The strange story of Sushant Rajput
By: Visvanathan, Shiv
.
Material type: 
BookPublisher: Seminar: Cradle of Diversity Description: 736, Dec, 2020: p.51-56.Subject(s): Motion pictures - India, Motion pictures - Social aspects
In:
Seminar: Cradle of DiversitySummary: TO understand the crisis and the narratives of the Sushant Rajput story, one has to go back to the legendary storyteller of Partition, Saadat Hasan Manto. In his lighter writings on film, Manto who was heartbroken by the Partition, claimed that the cultural answer to Partition lay in Bombay Talkies, which represented the hybridity of culture, the reciprocity of Hindi and Urdu, the friendship of the stars, which transcend the ugliness of Partition. Manto proved unerringly right as Bombay Talkies became Bollywood and provided the myths of India.
Bollywood, as a script of culture, and its variants encapsulated the contradictions of Indian modernity as a text. The narrative at the level of mythos managed to weave the oppositions between town and country, legal propriety and violence, family and public interest in creatively understandable frame. It satisfied the demands of both aspects and yet saw modernity as going beyond them. Whether one thinks of Deewar or Seeta aur Geeta one senses the creative interplay of dualisms.
The encounter between Amitabh and Shashi in Deewar is exemplary. As Amitabh boasts of all the wealth he has, he asks Shashi ‘Tere paas kya hai’ and the latter replies, ‘mere paas ma hai’. The nature of the encounter captures the mutuality, the contradiction of two value frames and hints at the explosive power of each. Crowds came, watched these utterly unreal movies capture the inner categories of their lives and went back content that the big screen made meaning and added context to their lives.
Through the Nehruvian and later decades, Bollywood held India together, making sense of urbanism, development, violence, and crime in a way, which made the social sciences feel secondary. The social sciences provided a more factual, ideological narrative, which while politically charged lacked the alchemical power of myth. Yet even then Indian sociologists who were suckers for Bollywood discovered a strange companionship between the two.
The post-liberalization years saw the breakdown of Indian modernity as a myth. The legendary stars that were exemplars and exponents of archetypal roles disappeared. Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor faded away. Amitabh Bacchan was living parasitically on his own reputation, where a suave old man mellowed the legend of the violent young man. Yet violence, which could earlier lie contained in the usual categories, now appeared different. Violence now had an instrumental, calculated quality and it lost its operatic power. The lines of spectatorship got blurred as the perpetrator consumed his own violence with glee. The mythical socialism of Raj Kapoor disappeared as aspiration and mobility took over.- Reproduced
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Vol info | Status | Date due | Barcode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Articles
|
Indian Institute of Public Administration | 736, Dec, 2020: p.51-56 | Available | AR124882 |
TO understand the crisis and the narratives of the Sushant Rajput story, one has to go back to the legendary storyteller of Partition, Saadat Hasan Manto. In his lighter writings on film, Manto who was heartbroken by the Partition, claimed that the cultural answer to Partition lay in Bombay Talkies, which represented the hybridity of culture, the reciprocity of Hindi and Urdu, the friendship of the stars, which transcend the ugliness of Partition. Manto proved unerringly right as Bombay Talkies became Bollywood and provided the myths of India.
Bollywood, as a script of culture, and its variants encapsulated the contradictions of Indian modernity as a text. The narrative at the level of mythos managed to weave the oppositions between town and country, legal propriety and violence, family and public interest in creatively understandable frame. It satisfied the demands of both aspects and yet saw modernity as going beyond them. Whether one thinks of Deewar or Seeta aur Geeta one senses the creative interplay of dualisms.
The encounter between Amitabh and Shashi in Deewar is exemplary. As Amitabh boasts of all the wealth he has, he asks Shashi ‘Tere paas kya hai’ and the latter replies, ‘mere paas ma hai’. The nature of the encounter captures the mutuality, the contradiction of two value frames and hints at the explosive power of each. Crowds came, watched these utterly unreal movies capture the inner categories of their lives and went back content that the big screen made meaning and added context to their lives.
Through the Nehruvian and later decades, Bollywood held India together, making sense of urbanism, development, violence, and crime in a way, which made the social sciences feel secondary. The social sciences provided a more factual, ideological narrative, which while politically charged lacked the alchemical power of myth. Yet even then Indian sociologists who were suckers for Bollywood discovered a strange companionship between the two.
The post-liberalization years saw the breakdown of Indian modernity as a myth. The legendary stars that were exemplars and exponents of archetypal roles disappeared. Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor faded away. Amitabh Bacchan was living parasitically on his own reputation, where a suave old man mellowed the legend of the violent young man. Yet violence, which could earlier lie contained in the usual categories, now appeared different. Violence now had an instrumental, calculated quality and it lost its operatic power. The lines of spectatorship got blurred as the perpetrator consumed his own violence with glee. The mythical socialism of Raj Kapoor disappeared as aspiration and mobility took over.- Reproduced
There are no comments for this item.