Repetition as Commentary: The Phenomena of Indian Cinema

Aleksandra Hirszfeld

Abstract

The author attempts to analyze and reveal the context within which the discourse of Bollywood cinema came to exist. This discourse is related to the stereotypes of the East that are deeply rooted in the Western tradition, with the orientalism that still precedes critical thought. Orientalism is above all an auto commentary on the Western self, as reflected in the self “Other”. The West creates itself through the contrast with the Orient. As a result we are dealing with a most interesting repetition: people of the Orient, although they do not construct “orienatalistic” ideas, they take part in the line of Orientalistic thought created and propagated by the West, and repeat it. What we are dealing with here is not only economic but also ideological imperialism: Western critique of masala films using categories of a product, which forms part of the classic model of orientalistic thought on the Orient, into the model of the tempting exoticism. Hirszfeld looks at this phenomenon through the prism of myth, as interpreted by Barthes and Propp. Bollywood cinema is infected by the West: the old myths are replaced by quasi-bourgeois myth-ideologies. What is created is new knowledge, hotchpotch of comments and new discourses, but they are created by the West.