Death Becomes Her: Bombay Cinema, Nation and Kashmir

Abstract

I present here a conversation featuring Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya who form the Desire Machine Collective (DMC), Guwahati, and I, as a film historian, query them on ironic histories informing a mythic love triangle of contemporary Indian history—the Indian nation, Bombay cinema and the region of Kashmir. DMC did extensive research and documentation in Kashmir during the production of their video installation Nishan I. While working on Nishan I, DMC stumbled upon a number of cinema halls that have remained closed ever since 1989 when Islamic doctrinaires enforced a ban on the showing of Bombay and imported cinema in the Valley. Subsequently these halls came to be used by the occupying Indian military forces as barracks, interrogation centres and ammunition dumps. The conversation presented below takes up their experience of Kashmir, Bombay cinema and the workings of the nation-state during the making of Nishan I. What we get running through DMC’s ruminations about the fate of cinema in Kashmir and the logics of work such as Nishan I is a perception about the manner in which the senses become disciplined, furtive and strained in the presence of military disciplinary regimes and how such a phenomenon spells the death of cinema in the lives of the people in many senses beyond the literal closing down of cinema halls. Disciplinary regimes spell the end of organic pleasures that went into the making of cinema as a celebration of the potentials of life as such.