In her Introduction to Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, Anita Desai wrote, “In India, the past never disappears. It does not even become transformed into a ghost. Concrete, physical, palpable — it is present everywhere.” The fragments of this presence, constantly reiterated to us in different forms of media, old and new, is our inheritance and burden both. Cinema is no different — it shows, hides, ridicules, justifies and sometimes gives birth to the contradictions that is inherent to India. They personify Faulkner’s declaration that the human heart in conflict with itself can alone make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
Locating desire in the fulcrum of Indian cinema is an interesting exercise in emphasising stories in a land where love is policed in a variety of ways. The complex mix of social conservatism that permits little to no physical display of affection between couples, grievous caste and religious hierarchies, and the general social inequalities in the country have exacerbated this conundrum about who is allowed to love who, and how much. At the same time, love in Indian Cinema is an interesting hyperbole. The best love stories are excessive, earnest and maximalist in a way that rings true to the pulse of the nation. Inspired by folk tales, spirituality and history, they also constantly reinvent themselves. They document people’s relationships with cities, the shift in generational thinking, and desire’s proximity to politics and culture.
In this issue, our contributors have analyzed the length and breadth of Indian cinema and its relationship with their own selves as well as a mirror to the social milieu we inhabit. In the form of editorials, art, music, personal essays, and poetry, they have succinctly managed to put themselves in the shoes of characters that have populated our screens for years, and the writing decisions that brought them to life. They have written in detail about contending with desire in the private and public sphere, and broken down tropes that have been a mainstay in Indian films to explain its impact on contemporary cultural understanding of relationships.
Interspersed with art-work celebrating popular Bollywood films, interviews with film journalists and bloggers, the issue is a great opportunity to dig deep, revisit and be introduced to the facets of films we have all seen growing up.
For a lot of us, films are an extremely important purveyor of our memory — a chronicle of our coming of age, marking our growth as individuals. As we come to understand the world around us more, we also look at the films we grew up watching differently, comprehending the nuances and the technical aspects better. This rite of passage is explored by multiple writers in this issue, who talk about films that served as a background score in their own bildungsroman.
For me, writing about films is like media synesthesia. I love feeling overwhelmed with the knowledge it inspires in me, how a frame in a film triggers the awareness of a painting I had seen, or how a a dialogue reminds me of a poem. This sense of fluidity is what makes film a bespoke medium, how it suffuses the banality of our lives with images of simultaneous movement into the past and the future. I congratulate everyone who contributed to the issue and worked behind the scenes, and most of all, Anushka Bidani, founder of Headcanon Magazine and Editor-in-Chief of the issue, who molded the love all of us have towards films into something concrete.
Paridhi Puri hails from Delhi. She loves reading esoteric Wikipedia articles, long walks in her balcony, Salman Toor’s A Spring Night in Pakistan, media about the redemptive power of love, and picnics in public parks in winters. Paridhi was a SUSI scholar at Between the Lines: University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She is the co-founder of Delhi Reads, a community venture that hosts discussions about literature and culture. Paridhi guest edited Headcanon Magazine‘s Issue II: Desiring Bollywood, a red-veiled, gold-spun ode to Hindi cinema. It is open for preorder now, and we would love to send it to your doorstep.