1st Edition

Popular Cinema in Bengal Genre, Stars, Public Cultures

Edited By Madhuja Mukherjee, Kaustav Bakshi Copyright 2020

    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.

    The 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; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, 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 geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised 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 cinema’s 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.

    1. Introduction: A brief introduction to popular cinema in Bengal: genre, stardom, public cultures

    Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi

    Part I: Styles, Stars and Popular Forms

    2. Rethinking popular cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): of literariness, comic mode, mythological and other avatars

    Madhuja Mukherjee

    3. Kanan Devi: a Bengali star

    Sharmistha Gooptu

    4. Performing the region: Sadhona Bose and the modern Bengali film dance

    Pritha Chakrabarti

    5. A postcolonial iconi-city: Re-reading Uttam Kumar’s cinema as metropolar melodrama

    Sayandeb Chowdhury

    6. Filmfare and the question of Bengali cinema (1955–65)

    Anustup Basu

    7. From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen

    Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta

    8. The action heroes of Bengali cinema: industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of popular film culture, 1980s–1990s

    Spandan Bhattacharya

    Part II: Ray and Felu Mittir, the private detective

    9. Feluda on Feluda: a letter to Topshe

    Rochona Majumdar

    10. Reviewing ‘Feluda on Feluda’: Maganlal Meghraj ‘Writes Back’ to Tapesh

    Kaushik Bhaumik

    11. Negotiating mobility and media: the contemporary digital afterlives of Feluda

    Pujita Guha

    Part III: Photo Essays: Public Cultures

    12. A booklets sequence

    Moinak Biswas

    13. Inside a dark hall: space, place, and accounts of some single-theatres in Kolkata

    Madhuja Mukherjee

    14. Rituparno Ghosh, performing arts and a queer legacy: an abiding stardom

    Kaustav Bakshi

    15. A Rendezvous with the Ghosh Brothers: A Sneak Peek into Bengal’s Homegrown Exploitation Cinema

    Subhajit Chatterjee

    Biography

    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 co-editor 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 published books include Anxieties, Influences and After: Critical Responses to Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism (2009) and Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, and Art (2017).