BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar (1988/2014) and Anamika Haksar’s Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hu (2018) represent a fusion of various modes, methodologies and mediums. While scholars have explored these films in relation to digital, avant-garde, documentary, post-communist aesthetics (or, end of Indian New Wave, in case of Om Dar-B-Dar), their magic realist aspect has received less attention. Recently, the term ‘magic realism’ has become diluted, often used as a trite shorthand for non-realist tropes. Both Swaroop’s and Haksar’s films, however, align closely with exemplary works highlighted in major studies on global magic realist films by Felicity Gee and Aga Skrodzka, while also offering a unique perspective within the Indian context. This article revisits the radical spirit of past eras by examining lesser-known incidents and the obscure vernacular history of magic realism’s circulation in India, which constitutes the affective communities that shaped the milieu. This study seeks to probe new entry points into the topic. Anchored in postcolonial scholarship, particularly the writings of Fredric Jameson and Christopher Pinney, this study formulates a theoretical framework that, like its global counterparts, finds resonances in the practices of avant-garde and prayoga filmmakers. The article explores the significance of semiotic guerrilla tactics in Indian cinema, alongside other definitional parameters, with respect to the two films mentioned before.

Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (Anup Singh, 2013) narrates the story of the family of Umber Singh, a Sikh patriarch dislocated during the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Possessed by a desire for a son, Umber imposes a regime of masculinity upon his daughter, Kanwar. Through ruptures of regional, national and gender identifications, the film thematises displacements and borders via the trans body. As male ghosts ‘possess’ female bodies and vice versa, Qissa’s spiral structure produces a shape-shifting, folkloric understanding of gender that is mythic, fluid and responsive to the Partition’s effects on gender identification and expression. Through meandering mobilities and destabilising hauntings, this transnational, queer diasporic text meditates on the transitivity of gender, nation and genre. In my discussions of Qissa in the US academic context, some interlocutors have expressed difficulty in reading Kanwar as a legible trans protagonist. Nael Bhanji asks, ‘Who is the correct and proper citizen that gets to speak in the name of a transsexual subjectivity?’ Diasporic and regionally attuned feminisms provide a counter fluency that parses gender and sexuality in dialogue with regional publics. Through a range of transgender and transborder identities, the film explores the transversal folds of trauma, longing and desire.