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ABSTRACT
In the recent decades of post-globalization India, a digital explosion in media platforms and technologies has created a new cartography of the city. This ‘informational’ vocabulary addresses the city not merely through built urban architecture but also through a mobile infrastructure of screens. MMS clips, surveillance footage, television news, home videos, memes, and so on are all symptomatic of this new digital archive of the city. This essay attempts to reflect on how Delhi’s urban imaginary is given a graphic volatile form through the viral circulations of its digital profile. As a new generation of Delhi-born directors emerge in the landscape of Bombay cinema, some of these filmmakers mobilize the recent televisual archive of crime in Delhi to respond to the city. At the same time, it is also interesting how a more generalized relation between the space of the night and urban violence is given a specific concrete iconography in these fictionalized accounts. Located within an intersection of Delhi’s urban imaginary, its expanding media infrastructure, and an aesthetic mobilization of the night, this essay examines Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010), Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009), and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 (2009) to argue that the violence in these films as much material as it is technological. It is not only the anxiety related to murder itself, but the viral circulation of death and a television aesthetic of replayed and sensationalized crime that haunts the contemporary metropolitan experience.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I refer to Delhi as a city of migrants keeping in mind not only the demographic growth in colonial and early postcolonial India, but also noting the urban expansion in the 1970s and 80s that led to a huge population influx in the city. In Amita Baviskar’s recent book, titled Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi, she refers to the peculiar paradox of the migrant identity in Delhi: ‘The making of Delhi’s working class is also bound to the perpetuation of their identity as migrants … Despite Delhi’s history as a city of migrants, where the overwhelming majority of the population consists of first or second-generation migrants, the fact of migration is selectively used to stigmatise certain social groups’ (49).
2. Refer to the Introduction, vii.
3. The suspicion of a world steadily moving towards a singular spatial imaginary can be found in, for instance, Marc Auge’s anthropological notion of ‘non-places’ and in Keller Easterling’s more recent work on the power of ‘infrastructure space’.
4. Refer to the Introduction, xxii.
5. While Baron elaborates the concept through digital clips and experimental artwork, I find the term to be a productive analytical frame to reference the multiplex-driven and commercially based Delhi films.
6. Other films that are not discussed in this essay but also feature as crucial parts of Delhi’s unfolding digital film archive include No One Killed Jessica (Raj Kumar Gupta) and Talvar (Meghna Gulzar). This would also include Richie-Mehta’s recently produced Netflix web series Delhi Crime (Richie Mehta).
7. The crash of MiG Pilots, the peculiar criminal adventures of Bunty Chor, and other such mediatized crime narratives are not only accounts of criminality that span both day and night, but are also soon taken up in a popular body of Delhi-based Hindi films: Rang De Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (Dibakar Banerjee), and others.
8. Anthony Vidler has suggested that modernist urbanism was constantly haunted by the fear of labyrinthine dark spaces, ‘which were seen as the repository of superstition, non-reason, and the breakdown of civility’ (qtd. in Sundaram 19).
9. The pornographic clip became a major scandal in 2004, as it was sold, watched, and virally circulated across cell phones in the early 21st century. As it was picked up and covered across news channels, the resultant media frenzy around the incident made it the focal point of many debates regarding privacy, sex education, governance in schools, but also important questions around the digital proliferation of media technologies – mainly around digital consent, the online circulation of illegal downloads, and the inefficacy of the Information Technology Act (2000) to deal with the 21st century media proliferation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPS_MMS_scandal. Accessed on 5 January 2022.
10. https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/entertainment-others/delhi-mms-scandal-inspires-dibakars-love-sex-aur-dhoka/. Accessed on 6 January 2022.
11. Between April-May 2001, there were several registered complaints on injury caused by a monkey-like creature from the eastern districts of Delhi. Most complaints bore a similar description in that they were all attacks during the night on people who were sleeping on their terraces. https://www.rediff.com/news/2001/may/18mon2.htm. Accessed on 10 January 2022.
12. Recounting the violence caused by the Partition, Sohail Hashmi offers some statistics on Delhi: ‘between 20–25 thousand Muslims were killed. More than 330,000 Muslims had left Delhi for Pakistan and the population of the city had declined by almost 350,000 by the time the riots ended’ (The Wire). https://thewire.in/history/partition-new-delhi. Accessed on 11 January 2022.
13. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the mediatization of religion through Doordarshan shows Ramayana (Ramanand Sagar) and Mahabharata (B.R. Chopra and Ravi Chopra), along with newer digital image productions, special effects, song and hymn compositions weaved a new ontological fabric of mythological consolidations.
14. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-42219773. Accessed on 11 January 2022.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Akhil Goswami
Akhil Goswami is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has recently completed his M.Phil. degree in Cinema Studies at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His primary research interests include global television studies, media infrastructures, cinematic urbanism, sporting cultures, and digital media spectatorships.