Introduction: Meheli Sen -- Part 1. Political and typological figures -- Sensate outlaws: the recursive social bandit in Indian popular cultures / Bishnupriya Ghosháá -- What happened to Khadi? dress and costume in Bombay cinema / Anupama Kapse -- Configuring the other: the detective and the real in Satyajit Ray's Chiriakhana / Gautam Basu Thakur -- Part 2. Generic mutations -- Diverting diseases / M. Madhava Prasad -- Nevla as Dracula: figurations of the tantric as monster in the Hindi horror film / Usha Iyer -- Haunted havelis and hapless heroes: gender, genre and the Hindi gothic film / Meheli Sen -- Part 3. Star figures -- "The face that launched a thousand ships": Helen and public femininity in Hindi film / Anustup Basu -- From Superman to Shahenshah: stardom and the transfigurative body of Hrithik Roshan / Nandana Bose -- Con-figurations: the body as world in Bollywood stardom / Sumita S. Chakravarty -- Part 4. Figuring (out) new Bollywood -- Metafiguring Bollywood: (Brecht after Om Shanti Om) / Bhaskar Sarkar -- Bodies in syncopation / Moinak Biswas -- Between Violetta and Vasantasena is Toulouse-Lautrec: cinematic avatars and Bollywood in Moulin Rouge! / Kirsten Strayer -- Afterword: Anustup Basu
Indian cinematic traditions have always relied on eclectic ways of figuration that combine signs and affects of desire and abomination. That is, incarnations often emerge at critical interfaces between good/bad, Indian/western, self/other, virtue/vice, myth/reality, and so on. Such figures are products of discontinuous assembling processes that cut through dyadic arrangements and pass the same character/body/identity via different, often contradictory, moral economies and sign systems. These many-armed, complex modes of figuration carry a special tenacity in Indian cinema for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the template of classical realist narration usually has had limited authority over its proceedings. Perpetually caught between the home and the world, between elation and agony, such cinematic entities carry in them the diverse, contending energies of the overall assembling arena of Indian modernity itself. The essays in this volume consider the issue of figuration in the broadest sense, including formations that are supra-individual, animalistic, divine and machinic
