BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

The filmmakers Ahmed and Mahmood Jamal have described Rahm, their 2016 Pakistani film based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603), as a critique of fundamentalist elements in their native Pakistan. The Jamal brothers propose Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, as a means to transcend the limiting social and political elements that reign in the quasi-mythical version of Lahore they represent. The brothers emphasize one of Sufism’s central values, the notion of a forgiving deity. Indeed, the film’s title, ‘rahm’ translates into English as ‘mercy’. Sufism within the world of Rahm stresses otherworldliness, understanding, empathy and clemency. In this article, I will examine how, in Rahm, certain characters attempt to adhere to Sufi values to bring greater justice to the society the film depicts, and how the film thus uses Sufism to critique inflexible religious extremism, especially in matters of sexual conduct. At the same time, I will also argue that the filmmakers shed light on how difficult it is to fully embody an idealistic notion of Sufi values. For when it comes to his own desires, the film’s enlightened Sufi magistrate’s blind spot to gender inequity competes with, and even obscures, his newfound capacity for wisdom and grace. So, while the film is superficially a triumphal story in which Sufi-inflected ‘rahm’ wins out over a harsher, punishment-laden theocratic society, its complexly rendered ending suggests that the title’s value is at best imperfect, and at worst ironic, especially for the women who remain vulnerable to the kind of patriarchal power structures that have traditionally enclosed women across time, religions and regions.

Film director, screenwriter and playwright, Sai Paranjpye is best known for her mastery of the art of translating human follies into humour. While numerous popular and journalistic readings of her films celebrate her aesthetics and middle-class narratives of romance and comedy, these have tended to foreclose other possible critical discussions of her films. This article offers a new theoretical paradigm for analysing Sai Paranjpye’s films by focusing on space and spatial experience as the site of sociocultural investigation. In doing so, it moves beyond the historic orthodoxies of ‘middle-class cinema’ that perpetuate class identity as the predominant tool of cinematic inquiries. Instead, I argue that the narrative concerns and aesthetic configurations of Paranjpye’s films strategise an encounter between the spatial and the social. This encounter is crucial in delineating ideas of social identity and interpersonal relationships, where space is the key structuring element. With a methodological focus on lived space and experience in Paranjpye’s Sparsh (1980), Chashme Baddoor (1981), Katha (1982), Disha (1990), Papeeha (1993), Choodiyan (1993) and Suee (2009), I propose the centrality of five dominant themes – border crossing; perceptions of home; private–public divisions; paradigms of social and spatial marginalities; and acts of mazaa/fun – as critical knots in accessing what these films reveal about the texture of late twentieth-century Indian life at the intersections of the spatial and the social.

This article is a report and a reflection on the events and interventions in the Telugu film and media world after the 2018 #MeToo movement. It uses the conceptual frame of the “intervention” to gather together different initiatives—legal, professional and artistic—that are attempting to change the ethics and aesthetics of the film industry. It draws attention to the work of the Voice of Women (VOW) collective that is calling for systemic and concrete changes in the industry to tackle sexism and misogyny. In a different section, the article focuses on the work of actor and VOW member Jhansi, discussing, in particular, a satirical play, Tit for Tat, written and directed by her. The article concludes that the interventions being made in this particular conjuncture are without guarantees but are definitely shifting the terms of the debate even if it is slowly and slightly.

This article explores a global transformation – the shift to an informational, networked society – and the ways in which this shift plays out spatially through the Bombay film industry’s contemporary action films. I argue here that new cinematic technologies, such as drone cameras, digital special effects, computer-generated images and post-continuity editing, have allowed new forms of action to emerge. These forms of action have unveiled a bodily experience of transnational space that has emerged in relation to neoliberal global capital. Through an analysis of action sequences in films like Krrish (Rakesh Roshan, 2006), Fan (Maneesh Sharma, 2016), Kick (Sajid Nadiawala, 2014), War (Siddharth Anand, 2019) and Tiger Zinda Hai (Ali Abbas Zafar, 2014), I will delineate the relationship between new film technologies, globalised codes of film production, new economic and spatial forms and the audience’s aspirations for a global, technologised citizenship.

This article explores how unions self-organise in response to the shifting social and economic landscape of the present times. It takes up the case of a union in Bollywood, the Association of Cine and television Art Directors and Costume Designers (ACTADCD), to examine how it constitutes itself in process. In doing so, this article explores the history of the union and two episodes of its coming together in the recent past: the 2017 multi-union strike outside the film studio complex, Filmcity in Goregaon, Mumbai and the first Art and Costume exhibition in 2019 at The Bombay Art Society art gallery of Bandra.

Political economy as an approach to media industries has long relied on data as raw material for knowledge production. However, the positivist pursuit of data can sometimes take away from the contextual nuances and lived realities of human labour in the industry. My aim, in this short piece, is to explore how localised power formations and cultural values must be accounted for, in order to interrogate the very process by which we claim knowledge of an industry. Reading ‘data’ – the prized raw material of media industry studies – against the grain is essential if we are to go beyond the presentness of the moment. Based on my fieldwork on labour utilisation in Malayalam soft-porn cinema, as well as the larger public discussions around the release of a judicial committee report – the Hema Commission Report – that was commissioned by the Kerala state government to study ‘options for improving women’ safety, security, a better salary, service conditions and creation of a conducive working environment’, I look at why political economy approaches to media studies must grapple with the contradictions and messiness of data, and how they are gathered to make claims.

Since the formation of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) in 2017 in response to the sexual assault on an actress, the Malayalam cinema industry in Kerala, India, has witnessed significant debates regarding gender justice in film labour practices. The sustained critiques mounted by the WCC have catalysed a range of institutional initiatives: the establishment of workplace complaints committees, dedicated grants for women filmmakers, and the partial release of the Hema Committee Report, which documented the structural conditions faced by women film workers. Even as implementing reforms remains an uphill task, feminist questions of gender parity and sexual harassment are also reshaping major film associations and trade unions, including AMMA and FEFKA, where women members are engaging in diverse negotiation strategies. This essay maps these interventions beyond WCC frameworks, offering a coalitional reading of the broader ecology of women’s agency in Malayalam film production cultures.

It will certainly come as a surprise to many that it is almost a century since the first cine-workers’ association, called the ‘Workers’ Association’, came into being in India, in the Bombay film industry in particular, that too in the late silent cinema period, in 1927. Unfortunately, there is no institutional memory of this workers’ formation, nor is there any mention in the contemporary records except in the evidence accompanying the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) report (1928). In this article, analysing and mobilising this extant evidence, I delve into the reasons which led to its formation and speculate why it vanished without a trace. I argue that despite its ephemeral existence, it made Bombay’s film workers imagine the possibilities of having trade unions of their own, which fructified later.

Reena Mohan, Bina Paul and I came together in 2019 to start a project titled A Room of Our Own, documenting women’s experiences of studying at the Film and Television Institute of India. We worked with a group of women filmmakers of all ages, pursuing different lines of work in various film industries – as technicians, directors, producers, writers, artists, activists in big studios, in production houses, in television networks, in artist collectives and in homes that doubled up as artist studios.