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The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2019

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Abstract

This essay argues that the phenomenon of repeat viewing of films by Bollywood audiences is worthy of being treated as an unusual cultural practice in which repetition and difference support and reinforce each other in the manner suggested by Gilles Deleuze. This relationship is particularly enabled by the relationship of music to plot in these films, in which song sequences provide a repetitive or percussive element that deepens the melodic and innovative element provided by the story. Not all films are able to attract repeat viewers, which raises a question about the role of the “formula” in the Hindi film industry. Further, the pleasures of repetition in this domain offer a suggestive perspective on India’s larger political dilemma, which is to combine the repetition of Western modernity with the unique developmental signature of Indian culture.

Keywords

repetitiondifferenceglobalizationcinema, pleasureBollywood
Type
Opinion Papers (Paradigm Response)
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 140 - 152
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

This paper has been more than two decades in the making and has had airings in Calcutta, New York, Toronto, Chandigarh, Berlin, and London, gathering wisdom from audiences in all these sites. The most recent occasion was at the British Academy in London, where I gained from the comments of participants at a panel to celebrate the conclusion of the ERC-funded project, Modern Moves, led by Ananya Jahanara Kabir. I am grateful for her comments as well as for those of two anonymous reviewers, who helped me to improve this paper. Ato Quayson also offered me some generous comments and encouraged me to publish this paper before it entered its third decade of incubation.

References

1 Gilles, Deleuze, Difference et Repetition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968)Google Scholar .

2 My arguments in this paper are contextualized and framed in two other papers on Mumbai and cinema, though neither of them takes up the question of repeat viewing: Arjun Appadurai, “Cosmopolitanism from Below: Some Ethical Lessons from the Slums of Mumbai,” in The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013), 197–214; Peter van der Veer, ed., “The Cinematic Soteriology of Bollywood,” in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 403–14.

3 Many observers of Hindi cinema have noticed the importance of repeat viewing, and there is considerable evidence that repeat viewing continues to be an important principle of viewer pleasure, even if there have been many technological changes created by cassettes, DVDs, television, and live streaming, as well as by changes in modes of screening, such as the large multiscreen theater complexes. In other words, both for viewers and for producers, repeat viewing remains crucial to Bollywood culture and is not confined to the golden period of Hindi cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. See Banaji, Shakuntala, Reading “Bollywood”: the Young Audience and Hindi Films (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Sabrina Ciolfi, “Popular Hindi Cinema: Narrative Structure and Points of Continuity with Tradition,” in ACME: Annali della Facolta di Lettere e Filsofia del’Universiti degli Studi di Milano, vol. LXV-I (2012); Shilpa Jamkhandikar, “Forget Online Serials, Eros’ Streaming Unit Bets on Bollywood Movies,” Reuters, August 14, 2018; Srinivas, Lakshmi, House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Further, the two films that have proven to have remarkable repeat value, even to the present, are Dilwale Dulhaniyaan Le Jaayengein (1995) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2001), both made long after the golden 1950s and 1970s in Hindi cinema. These films will be discussed later in this paper.

4 Srinivas, House Full.

5 I owe this insight to one of my teachers at the University of Chicago, the late A. K. Ramanujan, poet, translator, and cultural critic who observed that no one in India hears a story from the great Indian epics “for the first time.”

6 Here I must thank Ato Quayson for suggesting an interesting idea, namely that the films that produce the sensation of déjà vu are those that somehow contain, embryonically, the potential for repeat viewing, an element that viewers recognize and value. The difficulty with this suggestion is that it only defers the question of what this embryonic element might be and, more importantly, that it remains limited by the idea of some sort of identity between the viewed version and the (prior) imagined version, a view of the problem of difference and repetition that I think is inadequate.

7 Lalit Pandit, “Interview with Subhash Jha,” Rediff, December 16, 2014.

8 Sukanya Verma, “Hate It, Love It: You Simply Can’t Ignore the Tunes of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham,” Rediff, October 16, 2001.

9 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery of India (Calcutta, India: Signet, 1946)Google Scholar .

10 Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar .