Paper Abstracts
Feb 14th, 2017 by sharvari
Feb 23, 2017
Session I: Material Rhythms
The Materiality of Units: Auto-Rickshaw Meters and the Encompassment of Space
William F. Stafford, Jr.
Dept. of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Until recently, auto-rickshaw meters in Delhi were simple devices for reckoning distance travelled and converting it into fares as per government notified schedules. From 2012, all meters were required to incorporate GPS tracking and GPRS data transmission capabilities and to interface with government servers and new institutional frameworks for managing transit. In recent years, these capabilities have become more widely distributed through the growth of on-demand transport firms and the spread of smartphones, and a number of higher-order modes of coordination and dispatching of vehicles have become possible through exploitation of location-based technologies.
For taxis, these developments have given rise to a de-linking of location from space, as a medium for the representation and measurement of transit, and efforts to replace the meter with the smartphone app both as an anchor of device architecture as well as of regulatory form. This has not been the case with auto-rickshaws, however, in large part due to the fact that rates continue to be determined as per government schedules, even by private aggregator firms.
The fixedness of their prices has resulted in a convergence in the market for transport, as the rates for auto-rickshaws and taxis become closer as private firms lower rates for on-demand taxis, which has in turn led to protests against loss of livelihood, strikes, accusations of corruption and experiments in political mobilisation.
However, such a convergence requires a great deal of specific design, engineering and marketing work to make taxis and auto-rickshaws materially comparable as instruments of transit in the city, and much of this work can be understood through the figure of the unit. In this paper, I will explore the materialisation of units of measure, price and value through the specific affordances of the meter and the effects of their partial migration into the app.
The Un/sound of the Everyday in Textile Industry of Surat
Nishpriha Thakur
Doctoral Candidate, Shiv Nadar University, UP, India
This paper presents an ethnographic study of the movement of powerloom machines from house to workshops in the textile industry of Surat, India. Apart from utilitarian innovations after the introduction of electricity post 1920’s, I locate shifts at these sensory registers: a) Sound of the machine that emulated body movements when it was handloom and later when it became powerloom wherein body became a prosthetic abiding by the machine’s rhythm, b) Tactility associated with the machine and how it corresponded with the size of the machine, whether it is accommodated inside the narrow gala type houses in Surat and was a part of the everyday or when it moved to peripheries of the city where perhaps the tactile becomes regimented according to work timings, and c) smells that machines produce, for example strong chemical dyes that are now a part of the moat from 16th century in Surat, the pungent mix of vermillion and iron, or perhaps the strong sweat of multiples bodies working together in factories of GIDC (Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation).
After the boom in textile industry of Surat from 1960’s, there has been a processual shift in the relationship of the machine and the everyday. For example, the noise ‘Khat Khat‘, that was a ‘necessity’ for weavers to be able to sleep at night inside houses, was later deemed as hazardous by GPCP (Gujarat Pollution Control Board) in late 1990’s and powerloom machines were moved to the then peripheries of Surat. In this way, the wider ambit of socio-sonic politics has its own repercussions on the city. I argue that the limitations placed through socio-legal entities on the sensorial practices inside the inner city area of Surat provide an insight into how binary categories like commercial/residential, home/workshop, migrant/non-migrant areas are formed.
Architecture as Archive: Towards a Material History of Single-Screen Cinemas in Delhi
Tupur Chatterjee
University of Texas, Austin
This paper provides a historical account of single-screen cinemas in urban India through the anxieties around gender and class that were contained and embedded within the architectural space of the cinema hall. In foregrounding a material study of theater architecture, I follow Giuliana Bruno’s (2002, 44-45) theorizations on the essential “housing” of cinema in the public architecture of the theater which makes the motion picture a “social, architectural event.” I ask: how were gendered anxieties embedded in the industrial design of the theater? Through specific case studies of cinema-halls from the 1940s-1970s, I provide historical and ethnographic accounts of theater architectures in relation to their cultural geographies. In doing so, this paper connects the architectural space of the single-screen cinema to the gendered, classed and caste-based ideas about ‘hygiene’ and ‘safety’ that have long circulated in the upper-and-middle-class Indian imagination.
The first section of this paper locates the arrival of cinema in India within the pre-existing coordinates of gender and space, emphasizing the common anxieties around shared public spaces in the popular imagination. It then looks at film exhibition in Colonial Bombay, using photographs, newspaper reports, and other archival materials like posters and brochures. The first Art Deco theaters in the country were built in Bombay and played a significant role in cementing the city’s image as a modern, mobile and ‘cultured’ metropolis. The second section maps the transition from Art Deco to Modernist cinemas through a detailed case study of India’s first 70MM, Sheila Cinema in Delhi, designed by American modernist architect Benjamin Schlanger. Here, I draw upon extensive interviews with its owners and materials from their family archives like publicity brochures, maps, floor plans, photographs, press coverage etc. to suggest that the spatial politics of the contemporary multiplex in India can be traced to the long history of gendered anxieties that lived within the architectures of the earlier Art Deco and Modernist theaters.
Session II: Genre bending
Rewriting the World as Epistemic Object in Southwest India
Eric Gurevitch
University of Chicago
This paper interrogates the changing uses of the categorizing term ‘laukika śāstra’ in southwest India. By looking at how the 15th century Kannada Vivekacintāmaṇi and the early 18th century Sanskrit Śivatattvaratnākara reposition the world as epistemic object within a novel framework, the paper goes on to argue that information from the 12th century Mānasollāsa is rendered meaningful in a new manner, and that this process—together with new para-textual features that arise in manuscripts and manuscript fragments of Mānasollāsa—helps to show how information was rendered portable and new scales of circulation were sketched through texts normally described as encyclopedic.
Islamic and Pornographic Art: A Rāgamālā Painting Album from Avadh
Natalia Di Pietrantonio
Cornell University
Rāgamālā painting albums, which anthropomorphize music melodies in sets of 36 to 42 paintings, have mainly been studied alongside Sanskritic culture and Hindu devotional texts. Expanding recent scholarship that documents how Indo-Persianate courts also patronized rāgamālā paintings, I demonstrate that from 1754 to 1857 the Navabs (rulers) of Avadh (present day Uttar Pradesh) patronized rāgamālā paintings and folded the genre into an Islamicate genealogy. For instance, within Persian poetic treatises from Avadh, Islamic prophets such as David and the archangel Israfil are cited to explain how rāgamālā paintings were actually a subset of Islamicate music and art.
While in Avadh in the eighteenth century, European colonial officers also patronized and collected these rāgamālā paintings. However during the British Raj, imperial officers and museum personnel would later call for their destruction and their erasure once these images entered European institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In museums and libraries, these paintings were subsequently labeled as obscenity and as pornography.
The appellations of “Islamic” and “pornography” represent not only two different sets of viewing practices, but they were both radical acts of translation that transformed the meaning of rāgamālā paintings. They were also not mutually exclusive. The Navabs also remarked on the erotic nature of these paintings. Rather than favor one view as more authentic than the other, I interrogate the tension between these descriptors and ask: What kind of work do these images perform as Islamic and pornographic art?
My case studies for this paper are a rāgamālā painting album (J. 42), and two Persian poetic treatises from Avadh. Overall, I argue that Album J.42 and other similar rāgamālā albums do not have a fixed meaning as a historical source. But rather, by studying the various interpretations of J.42’s meaning and its (de)valuation, we can understand the various political agendas that have intersected across its pictorial landscape.
Textual archive and cultural history of the urban in north India: Allahabad at the turn-of-the century–an initial survey
Sanjukta Poddar
University of Chicago
With the territorial expansion of Allahabad and rise in population in the late nineteenth century, it also became the center of colonial administrative apparatus such as the Allahabad High Court (1866), and on the other hand, center of heightened political activity, such as that of the newly-found Indian National Congress (1885). Alongside, social and cultural institutions such as printing presses and units of higher education also came up. Christopher Bayly’s seminal text on Allahabad, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920 (1975), remains the only significant scholarly contribution on the city which traces some of these changes. This work of social and economic history examines the operation of caste and kinship networks in the growth of mercantile capital that led to the development of cultural and political institutions in the city. However, significant material on the city is also available in literary and textual archives which remain unexamined. For instance, poet Harivansh Rai Bachan’s autobiography, Kya Bhuluoon Kya Yaad Karoon (1969), provides a key insight into the experience of living in Allahabad and its suburbs at the turn-of-the century.
Instead of a close engagement with any particular work on Allahabad, this paper intends to use the scope of this seminar and engage with some of the provocative questions raised here and how they bear on my project. Thus, this paper is an initial attempt to put together a textual archive on an emerging urban site in nineteenth-century north India, Allahabad. It constitutes part of a larger, more ambitious project of thinking about the city or city-like spaces in India at the turn of the century. A crucial challenge is to collate a methodology that can engage with such an archive and posit constructive questions to it. Thus, this paper is a self-reflexive exercise in thinking aloud about broader epistemological concerns such as the relationship between textual/literary genres and the representation of spatial locales like a city. For methodological purposes, it is important to highlight which aspects of Allahabad are of interest to my project, which will also define the nature of the project.
Broadly, I envisage this as a project of cultural history of Allahabad and an intervention in the intellectual history of urbanity in India. The literary material examined so far, such as travel diaries, personal reflections, or autobiographies, are not always directly occupied with the city, but read closely and reflexively, do provide key insights into it. In such a scenario, how can we productively use such an archive to answer the questions posited to it. In other words, there is a tension between the questions asked and the material available which cannot be bypassed by asking different question or simply switching the archive. This paper will argue that it is possible to productively mine literary works and textual archives to answer questions of social and cultural history, and posit alternative ways of thinking about the urban in India beyond Eurocentric discourse.
Session III: Crossovers
The lyres of the inner sanctum: A trans-oceanic perspective on the instruments of Siddi Goma
Jazmin Graves
University of Chicago
Fifteen years ago, a conference at the University of California at Los Angeles revealed the need for “established theoretical and especially methodological (disciplinary?) models for understanding the global flows of people, power, ideas and things that comprise the field-research possibilities of an Indian Ocean World studies agenda. Furthermore, this ‘lack’ was definitively attributed to growing fissures in the area-studies model of the western academy.”1 The area-studies model privileges a sedentary, continentally-based outlook on the Indian Ocean’s transnational, “cosmopolitan” networks of mobility and exchange. As its name misleadingly suggests, the Indian Ocean’s center of gravity may not be the Indian subcontinent that has divided its western and eastern halves and has served as a landed site of connection between them. We may instead perceive the body of the Indian Ocean and the transoceanic relationships linking the individuals, institutions, and societies of its surrounding landmasses as an array of ellipses intersecting one another or overlapping at one shared point of the ellipse’s two foci. For example, East Africa-India transoceanic connections constitute a dual-focus ellipse, yet this would elide the Middle East, which generally served as an intermediary point linking the two. We may therefore conceive of East Africa-India relations as a triangular configuration of three ellipses, with one focal point of each ellipse concentric with that of another at each of the three sites. This begins to reshape the theoretical model of the Indian Ocean World, and inform methodological models for its study. Understanding the Indian Ocean World demands an interdisciplinary approach linking historical and anthropological research, facilitated by multilingual specialization, and born of multi-sited fieldwork between the multiple foci of the Indian Ocean World as necessary for each individual project.
Exile, Mimesis, and the Art of Gendun Chopel
Ryan Gauvin
University of British Columbia
This paper considers the artistic works of Tibetan scholar Gendun Chopel (1903-1951), produced during his self-imposed exile in India and Sri Lanka from 1934 to 1946. Engaging with the historic roots of Buddhism and experimenting with both Indian and British artistic styles, Gendun Chopel’s surviving sketches and paintings eschew his traditional training in Tibetan thangka painting, designating him, by many, to be “Tibet’s first modern artist.” Drawing upon Natasha Eaton’s study of William Hodges’ Indian landscape paintings as forms of colonial mimesis, I posit that the colonial mimetic encounter finds its counterpoint in the exile experience: both experiences are founded on a contrapuntal awareness, and both are concerned with mimesis as action. Using Chopel’s painting of the Abhayagiri Stupa, a sacred Buddhist site in Sri Lanka, I argue that rather than merely imitating foreign technique, Gendun Chopel’s art practice is engaged in a mimetic act, demonstrating a respect for – but ultimately a mastery over – Western reason by Tibetan Buddhism. Moreover, I propose the possibility of Gendun Chopel’s art having oracular vision: of Tibet’s political turmoil following his death, the diffusion of Tibetan Buddhism across the globe, and Tibet’s engagement with a Western worldview in the latter portion of the 20th century. To present such a bold assertion is to acknowledge the potent mimetic act in which I am involved as an art historian, viewing Chopel’s art through an analytical lens, but also through the context of its creation. A consideration of Gendun Chopel’s artwork as exilic mimesis, provides a novel framework for considering Tibetan contemporary artists working in his legacy, engaging contrapuntally with both traditional Tibetan art and those artistic styles encountered in exile. Rather than merely acknowledging foreign influences, engaging with contemporary Tibetan art through mimesis is to awaken new possibilities for its reception and its scholarship.
Of Soldiers and Cyborgs: Materiality and Metaphoricity in Johnny Gurkha
Anu Thapa
University of Iowa
Following Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, this paper reads the Gurkha soldier as medium and message. One of the world’s elite fighting units, the Gurkha soldiers have historically occupied a curious position that exceeds hierarchical dualisms such as self/other, subject/object, superior/inferior, colonized/colonizer, and masculine/feminine. By attending to the leveling of the Gurkha soldiers’ body and war technology in representative imperial texts from the late colonial period, I consider the British Empire’s recruitment of these soldiers along Donna Haraway’s radical but geopolitically exclusive cyborg politics. In particular, this paper analyzes the 1945 film Johnny Gurkha along two axes: as a text that interpellates the Gurkha soldiers into a cyborg-subjectivity, and as a medium implicitly bound with body techniques. In a Kittlerian sense, the feedback loops of myths, military drill, and interpellation, find their ultimate articulations in the medium of film. Thus the representation of the ‘Gurkha’ in Johnny Gurkha—a film that functions as an ethnographic account as well as a recruitment video—lends itself to a material and metaphorical reading. The instrumentalization of the Gurkha soldier harnesses the ties between the natural body (physis) and the synthetic (techné). The myth of the Gurkha renders his body into a tool; his body, in turn, becomes the locus of the myth’s origin. Furthermore, the film attempts to re-present the narrative of a crumbling Empire whose foothold lies in a historically derived, racialized military imaginary. Thus facilitated by the British Empire’s scopic regimes—the ensemble of practices and discourses that surveil and control, the hybridized bodies of the Gurkha soldiers gain heightened significance during the wars of decolonization. Consequently, the Empire’s relationship with Nepal is revealed as an exercise in biopolitics which, as Michel Foucault posits, is tied with sovereignty. This paper thus expands British imperial discourse beyond the administration of occupied colonies, and into relationship with the ‘non-colonies’. Ultimately, it provides a framework for understanding Nepal’s present day remittance economy as a colonial legacy partly emerging out of the British Empire’s labor-importation agreement with the nation.
Feb 24, 2017
Session IV: Contesting narratives of disappearance
Dignified animals and wild men: civility and species in Indian circus law
Eléonore Rimbault
University of Chicago
Focusing on the final provision of a High Court of Kerala Decision concerning infringement on animal rights in circuses (Balakrishnan v. Union of India, 2000), this paper considers how legal decisions limiting the rights of circuses as a form of entertainment and business serve to reaffirm values the Indian government wishes to associate with itself in the international domains of intervention having to do with animal rights and the prevention of child labor.
Although India currently counts few circuses, not all of them proven guilty of animal abuse and child labor laws infringement, Indian courts and the Supreme Court have issued decisions, often supported with evidence provided by local and foreign NGOs, impacting the circus as a form of entertainment and lifestyle as a whole, reinforcing a widespread discourse announcing, and at times mourning, the disappearance of the circus. These decisions have been visible platforms for the Indian government to express its commitment to humanitarianism, empathy with all beings, environmentalism and the protection of children’s rights.
With their seemingly dwindling numbers, lack of unity and financial means to engage for long in legal battles, and yet their surprising resilience as tropes in the Indian imaginary fed by films, omnipresent posters and childhood memories, circuses constitute ideally visible targets for the Indian state to affirm its values, without the cost that fighting other forms of animal abuse and child labors more prevalent in India would generate.
This paper considers the ethical difficulties that targeting the inter-species and inter-generational motley crew of circus troupes creates: for instance, what sort of inter-species hierarchization makes it justifiable to take away the tamed animals which allow circus troupes to make a living? Are there domains of Indian society deemed less humane than animals in these decisions? And what forms of mastery over animals does the Indian state accept as dignified?
Memory Against Archive: How The ‘Ways of the Law’ Challenge Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan
Salman Hussain
The Graduate Center, CUNY.
In this paper, I analyze the politics of protest in Pakistan as practiced by human rights activists and litigants seeking justice for people disappeared by state military and intelligence agencies. I examine how these activists, family members, and friends create “dossiers of memory” to recall the memory of the disappeared and keep them in public view and in the public record. These mobile dossiers, which contain traces of the disappeared (life-details, photographs, petitions, and applications), disclose how activists and family members challenge the “selective amnesia” imposed by the Pakistani state as it prosecutes the so-called war on terror in the country (Trouillot 1995).
The privileging of courts as sites of contestations over memory and history, and their archives as the repository of these contestations, hides from our ethnographic sight many other sites and forms of documentation and expressions of remembrance ‘external’ to law, which the litigants create outside courts and their legal modes. These other material forms and fragments illustrate the struggles that the subjugated voices have to engage in to enter the archives and to counter state’s narrative.
The crucial struggle for many of the claimants in the enforced disappearance cases centers on mastering the judicial forms of performance and argumentation in the courts and thereby to enter their dossiers into the state’s legal archive. Archives, as a number of historians and Anthropologists have argued, could be hegemonic as well as subversive – they could act as instruments of power, to control and manage the populations (Foucault 1970; Cohn 1987; and Stoler 2009), or they could be excavated as sites of “subjugated knowledges” (Zeitlyn 2012, 461). But how do the subjugated voices enter the archive? What are the sites, objects, and modes of resistance through which the subaltern access the archive?
National Archives of India: A Historical Recourse of Preservation and Knowledge Production
Sana Aziz
University of Delhi
This paper locates the National Archives of India (NAI), in the larger framework of politics of archiving and knowledge production. It examines the evolution of NAI, from a colonial organization of ‘power’ to a post-colonial institution of ‘preservation’, thinking through the complexities involved in the politics of ‘recording’ and a variety of ‘absences.’ For 125 years, NAI has been functioning as a custodian of public records pertaining to various regions of South Asia. As a cultural and intellectual agency, it does need a historical recourse to be undertaken in order to discern the technical as well as epistemological complexities surrounding it.
The archival records produced and preserved at NAI are a result of various colonial entanglements with South Asia as a colony and people from the region as colonial subjects. This paper looks into the cerebral role that the colonial state played in manufacturing the archival body of India which can be located in various frameworks of power, polemic, knowledge and conquests. This paper through the institution of NAI depicts how the British facilitated the process of colonization of knowledge through archives and how this was intimately related to the collapsing indigenous power structures and communities and the emerging political polemic during the colonial times.
As the colonial archives became mettle of the colonial political aspirations and had little or nothing significant to offer for the studies of the marginalized groups, of the subaltern classes, of women, of sexualities. This will answer some of the conceptual absences, sequential gaps and broken linkages in colonial archives in India. Prevalence of such problems had been figurative signifiers of the intellectual obscurantism on the part of the colonial officers documenting these records in order to propagate a particular ‘method’ of writing history. This paper will examine the certain methodological complexities on the ‘reliability’ of the archives.
Redefining ways of safeguarding the ICH of India
Rajat Nayyar
Tallinn University, Estonia
Espírito Kashi (a luminous state of mind) is an avant-garde media organisation rooted in Varanasi. It is actively working towards redefining ways of safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage of India through the practice of visual anthropology and collaborative ethnography. Espírito Kashi uses new media technologies to disseminate the content online as well as offline in rural India.
It took us some years to realize that we are not after sustainability of our films, but the sustainability of the folklore itself. This is a huge task and surely the conventional preservationist model does no good in that regard. We do not want to make films and put them in archives and museums, for the purpose of preservation. What then could be Folklore 2.0?
In the past years, we learnt a lot from small experiments like collaboration with rural youth to produce shared knowledge (an art book). This kept us thinking. So, we decided that our main audience has to be the community with whom we make the film. We go back, screen the film to the entire community and initiate a discussion. These discussions, then, engage the young and the old, which allows them a space where they can experiment with their own folklore, to continue their traditions by asking the right questions and to change it wherever unnecessary. This is our innovative approach to safeguarding the folklore.
I would like to speak about our project by screening three videos: Crossing a River, Losing a Self (Ethno-fiction, retelling an ancient folk-tale), Janeu (Ethnographic film on the sonic landscape created by the songs that are sung by women during the initiation ritual) and Folklore 2.0 (the discussions happened when Janeu was screened in the rural community). Our films have been screened at prestigious conferences (such as EASA, SIEF) and ethnographic film festivals.
Session V: Perspectives from the Margins
Recasting ‘the Heroes’: Historicization and Identity in Contemporary ‘Tulu-nation’ in South India.
Yogitha Shetty
University of Hyderabad
This paper is an attempt to understand the way heroic figures from the past are reconstructed in the present by radically departing from the positivist modes of writing history. And, how this historicized past enriches the material culture manifestations of a caste identity. It analyzes how the community of Billawas in west-coast India (within the ethno-linguistic minority region of ‘Tulunad’) recast the masculine caste-heroes Koti and Chennaya (purportedly 16 th century) as ‘historical’ figures.
This ‘indigenous’ history challenge the disciplinary contours of evidence-based history by adopting a distinctive scientificity only verifiable within the discursive rationale of the community in question. It looks into the indigenous ‘scientific’ practices of drushyanjana (a vision of the past on a spread of salve- like substance called anjana) in presenting the legendary figures as authentically historical, further corroborated by the evidence of sacred geographical memory. It attempts to understand the relationship between historicizing acts and the materiality of body, which has magnified significance, especially in a predominantly oral-performative community of Tuluvas.
Through the theoretical tools offered by memory studies and Subalternity, this paper tries to understand how such discursive practices of knowledge creation pose challenge the metatheories of objective, scientific history. Further, while the epistemological exploration of community challenge mainstream narratives of the past, this paper also tries to address the question of why historical reconstruction nevertheless becomes the only legitimate way of
imagining a particular past for the community? And, if participating in the modernity of history writing, albeit discursive, is a necessary condition for refiguring the socio-political dynamics in the present?
Cinematic Erasures: Malayalam Cinema and its Discontents
Manju Edachira Parameswaran
University of Hyderabad
This paper seeks to study cinema as an archive and a document of erasure by foregrounding the concept of “cinema within cinema” in the context of India, particularly Malayalam. Here, “cinema within cinema” can be a story; where its concentration is on cinema or a narrative that is conscious of the production of cinema. More precisely, cinema becomes the subject of its story telling. Cinema, as a culture industry, documents itself thorough the medium of cinema, thereby historicizes itself. However, when cinema depicts itself, marginalized presences are erased, and absented again. Within the structure of institutionalized casteist patriarchy, the attempt of cinema to document itself, as a socio-cultural institution, leads to the double erasure of Dalit presence.
This invisibility of Dalit presence questions the reflexivity that Malayalam cinema claims for itself. Malayalam cinema is an Indian film industry based in the south Indian state of Kerala for the production of motion pictures in Malayalam language. It witnessed the trend of “cinema within cinema” in the post 2000. A period which also witnessed the consolidation of Dalit discourse in Kerala, especially with the emergence of social media activism. The alternative film production by the Dalit film makers challenged the established hegemony of Malayalam cinema. These documentary films seldom appear as materials in the discourse of film studies in India. This paper attempts to problematize the self-conscious archiving of Malayalam cinema with special focus on the counter film productions. It endeavors to explore the innovative techniques in visuals, sound, music and cinematography at the level of aesthetics. Further, it tries to analyze cinema and social media as means in asserting the identities of the marginalized, and its significance in researching the contemporary.
Queer Lines: Casting Tales in Gender Stereotypes
Debarghya Sanyal
University of Oregon
This paper explores queer moments and characters from B R Chopra’s 94-episode Mahabharat, a serialized version of the eponymous epic aired in 1988, and its making-of documentary, Mahabharat Ki Mahabharat. The serial is considered a milestone in Indian television history for the spectacle it offered and the massive viewership it generated. Not surprisingly then, over the years it has become a trend-setter in iconographies as well as character types. And in doing so, it has helped cement certain body postures, gaits and speech styles as “normative” signifiers of gender categories. I argue that in spite of its predominantly heteronormative nature, Chopra’s retelling lays bare the inevitable presence of a queer space, and the deep-seated phobia against it, a dynamic dialectic which characterized the socio-economic reality of 1980s-90s India.
By the time Chopra’s Mahabharat aired, a televised retelling of the other major Hindu epic Ramayana had instilled a faith in the historicity of an ‘ideal golden past’. With the Emergency, the Sikh riots and the failure of Nehruvian Socialism as its background, Chopra’s production sought to address the question of how these ‘ideals’ should conduct themselves in times of contemporary conflict and strife. Here, the characters’ body was used by the producers as a prominent router of their approach towards handling these situations of strife. This importance on the body as the repository of a character introduces a dialectic between the actors and the characters, mediated by a desired body ‘ideal’.
Identifying how heteronormative binaries were constructed, I argue that Mahabharat inevitably brought to light the presence of recurring slippages within the otherwise phobic historio-realist ‘phantom ideal’ it projected. In doing so, the series lays bare the plasticity of the neatly categorized ‘ideal,’ and the rise of a new queer space which would go on to dominate Indian politics and culture of 1990s and 2000s.