Chitra Ganesh on Utopia, Futurity, and Dissent, Ocula, October 2020
This conversation between Ganesh in Brooklyn and Jareh Das in Warri, Nigeria, unfolded via Google Meet and several emails. The discussion reflects on unexpected Bollywood connections across South-South geographies, collaboration as an anchor for peer and intergenerational exchanges of ideas, the importance of popular culture as an entry point to overlooked histories, and the rupturing of colonial legacies by the diaspora.
JD: I grew up in Lagos in the 1990s where everyone watched a lot of Bollywood movies and it is still very popular. I remember Nagin (1976) centred on a female protagonist who could transform herself into a snake, and the movie follows her quest to avenge the death of her lover. I bring this up because I recall, in these movies, prominent themes of the 'avenging woman' who was also often depicted as a goddess. What themes and elements of the visual language of Bollywood movies interest you, and when did you first engage with these movies and the visual and popular culture around them?
CG: It's amazing that you bring up Nagin! One of the posters for this film, in particular, has been iconic for me. Growing up in the Queens and Brooklyn boroughs of 1980s New York City—before the birth of VCRs and home movie culture—there was a local theatre that screened Bollywood films, so I actually saw the film on screen. For many immigrants, especially those from middle or lower-middleclass backgrounds like my family, popular culture in the form of music, movies, and comics were cherished by my folks and their peers and provided a bridge of sorts to the idea of home.
These wonderful South-South connections, including the immense popularity of Bollywood in Nigeria, is a reminder of a conundrum: how do genres and forms like Bollywood, with ubiquitous global influence in shaping affective response, aesthetics, and desire, remain relatively overlooked and consistently marginal in the United States? At that time specifically, the global embrace of South Asian popular film running across the former Soviet Union through Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco, Kenya, Nigeria, and more was pretty much non-existent in America. I began to consider these omissions in my practice, and explore the sensual excess in the costumes, posters, and performed femininity that characterised 1970s and 80s Bollywood film.