Melodrama, mimicry, and menace: Reinventing Hollywood in Indian science fiction films

Abstract

AbstractIn the last 10 years science fiction (sf) movies have seen a perceptible increase in the Indian film industries. Although this rise in the number of sf films reflects Indian society's changing concepts of science, technology and rationality in the context of the country's rapid development in the industrial and scientific sectors, an undeniable cause is the influence of Hollywood blockbusters, through direct and indirect borrowing and reinventing of plots, themes, and images. These borrowings, though, are more like extracted skeletons than proper remakes, because Bollywood cannot use Hollywood's socio-cultural values. Consequently, in sf movies the Indian viewer is presented with a curious amalgam of Western techno-science and a traditional, often anti-modern, values system: a blend of Western technological imagery and Indian melodrama. Even if an Indian film directly copies from a Hollywood movie, it alters the purpose, effect, and associations that the original work emphasizes. Such a process of modification embeds these films into the discourse of cultural mimicry mentioned by Homi Bhabha – a menacing, subversive, and partial copy that mocks its own sources. Notes 1. According to CitationVasudevan, the following associations make this term an appropriate expression for the popular film tradition: 'emphasis on loss of family, of community, and difficulties of achieving romantic fulfilment … high contrivance in narrative mechanisms, for example of coincidence, as if insistently locking dramatis personae to a particular narrative universe' (The Melodramatic Public 10). 2. In addition to the more artistically and less commercially inclined 'Parallel Cinema', mainstream productions that do not follow formulaic melodrama surely exist, but the large percentage of films that follow the above mentioned formula makes it appropriate. 3. Bhabha says, 'What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely 'rupture' the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a "partial" presence. By "partial" I mean both "incomplete" and "virtual"' (123). 4. Basu (559) mentions Mehboob Khan's Mother India and B.R. Chopra's Naya Daur, both released in 1957, as examples of such films. 5. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), CitationSuvin defines sf in the following manner: 'It [science fiction] should be defined as a fictional tale determined by the hegemonic literary device of a locus and/or dramatis personae that (1) are radically or at least significantly different from empirical times, places, and characters of "mimetic" or "naturalist" fiction, but (2) are nonetheless – to the extent that SF differs from other "fantastic" genres, that is, ensembles of fictional tales without empirical validation – simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author's epoch' (viii). Thus, according to him, through interaction of 'estrangement' and 'cognition', sf creates a 'novum', or something radically different from the existing world, in its narrative universe. 6. Such discourse has become a topic of high debate. While scholars such as CitationVandana Shiva consider possibilities of such alternative epistemology, CitationMeera Nanda completely dismisses that claim. Nanda questions the scientificity of Vedic science by citing Subhash Kak and Rammohan Ray's tendency of projecting Vedic passages as coded form of scientific language. She further questions the scientific methodology of the ancient sages, the absence of which marks Vedic science as a form of mysticism rather than science. 7. Although sending 'sound waves into space', as the scientist describes, is technically impossible. 8. Itself loosely based on Isaac Asimov's I, Robot stories. 9. This is a reference to the Indian epic Ramayana, to which many films in the melodra