International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

Bollywood cinema is known for its sensational pageantry, offering an elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines designed to entice the viewer. It is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation. As Amit Rai argues in UNTIMELY BOLLYWOOD, the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema emblematize the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India and Indian diaspora. Through his analysis of contemporary media practices, Rai seeks to shift emphasis from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of audio-visual media to a vocabulary that accentuates the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of “assemblage” to refer to the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media practices. Rai considers media as a contested production of sensation, where there is a dynamic interaction between text, technology, sensation, and bodies. In so doing, he charts out the biopolitical ramifications of globalized media, probing the ways in which cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of power and sensation and reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy.

In the first chapter Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal. He elicits from that event—the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd—an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure that induces a sense of untimeliness in the participant. The cinema is a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He then goes on to consider media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, and thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. The following chapter expands upon this notion of media contagion, tracking the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India. The final chapter examines how the liberalized media assemblage maximizes profits through the affective management of risk, particularly through attention to the precariousness of the sexualized body.