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Review: Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film

In 2002, the Victoria and Albert Museum of London held its first largescale exhibition of Indian movie posters. In part, Cinema India has grown out of that endeavour and attempts to provide a contextual understanding to a study of Hindi film as a crucial component of the visual arts in modern India. In keeping with a discussion of this kind, the volume includes numerous illustrations including film stills, movie posters and handbills which probably make it a valid purchase on those grounds alone. The great attraction of this book is that it inverts the recent pattern in Indian film studies that has tended to condense discussion of the visual culture of the Indian film within a more detailed socio-historical account of ideological development (see, for example, Madhava Prasad's Ideology ofthe Hindi Film (1998)). In this case, it is the development of the visual culture itself which is foregrounded, The book is divided into two sections, the first part being Rachel Dwyer's detailed discussion of film style, while the second consists of Divia Patel's exposition of film advertising. In reference to the work of Ravi Vasudevan, Rachel Dwyer presents the Bombay cinema as a 'cinema of attractions', orientated around the gratification of the scopophilic gaze. However, in the Indian context, the reciprocal exchange between the viewer and the viewed articulated by the concept of darshan is explored as the site of a more dynamic relationship between the viewer and the star image. The juxtaposition of these two aesthetic models of the act of looking is probably one of the most intriguing elements which appears within this discussion of film settings, costume and other elements of mise en scene. Nonetheless, there is also a clear recognition here that a discussion of Indian film style must of necessity negotiate the hybrid origins of the Indian film and its emergence against the backdrop of the Indian encounter with modernity. Dwyer insists, therefore, that attempts to identify an indigenous aesthetic based wholly upon perceived synergies with classical Indian aesthetics, such as rasa theory, are mistaken. She goes on to argue, however, that the cultural practice of darshan cannot be omitted from a visual understanding of Indian popular culture. Divia Patel charts the development of Indian film advertising as an art form and as a site for the communication of meaning. This has been an under-researched area to date, and Patel provides a valuable insight into the dynamic relationship between the cinema and other forms of contemporary visual art. The chronological account of both technological and aesthetic development is accompanied by a discussion of the symbolic power of the star image as embodied by Arnitabh Bachchan and of representations of femininity in Indian film art.