The cultural space of a film narrative:

Interpreting Kismet (Bombay Talkies, 1943)

Ravi Vasudevan
Department of Film Studies
University of East Anglia

Recent developments in cultural history have emphasised the importance

of representation in understanding social and political processes. It has
been stressed that images and ideas have a definite function in the shaping
of social and political relationships, and are not merely excrescences over-
laying a more ’basic’ reality. Work of this type ranges from an examination
of how social groups project and contest images and ideas to how, at the
level of the state, procedures and categories used to order the ’real’ are
generated. 1
Mine is a specific problem within this coriceptual field. Instead of cor-
relating the representations of the commercial cinema to the outlook of a
particular social group, I will examine them in relation to the cinema’s
function as an entertainment and leisure institution. In any case, it is difficult
to attach film-viewing to any particular audience; and even if research into
the film-going audience were done with any degree of precision, this would
only be one starting point for uncovering the world view of the targeted
audience. That world view would have to be identified in relation to a
series of other practices and belief systems engaged in by the concerned
2
group, a task which has been the object of cultural reception theory.2
1 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, Temple Smith, 1978, is
the best-known work of a large and increasingly sophisticated body of literature, on plebian
cultural practices; Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations,
translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Oxford, Polity Press, 1988, is a broad ranging work on
representation, one which also takes into account the way the state ’constructs’ society.
2
For an example of this field, Janet Staiger, ’The Hand-maiden of Villainy: methods and
problems in studying the historical reception of a film’, Wide Angle, Vol. 8, no. 1, 1986, pp. 19-27.
Author’s Note: Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library, and at the Workshop on Cultural History, Centre for Historical Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, 26-28 November 19<if, I would like to thank Radhika Singha
for her comments on the paper.

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There are a number of reference points for the analysis of the commercial
cinema’s representational activity. Not the least of these is that the cinema
is a business, with a definite structure of ownership, of financial power and
of material constraint. It is also an institution purveying distinct audio-
visual pleasures; and, socially, it occupies a definite temporal position and
performs certain symbolic work. Temporally, it is consumed in a leisure
time as distinct from a work time; symbolically, it repeatedly works through
and resolves certain patterns which are illicit or transgressive of society’s
normative order. Etymologically, entertainment means a ’holding between’.
The cinema’s work of representation performs just such an operation; its
skills are used to generate fantasy spaces for its audience, spaces which are
literally ’held between’ phases of routine domestic and working life.
To draw out the sphere of meaning and pleasure I have identified for the
commercial cinema, I will use the following material: the film’s narrative
and audio-visual strategies, and the products and institutions the cinema
generates around itself. By the latter I mean the framework of information
that a film-going audience is likely to be exposed to: publicity leaflets,
newspaper advertisements and periodical literature, both of the industry
and of the film press. These constitute a series of other narratives which,
whed placed alongside the film story itself, often afford interesting insights
into the possible range of meanings which could be generated from the film.
In the course of the analysis, I will place particular emphasis on the
audio-visual aspect of film culture. For, too often, there has been a tendency
to interpret the meaning of a film in a direct, unmediated way. We have the
representation here, and that which is represented, society, out there, and
our business has been to show the way the one reflects the other. A concept
of how the cultural institution mediates the depicted world, indeed, more
complexly, how it constitutes that world, is needed. If details of con-
temporary social life are observable in a particular representation, then it is
important to identify how the institution articulates meanings in terms of
its own interests and its particular sensuous features.
To illustrate these methodological problems in the analysis of commercial
cinema, I will refer to a highly popular work, Kismet, made by Bombay
Talkies in 1943.3 In keeping with my emphasis on the material component
of cultural institutions, I begin with a simple arithmetical exercise: Kismet’s
footage was 1;1745 feet; yet the government had imposed a limit of 11,000
feet on motion pictures because of war-time shortages of stock. Why was
Kismet allowed to exceed this sum by 745 feet?
At this time new entrepreneurs propelled by war-time profits were thrusting
their way into the motion picture industry. These new men charged that
.vested interests’ in the industry had managed to set up privileged access to
3
I have made a brief note about the film’s production details and a brief summary of its
plot, which is appended at the end of the article.

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the Commerce Department of the Government of India. Further, because

the studio interests were longest established in the field, it was their
representatives from Bombay Talkies, Ranjit Movietone and the Wadia
group, who were inducted into the Indian Motion Picture Producers’
Association sub-committee to liaise with the gov,ernment to determine the
allocation of raw footage.44
The relationship between these details and the problem of identifying
the specific system of culture and meaning generated through the cinema
would seem an obscure one. The question boils down to this: what does
745 feet of film have to do with film culture?
I suggest an analysis resting on three basic premises. First, there is a
question of the political and material framework exercised by the govern-
ment. Kismet had direct references to the war effort; presumably, these
stemmed from contemporary anxieties about the situation. Yet the references
conformed to the particular terms of the government’s war mobilisation
drives. The induction of such propaganda in the fiim could only strengthen
speculation that Bombay Talkies access to extra footage arose from the
studio’s special relationship with the government. So the government’s
power in the field of censorship and material controls was manifest in
the narrative of the film. However, I will show that the effects were not
so straight-forward; the film and publicity material display other attitudes
to the war effort as well.
My second proposal is that the contest for power within the industry is
apparent in the film’s narrative structure. I argue that the interests of Bombay
Talkies and the larger studio system are represented in Kismet’s story. This
is done by alluding to the type of relationship the established studios bore
to the cinema, and the way this relationship was endangered by other inter-
ests whose only motive was a desire for profit.55
In drawing attention to this possible interpretation I do not suggest that
all film narratives of this period obsessively focused on the conflict within
the industry. But in this particular case the representation of the industry
does acquire a certain significance. This is for two reasons. The conflict
between Bombay Talkies and the new interests is highlighted by the popular
4
Information about the relations amongst the government and sections of the industry is
drawn from the following material: ’A raw deal in raw films’, editorial, Film India, February
1943, pp. 3-9; ’The scandal about extra footage’, Ibid., p. 13; ’The length’, Journal of the Film
Industry, Vol. 3, No. 6, February 1943, pp. 11-12; see also E. Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy,
Indian Film, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 124.
5
In discussing the different ways representational practices describe relations between
people and the social world, Roger Chartier has pointed out the importance of ’institutionalized
objective forms by means of which representants...mark in visible and perpetuated fashion
the existence of the group, the class, or the community’. Cultural History, pp. 9-10. In my
interpretation Bombay Talkies and the studio syst&egrave;m are ’representants’&mdash;though not in a
conscious way&mdash;whose interests are depicted in the story of Kismet.

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periodical literature in relation to this particular film, 6 so the conflict

becomes part of the framework of knowledge available to a habitual
audience, and thereby, part of the range of possible interpretations that
can be made of the film. But the industrial conflict acquires such a density
of narrative significance because this was a historically important period
for the studios. They retained their privileged ’position in relation to their
rivals, and nothing better illustrates this than the extra footage gained by
Kismet. As I will show, Kismet goes about the job of justifying this privilege,
to the point of underlining the superior ability of the studio system in
generating cinematic pleasure.
The analysis at this point is geared towards emphasising that pleasure and
meaning in the cinematic experience is strongly self-referential rather than
merely referring to extra-cinematic experience. But this self-referentiality
encompasses not only the act of viewing and understanding the on-screen
story, but also the reverberations set off when this process is combined
with off-screen information. Most commonly, this type of information
focuses on the stars performing in the film, and generates a fascination for
stories about their off-screen lives, their lifestyle and affairs, their career
choices, constituting another imaginary universe which is often invested in
the imaginary world of the film fiction.~ In this instance I have underlined
the importance of off-screen information about the studio. This was because
the distribution of significance between studio and star was in a transitional
phase. The emergence of the star as a decisive agent in the industry was yet
to take place.8
This brings me to my third and final premise though, by now, we have
finally left that 745 feet behind. The institution of the cinema has a certain
distinct presence in society. It not only affords us the ornate indulgence of
our desire to look, it also positions itself in relation to other institutions and

representational drives. This placement may be in relation to certain other

media such as broadcasting and the phonograph; central because of the
importance of the film song. But, more complexly, the cinema is aligned
with encompassing images of society, figurations which present it in relation
to definite discourses about tradition, modernity, and formations of subjec-
tivity and identity. In particular, I will take up the way the cinema reworks
normative narratives of the individual life cycle, highlighting the transgres-
sive role but reintegrating it into the normative and how it, in this sense,
supplies a regulated outlet from the social norm, one which is both transgres-
sive and recuperable.
6
’The scandal about extra footage’
7
For a suggestive analysis of this interplay of off- and on-screen stories in relation to an
Indian star, Nargis, see Rosie Thomas. ’Sanctity and Scandal: the mythologization of Mother
India’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 11, no. 3, 1989, pp. 11-30.
8
Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, op. cit., pp. 127-129.

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The Political Structure of the Narrative .

The references to the war in Kismet ensured that there would be no

differences between the colonial government and the film-makers over
the depiction of this issue. The references appear at two points in the film.
The first is that of the theatrical performance of the song Hindustan
Hamara Hai. The second is an incident in which newspaper headlines
about the war situation are shouted out by a vendor. Significantly, these
references to the war effort find no mention in the publicity synopses
released for the film, nor in the newspaper advertisements. The patriotic
song is included in the film song books9 sold to the public, but the song
does not tell a story as the synopsis does. The synopsis provides a better
index of what is offered as the attractive features of the narrative, and, in
the case of Kismet, these are the romantic and mystery elements of the
plot.10
Tommy mind, the suppression of any reference to the war effort in the
synopsis indicates that the film makers understood that this theme would
invoke ambiguous reactions in the public. The structure and performance
of the song play upon this knowledge.
The song proclaims a readiness to defend Hindustan against the -whole
world. It is only towards the end,of the song that the enemy is named as the
Germans and the Japanese. II
More significant is the way the theatrical scene changes during the song.
There are three segments to the performance, each separated by the drawing
of curtains. First, there is a scene of army mobilisation. Second, the
ordinary citizenry. invoke the patriotic song, with Rani, the crippled
heroine, leading the singing; finally Rani, now in the image of Durga,
stands before a map of India, heraldic women figures surrounding
her, the soldiers of the first scene marching out from either side of the
map.
The succession of scenes in this performance recalls what in nineteenth
century British and Indian theatrical parlance used to be called ’dissolving
9 The song book is composed of song lyrics and, normally, synopses in both English and
Hindi. There is a substantial collection of song books available at the National Film Archives
of India, Pune.
10
The following excerpts will suggest the tone of the synopsis:

Shekhar was a crook or was he not?.... Why did such a calling claim so fine a man?....
Rani... needed all the sympathy in the world....Shekhar tendered her his...sympathy....
Fed on her adoration. Shekhar’s sympathy glowed into a warmer feeling....

11
The refrain of the song is Door hato, e duniya walon Hindustan Hamara Hai! It is only
in the last verse of the song that it is specified that the Hindustani must stand firm against the
Germans and the Japanese.

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views’.12 In tne British context, new techniques of scenery shifting and

lighting allowed for the depiction of changes in time and place. Perhaps
these representations invited a wonderment at the new vistas opened up by
the communications revolution of the nineteenth century.
The dissolving views of Kismet’s theatrical scene are rather different.
Here what is shifting is not a register of space and time, but one of iconic
figures. The separate placement of state and citizenry in the first two seg-
ments of the performance are now condensed into the masculine imagery
of soldiers being inspired to the defence of the nation, as represented by
the female deity. Further, within this concluding scene, editing techniques
suggest the layered nature of iconic space. There are cuts between the
soldiers arrayed in front of Durga, to Durga by herself, the soldiers presence
now relegated to their voices on the soundtrack. So, within the final scene,
there is a movement between the aggressive figures of army and state and
a more culturally essentialised image.
I am suggesting that there is a slip in the narration from the starting point
of the theatrical scenes, when the audience is invited to identify with the
war drives of the state, to the third scene, which inducts a shifting relation
between these drives and a traditional iconography. The movement of the
theatrical performance sets the terms for the renewing of links with the
,
larger narrative logic of the film. For the changes of scene recentre the
heroine till she is standing immobilised before a map of India. It is her
helplessness and her unfulfilled desires which will be the major concern of
the hero and of the story, a focus which is emphasised in newspaper
advertisements. 13
12
For example, Christine Gledhill, ’The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’ in
Gledhill, ed., Home is where the heart is, London, British Film Institute, 1987, p. 21, for an
outline of these developments in British theatre; and R.K. Yagnik, The Indian Theatre: its
origins and later development under European influence, with special reference to Western
India, London, Allen and Unwin, 1933, pp. 92-117, for Indian developments.
13
One advertisement for Kismet shows Rani praying; underneath, there is the caption:

He hears
All sincere prayers and grants
All right things as He did in KISMET

Bombay Chronicle 27 February 1943.

Another advertisement runs:

Fighting with fate

She discovered a life mate
Who made her a princess from a pauper

Bombay Chronicle 27 March 1943.

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I must stress that I am not in any sense affirming that the final scene pre-
sents an authentic constant identity at the core of transient ’modem’ identities.
Rani’s incarnation as Durga, clad in a glittering cardboard and papi6r
machd outfit, harks no further back than the deities of mass produced calendar
art of the turn of the century But this opposition allows the flow of
images to change track from a state defined ’war effort’ to that of a tradi-
tional India inspiring action in her defence.
I will relate the image of the female figure as object of inspiration and
object of defence to the second reference to the war. This consists of a triad
of newspaper headlines called out by a vendor when our thief-hero is passing
through a street. They are.as follows:
Haar Ki Chori-Chor Lapata
(a gap follows)
Hitler Ka Hawai Hamla Bekaar
Azad Hind Ka Sampadak Giraftaar15,
The thief then buys the newspaper from the vendor, and moves on.
It is useful here to think over the relationship between these narrative
levels, i.e., between the reference to the main story of the thief and to
those relating to war and domestic unrest. The first political headline
stresses the safety of the British at home, the second their power to arrest
resistance in India.
In relation to the British then, we hear that an attack has been repulsed
and a force arrested. But these statements are bracketed between a verbal
and a visual reference to the thief-a figure, precisely, who escapes arrest.
There is a threat here which is still active. Not only then is the political
narrative subordinated by the more abiding story about the helpless girl
and the noble, stylish thief who comes to her aid. The thief has a nationa-
list resonance, a residual energy and force, that derives from his placement
in this sequence. And the metaphor is extended through the way the
romantic imagery is arranged; for the girl is aligned with the nation,
which the thief will restore to its rightful position. The issues of national
defence and mobilisation are pushed away from the overt sites of their
statement and are expressed through the conventions of a less discomfiting
address.
14
For a suggestive analysis about transformations in popular representations resulting from
the introduction of mechanical reproduction, see Tapati Guha Thakurta, ’Artists, artisans
and mass picture production in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Calcutta: the
changing
15
iconography of popular prints’, South Asia Research, 8, 1, 1988, pp. 3-45.
Necklace stolen&mdash;thief missing;
Hitler’s aerial attack fails;
Editor of Azad Hind arrested.

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The Industry Narrates Its Own Anxieties

I want to move on now to giving a fuller sense, of how this narrative interlocks
with the narrative of the Bombay film industry at a particular phase of its
evolution. I suggest that the industrial narrative is given a place within the
story through the themes of usurpation and resolution of the resulting
disturbances. In effect the film industry narrates its own anxieties and
desired self-image through the film narrative.
In this connection the conflict between old and new wealth, between Babuji,
Rani’s father, who once owned the theatre and Inderjit, the hero’s father,
who usurps it, parallels the anxieties felt by Bombay Talkies in the early forties
when the established studios felt threatened by the entrance of speculative
wealth. 16 As I have shown these new, fly-by-night capitalists were being held
off by the influence which the older financiers wielded with the government
through their privileged access to scarce raw footage. The older studios’ fears
of dispossession were prophetic, for the economic pressures of the war period
signalled the demise of their power within the film industry.1~ In Kismet these
anxieties about the loss of wealth and position are handled through the use of
popular narrative concerns which focus on the disturbance and reinstatement
of the true lines of inheritance and identity. 18 The inheritance which has been
lost, that of Babuji and his family, is constantly returned to them, for Shekhar’s
crimes invariably involve the transfer of money or precious objects from his
father, Inderjit, to Rani, Babuji’s daughter.
But in fact the old wealth, represented by Babuji, is never restored to its
old authority. It is only the travails of this dispossessed family which are
brought to a close. Babuji’s debts to Inderjit are written off, Rani’s
pregnant sister is permitted to marry Inderjit’s younger son, her lover, and
Rani herself enters the family as the daughter-in-law. In short, what is
enacted is not the full restoration of that which was usurped, but a process
of reconciliation which culminates in the humanising of the ruthless Inderjit.
Ironically the film narrative was more prescient than the narrative of
contests within the film industry. For the time being the studio system had
succeeded in holding off the upstarts, but the film narrative upheld the
victory of the parvenue. However, the work of the narrative is exactly this,
to transcend the simple polarity between defeat and victory and to find a
third point where reconciliation, resolution, and more latently, a favourable
future for the entertainment industry can be grounded. Thus, on the one
16
For example, Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, who was associated with Bombay Talkies, noted
that speculative dealing was destabilising the industry and discouraged substantial investment.
Film India, March 1943, pp. 33-37.
17
Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, op. cit., pp. 127-129.
18
For an elaboration of this analysis, see Ravi Vasudevan, ’The Melodramatic Mode and
the Commercial Hindi Cinema: notes on film history, narrative and performance in the
1950s’, Screen, 30, 3, 1989, pp. 29-51

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hand the narrative of the film appears unduly pessimistic about the fortunes of
established capital, given the balance of power in the industry at the time.
On the other hand the narrative of Kismet appears to entertain a hope that
the new force on the horizon, Shekhar, the figure who will inherit power,
will be able to neutralise the malign features of the opponent and to accom-
modate the older interests.
At this point, I need to explain why it is that I have insisted on relating
the problem of economic change in the film story to the situation in the
industry. After all, the phenomenon of black money and a highly speculative
investment climate was not peculiar to the film industry but was a wider
feature of the economic situation. If a correlation can be drawn between
these themes and the film narrative, then why should I reject a reflectionist
approach to cultural meaning? This is because it would be an exercise in
redundancy to establish that economic pressures in society are given expres-
sion in cultural activity. It is instead in the particularity of the cultural insti-
tution that we should be looking for meaning, and especially for a meaning
which is encompassed in the particular sensate pleasures the cinema offers.
In this context the striking features of the narrative of Kismet is that we are
called upon to examine the destiny of an apparatus of spectatorial pleasure.
First, the clash itself takes place over an entertainment institution, the
theatre. Not only are we invited to look at an entertainment form within
the film which has similarities to the conditions of presentation and spectator-
ship of the cinema; we are asked to do this in ways which highlight our
enjoyment of the cinema as a place in which our desire to look is indulged.
I refer here to the device of ’point of view’,19 a type of editing structure
which, under the influence of the Hollywood cinema, has come to connote the
narration of a story from the optical viewpoint of a particular character.
Essentially it is composed of a triadic editing structure on which there may be
variations and incomplete applications. Shot 1 shows a character looking at a
point outside the frame or off-screen; shot 2 shows us an object, or character,
or set of objects or characters; shot 3 returns us to the first shot. Convention has
it that the object in shot 2 is seen from the character’s point of view in shots 1
and 3 and from the point occupied by him or her in space. What happens in a
number of instances in Kismet is that the character whose point of view is es-
tablished in this way is removed and we, the audience, are put in his place.
For example, in the second sequence of the film Shekhar comes upon a
float which is advertising a theatrical performance. Our attention, which
was fixed on Shekhar, is diverted via his point of view to a dancer’s per-
formance on the float. Shekhar himself is removed from our vision and,
19
Edward Branigan ’The Point of View Shot’ in Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods, Vol. II,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1985; also Edward Branigan, Point
of View in the Cinema: a theory of narration and subjectivity in classical film, Berlin and New
York, Mouton. 1984.

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fleetingly, our attention fixes on the female dancer, even though she has no
narrative function in the film.2° In another sequence, Shekhar and Babuji
watch Rani singing her song in the Hindustan Hamara Hai pageant. Our view
of the performance is relayed through the gaze of Babuji and Shekhar, but that
introductory view is also periodically forgotten, so that we see the pefformance
directly, in an unmediated way. A theatrical performance Shekhar and Babuji
look at becomes a filmic performance we are looking at, a performance which
fills the film frame, and which is unmediated by internal spectatorship.21
In summary then, the intrusion of the film industry into the film narrative
is achieved (a) by a thematic arrangement which makes an entertainment
institution the object of conflict and (b) by rendering that entertainment
. through processes of spectatorship which echo and then project our own
film-viewing situation. The cinema foregrounds, in the film itself, its own
particular ways of generating pleasure.
This is done by the use of ’point of view’ structures; but it is also brought
about by deploying metaphors for the cinema. The key metaphor here is
the loss and recovery of Rani’s powers of movement. Her paralysis is the
point of stasis between tne past and the future-of the cinema. Both Babuji,
the former owner of the theatre, and Shekhar, projected as the future
owner, are associated as producers and spectators with those points in the
story when Rani is a mobile figure on the stage. Opposed to this Inderjit,
the nouveau riche figure, holds her as a static, immobile image. In this sense
the meaning of the film is not only that the prevalent institutional structure
of the industry is endangered, but, more pertinently for the film spectator,
that the apparatus of cinema and its specific pleasures are endangered.

The Representation of Film’s Relationship to Society

In the analysis so far I have put a lot of weight on the argument that the
institution of the cinema presents images of itself, its sphere of activity and
its travails through Kismet’s narrative. I now want to turn to the issue of
how the cinema represents its relationship with society in the film narrative.
There are two levels involved in this representational activity. There is a
20
This is an instance of the ’incomplete’ application of point of view procedures. Shot 1 shows
Shekhar looking off-screen; shot 2 shows the dancer; but instead of another shot signalling the
return to Shekhar’s point of view, Shekhar enters the space of shot 2, entering the space of his
own vision, as it were. I have noticed this elsewhere, and am trying to develop an argument
about the renewed externalising of our viewpoint that such a strategy, consciously or not,
effects.
21
This is analogous with processes of spectatorial substitution observed for the Hollywood
musical. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1982.
especially Ch. 1. Other spectatorial practices characteristic of Indian culture are drawn into
the film viewing situation. A particularly prevalent one is that of the devotional look directed
by a worshipper onto a deity. There is an example of this in Kismet, as Rani prays to Krishna.

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contextually defined level of interaction and representation. This I have

illustrated by the conjunctural intrusion of discourses about the war, whose
articulation in the narrative was influenced by the government’s powers of
censorship and by its powers over the allocation of raw footage.
In a less contextual, more persistent and regular way, the cinema’s represen-
tational activity is related to the drive to.find social legitimacy for itself. To
do so the cinema must wander further afield; it must move beyond itself to
generate images of society, normative models and ideal types. It is impelled
to do so for institutions devoted to pleasure were not acceptable as a matter
of course in the contemporary framework of Indian public opinion, least of
all an institution which draws upon our fascination with sexuality. In the
1920s, when government canvassed the opinion of Indian and European
elites about the cinema,22 the responses displayed an anxiety about the im-
morality of the institution. The main reference point for these fears was the
western cinema. The British feared that race authority would suffer from
the display of western norms of sexuality before an Indian audience. The
Indian elite deemed that this display would have an effect on the morality
of Indian audiences and should certainly not be a model for Indian films.
Here are the outlines of what may be referred to as the anxious areas of a
middle-class public sphere. This anxiety revolved around the representation
of intimate relations in an open and spectacular way. The cinema was,
therefore, subject to a regime of censorship and of moral regulation.
In the face of such regulation, film narratives of a conventional type rest
on a double imperative. They have to draw upon cinema’s capacity to trans-

gress, to realise exactly those features which are not allowed a display in
daily public~ife,)4nd which the audience, therefore, finds particularly attrac-
tive. But on the other hand they also have to meet the demands of public
morality, to close the space opened up by the transgressions of the cinema.
In Kismet there are sequences charged with a dream-like wantonness, even
though the narrative elides their sexuality. Shekhar sees a necklace adorning
his stepmother. The narrative suggests that he is transfixed by a desire to steal
it, but this is rendered through a close up of the ornament on her neck which
is intimate and even perverse in the glint of metal on flesh. Later, our
thief-hero enters the heroine’s home at night; the narrative justifies this as
a quest for the necklace. But his slippery, mercurial movements through the

various rooms, including the heroine’s, and the voyeuristic glances allowed by
a torch light, all hint at the sexual undertones of the situation. Even the hero’s

desire to enable his beloved to walk again has a similar resonance. For the
achievement of this desire is displayed through a spectacle oriented to fulfil
male visual drives. Rani enacts a spectacular dance to display the renewed
wholeness of her body.
22
Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927-28, Evidence, Vols I-IV, Calcutta, Government
of India Central Publications Branch, 1928.

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It is from such transgressive spaces that the narrative has to movie, on and
generate a normative system within which it can place itself. I have a hypo-
thesis to propose, that this normative system is what has been referred to
by psychuanalysts as a regulative psychobiography. Essentially such a system
outlines a model for the stages of life that a man is meant to go through.23
Within the Hindu symbolic order, these are well known: brahmacharya
(studenthood), grahastha (householder), vanaprastha (hermit) and samnyasa
(renouncer). This order prescribes the path that must be undertaken if
duty and morality are to be fulfilled. The order may be called a regulative
psychobiography because it also prescribes the various dispositions of psycho-
sexual energy that different stages of life require: from intellectual energy
and celibacy in studenthood, to the regulated deployment of sexuality in
the generation of a family, and the gradual withdrawal from material and
sensual attachment in later life. 24
I hypothesise that symbolic narratives and cultural institutions often reorder
this kind of prescriptive biography in relation to various perceived social
needs. For example, Romila Thapar has pointed out that a counter-cultural arti-
culation of the symbolic order was fashioned in ancient Indian society by a
short-circuiting of life stages in a direct, conscious move to the position of
samnyasa. The position of a householder, that stable intermediary term
and fount of social respectability, would be bypassed in a framework of active
dissent.z5 In popular cinema, such a trajectory is classically illustrated by the heroes
of Devdas (P.C. Barua, 1’935; Bimal Roy, 1955) and Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957).
I would suggest that in a regulated, stable fashion, entertainment insti-
tutions are earmarked for the manipulation of such symbolic systems. They
provide a counter-balance against the weight of family life and the pressure
to conform to the normative patterns laid out for psycho-social satisfaction.
’Entertainment is particularly important in providing a systematic outlet,
both from the rigours of the working day and of domestic life and in creating
fantasy spaces that diverge from mundane routine.
23
The notion that cultures have a definite perception about the stages of life that a person
goes through needs to be historically controlled; Philippe Aries has suggested, for example,
that there is a definite history to the emergence of the notion of child, adolescent and, indeed,
significant changes in the concept of old age between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Centuries of Childhood, translated by Rober Baldick, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973, ch. 1.
However, I using a notion of a normative order, which pertains to questions of morality
am
and not only perception. Undoubtedly though, such a system also requires historicisation.
24
Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-analytical Study of Childhood and Society in India,
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1978. I have suggested that various peculiarities are observable in
Indian film narratives, especially the way in which transitions from one life stage to the next take
place. While the path of development for the male child parallels that of Oedipal conflict,
there is a marked denial of masculine powers in resolving the relationship with the father; and a
greater weight is placed on the mother’s role in gaining an identity for her son than could ever be
conceived of in the Oedipal paradigm. See my ’Melodramatic Mode’, op. cit., pp. 32-37.
25
’Renunciation: the making of a counter-culture?’ in Ancient Indian Social History,
Delhi, Orient Longman, 1978, pp. 63-104, especially 79-84.

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To put it almost formulaically, the thief, the one who removes property
and effectively questions the legitimacy of certain lines of inheritance, is
exactly the ’other’ of the householder, he who enshrines stability and line-
age. The thief-hero is outside the symbolic order, or perhaps could be said
to lie within its shadows, its negative field. The recurrence of this figure in
the commercial cinema fr6m the early 1940s indicates that the symbolic
narratives generated by the cinematic institution have become the stable,
long-term reference points for the fantasy of a non- or asocial norm.
But this is not, therefore, a space for escapism. For in popular film narra-
tive there is a return to the orbit of the normative and morally acceptable,
and an annulment of the excesses which have been released in the narrative.
In fact, as I hope I have been able to show, the thief-hero is himself an
ultimately moral figure, for he does not so much negate the householder’s
position as question his legitimacy, and effectively seeks to relocate the
property with the rightful heirs. He thus already presents the possibility of
a moral reordering of the household and of property relations within it.
But it-would be wildly inadequate to reduce his functions in this way; for it
is above all the act of thieving, its glamorous, performative, and, as I have
suggested, its implicity sexual features which are so attractive.
The moral ending may well be set by the thief, it may indeed stem from
his powers and actions; but it is another figure who alone can re-integrate
the narrative to symbolic order. It is in this context that the figure of Rani
needs to be resurrected. Hitherto, Rani has appeared in this analysis as a
destitute, impaired object of the hero’s romantic and benevolent atten-
tions. By the end of the tale she has recovered her powers of movement
and used the hero’s romantic attraction for her as a bargaining point with
his father Inderjit. She, her father and sister are granted various favours
and allowances, including the lifting of criminal charges against Shekhar.
Why does this re-integration of the established symbolic order have to be
enacted through a woman who has hitherto been
quite ineffectual? This is
because the period of the transgression has been inaugurated by the loss of
the hero’s mother, and he can be brought back into the space of the house-
hold only when another woman who can arrest his father’s aggression has
been found. It would appear that, within the contested space of the house-
hold, she functions as a buffer between father and son in their conflict over
authority and, indeed, over herself. In a sense, the woman must soften the
trauma of the contest between father and son and so ensure a relatively stable
process of adjustment, reconciliation and inheritance.
The result is the achievement of something like a joint family, wherein
different generations and a number of embryonic family units are amicably
brought together within one family space. What is interesting is not only
that films of this period integrate their narratives into such a perception of
the social norm, but that the film industry also generated information

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about its industrial arrangements in terms of the same familial metaphor.

Thereby, the industry carved out a space not only for the legitimacy of its
products but also for its production system as a socially acceptable institution.
Most of the narratives about film enterprises emphasised the way they func-
tioned as family units, from stories of Mrs. Phalke pawning her jewels and
washing film negatives, to memories of the studios of Prabhat and Bombay
Talkies as households in which a benevolent paternal regard for the employee
was of foremost importance. In Devika Rani’s phrase, Bombay Talkies
was like one big happy family.26
These narratives not only identified the studios with such socially legiti-
mate models, they also came to reflect various anxieties about the structure,
of their so-called family. In this regard, it would be interesting to date the
emergence of the thief-hero, as opposed to other asocial hero types such as
the renouncer. For, in 1943, when Kismet was released, the spectre of black
money assailed not only the established studios but industrial arrange-
ments as a whole. In particular, these years witnessed the emergence of the
star as a powerful economic phenomenon, one who freelanced, and was
not tied by contract to any of the established studios.21 The star was a free
floating agent, disruptive of all existing power and authority; one could not
have a more striking analogy for the functions of the thief-hero vis-A-vis the
family in Kismet. Perhaps here we have a prescient vision of the studio system’s
own dark future, and of the prime arbiter of that destiny.

26
See the reminiscences available in Indian Talkies 1931-56, Bombay, Film Federation of
India, 1956.
27
Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, op. cit., pp. 127-129.

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Synopsis
KISMET (Bombay Talkies, 1943)
(Producer:S. Mukerji, Screenplay and Direction: Gyan Mukerji, Cast: Ashok
Kumar and Mumtaz Shanti).

Characters

Babuji a destitute old man, father of Rani, the heroine; the one time owner of a
theatre which he lost to Inderjit;
Inderjit the grasping, nouveau riche owner of the theatre; father of Shekhar;
Shekhar the thief-hero, later revealed as the runaway son of Inderjit; the romanti-
cally inclined benefactor of Rani;
Rani the crippled ex-dancer; now a professional singer in Inderjit’s theatre; she will
recover her powers of movement with Shekhar’s help.

The Story
Shekhar, the thief-hero is released from jail. He becomes involved with the destinies
of a family who have fallen on hard times. Babuji lost his theatre to his grasping

employee, Inderjit. His daughter Rani was a child dancer but became crippled in a
performance. She sings in what is now Inderjit’s theatre. Shekhar becomes her
benefactor, stealing for her rent, plying her with gifts, and arranging for an operation
on her leg. Shekhar’s thefts are at Inderjit’s expense. Unknown to either, they
are in fact father and son. She-khar had run away as a child when his widowed father
took another wife. The film ends with the reconciliation of father and son through
the medium of Rani. Rani is betrothed to Shekhar and her family’s travails come
to an end.

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