Madhuja Mukherjee - Popular Cinema in Bengal

Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry.

This book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intense public debates (subjects such as high and low culture, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geopolitical transformations, this book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialized over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding regional cinema as a category, in relation to national cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption and cinemas meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks.

Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.

Madhuja Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, India. Her publications include New Theatres Ltd.: The Emblem of Art, The Picture of Success (2009), Aural Films, Oral Cultures (2012) and the award-winning anthology Voices of the Talking Stars (2017). She is coeditor of Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India (forthcoming).

Kaustav Bakshi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Jadavpur University, India. A Charles Wallace Fellow, he has worked on Anglophone Sri Lankan literature for his doctoral thesis. His publications include Anxieties, Influences and After: Critical Responses to Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism (2009) and Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, and Art (2017).

David Washbrook - University of Cambridge, UK

Boria Majumdar - University of Central Lancashire, UK

Sharmistha Gooptu - South Asia Research Foundation, India

Nalin Mehta - La Trobe University, Melbourne

This series offers a forum that will provide an integrated perspective on the field at large. It brings together research on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences, and provides scholars with a platform covering, but not restricted to, their particular fields of interest and specialization. Such an approach is critical to any expanding field of study, for the development of more informed and broader perspectives, and of more overarching theoretical conceptions.

The series achieves a multidisciplinary forum for the study of South Asia under the aegis of established disciplines (e.g. history, politics, gender studies) combined with more recent fields (e.g. sport studies, sexuality studies). A focus is also to make available to a broader readership new research on film, media, photography, medicine and the environment, which have to date remained more specialized fields within South Asian studies.

A significant concern for the series is to focus across the whole of the region known as South Asia, and not simply on India, as most South Asia forums inevitably tend to do. We are most conscious of this gap in South Asian studies and work to bring into focus more scholarship on and from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and other parts of South Asia.

South Asian Folklore in Transition

Crafting New Horizons

Edited by Frank J. Korom and Leah K. Lowthorp

Mind, Soul and Consciousness

Religion, Science and the Psy-Disciplines in Modern South Asia (With a Foreword by J.N. Mohanty)

Edited by Soumen Mukherjee and Christopher Harding

Children and Knowledge

Contemporary and Historical Perspectives from India

Edited by Zazie Bowen and Jessica Hinchy

Popular Cinema in Bengal

Genre, Stars, Public Cultures

Edited by Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi

Edited by

Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi

First published 2020

by Routledge

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ISBN13: 978-0-367-33082-8

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Publishers Note

The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles to book chapters, namely the inclusion of journal terminology.

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Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi

PART I

Styles, Stars and Popular Forms

Madhuja Mukherjee

Sharmistha Gooptu

Pritha Chakrabarti

Sayandeb Chowdhury

Anustup Basu

Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta

Spandan Bhattacharya

PART II

Ray and Felu Mittir, the private detective

Rochona Majumdar

Kaushik Bhaumik

Pujita Guha

PART III

Photo Essays: Public Cultures

Moinak Biswas

Madhuja Mukherjee

Kaustav Bakshi

Subhajit Chatterjee

The following chapters in this book were originally published in South Asian History and Culture, various volumes/issues. When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:

Rethinking popular cinema in Bengal (1930s1950s): of literariness, comic mode, mythological and other avatars