Ranjani Mazumdar

Jawaharlal Nehru University, Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Faculty Member

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Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of Arts and Aesthetics. Her publications focus on popular cinema, techno-urbanism, and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007), co-editor of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema (2022), and guest editor of two special issues of Bioscope on cinema and techno-materiality (2013) and a dossier on Pathaan (2023). Her writings have appeared in several anthologies as well as in journals such as Studies in South Asian Film and Media, Bioscope, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Screen, Social Research, Journal of Television and New Media, Economic and Political Weekly, Film International. Ranjani has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed). She has been a Marie Curie European Union Fellow in Indian Film at the University of Westminster (London) a Fellow at the Cities Cluster of the Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for Historical Studies, Princeton University, a British Academy (ESRC) Fellow, an ICSSR Visiting Fellow at the Maison des Sciences de l’homme in Paris, and visiting faculty at the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her current research interests include intermedial encounters, contemporary nonfiction media aesthetics, and the intersection of technology, travel, design, and colour in 1960s Bombay cinema.
Faculty profile link -
https://www.jnu.ac.in/content/ranjani
Supervisors: Robert Stam
Phone: +919818089519
Address: School Of Arts And Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Mehrauli Road

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The <i>Pathaan</i> Effect

<i>Pathaan</i>: Networks of Affective Virality

Spectacle and Death in the City of Bombay Cinema

Princeton University Press eBooks, Jun 8, 2021

The Legal Unspeakable: Rape in 1980s Bombay Cinema

Gendered Citizenship, 2017

Vigilante films have historically enacted a quest for personal justice through the use of extra l... more Vigilante films have historically enacted a quest for personal justice through the use of extra legal means. This global genre draws our attention to themes of revenge, violence, high octave emotional intensity, and the limits of the legal system. The inability of the ‘system’ to deliver justice forms the backdrop within which cinematic vigilantism operates as a visceral response. The experience of humiliation and disempowerment provides the moral justification for such extreme action. This paper will focus on the circumstances that created the 1980s vigilante films of Bombay through a focus on the theme of rape and revenge. In these films the legal system emerges as a major target with ordinary young men and sometimes women taking extreme steps. The national and regional media of the early 1980s witnessed widespread circulation of testimonies of women who had suffered sexual violence. The blatant abuse of power by the police and bias in the judgments on rape trials led to women’s mobilization across the country. Public meetings, poster campaigns, street theatre, signature campaigns, rallies, and demonstrations created a high visibility for the campaign. Rape became a major issue forcing a discourse in the public domain and became the trigger for the rape films of the 1980s. In the films that I look at, there is a union of rape and revenge that leads up to vigilante action. The narratives produce a complicated discourse on morality, womanhood, the law and ‘Indianness’. Through discussion of films like N. Chandra’s Ankush (1986), Aditya Bhattacharya’s Raakh (1989), B.R. Chopra’s, Insaaf Ka Tarazu (1980), and Avtar Bhogal’s Zakhmi Aurat(1986), the paper will raise questions about the visceral enactment of rape on screen and its relationship to political culture in the 1980s.

Design

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2021

Cinematic design is a strangely slippery term that can include a range of activities linked to th... more Cinematic design is a strangely slippery term that can include a range of activities linked to the imagination of screen space, the style of film publicity, the choice of costumes and the architectural layout of the theatre where the movies have traditionally been housed. It is, however, in the mise-en-scene where design has played the most significant and enduring role in creating an atmospheric sense of space. If the imagination of this cinematic space was once driven primarily by temporary structures built in studios, over a period of time a hybrid form has emerged that combines the physical texture of sets with the use of actual locations and virtual spaces generated through special effects (Bergfelder et al., 2007). Set design requires a large labour-intensive workforce that is managed by figures who are interchangeably referred to as art directors, production designers, set designers, set decorators, etc. (Bergfelder et al., 2007; Izquierdo Tobias, 2016). Most production desig...

Figure of the 'Tapori

Economic and Political Weekly, 2001

Cinema in late 20th century India has also engaged with cities to represent the new experience of... more Cinema in late 20th century India has also engaged with cities to represent the new experience of modernity, and to produce new and complex representations, that often reflect the fluidity and fragmentary character of urban life in India. This essay is about recent appropriations of the city 'street' through the construction of a subculture of masculine performance, strongly rooted in the urban cultures of Mumbai. It is this subculture that gave rise and constructed the popular figure of the 'tapori' a male persona who was part small time streethood, and part the social conscience of the neighbourhood.

“Invisible Work” in the Indian Media Industries

Media Industries Journal, 2015

Media production is a practice that draws on the creative skills of many different kinds of profe... more Media production is a practice that draws on the creative skills of many different kinds of professionals including those who belong to the margins. This world of "invisible workers" includes stunt artists, body doubles, dancers, junior artists, makeup artists, lower-end technicians, and spot boys. The lives of these workers remain largely peripheral to the hype and spectacle generated by media industries. In deeply hierarchical societies like India, production practices tend to reinforce the existing social and class hierarchies, but on a much bigger scale. When industry practice is analyzed, these people often appear as statistical information sets. The article makes a strong case for detailed ethnographies of such working practices as a methodological intervention within media industries scholarship.

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Chapter 7. Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque

Noir Urbanisms, 2010

The Hidden Story

PsycEXTRA Dataset

The Figure of the Bombay Tapori: Language, Gesture and the Cinematic City

Urban Studies, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006

Dialectic of Public and Private: Representation of Women in Bhoomika and Mirch Masala

Economic and Political Weekly, 1991

... Ranjani Mazumdar The post emergency period in India witnessed the production of a number offi... more

Destination Europe:The Practices of Mapping in Contemporary Bombay Cinema

Film and Place in an Intercultural Perspective, 2023

This paper looks at the cartographic consciousness involved in the use of European locations in c... more This paper looks at the cartographic consciousness involved in the use of European locations in contemporary Bombay cinema, as well as the infrastructure, trade and diplomatic networks that have made the use of these spaces possible. Zoya Akhtar’s, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) mobilizes the typical European vacation to travel by road across Spain’s expansive fields, dazzling blue skies, majestic mountains and cliffs and other sites of leisure. In Siddharth Anand’s espionage film, War (2019), we witness swift movement via flights, ships, boats, and automobiles to encounter a high-speed international world where borders are porous. The bustling quality of London’s streetscape, along with aerial views of the city’s financial district, are mobilized in Maneesh Sharma’s Fan (2016) to establish the transnational stardom of the film's protagonist, Shahrukh Khan. Imtiaz Ali’s film Tamasha (2016) takes us to Corsica in France to present the experiences of a man with a personality disorder. These kinds of emotive encounters with space require a structure where film organizes itself like a map. I hope to argue that these on-screen depictions of European space carry surface inscriptions of a complex infrastructure linked to globalization and offer a contemporary understanding of the relationship between space, place, power and technology.

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Introduction to A Companion to Indian Cinema

Wiley Blackwell, 2022

Introduces some of the key debates in the field of Indian Film Studies.

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Technological Obsolescence and Space in Bombay Cinema

A Companion to Indian Cinema, Wiley Blackwell, 2022

Explores the role of analog and digital media forms in the construction of space in Miss Lovely,... more

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The Cinematic Map of the Bombay Slum

Media and the Constitution of the Political, 2022

The Bombay slum on screen inevitably tends to focus on Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest squatter se... more The Bombay slum on screen inevitably tends to focus on Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest squatter settlements and home to more than a million people. In this article, I show how a planetary vision articulated explicitly in aerial views or in a kind of statistical realism can be contrasted with a cluster of challenging images available in films like Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy (2019), Pa Ranjeeth’s Kaala (2018) and Danny Boyle’s Slum Dog Millionaire (2009). In all three films there is a desire to recognize the ecology of media and its circulation of popular culture as a crucial entry point into slum life.

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Film stardom after liveness

Continuum, 2012

As films move from exhibition theatres to television, from award shows to talk shows, dance perfo... more As films move from exhibition theatres to television, from award shows to talk shows, dance performances to fashion shows, the figure of the star acquires a new force. Given the new networks of circulation, mega-budget stage events, touring shows and award nights have emerged as a prime site for the production of stardom. These promotional events are saturated with advertising, dance performances, comic acts and a dazzling ambience that exists within a wide network of transactions between the film industry, the Indian diasporas, event management companies, fashion designers, choreographers and sponsors. This article locates and traces the emerging links between advertising, film culture and television through a specific focus on the role of event management companies. Stars, fashion designers, choreographers, stage designers and sponsoring companies work with event management companies to mount lavish stage shows. In addition, the television telecast design and placement of cameras is also worked out with the event managers. Thus, star culture now also operates within a significantly new economy of televisual liveness that has emerged with globalization in India.

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Artists and Film Stars

Twentieth Century Indian Art, 2022

On the relationship between Popular Cinema and Art in India

Photographic Events in Bombay Cinema

Modern and Contemporary Indian Photography, 2022

This article looks at the intermedial performance of stillness in popular Bombay films. The films... more

Design Keyword

Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2021

On the scholarship dealing with Space and Production Design in Bombay Cinema

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Terrorism, Conspiracy, and Surveillance in Bombay’s Urban Cinema

Social Research: An International Quarterly, 2011

This essay looks at three films from Bombay that take the issue of terrorism to mediate the lands... more This essay looks at three films from Bombay that take the issue of terrorism to mediate the landscape of conspiracy, surveillance, and the city. The films are Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday (2005), Raj Kumar Gupta's Aamir (2008), and Neeraj Pandey's A Wednesday(2009). All three films belong to a body of cinema that has emerged in relation to what is now commonly referred to as the Multiplex era. The filmmakers belong to a community of cinephiles and are therefore extremely conscious of and dedicated to their craft. These twenty-first century films refer to various terrorist attacks of the last two decades and work with an investigative cartography, staging the city through narratives cluttered with evidentiary details, an aggressive marking and arranging of information, and a constant presence of the visual media as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. Unlike popular melodramas, the films discussed here open out cataclysmic events through reenactments and precision-style un...

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Ranjani Mazumdar

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