiv's claim to adult rationality in the film—is resonant with Nandy's reading of modern childhood, in that it resonates powerfully with the adult anxiety of regression: “childhood has become a major dystopia for the modern world. The fear of being childish dogs the steps of every psychologically insecure adult and of every culture that uses the metaphor of childhood to define mental illness, primitivism, abnormality, underdevelopment, non-creativity and traditionalism” (65). When Anshuman and Madhu visit the family, Raksha clearly states, “I don't like her,” prompting an immediate demand for an apology from an embarrassed Rajiv. At the fateful party, Madhu pinches Raksha's cheek cooing, “She doesn't like me. But I love her!” Madhu's sinister energy is signposted most clearly in her interactions with the little girl. Especially in the party sequence, Madhu's defiant screaming even after having been discovered—her lack of remorse and her aggression—alert us to the insane, irrational child within. Her reaction to their humiliation is a childish covering of her eyes and wailing—hardly, I would suggest, the response of an adult. What I would like to emphasize here is that Madhu's baroque anger is linked to her child-likeness, which eventually becomes pathologically vindictive. See Taran Adarsh's review. Even user reviews on IMDB mention female feticide in relation to the film's take on abortion. Interestingly, the name “Shivani” also refers to the same goddess, another technique by which the film equates the child and the fetus. As an aside, it is interesting to note that in many of these films CGI—a modern technological innovation that has irrevocably transformed the cinema in recent years—is deployed in aid of elaborating and often buttressing a non-modern, traditionalist ideology. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMeheli SenMeheli Sen is Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Program at Rutgers University. Her research area is popular Hindi cinema, commonly referred to as “Bollywood.” She is interested in how the filmic registers of genre, gender, and sexuality resonate with specific moments in India's troubled encounters with modernity and globalization.