Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 2, Number 3, 2001

Melodramatic polities?
M. Madhava PRASAD

Students of lm melodrama have, of late, turned their attention to its global spread, its diverse manifestations in the different regions of the world; in particular, the strong, durable traditions that have arisen in many parts of Asia. Like its twin, realism, and like many other concepts and modes of modernity indeed like modernity itself melodrama is now attracting attention from scholars who are interested in the way it has travelled across time and space from its origins in early capitalist Europe, how different cultural formations have received it into their midst, how they have brought their own traditions of performance to bear on the form to give it a distinctly national identity.1 In western discussions of melodrama, the focus had been almost exclusively on the genre of womens melodrama, and by the time critical attention turned to it, it had become more or less a thing of the past. Moreover, except for early lm versions of nineteenth century stage melodrama, these Hollywood womens lms were always marked by a degree of compromise with realism, or at least that is how it looks when we compare them to Indian lms in the melodramatic mode. This is probably due to the sustained development of cinematic technique under the privileged sign of realism, which is a dominant feature of lm culture in the west. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to say that one crucial factor that distinguishes Indian lm melodrama from the western kind is that it develops in a cultural space that is not dominated by a culturally privileged quest for heightened verisimilitude. What is arrestingly novel about discussions of melodrama in the Asian context (Dis-

sanayake 1993)2 is the way in which critics repeatedly point to the melodramatic nature of social existence in Asian countries. Thus, Yuejin Wang remarks that `the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is perhaps one of the most melodramatic phenomena in human experience, because it `created a moral universe that allowed only angels and devils (Wang 1993: 85). Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto also speaks of melodrama as a socio-historical experience: `the melodramatic which does not simply designate a literary or cinematic genre but an ideologeme supporting the social formation of postwar Japan (Mitsuhiro 1993: 106 107). Catherine Russel avers that `national identity in Japan has a particularly melodramatic structure (Russel 1993: 143). Maureen Turim, speaking of the similarities between Japanese and American melodrama, remarks, `Our real is fundamentally melodramatic (Turim 1993: 176). This is de nitely a new twist to the melodrama debate, one that seems to have arisen speci cally in the context of comparative work on Asian and other nonwestern traditions of melodrama. But what exactly does it mean to describe a society, a particular period in the history of a country, or a dimension of modern social existence across cultures and historical periods (our `Real ) as being melodramatic? These critics would seem to be identifying a psychic structure, or an ideological construct that inheres in and characterizes social processes and movements. Contrary to the interpretative logic of Peter Brooks The Melodramatic Imagination (Brooks 1976), which locates melodrama in the social milieu of early capitalism, here we see critics extending melodrama as metaphor, as concept even, to the understandin g of
2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

ISSN 1464-9373 Print/ISSN 1469-8447 Online/01/030459 08 DOI: 10.1080 /14649370120011097 5

460 M. Madhava Prasad social processes, implying thereby a relation between aesthetic and socio-political instances, which raises a whole new set of questions. We are not in a position to inquire into the truth of these claims in any detail. Instead, let me return to a proposition that we hinted at earlier, that melodrama and realism are the twin cultural modes of capitalism, emerging more or less in parallel in Europe. Yoshimoto, citing Russel Merritt, contends that melodrama can be de ned only negatively, that in relation to realism, `what is called melodrama is something that does not t into the standards of realism in a particular historical moment (Yoshimoto 1993: 104). If melodrama can only be de ned negatively as a surplus that realism cannot incorporate, the persistence and dominance of the melodramatic mode in Asia, by contrast to its steady absorption into the realist framework in the west, taken in conjunction with the theories of the social inscription of melodramatic structure cited above, may suggest a sort of global map of distribution of aesthetic and political forms. A melodramatic polity (however this is to be understood), and a dominant melodramatic aesthetic would seem to go hand in hand. The `geopolitical aesthetic (Jameson) that can be glimpsed behind this formulation must also necessarily lead to a re-consideration of the linear historical narrative of aesthetic `periods (melodrama, realism, modernism, postmodernism etc) which evolved in relative isolation in areas of the First World. These differences, it must now be conceded, have a synchronic spatial distribution based on a socio-political logic that must be investigated. For the purposes of our present discussion, we should at least bear in mind the following question: what if, far from succeeding each other as two different and historically speci c (that is speci c to their time of origin and elaboration), aesthetic modes, realism and melodrama were two complementary as well as contradictory aesthetic expressions of a single social form, two different ways of relating to the social whole? To extend this speculative line of thinking a little further, let us take cognizance of D. N. Rodowicks insight that the family in melodrama `imagines itself as a world divested of signi cant social power addressing itself to an audience which does not believe itself to be possessed of social power. (Rodowick 1991: 239) The melodramatic world is peopled by those who seem powerless against destiny but also the law, the state and other external structures of authority. But it is the counterposing of the moral structure of authority that the family upholds against these external agencies that makes for the distinction of melodrama. Can this idea of the powerless social condition that melodrama fundamentally addresses itself to, throw light on the more ambitious proposals about the melodramatic nature of societies? Is the global history of melodrama also a story of the geopolitical realities of the contemporary world? Whatever the answers to these questions, it is clear that studies of lm melodrama, which were initially con ned to the analysis of a Hollywood genre, are now inclined to look toward different national traditions of melodrama as a site for exploring certain neglected aspects of the relation between aesthetics and politics. The emerging eld of comparative melodrama studies draws our attention to a vast area of cultural practice that gives the lie to one of the assumptions that underwrites cultural study, that culture is a more or less autonomous zone of activity. In this context, we could tentatively propose that, beyond its strictly aesthetic de nition, melodrama now signi es a cultural eld where culture itself is not a stable and autonomous category, but is rather enmeshed in, and indistinguishable from, other instances of a social formation, such as the political and the economic. * * * Modifying Tolstoy, let us propose that all developed countries are alike, while every underdeveloped country is underdeveloped in its own unique way. And thereby we bring into focus one of the hidden meanings of development, i.e. that it refers to the production of culture as a substance framed by the grid of modernity. It is not the cultural substance of developed countries that is alike (it is thus not a question of an exhaustive homogenization) , but the way the cultural

Melodramatic polities 461 substance is framed as the content of a national enclosure. In an underdeveloped country, essentially, what ought to be culture refuses to recede into that role and insists on challenging the grids of modernity with its own frames of intelligibility. The historic compromise that characterizes life in the advanced capitalist countries, where social struggles have made peace with the rationalities of modern government, contrasts sharply with the inability of these rationalities to effect such universal submission to the contract, the continuing struggles over the state form itself3 that characterizes political life in the underdeveloped countries. At the same time, as the term underdevelopment serves to remind us, these cultural elds cannot be thought to inhabit a space unencumbered by developmental rationalities, for they are everywhere forced into a negotiation with the latter. The speci c character of the relations between these forces at any given moment is perhaps an important determinan t of the cultural eld speci c to any social formation. All realist cinemas are alike; every melodramatic cinema is melodramatic in its own unique way. Here again, the truth of melodrama lies in its refusal of the realist frame, the insistence on occupying the surface of the screen. What ought to remain content with being content refuses to recede into that role and breaks through the realist barrier for a te te-a -te te with its audience. Thus, the possibility of a common currency of realism, which would make the otherwise mutually incomprehensible content of different national cinemas/national spaces commensurate (not identical) with each other, is constantly negated by lm melodrama. At all times, however, melodramatic texts are engaged in some form of dialogue with realism, setting up a variety of compromises. In this paper, I do not concern myself with the wider signi cance of these questions since I lack the necessary familiarity with other national cinemas of Asia. I will con ne myself to the cinemas of India and offer a descriptive account of the eld of lm melodrama and a somewhat closer look at a particular generic formation. To chart the eld of Indian lm melodrama, we have rst of all to undertake the taxonomic task of describing the various divisions within it. In the rst place, we need accounts of the industries centred around the major languages in which lms are produced: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi in order to map the differences and continuities between them. Secondly, we also need to pay attention to the logics of differentiation that are at work within each industry: these logics may differ from language to language or in some regional formations, they may constitute the common ground of a number of language cinemas (as in south India). This paper will examine some of the descriptive/conceptual possibilities of such an enterprise before a brief examination of a particularly well-established melodramatic tradition in south India, which I will tentatively call the genre of Brahmin/middle class self-critique, which was the forte of directors such as K. Balachande r (Tamil) and Puttanna Kanagal (Kannada). The lms of this genre occupy a paradoxical space: they mount a trenchant critique of Brahmanical orthodoxy, but in the name of a purer orthodoxy. They vacillate between a conservative and a social reformist stance, and diffuse any threat of reformist clarity with devices of mystery and madness. This infusion of madness and mystery seems also to coincide with the rise to author status of the directors concerned. Indeed the two directors named above have been key gures in the evolution of the respective industries, establishing an alternative space within the eld of melodrama in which the socio- and psychopathology that is barred from the idealism of mainstream cinema is taken up with a vengeance, but not without its own compensatory supplement of idealism. The paper will discuss how popular auteurism of this kind contributes to the rise of the idea of audience as community. In the evolution of Indian lm melodrama, the 1940s and 1950s constitute a crucial period during which a nationalist, or what Ashish Rajadhyaksh a has termed the `epic melodrama (Rajadhyaksh a 1993) concerned with `themes of nationality, was produced in several lm industries of the country, by such pioneers as V. Shantaram, P. C. Barua, K.

462 M. Madhava Prasad Subrahmanyam, Vauhini Studios, etc, followed by Hindi lm-makers such as Mehboob and Raj Kapoor. This is a crucial period in Indian political history, when various legacies of the ancien regime were still in play centrally even as efforts were underway to re-map the territory in accordance with new ideals. The epic melodrama properly belongs to that moment when the newly emergent forces in Indian society had, as yet, not asserted their presence. During the ancien regime, the British presence as the ruling race had no regional basis, and was distributed evenly across the territory, concentrated, apart from Delhi, in the presidency capitals, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. These naturally became important centres of nationalist activity and, as long as the nationalist movements impetus lasted, cultural production, especially in technological arts such as the cinema, was largely concentrated in them. Films in the epic melodrama genre re ected Congress party ideology and, more broadly, the nationalist vision of a progressive India struggling to rid itself of caste, superstition, illiteracy and other signs of backwardness in a world that had by then developed a common measure of human happiness: modernity, later to be known as development. A vision of India combining its glorious past frozen in images from ancient history developed by Indologists, and its future signalled by the resolve to implement a command economy that would transform the landscape and transport the country into the ranks of the front-runners, was the horizon against which the epic melodrama was staged. True, in lms such as Devdas, there is a melancholy that does not sit well with this dream of utopia, but even there, analysis would show that there was a peculiarly nationalist pleasure to be had from this drama of dividedness , charting the heros drive to self-destruction. More than a genre, it was `a mode of cultural production/assimilation which has `intervened quite fundamentally in the formation of the imaginary institution of India (Rajadhyaksh a 1993), realizing the shift of cultural valuation towards what was designated as a `realistic imagery, from an earlier emphasis on `more Indian imagery. This shift itself corresponds to the nationalist imaginary s turning its gaze away from the colonial relation, where Indianness is asserted against what is seen as foreign to it, and towards the internal substance of the nation. We have noted how the Hindi cinema, whose production became centralized in Bombay, took up this nationalist theme in the epic mode after the Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and others had already established the genre. This is an interesting fact to re ect upon because, in subsequent years, the relation between Hindi and these other language cinemas would be somewhat reversed. Here, at this juncture however, we are witness to the phenomenon of an Indian nationalist ideology being effectively and unproblematically elaborated in lms that spoke a regional language. The nationalist outposts were fully functioning and, deriving their strength to some extent at least from the infrastructural legacy of the ancien regime, were able effortlessly to articulate a nationalist position from any location whatsoever. Meanwhile, the Republic, founded upon a Constitution that conferred individual rights upon the citizenry, was producing its own effects. The nationalist model of unity, predicated upon the planned production of homogeneity, was being implemented at one level, through the measures for the propagation of Hindi for instance, while on the other, nationalist tendencies within the federation, based on linguistic identity, were beginning to assert themselves. These two dynamics have been at work concurrently in India for the last 50 years, and many of the complexities of the socio-political scene today derive from their parallel and overlapping effect. This must not be understood to refer to two exclusive groupings, where one declares allegianc e to the nation and the other asserts regional identities. Rather, we must think of them as overlapping elds that are inhabited by all, simultaneously. Among the political events occurring in this period of transition to a Republican polity, which had a direct bearing on the evolution of the eld of Indian lm melodrama, is the so-called linguistic reorganization of the states of the republic. Prior to 1956, when this was of cially proclaimed, there had

Melodramatic polities 463 already been a proposal within the Congress for some kind of of cial recognition of the nationality claims of regions where one language predominated. During the nationalist struggle, this had been accepted by the leadership as a reasonable demand. The Soviet system of nationalities united by a revolutionary project might have served as a model for this imagined nation-complex. At the same time, an Indian national identity was being formed during the decades of struggle. Thus, at one and the same time, the set called India was imagined in two different ways: on the one hand, India would be merely the name of a set of nationalities that coexisted within its territories. In this instance, language would be the primary principle of national identity. Thus, India would consist of Bengal, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab etc. India would be the name of the set but not an element of it. On the other hand, India was also conceived as a set that included only itself. In this model, all other nationality claims were perceived as a threat to the self-identity of the set called India. The Nehru governments policy re ected this phobic reaction of independent Indias ruling elite to the demand for linguistic reorganizatio n of states. Nevertheless, the demand from the regions, especially the south, for such reorganization was so intense that, in 1956, it was conceded and the linguistic states came into being. This did not immediately create anarchy or secessionist frenzy, as some feared. For one thing, of cial policy favouring Hindi as the national language continued and the dominance of this element of the set over other elements deepened in some sectors. In the case of cinema, we have the incontrovertible evidence of the last half century to show the increasing popularity of the Hindi cinema in all corners of India, even as other regional cinemas have also ourished. Today, there are signs that this particular balance of forces may be shifting somewhat, that new equations are emerging. For the moment, however, we will concentrate on the stable picture that has impressed itself upon our minds over the last few decades. With linguistic reorganization , the role of the presidency headquarters as the centre of cultural production, serving also as an outpost of nationalist enunciation, receded into the background and a new re-centring of cultural production around state capitals began to emerge. Language-speci c markets began to be carved out of the national territory. Of course, even before 1956, lms were being produced in all the major languages, so the language-speci c markets were already in existence. However, the difference was that then the market was not de ned as at the same time supporting a national identity. Thus, lmmakers and stars and other personnel would work in different languages at the same time. Some of the biggest names in the south Indian lm industry are known in three or four language cinemas as major producers or directors. Sometimes ordinary lmgoers may not even be aware that their favourite lmmaker also makes lms in another language. In principle, there is no reason not to think that the dominant forms of lm melodrama would continue to be reproduced in each of these industries, with some special characteristics arising from the linguistic speci city. Indeed, one can see that the major constituent elements of the Indian lm melodrama, as it has evolved over several decades, are present more or less in their familiar form. There is not a great deal of formal variation across language borders. And yet, with the emergence of the new (sub)national markets, something altogether new seems to emerge. Each of these linguistic markets, especially in the south, acquires a star system of its own with some unique features, features common to three of them, but which cannot be found in the Hindi cinema or anywhere else. Each industry, in other words, begins to organize itself around a couple of male stars, one of whom occupies a position of near-monarchic supremacy, not only in the industry but also among the movie-going public. Thus, three of the southern states have produced lm stars who have become, or have had the potential to become, political leaders. And since then, the lm industries have continued to be organized along the same lines, with stars, usually male but

464 M. Madhava Prasad sometimes female, acquiring a following that is unlike the usual fan following that stars enjoy everywhere else, in that there is always a slight political dimension to the adulation. What we see here is lm melodrama functioning as a support of national identity, providing a sort of shadow system of political representatio n for nationalities that have no of cial avenues for consolidating their status (since the states, although organized linguistically, are considered as mere administrativ e units by a still suspicious Centre). This is a development that I have tried to outline elsewhere (Prasad 1999). Here, I want to turn brie y to the other sector that coexists alongside the one described above, and which manifests a different relation to national identity. While the lms of the stars discussed above have a broad mass appeal, the second segment, which has its own repertory of stars, appeals largely to a middle class audience. Here, the axis of identi cation is not political but cultural. The turn to `more realistic images and symbols that Rajadhyaksh a mentioned as characteristic of the epic melodrama is retained here: the emphasis is on an authentic representatio n of life, especially middle class or upper caste life. Authenticity is a value, but it is not privileged over melodrama. Among the lmmakers who are associated with this genre are K. Balachande r (Tamil) and Puttanna Kanagal (Kannada). To give a very quick idea of this genre, I will discuss Balachanders Arangetram (1973) as exemplifying a genre of Brahmin self-critique, which is a mutation of the epic melodrama. In a career spanning four decades, Balachander has been a stage personality, and has subsequently made lms in four languages. He is also known as the discoverer of the two foremost Tamil stars of the present, Kamalahasa n and Rajnikant. Like his Kannada counterpart Puttanna Kanagal, known for his controversial themes, Balachander created quite a stir when he made the sensational Arangetram in 1973. At one level, the story of Arangetram is a familiar one that has featured in many lms: a large, impoverished family where the parents have lost their earning capacity and the burden of looking after everyone falls on the eldest of the children, a woman, who must sacri ce her own self-interest so that her siblings may grow up and lead a normal life. Ritwik Ghatak employed the same formula very effectively in his Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), which is still within the bounds of epic melodrama, while Arangetram, as we shall see, bears witness to its disintegration. Essentially a tale of sacri ce and a compensatory idolization, this theme is employed by Balachande r to portray the deep corruption of Brahmin society. This state of corruption in turn is related to the failure of this community to reform itself and acknowledge the changed conditions under which they live. An impoverished priest has a house full of daughters and one son (and his wife guiltily acknowledges that one more is on the way). The eldest sisters character trait is a peculiar, prolonged giggle, which signi es at once her innocence, which will be destroyed, and a forewarning of the state of madness into which she will inexorably descend. When she goes in search of a better job, she is lured into prostitution. Leaving the family, she goes away to Hyderabad, from where she regularly sends home her earnings. The family home is transformed into a luxurious mansion and parents and siblings bless their absent benefactor as they realize their life ambitions. Returning home for her sister s wedding, she betrays a lack of feminine modesty and the secret of her success is discovered by a prying relative, while she in turn discovers that her sisters ance had been her customer. When the entire family turns against her and throws her out, a neighbour, a man of peasant caste, takes her home and his son agrees to marry her. There is a mad woman in the village who runs around beating a tin can, expecting her husband to return. Running out to inform her that she is getting married, the heroine ends up in the mad womans role. We encounter the Brahmin middle-class family in a state of acute degeneration, shorn of its ideals, its nationalist vocation forgotten, in the grip of a defensive and virulent orthodoxy. The authorial commentary, which intrudes in a variety of guises, condemns this class for retreating into its own shell, its paranoid reaction to the compulsions of modern

Melodramatic polities 465 existence, the total loss of familial affect, the abdication of its leadership role in national affairs. At the same time, there is a hint (which emerges more explicitly in later lms emboldened by the upper caste struggle against af rmative action) that the Brahmin middle-class has been betrayed by the nation, abandoned after its sacri ces in the cause of nation-building. The nationalist framework has shrunk, leaving behind a community that was once active in the nationalist movement to examine the corruption that is destroying it from within. The absence of social power, symbolized by the patriarch s pre-modern and unpro table occupation of priesthood, and the grinding poverty, is the axes of address that the lm exploits in its relentless drama of victimization, as the Brahmin male protagonists are stripped of their idealistic exteriors and exposed as corrupt weaklings, the cutting, castrating words of the heroine as she explains her choice of profession leading them, one by one, to bow their heads in shame. By contrast, the peasant family s men are robust and honest people, symbolizing a more open, straightforward morality. This evacuation of patriarchal authority from the familial scene shows the vulnerability of the women, exposed as they are by this absence of protection, to the seductions and dangers of the outside world. A family without a legitimate and capable head, a community without a leader, dislodged from its vanguard position in the task of national reform: such is the world the lm presents us. Instead of the redeeming strategies of the dominant forms of melodrama, including the more optimistic epic melodrama of an earlier era, this narrative provides the pleasures of an unmitigated masochism, which also unites the community as audience. And unexpectedly, there remains one leader who is unaffected by this universal condemnation, the director himself, who henceforth becomes the voice of a community, a cinematic author with whom the audience identi es. In the other popular genre discussed above, the star emerges into the role of an author gure, the absolute centre of an aesthetico-political formation within which all messages emanate from this centre. Here, in this genre of middle class cinema, directors often emerge as authorial gures (here we are not talking about the auteurism discussed in the Hollywood context), around whom informal audience-communities arise, characterized by a state of receptivity that complements melodrama s constitutive pedagogic mission. We have looked brie y at two developments within the broader eld of Indian lm melodrama, both of which have a signi cance that goes beyond the aesthetic dimension. There is also, within the language cinemas, an observable complementarity between these two sectors of the aesthetic eld, with one explicitly marked by a logic of symbolic identi cation and sustaining a shadowy structure of political representation, while the other generates imaginary identi cations and the quest for cultural authenticity. In the latter case, it would seem that the frustrations attendant upon the failure to hold the national cultural space under the reformist gaze lead to the melodramatic `excesses of masochistic self-critique. To the former we owe the uniquely Indian phenomenon of a signi cant overlap of the domains of cinema and electoral politics, which holds important lessons for political theory. While we are still a long way away from understandin g this phenomenon, we can be reasonably certain that at its heart lies a unique historical conjunction: the combination of cinema the cinematic screen in particular as a space for fantasy projections and melodrama, where the crucial subject position derives from the experience of social powerlessness. Notes
1. In India, lm melodrama has been consistently misrecognized as an indigenous genre deriving from a combination of folk and classical roots, its narratives traced to the great epics, its techniques to the rasa theory, and to folk theatrical traditions. While all these and other indigenous factors can no doubt be glimpsed at work locally at certain points in the text, the overall structure and the most familiar features derive unmistakably from nineteenth century European stage melodrama, via the Parsi theatre, which was a major popular cultural institution of colonial India. See Vasudevan (1989).

466 M. Madhava Prasad

2. Melodrama and Asian Cinema, edited by Dissanayake (1993), is an important and useful collection of articles on this question. 3. For a more detailed discussion of this see Prasad (1998). 1950s. In Landy (ed) Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 237 247. Russel, Catherine (1993) `Insides and outsides: cross-cultural criticism and Japanese lm melodrama. In Dissanayake (ed) Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 143 154. Turim, Maureen (1993) `Psyches, ideologies, and melodrama: The United States and Japan. In Dissanayake (ed) Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 155 178. Vasudevan, Ravi (1989) `The melodramatic mode and the commercial Hindi cinema: notes on lm history, narrative and performance in the 1950s, Screen 30(3): 29 50. Wang, Yuejin (1993) `Melodrama as historical understanding: the making and the unmaking of communist history. In Dissanayake (ed) Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 73 100.

References
Brooks, Peter (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dissanayake (ed) (1993) Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitsuhiro, Yoshimoto (1993) `Melodrama, postmodernism, and Japanese cinema. In Dissanayake (ed) Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101 126. Prasad, M. Madhava (1998) Ideology of the Hindi Film, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Prasad, M. Madhava (1999) `Cine-politics: On the Political Signi cance of Cinema in South India, Journal of the Moving Image, No.1: 37 52. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (1993) `The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cinema, Journal of Arts and Ideas no. 25 26: 55 70. Rodowick, David N. (1991) `Madness, authority, and ideology in the domestic melodrama of the

Authors biography
M. Madhava PRASAD is a senior fellow at the Center of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India.