Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (review)

Ashish Rajadhyaksha, coeditor of the well-known Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema,¹ has produced another encyclopedic work of great breadth and depth (over 400 pages long). However, as the author acknowledges, this book is more an intellectual autobiography than an encyclopedia because it brings together much of Rajadhyaksha's thinking and many of his writings from the early 1980s to the 2000s. He extensively updates the earlier materials for the book, includes more recent empirical evidence, and recasts it all in a new theoretical light for the present.

The book is divided into three sections; the first section, "The Argument," consists of the Introduction. The second section, "The Evidence," is divided into four parts: "'Bollywood' and the Performing Citizen"; "The Cinema-Effect and the State"; "1970s Questions: The 'Cinema Effect,' the National-Symbolic and the Avant-Garde"; and "The Practice: Two Films and a Painting." The third section, "Afterword," consists of one chapter titled "The Cinema-Effect: A Concluding Note." The book is richly illustrated, and the images provide important visual references to many old and new Hindi films; extratextual evidence like posters, photographs, and publicity materials; and "minor" texts like art, paintings, and avant-garde films that Rajadhyaksha examines in various chapters.

It would not be easy to summarize in a short review the contents of a book that traverses many intellectual journeys over several decades in the life of a prolific writer like Rajadhyaksha. Perhaps it is also unnecessary, given that many of the chapters in the book are updated versions of very well known essays that have received wide circulation over the years. For instance, the first section on "'Bollywood' and the Performing Citizen" includes revised versions of the arguments made by Rajadhyaksha in a much-cited essay titled "The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema." Similarly, Rajadhyaksha's take on the theory of looking—which is covered in sections two and three of the book—is already well known to readers familiar with his arguments about the "four looks" in Indian cinema.

The book reworks many of the insightful arguments that Rajadhyaksha has advanced over the years: about Bollywoodization, on the relationship between cinema and the state, on looking, and on the avant-garde. The vast amount of material covered in the book often makes it difficult to keep track of the continuities and connections among the various arguments within each chapter and across various chapters. However, Rajadhyaksha pulls it all together with the aid of a couple of key framing devices, the "time of celluloid" and "the cinema-effect."

Marking the "time of celluloid" very precisely as the years between 1895 and 1990, Rajadhyaksha defines it as a period that was dominated by the technology of celluloid, and by "cinematic effects" that emerged on celluloid but are always reappearing in sequel technologies. The overall objective of the book is encapsulated in the title of the introductory chapter, "A Theory of Cinema That Can Account for Indian Cinema." The "new" theory, Rajadhyaksha claims, is generated through his analysis of the narrative evidence produced by Indian cinema during the period that he calls the "time of celluloid." If the arrival of cinema in 1895 in Paris (and in 1897 in Bombay) marks the inauguration of the "time of celluloid," then its demise is marked by the appearance of Avid consoles in the early 1990s as the rise of digital editing systematically eliminated the dominance of celluloid in the production process.

For Rajadhyaksha, the period between 1895 and 1990 also marks the emergence of a particular mode of public engagement with the moving image that is exemplified by celluloid. Furthermore, he claims, celluloid also fabricated and narrativized this public domain in both cinematic texts and social contexts through twin regulatory mechanisms of containment and excess. "Containment," Rajadhyaksha writes, "is a formal requirement of the film frame and a social requirement of perhaps the most crucial institution of the public domain in our time...