Muñoz-Tuñón

and therein lies its valorised status. The new mix announces a posthybrid moment whence the binary of hybridity/purity and abnormality/

normativity does not have to be resorted to. The new mix constitutes its own terms of reference.

A Place Called Elsewhere

In the 2003 film Mein Prem Ki Diwani Hoon, the setting is a fictional town eponymously called Sundarnagar, or ‘the city beautiful’. It is a town of idealised dreams and bourgeois opulence, of houses belonging to the purveyors of traditions, with living rooms the size of convention halls, populated by pampered patriarchs, gullible grandmothers and servile servants, all in their proper places. The lawns to the houses are wide, and the driveways regal, while the mellifluous town harbours manicured parks, quaint telephone booths, gardens, and outdoor spaces to run away to that include quite inexplicably snow-clad mountains, lush streams and sandy beaches, all in one go. In the film, Sundarnagar is depicted as a town in India, yet the entire film was shot in New Zealand. The Indian city of Sundarnagar may be fictive, but it is depicted in a real place. That place is elsewhere, and this is the ubiquitous trope in Hindi-Bollywood films: the relentless flight towards elsewhere.

This flight to elsewhere is structurally embedded in the song-dance numbers – the

‘chansons d’amour’ – that are theraisons d’être of Hindi-Bollywood films. I call the location of these chansons d’amour song-sites.

The song-site in the Hindi-Bollywood filmic imagination weaves music, dance, couture, urban and landscape imagery into a phantasmagoria of dreams and desires. The literal space of such song-sites has always been an exotic, faraway place, somewhere the inevitable amorous couple could instantly be transported to without

Hafeez Contractor, Dheeraj Dreams development, Bhandup, ongoing

Developing a dream topography.

Hafeez Contractor, Apartment Towers for Mumbai, 2000 Urban towers: an ensemble of styles, genres and desires.

a cue. The lush valley of Kashmir was a ubiquitous site of that dream topography, as also are places like Manali, Kanyamumari, Goa and Simla. But now, more and more, since Kashmir has devolved into a political chaos or the transnational siren has finally arrived, the song-sites exist subliminally in imported places, in Switzerland, Germany, even New Zealand. As in a veritable catalogue of the National Geographicexotica, charming, picturesque, urbane or just generally well-formed places are grafted onto the body of an extremely predictable, rebarbative and supertheatrical narrative that may have a generic setting in some gaonin Punjab, or a chawl in Mumbai. What makes Mein Prem striking is that it is in its entirety a song-site; it takes the elsewhere of the song-site to the entire film.

What to make of the manufacture of this cinematic urban imagery without being facetious? Can one make an Italo Calvino-like catalogue of these grafted places, as a kind of modern fable of urban imagination? Or, can they be treated as a cryptic enumeration of the collective fetish of the Indian urban middle-class as it encounters, experiences and succumbs to (new) global coordinates? Or, are these sites a symptom of a Postmodern hybridity (a new mix) manufactured, distributed and consumed filmically? Or, is Bollywood, surreptitiously, unwittingly or unselfconsciously, writing alternative visions for urban India? Or, is cinematic Sundarnagar, as Thomas Pynchon did with the medium of TVin his fictional work Vineland, a ‘quixotic cognitive enterprise’ that converts a Postmodernist space into a tool for thinking about an otherwise elusive and unrepresentable system?³

With quixotic Sundarnagar we are in the realm of urban images and imageries, no matter whether they are from a non-reflexive cultural production, and no matter whether they are props in a substance-denuded performance. A new expressive congruence is formed nonetheless by cinema, architecture and spatial utopia which now enter the realm of imagining the city.

These places from elsewhere, real and actual, become fictive in the Hindi film narrative because the places are not named, and they are not located with any amount of precision; they are literally framed to be ‘foreign’, to be elsewhere. It is this admixture of actuality and alienness that makes these sites

hyper-real places. In generic Hindi films, the sites of the songs are hyper-real because they are seemingly real. The sites are not unreal by themselves. A city like that exists somewhere in Germany. A landscape like that exists in Switzerland. And yet they become profoundly unreal or, if you prefer, seemingly real, and hence hyper-real, by the nature of being grafted on the cinematic body, when they are collaged, montaged, cut-and-pasted alongside a normative and urbanistically messy landscape – a real city in India. The significance is in the juxtaposition, in the being side by side.

What is being side by side? The normative and the superlative, the usual and the ideal, the place here and now, and a place elsewhere. It is technically a

juxtaposition of the messy landscape and dream topography. The former is of a native and the latter of a transnational provenance. It is also in this sense that spaces of Hindi film represent a ‘mix’. And despite what is perhaps conceptually a jarring hybridity, the satisfied audience takes it as a ‘flow’, a flow through diverse, unrelated, discontinuous spaces. Sundarnagar is not an isolated cinematic place, and yet Sundarnagar is not an Indian town that could be located with precision for it is part of the longing of the urban upper-/middle-class to approximate an ‘elsewhere’. And yet we do not know whether that longing is therapeutic or psychotic.

What distinguishes Sundarnagar from another well-known fictional town – RK Narayan’s Malgudi – is the transnational divide, the trope of consumptive desire embedded scene-by-scene in the former, in the frame-by-frame embodiment of transnational utopias on the native set of reference, of the presence of the idea of a globally charged place that replaces (or at least contests) the last vestiges of the empirical here. Is Sundarnagar, then, a premonition of Indian cities – part of a narrative on urban imagination in India – happening in the simultaneous collapse of either Nehruvian or Gandhian ideology, and the proliferation of a global, transnational indulgence?

Hafeez Contractor,Lake Castle development, Powai, Mumbai, 1989 Signatures of a new living: mixed metaphors and stratospheric locations.

Notes

1 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge (London and New York), 1994.

2 The term was derived after a conversation with Michael Meister.

3 Brian McHale uses Thomas Pynchon’s Vinelandto understand the Postmodern ontology of television. ‘Much in the same way … that [Fredric] Jameson has sought to convert the spaces of postmodernist architecture into a tool for thinking about (“cognitively mapping”) the otherwise elusively unrepresentable system, Pynchon may be seeking to convert TVinto a tool for cognitively mapping the place of death in a postmodern culture. And much as Jameson has strangely, and controversially, redeemed even so unlikely a building as John Portman’s egregious Bonaventure Hotel by appropriating it in this way to his (and our) cognitive use, so Pynchon has, perhaps more strangely still, “redeemed” TV.’ Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge (London), 1992, p 141.

4 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham), 1993.

The Metrosexual Mantra