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Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora, "Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
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Priyam Sinha
So welcome to New Books Network. I am Priyam Sinha, the host of Today's interview with Dr. Megha Anwar and Dr. Anupama Arora, who will be telling us a lot more about their recently published book Screening Hindi Cinema and neoliberal crisis in 21st century India. So just beginning with an introduction of the two authors who are here with us, we have Megha Anwar, who is the Associate Dean for Research and Clinical Associate professor at Purdue University. She is a theorist of literature and visual culture and her research areas include contemporary postcolonial literature, global cinema, Victorian literature and visual culture. The next is Anupama Arora, who is a professor of English and Communication and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. So thank you for accepting my invitation here for this podcast interview.
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Dr. Megha Anwar
Thank you Priyam. It's very nice to be here.
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Dr. Anupama Arora
Thanks Priyam. Looking forward to the conversation.
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Priyam Sinha
Thank you. So just a little bit about the book before we jump into more discussing, more details about how you went about about this research study and also what informed a lot of your research and the book. So Screening Precarity integrates a cultural analysis of film texts and history, industry transformations and the violence and crisis of political economy infrastructures to study post liberalization shifts in the Hindi film industry in India. The book investigates Bollywood as a media system that moved away from the glee and gusto of liberalization in 1990s to an industry contending with the failures and inadequacies of neoliberalisms, promises and the accedancy of material affective redressals offered by religious ethnonationalism. The monograph examines 19 Hindi language films released post 2010 to study contemporary India's precarious public sphere, which has been characterized by a pervasive sense of professional personal insecurity experienced by the vast majority. This book is about the role of cinema or cultural texts more generally in a period marked by incredible insecurity, violence and the absence of collective political alternatives. So let's jump into the questions. Obviously it is an honor to have you here with us to be discussing this thought provoking scholarship, especially now that we've been discussing so much about precarity, precariousness of labor networks and contemporary media, the role of media in our everyday lives, especially in India. So my first question would be could you tell our audiences what you mean by precarity and the cinema of precarity? What are the types of precarity you discuss, particularly in this book?
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Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, thank you Priyam for that question and for having us on the podcast. So at the very outstart we want to say, we want to note that precariousness has always been at the heart of Hindi cinema. Over and over again, Hindi films have converted national insecurities into cinematically fertile territories. Think, for instance, about films made between the 1950s and 1990. India was a newly independent, post colonial nation recovering from colonial plundering. It was trying to address, even if insufficiently, and that's a whole other story, the inequities of class, caste and gender, and come to grips with the trauma of partition. The films in these four decades played a key role in the project of narrating a post colonial India. And they did so by proactively contending with the nation's very real precariousness. Right? Its material insecurities, its political and cultural vulnerabilities. So in 1991, as we know, something dramatic happens. India opened its doors to foreign investment and this produced an abrupt makeover. India went from a pious, austere, frugal Gandhian nation to shining India of commodity culture, foreign technology, international travel, global brands and glitzy malls. The most popular films between the 1990s and early 2000s were about the very rich industrialists and diaspora, big budget family melodramas and wedding extravaganzas that articulated the good times, the hopes and dreams that came with liberalization and the anxieties that were being managed by these films were about balancing the vulnerability and threat to Indianness, to Indian traditions, alongside neoliberal aspirations.
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Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah, and you know, I think Anupama has brought us to where we arrive at the period of our book that screening precarity grapples with. And in terms of dating, you know, the films that we look at are all made after 2010. We look at 19 films, Priyam, as you mentioned, and the vast majority of these were released after 2010. And we are looking through these films at cinematic renditions of precarity or what you can think of as India cinema of precarity. By precarity, we mean something different from precariousness or vulnerability that, as Anupamma was mentioning, has always characterized Indian cinema. Right? So precarity is a very distinct and historically contingent condition that is produced by the violence of neoliberalism as it intersects with and compounds the insecurities and the vulnerabilities that pre existed liberalization. And so in this phase, in this post2010 phase, what we are seeing is that Bollywood as a media system has moved away from what you mentioned, you know, the glee and gusto, the enthusiasm that was associated with liberalization in the 1990s and the early 2000s. And what we have instead is an industry that is contending with the failures of neoliberalism and simultaneously what is happening is an escalation in religious ethno nationalism. So a book is an exploration of the celluloid, sorry, configurations of precarity. We study how precarity is mediated by the film form in India and what that mediation reveals about contemporary Indian polity. So this book is about the role of cinema or cultural text more generally in a period marked by a pervasive sense of professional personal insecurity, violence, and the absence of political alternatives. Right. And we are really studying what happens to culture and what culture makes happen in a historical conjuncture where neoliberalism and ethno nationalism enmesh and co produce one another.
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Priyam Sinha
Great, great, that's very exciting and thank you for actually detailing that out. So I was very intrigued by the fact that you mentioned right at the start of the book that, and I quote, films in India are being produced in a climate of overt, covert and self censorship. So could you elaborate on the uniqueness of this climate and how that informed your investigation of the cinema of precarity?
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Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah, and that's a. You know, this is something that we have to contend with because, I mean, the first thing to say here is that the climate of censorship abounds generally across sectors and landscapes, right. Of media, of information, of culture, of discourse, politics within academia. I mean, there's a climate of censorship pretty pervasively, you know, across the board. And so Bollinger, Hollywood is no exception. Right. And in fact, our book begins with an anecdote that captures this atmosphere and sort of pressure of censorship. So we're sure you and the listeners will remember that in early 2021, pop superstar Rihanna tweeted about the ongoing mass mobilization of farmers in Delhi, asking, and I think her tweet was, why aren't we talking more about this? And there was a photograph of the farmer's protest, right? And she hashtagged farmers protest. And the very next thing you know, Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut responded to Rihanna's tweet, right? And in Kangana Ranaut's tweet, she called the protesting farmers terrorists, right? Trying to divide India so that China can take over our vulnerable, broken nation, I'm quoting her. And make it a Chinese colony, much like the usa, Right? And from there, of course, all hell broke loose. So Modi's right hand man and a man and home minister of India, Amit Shah, declared that Rihanna and Greta Thunberg, who by this time had already retweeted Rihanna's post, were part of, and I'm quoting Amit Shah here, a motivated campaign right to deter India's unity and progress. And many government officials urged social media followers to push back, stand united against this foreign propaganda. And with that, what was really interesting was like almost like clockwork. And with this eerie homogeneity, a whole host of Bollywood stars, everyone from Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan, Karan Johar, all these big Bollywood celebrities, joined the bandwagon and started condemning foreign interference aimed at dividing the nation and promoting anarchy. That's what they were saying these foreigners are doing on social media. And what is interesting for us, and in a sense, the starting point of our book, is this total synchronicity between the political class in India and the stars of Bollywood. Right. And their shared anxiety about India's power and reputation. So if you think about it, at the heart of the social media controversy is a contestation over the reality and meaning of India as a precarious nation and the question of who is entitled to naming and calling out India's precarities. Right. It shows you that the contestations over what constitutes a legitimate voice in India and about India, like, who is that? And there's a sort of tussle over that. And it's fascinating that a transcontinental social media row between celebrities send the Indian government's PR machinery into overdrive, calling upon Bollywood celebrities to defend the Indian state. So this draws attention to Bollywood's recruitment and embedment in global power networks. And these global power networks are as much then, about state power as they are about star power. So this moment reveals a lot that about the role that Hindi cinema and all the characters of Hindi cinema. Right. All the personnel of Hindi cinema, what role they play in the etiology and grammar of precarity in India today. Yeah.
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Dr. Anupama Arora
And at this point, we also want to draw attention to another way to think about the relationship between the Indian state and Bollywood in this present moment and the place of censorship in this relationship. So journalist Atish Taseer, among others, has argued that historically, Bollywood has stood for and been celebrated as a microcosm of pluralistic India. And this is precisely why it has emerged as a prime target of the Modi government and its social media trolls. We know that there are explicit and implicit demands placed upon actors, directors and other film industry workers by the Indian state to fall into line with its politics. And we also note that many corners of the industry are happy and eager to oblige. The state and its cultural machinery has increased surveillance of content on streaming platforms increasingly over the last decade. Right. On Netflix, on Amazon, prime video. And this has had a chilling effect on filmmakers and actors. There's another excellent piece in the New Yorker by the journalist Samanth Subramanian. It's titled when the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood. And it's a solid investigative account of the mechanisms by which Bollywood is being rescripted under pressure from the Hindutva state and an authoritarian cultural milieu. And one of the things that he writes about, and I'll just quote from the piece, is how some filmmakers have embraced genres that match the BJP's tastes, right? Whether these are dubious historical epics that glorify bygone Hindu kings, action films about the Indian army, political dramas and biopics that are dutifully skewed. And all of these productions draw from BJP's roster of stock villains, medieval Muslim rulers, Pakistan Islamists, terrorists, leftists. I mean, there's a laundry list here. So to return to a book of the films that we study, it's clear that some of them serve a propagandist function. Others, however, encode a critique of neoliberal Hindutva and in a subtle and sometimes even brave way. And that is why, even though we highlight how these films proactively promote precarity and sometimes practice self censorship to navigate the dictates of neoliberal Hindutva, we also study the alternatives and resistance to precarity proposed by Hindu films by Hindi films.
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Priyam Sinha
Thank you. That was also a very nice backstory to what you are also working on and what this book is all about. And that also brings me to the next question. So in chapter three of your book, you four foreground the precarity of religious minorities, specifically Muslims. So what place does the Muslim question occupy in the cinema of precarity? And how does your book contend with the representation of Muslims? What is different about the way Muslim bodies are treated in contemporary Bollywood films compared to how they have been represented historically in Hindi cinema?
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Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah, thank you for that question, Priyam. You know, in some ways I would say that the Muslim question is a central concern that permeates the entire book. So while chapter three of our book focuses more closely on the precarity of Muslim men in neoliberal Hindutva. Embracing India in chapter six, for instance, and I hope we'll talk more about that, we look at the figure of the Kaap and his treatment of Muslims on screen. And then in the epilogue, we close out with an analysis of pathan, which was SRK's big post Covid blockbuster in 2023. Right in chapter three, which is where we specifically dedicate our time to thinking about the Muslim question. We look at four films, Aamir, Black Friday, Raees and Gully Boy. Now we know that and you know, as a quick background, we know that the vulnerability of Muslims in both the Indian nation and in popular Hindi cinema is not new, right? So despite India's self avowed status as a secular state, the trauma of partition produced a need for the Indian state to work overtime to manage its strained relationship with its Muslim subjects, right? Muslims who had refused to leave India for Pakistan represented the promise of India's success as a secular nation. But on the other hand, they also embodied a kind of slippery citizenship, right? Like they were seen as unreliable subjecthood that threatened national treachery at all times. And Muslims have been within Indian cinema, sort of marked symbolically as the enemy within, right? And this of course is how Hindutva discourse treats them. Muslims are always seen as sort of haunting the integrity of the Indian state as well as the security of its Hindu majority, right? But let's move to the present in the last two decades in India and this is also the timeline of the book, right? We know that the country has witnessed what many have called the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, and there's a kind of normalization of religiously conservative, ethno, national public sphere. And simultaneously there's been an escalation in the intensity and the forms of violence against Dalits, religious minorities, especially Muslims, right? That were all. And all of this was of course, we know, always present, but they're now expressed much more intensely and belligerently. And just to focus on Muslims for the purposes of this question, within Hindutva, we know the logic is that Muslims become second class citizens and experience what one of the scholars Banki has called precarity of place, which is that their right to dignified citizen livelihood, lively lives, right, really are systematically attacked. So in addition to casual everyday discrimination, whether in housing, education, employment, this is evident in a series of developments that have targeted Muslims over the past few years. And you and of course our sort of listeners will know like that spate of events, right? Everything from large scale disenfranchisement of largely poor Muslims through the caa, the Citizenship Amendment act, or the hounding of Muslim students, student activists and attacks on Muslim universities, the desecration of mosques, official and official bans against Muslims, offering namaz in public spaces, riots, vigilante violence against Muslims, including public lynching, right? These stand out as only a few of the acts of hostility against Muslims in India. And these Developments what we are arguing have consolidated religious polarization and exacerbated the material, social, cultural and psychological precarity of Muslims in India. And this is reflected in the films.
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Dr. Anupama Arora
Right?
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Priyam Sinha
Right.
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Dr. Anupama Arora
So it's against this current political landscape that our work studies what happens to the Muslim question in cinema. I mean, as most scholars of Hindi cinema are aware, right. Scholars have written extensively about the representations of Muslims in Bollywood. And one of the key tropes that they have identified in the way that Muslims have been represented on screen, especially since the 1990s, really, is of Muslims as terrorists. This has been the most predominant format of Islamophobia that Bollywood films have participated in and perpetuated. So our work in chapter three takes off from here. We look at how this Muslim equal to terrorist question has a spatial anchoring. So we focus not so much on what the Muslim does, that is the Muslim as terrorist, but where the Muslim lives, the spaces that Muslim men on screen in Bollywood films occupy. So the Muslim as slum dweller. And what we're arguing is that contemporary Bollywood films tend to conflate slums and Muslims two distinct social entities, one that's spatial and the other religious identity. The films feed this nightmare of slums crawling with innately criminalized and terroristic Muslims. And in doing so, Bollywood really combines and compounds xenophobic paranoias about national precarity with elite frustrations about urban working class spaces and geographies of poverty. It perpetuates a logic where Islamic terroristicness masquerades as poverty. And it normalizes a political narrative about the poor that views them as dangerous. As a result, these films then allow for a right wing synergy where a sectarian responds to Indian Muslims, one that makes an argument for ridding society of all these illegal or unpatriotic Muslim migrants can then join forces with neoliberal fanaticism about ensuring a disappearance of India's urban poor. Such a program best subtly advocates, at a single stroke, ridding the urban national social space of both undesirables and menaces.
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Dr. Megha Anwar
Right.
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Dr. Anupama Arora
The urban poor and the terroristic Muslim.
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Priyam Sinha
So that brings me to the next question as well. So, interestingly, you also point towards the uppercastness in Bollywood's display of India, Indians and Indianness, as well as the resulted invisibility of Dalits in terms of storylines. So could you please discuss how your book engages also with the caste and precarity question in post millennial Hindi films?
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Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, sure, Priyam. So, you know, as we've been talking about, while the figure of the Muslim has A long standing history of management in popular Hindi cinema. The film industry, or at least the mainstream film industry has more or less elided caste and Dalit identities with an alarming insistence. And this, you know, and this sort of evasion or elision, elision has taken different forms. So caste is sometimes just subsumed within class precariousness or caste is just named only to reference the lives and bodies of those that lie outside the privileges of upper casteness. Right? So it never calls into questions the automated Brahminism of the protagonists. Caste can also hover on this margins through the everyday use of caste based slurs. So in chapter four of our book we examine three post millennial Hindi films which mark a distinct break in this long history of silence around and really the invisibilization of caste in cinema. And two of these films, Masaan and Gili Pucci are by Dalit director Neeraj khevan. And the third one is Anubhav Sinha's Article 15. And we read these films for their engagement with caste precarity. And we do this, our work through prioritizing how these films reconfigure the couple form and romantic love, which as we all know is one of Bollywood's most cherished narrative templates. Right? We've seen how these tropes of romantic love and couple formation are relentlessly repeated and celebrated in mainstream Hindi films that fixate on the big fad Indian wedding of upper caste and upper class protagonists, especially in the post liberalization context.
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Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah. And I think what we're saying in our chapter is that unlike these mainstream films from the 1990s and the 2000s, the films that we look at, the three films that Anupama mentioned, do not have conventional happy endings, right? In fact, what they do is they explode the fantasy of a happy ever after as they present caste as a structural impediment to love and coupledom. And the couples in these films provide us an occasion to meditate on the radical political dimension of love and the possibility, or rather the impossibility of love in the context of a casteist order, world order, right? And as the hierarchies and oppressions of caste become forefronted, these films allow us to track the interconnections between caste precarity and the precorization of the couple form. So this unveils coupledom or the right to love as the ultimate expression of what is an inequitably distributed privilege. So love, which is the easiest and the most automated subject matter in Bollywood, right. Suddenly becomes a very crisis ridden and unequal terrain. Who gets to be a couple and consummate or actualize their love and whose coupledom is extinguished? These are the questions that these films compel us to ask and they allow for a mediation or a meditation on the tribulations or impossibility of inter caste or Dalit love. The second caste is introduced into the romantic equation through familial pressures, community norms, societal imperatives or state repressions. Both inter caste love as well as Dalit couples right to be become deeply imperiled. And we sort of conclude that ultimately the couples in crisis or the couples in progress in these films represent a kind of the neoliberal nation struggling with its legacies of caste without being able to offer collective solutions for an equitable future. And this is also what we are identifying as a key feature of the cinema of precarity. You can identify the problems, right? But the the sort of looking for collective solutions becomes the hard task. Effy.
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Priyam Sinha
So moving ahead in discussing what constitutes the New Woman, you also highlight platform productions on Netflix and Amazon Prime. While there is a prominent increase in women centric storylines and character arcs in them, I'm sure early career researchers like me who are interested in learning about gendered precarity and gendering of precarity also would be curious to know about renditions of the New Woman in a New Bollywood and digital platforms. Interestingly, that also connects to the themes that you addressed in your edited book, Bollywood's New Liberalization, Liberation and Contested Bodies. So could you tell us briefly about connecting the line of thought across these two books that both of you have worked on?
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Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, thanks Priyam for that question. And thank you for mentioning our edited collection on Bollywood's New Woman. It came out in 2018 with Rutgers University Press and it has 18 essays. All of them are dedicated to the cinematic figure of the New Woman. All the essays in this anthology really investigate how women in post liberalization India have become receptacles and mediators of the socioeconomic and political pressures birthed by liberalization. And most of the films discussed in the edited volumes are representations of mainstream and hegemonic forms of the New Woman. Right? And this is upper right. This new woman is upper class, upper caste, Hindu married mothers and conventionally attractive and easily recruitable into mainstream genres. In these renditions of the New Woman, the non hegemonic or subaltern ways of being, you know, quote unquote new or being quote unquote woman are marginalized. There's almost no space for conceptions of New womanhood that occupies identities that are poor or working class or even lower middle class Dalit. And so these end up occupying really the outskirts of this category of newness. And so while these mainstream representations of the new woman have disrupted what has been identified as the tradition, modernity, binary that filmic representations of women have been stuck in for decades, they also tend to fetishize and silo gender justice, often making intersectional political and economic justice secondary.
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Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah, and I think that's a good place to sort of segue into our new book, right, where we address these sort of exclusions by reinserting class precarity as a critical lens to understand contemporary Bollywood's engagement with gender. So this is the work we undertake in chapter five. And in this chapter we examine the mainstream film Viradi Wedding as well as Netflix films Is Love Enough Sir? And Zoyakhtar's short film in the anthology Love Stories 1. And instead of focusing on the lives of elite women, we focus on the lives of female domestic workers, migrant laborers, and the aspirational lower middle class young women. Instead of focusing on intraclass interactions between rich women, we focus on interclass interactions between elite and working class women. We studied these films for how women's on screen encounters with each other bristle with tension when they transpire across class lines. And we examine how the films attend to the interior lives of elite and non elite women and how these films, in a sense, configure their respective precarities differently. Right, because their precarities are different. And what we're sort of saying is that these films help us draw attention to the ways in which neoliberal politics have hijacked feminist politics. Right. When you start to examine these films, you realize that a lot of the markers of women's liberation that are associated with the new woman, such as pleasure, mobility, choice, autonomy, sexual agency, consent, entrepreneurialism as they are presented in mainstream Bollywood cinema. All of these attributes of liberation, right, they need to be radically reimagined and problematized. Like in a sense, they no longer hold and they become very dubious categories or signs of liberation when class precarity is centralized. Which is why we're looking at sort of inter class interactions in this chapter.
- [31:30]
Priyam Sinha
So, moving ahead, I was also very fascinated by your discussion of the genre of cop films and its intersection with what is packaged as a masculine body genre. So could you talk a little more about how the cop films you discuss are related to or different from the figure of the cop found in the 1970s angry young man culture of Films. How do these new Bollywood cop films invoke or play with the idea of masculinity? And why should we pay attention to this now?
- [32:07]
Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, thanks for this question. So we'll begin. We'll just begin by providing a little bit of context for the discussion of cop films in our book. We look at cop films in chapter six of our book, which is titled Politics and Political Agency in the Age of Precarity. And the focus of this chapter is on examining the fate of politics or political agency or political possibilities and outcomes in a culture that breeds precarity. And to sort of answer this question, to look at this, we focus on two categories of films. In the first category of films such as Shanghai and no One Killed Jessica, films that register middle class outrage and agency, right? To issues that are very dear to the middle class, like development and corruption. Then the second group of films that we examine are cop films, which we think offer a very particular expression of political agency in the age of precarity. And within this context, we look at two of Rohit Shetty's blockbuster cop films, right? Simba and Suryavanshi. For how these films tackle or one might even say manipulate or weaponize national anxieties around rape and terrorism. And the point we're making is that the political agent and agency that is valorized in these films is embodied in this cop, right? The muscular, masculinist vigilante cop. There is a culture of endless impunity that is extended to him and to the law enforcement machinery. And we go on to show that there is a total alignment between the political agency of the vigilante cop and authoritarian values. And this matters because this is quite different from past rendition of cops in Bollywood, particularly the most iconic figure of the cop, Priyam, as you mentioned, that of the angry young man and the cop in Shetty's films, right? Simba and Suryavanshi repurposes this angry young man cop, but towards very different ends that ultimately serve the contemporary political moment. Now, viewers of Hindi cinema are familiar with the trope of the cop who resorts to extralegal means to render justice, right? One of the quintessential cop films in this genre is, as most of our listeners might be aware of, is the 1970s film Zanjeet, where Amitabh Bachchan plays a disenchanted cop who's seeking extrajudicial political and personal justice. It's a film about an honest police officer who has to work outside corrupt, right, weak institutional network frameworks to avenge both his family's murder and to bring criminals to justice. It was this film, Sanjeev, that also introduced to the public this powerful cinematic figure of the angry young man, right? A figure who represented the disaffection of the dispossessed urban working class Precariat. And this, more importantly, this larger than life figure also represented and offered an anti authoritarian fantasy of resistance. Now, the cops that we encounter in films like Simba and Suryavanshi are very different.
- [35:19]
Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah. And I can sort of expound on that difference. Right? So for instance, unlike older films featuring the angry young man of Amitabh Bachchang, right. Simba the cop is not a traumatized orphan. He is an orphan, but he is not traumatized. Right. And he's not a disaffected anti establishment figure. On the contrary, he is very much the embodiment of the establishment. And in fact, he mobilizes consent for establishmentarian populism. This cop does not step out of the state to annihilate the criminals or the rapists, but rather he actually steps into his state sponsored role as the state's functionary. And the most important thing is that he revels in this role, right? Like he loves being a cop. So you know, Vijay in Diwar, which is the other most iconic Andrew young man film, has this iconic tattoo, right? Meera Baap Chor Hai or My Father is a Thief. Simba, like Vijay also has a tattoo. And Simba's tattoo is very much a nod to Vijay's iconic forearm tattoo. Right. But unlike Vijay, Simba's tattoo does not signify a traumatized body that speaks a history of coercion or shame or helplessness as it does in Diwar. It's not a forcible branding that signifies his marginality and social displacement. Instead, Simba kind of proudly flexes his tattoo and what his tattoo says is police. So it's very literal. The tattoo is very literal, Right. It is a marker of the pleasure and the pride in being a functionary of the state. Right. It shows just how glad he is to exist as an extension of the state. He's literally the strong arm of the state. Right. And similarly in Suryavanshi, the brooding masculinity of the cop as the angry young man is kind of remodeled as a unapologetic ethno nationalist masculinity as he takes on terrorism, especially the Muslim terrorist. Right. And what is striking to us about these new cop films is how custodial violence or extrajudicial vigilante justice or the encounter, right. We know that there's a lot of scenes of encounters. All of these things occupy less a space of secrecy. And now in these new films operate as sort of normalized occurrences that are sanctioned by the state. So unlike earlier Angry Young man films, the vigilante cop in these new films is not at odds with the state. And additionally the public goads the cop right to enact extrajudicial justice and legitimize his actions as ethical. The public does that. So what you find is that there is a kind of harmony that is created between the cop, the people or the public and the state to reveal a consensus around authoritarian populism. And this consensus is what provides the edifice of the neoliberal Hindutva state.
- [38:20]
Priyam Sinha
So that's very interesting. And you also go beyond theorizing films and new media content as texts and foreground social media, circulated content and contestations. For instance Sushant Singh Rajput's death and nepotism, among other events that you also explicitly discuss. While this is not a central argument in your book, you discuss the precarity of stars or the construction of stars emerging from an increased scrutiny of their mediatized presence, audience star interaction and an underlying perception of them being embodiments of the Hindutva sentiments. So how does your book engage with the question of the star as precarious labor?
- [39:10]
Dr. Anupama Arora
Priyam, thank you for this question. You're right. While it's not the central thrust of the book, we do recognize the economic precarity and professional insecurity that haunts the lives of new actors, but also established stars and even more starkly, the challenges faced by the film industry's behind the scenes freelance talent. So before we talk about the precarity of actors and stars, we should note that the privileges and the struggles faced by actors does not even begin to capture the challenges that are faced by the industry's itinerant, skilled and unskilled labor. This group perpetually incurs the threat of unemployment, underemployment, sexual exploitation, cruel working hours, and that enjoys zero security even under normal work conditions, let alone the kind of crisis that were prompted by COVID 19 when the entire film industry came to a grinding halt. And it was also in the midst of the pandemic that the reality of the precarity of new stars came to a head. You mentioned actor Sushant Singh Rajput's suic. His death really stirred also a debate about nepotism in the film industry, about this bitter competition for narrow opportunities between so called entitled star kids and industry outsiders who struggle to build their film careers on talent and grit. And of course, this debate really resonated in the public sphere because Indian institutions, most visibly politics and film, are dominated by dynastic families. But, you know, so we're talking about the debate around nepotism. But even established actors are subject to precarity in the face of changing political landscapes. We've been seeing, and we mentioned this a little bit before, we've been seeing how actors work to align themselves with hegemonic politics as a way to preserve their privilege or to make themselves exempt from vulnerability by siding with the powers that be. So you have an actor like Akshay Kumar who models himself as a nationalist hero, who champions the right wing government's brahmanical, patriarchal protectionist policies, and in the process also setting himself up as a Hindu alternative to the three big Muslim khans in the industry, Aamir Salman and Shah Rukh. Similarly, other A list Hindu male actors in Bollywood like Ranveer Singh, Ajay Devgan and Amitabh Bachchan have also harnessed their masculinities in the service of establishing a Hindu hegemony.
- [41:52]
Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah, I mean, if you remember, in 2019, you know, there was a group of a list Bollywood celebrities who were brought in on a private plane to Delhi to meet Prime Minister Modi, and they were encouraged to post the group selfies they took with him, Right? And again, Atish Taseer has noted that not a single Muslim actor or director was included in this photo op. Right? And you can see their wide grins and the general atmosphere of bonhomie between Modi, right, who's a Hindu supremacist leader, and the industry's young celebrities. And that that sort of general atmosphere of well being, you know, is an indication of powerful celebrities falling in line with the concerted effort underway to reconfigure the film industry along communal lines. And we've seen repeatedly that if and when celebrities don't line up behind the Hindutva agenda, they risk virulent social media attacks and harassment by the champions of Hindu nationalism. For example, Swara Bhaskar is constantly subjected to social media trolling for her critique of patriarchal and sectarian politics. Other actors have been subjected to unwarranted tax raids and investigations. And directors. Actually, there's also harassment of celebrities simply for naming their children after historical Muslim figures despised by the Hindu right. When Aamir Khan talks about the growing intolerance in the country, he faces backlash and calls to boycott his films. And among the Khans, SRK represents a very Interesting case study of how stars have become precarious. Right. SRK is someone who has in recent years shown us a pretty resilient and playful navigation of precarity, performing strange balancing acts that sometimes work and sometimes fail. Right? And this is especially true since 2022, when his son Aryan Khan was arrested on trumped up drug possession charges. And we know that this sent a chill through the industry because it was clear that this was an act of disciplining Bollywood's biggest and most respected Muslim star. Right? So on screen and off screen, we see SRK constantly working overtime to manage his precarity as a, quote, unquote, good Muslim superstar who is beloved and adored by the masses and yet not impervious to disciplinary tactics by the state. So in fact, we. And I mentioned this earlier, right? We, we conclude our book with a brief discussion of his blockbuster film Pathaan, because Pathaan allows us to register the limits of what it means for an SRK to use his stardom as an adequate foil to religious authoritarianism. Can neoliberal ethics, and let's be very clear, SRK embodies so well in his personhood and his films, this neoliberal ethic. Can neoliberal ethics ever truly counter the precarity that he is subjected to and other Muslims are subjected to in India for being Muslim? And what is the price of such an attempt anyway? Right. And that's kind of what we close our book with.
- [45:07]
Priyam Sinha
So that's been really exciting and interesting to know these about what is the underlying perception in your book? So before we conclude, and I'm sure our listeners would be similarly curious to know about the methodology that you adopted in doing this study and the challenges that you faced in collectively actually theorizing these themes.
- [45:32]
Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, Prem. So this project is fundamentally interdisciplinary in orientation and it draws from a range of fields and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, history, sociology, visual studies, cultural studies, women's and gender studies. And we do that in order to provide a really comprehensive overview of the social, economic, political and cultural context that shaped the contemporary Indian mediascape. So we would say that the book deploys a range of methodologies where the analysis relies primarily on qualitative interpretive methods that are both textual and material. This includes a close reading of films, right? Textual analysis, but also analysis of paratextual material like film reviews, interviews with cast and crew and social media texts and so on.
- [46:22]
Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah, and what we do in the book is that, you know, our chapters are organized around different kinds of precarity in contemporary India. Right. Focusing on class, religion, caste. And we've been talking about this gender and political precarity. And in each chapter, we study sort of the variegated and the unpredictable ways in which these precarities kind of intersect or combine or overlay one another in films that constitute the cinema of precarity. Right. And what we find is that there is no one template for how each film engages precarity or Hindutva or the enmeshment between the two. In fact, the pleasure that many of these films offer us comes precisely from the fact that there is no singular formula for how precarity operates, for what it looks like or the outcomes it produces. And in the book, we spend a lot of time examining how precarity is represented. And to do this, we sort of zero in on three things. The first is we kind of focus on the spaces of precarity. We look at the real and the imagined geographies that precarity produces, as well as we study sort of the space, what space does to precarity. Right. We examine how precarity operates through particular types of spaces. We track precarity at home, in bedrooms, in living rooms, at work, in both formal and informal sites of labor, government jobs, corporate offices, factory settings, in rural and urban contexts, in gullies or of slums and interstate highways. Right. The second thing we do is we explore sort of the affective emotional worlds, the psychologies that precarity produces. Because precarity imposes a kind of psychological strain on neoliberal subjects. The precariat is kind of characterized by hyperactivity, exhaustion, chronic uncertainty, anger, alienation, frustration. This constant hustling and grandiose and entrepreneurial fantasies. These precarious subjectivities and psyches are the coping mechanisms to survive precarious material existence. So in the book, we track the visual, the somatic, the verbal manifestations of these psychological traits in the characters that appear in the films. And the third thing we do is we engage with these films as a kind of. Of shared. A part of the shared affective environment. Right. So we focus on what relationships and interactions look like under precarity. We study clashes between those with privilege, looking to protect their hegemony, and the precariat that are trying to jadedly achieve the blueprint of a fantasy that is no longer either sustainable or achievable. Right. We focus on precarious subjectivity in relation to other precarious subjects. And our conceptualization of precarity sort of considers the hierarchies within which precarities are located as well as how precarious subjects constantly navigate and negotiate these hierarchies. The thing to remember is that a precarious subject or a precarious subjectivity is never one thing alone. Right? It morphs in relation to other nodes of power, privilege, disenfranchisement that it encounters and engages. This is why the various permutations and combinations of precarity are so important to our project. This is what allows us to observe which bodies, which communities, which political visions are rendered precarious and under which circumstances or conditions in the pursuit of ethnocentric authoritarianism.
- [49:56]
Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, and as we think about how precarity is represented, we treat these Hindi films that are discussed in the book as responses to a state, state of what we call continual crisis that India has experienced in the first two decades of the 21st century. And the state of crisis, as we've suggested above, is as much an outcome of a landscape of material deprivation as it is the result of the political narratives that are manufactured about it. So these films in this context are both depictions of an ongoing sense of crisis as well as narratological contributors to it. And this interweaving of reality narrative is at the heart of what Henry Guru calls the cultural politics of neoliberalism.
- [50:42]
Priyam Sinha
So thank you so much for your valuable time and extremely insightful conversation about your book. And before we conclude, lastly, I'm sure our listeners would also like to know about your future projects, books or articles that you're currently working on, maybe together, but also individually.
- [51:02]
Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, thanks Priyam. We'll talk about the projects we're working on collaboratively. So we've got a couple of projects going. One is about remakes. We're working on a piece about the 2012 remake of the 1990 film Agnipath. And this is for an edited collection on Bollywood remakes. In the piece, we study the role that Karan Johar's film plays in crafting a post liberalization vision of India. And we study the dissonance between the quote unquote original, which was produced by Yash Johar, and then his son's remake to illustrate an important shift in Hindi cinema's models of Bilini and an accompanying shift in India's relationship with its own Muslim citizenry. So that's one of the projects that we're working on.
- [51:48]
Dr. Megha Anwar
Yeah, and I'm happy to talk about our next book project, which again Anupama and I are working on together, which includes Bollywood but expands more to global cinema, where we look at films both from the global north and the Global south, focusing on 21st century cinematic configurations of masculinity. The project, which is in its nascent stage, is tentatively titled Real Men, Real Global Cinemas and the Crisis of Masculinity. And we will examine a kind of transnational corpus of contemporary films that have been released across a range of geographically and culturally diverse national contexts. And what we are doing, our hope is through this project is to kind of push against the current polarized discursive arena that on the one hand, condemns and caricatures men as embodiments of toxicity, violence, incel culture and entitlement. But on the other hand, the other part of the polarized discursive arena is that men are the casualties of feminism's excesses, right? And they are now culturally marginalized. And what we are doing is that we look at films that are able to sort of move past these polarities to forge a more nuanced cinematic grammar of a dialogue right between what appear to be irreconcilable political and experiential worldviews. And the films we examine show us that the weaponization of mental and the hijacking of their suffering really works to serve the goals of a divided public sphere where competing narratives of masculinity actually obfuscate what is the real violence, right. Very often against subaltern men.
- [53:32]
Priyam Sinha
That's very exciting and I eagerly look forward to engaging with all of your. Both of your work, your collaborative book project, but also a lot of your projects that you just spoke about. And thank you very much again for your time and accepting this invitation for this interview.
- [53:50]
Dr. Megha Anwar
You, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much, Priyam.
- [53:53]
Dr. Anupama Arora
Yeah, thanks, Priyam. It has been a pleasure.