Bombay Noir

Abstract

Looking for film noir in India, apparently, is to miss the point of Indian cinema altogether. For on the one hand, debate on the form of Indian popular cinema is alive and well, as evidenced in the recognizable scholarship on the specific form and structuring of various genres. Regardless, noir receives passing mention. By contrast, stateside, the growing number of compendia on film noir, the lists of films added, subtracted, and discovered, defy any settled definition of a canon rather, revisionism plagues film noir more than any other genre, most prominently gestured through nomenclature: historical noir, neo-noir, tech-noir, French noir, Nikkatsu Noir, Hong Kong Neo-Noir, Kowloon Noir, East Asian Noir, to name a few.

Thanks to Andrew Spicer for a careful reading of an earlier version of this chapter and to Anuj Vaidya for promising a partnership in crime. The first version of this chapter was a presentation at SCMS in the wonderful company of David Desser and Corey Creekmur. I have benefitted from questions raised in subsequent presentations at Westminster University, University of Stonybrook, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Industrial Design Center, Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and The South Asia Institute, The University of Texas at Austin. Previous versions of this chapter have appeared in the following publications: ‘Bombay Noir.’ In A Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. (London: Wiley Blackwell Publishers, 2013). ‘Bombay Noir.’ Journal of the Moving Image 15, December 2015. I thank Andrew Spicer, Helen Hanson, and Moinak Biswas for these invitations.