I am grateful for the responses to my essay on “repeat viewing” by Kabir, Mazumdar, and Wong, each of whom offers a sympathetic critical response, pointing to ways of elaborating and complicating my argument about the relationship of repetition to difference in Bollywood films. In this comment I stress issues of genre, history, and context.
Ranjani Mazumdar offers a subtle and generous improvisatory line of thought in her response to me, which centers on the role of the films of the 1960s in subsequent Bollywood productions. This fascinating suggestion leads her to the foundational insight that the relationship between repetition and difference itself has an archive, in fact a meta-archive, composed of elements of films from the sixties: the stars, the songs, the scenography, the sets, the story lines, and so on. This meta-archive adds an outer frame to the inner frame provided by song and story and opens the intra-filmic structure of memory to the broader extra-filmic horizon of history. This movement from memory to history also opens another path leading from the pleasures of repetition with a difference in film viewing to the anxieties of history without difference in the struggle to modernize India.
The relationship between the micro-temporalities of filmic experience and the macro-temporalities of history has not been engaged much previously, except through the narrow lens of thematic content or through the overly literal lens of political economy. What this discussion suggests is a subtler way to see how filmic and historical experience frame and reframe each other, through their respective and interactive ways of handling the way in which repetition and difference generate the possibility of the new. In the special relationship of repetition to the formula, the hit and the remembered viewing in Bollywood film culture, there is also a transformation (through repetition) in regard to space, as Indian trains are replaced by Eurail, Indian settings by European ones and the national mise-en-scene by the global. Thus, Ranjani Mazumdar’s response also prompts me to think that there is potential future value in examining the logic of repetition and difference as one that pertains not only to time but also to space.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s spirited response likewise invites us to look more closely at the relationship between repetition and difference as playing out differently in different socio-historical circumstances. She deftly captures my argument about how Deleuze’s ideas repetition can cast new light on repeat viewing in Hindi cinema culture because of the ways in which songs and story play a contrapuntal role in regard to percussion and melody, with percussion providing the element of repetition and narrative the element of innovation. What her own knowledge of African and Afro-Caribbean forms of percussion enables her to note is that they rely on different musical sensibilities, with the South Asian mode preferring convergence and the Afro-Caribbean mode preferring divergence, in the way in which percussion plays with layered and superimposed timelines, as in the “call and response” structure. This observation makes a great deal of sense to me and converges with Ranjani Mazumdar’s observations about the wider recall of prior cinematic decades as a frame for the subsequent micro-recall of specific filmic elements and genres. In both cases, my own argument is drawn into a wider context.
Kabir’s invocation of the Afro-Caribbean mode of repetition and recall as taking on a different shape than it does in Indic patterns of recall, remembrance, and repetition opens me to address a wider dilemma and debate in postcolonial studies between approaches emerging out of the Latin American experience (notably those associated with the “decolonial” turn) and those emerging from India, especially those associated with Subaltern studies. As many of us are aware, this tension partly reflects the difference between the five-hundred-year arc of the European presence in the Caribbean and the much shorter experience of European rule in South Asia, which has no equivalent history before the middle of the eighteenth century. This difference is also a product of the distinction between the preindustrial motivations of Spanish and Portuguese kings, missionaries, and navigators in the years between 1500 and 1800, and the industrial logic of the British, Dutch, and French imperial ventures of the post-Enlightenment world. This difference in economic regimes, religious ideologies, and imperial terrains in the Old and New Worlds produced very different logics of indigeneity, conversion, creolization, and decolonization in these two worlds. Today these differences are also played out in the intellectual struggles between the decolonial and postcolonial approaches to emancipation in the wake of European rule in the colonies.
It may be, following Kabir, that we can draw on the ways in which percussion works differentially in the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean traditions to find a new way to connect the histories (and historiographies) of European dominion in South Asia and in the Afro-Atlantic worlds. Sometimes the differences seem to overwhelm our impulse to connect, compare, and cotheorize these two spatiotemporal forms. Perhaps the eccentric lens of percussion, performance, and pleasure can help us out of this impasse. And here I draw on a rather unlikely source, an essay by the anthropologist Rodney Needham (1967) in which he tried to explain why noise that is produced by striking or shaking associated in many societies throughout the world, especially in small scale societies, is associated with efforts to communicate with the other world.
After a careful effort to define the core of the problem, in the most precise possible cross-cultural terms, Needham decides that it is percussion, not melody or rhythm, that is the key characteristic of these noise-making forms. He further shows that the common object of these percussive forms is not communication with the other world, but is a more general feature of all rites of passage, namely transition. So, Needham ends his provocative essay (very much inspired by a certain brand of anthropological structuralism) with a hypothesis of startling simplicity, which he does not claim to have fully understood: “There is a connexion between percussion and transition” (613).
When I read Kabir’s response to my essay, I was reminded of this 1967 essay by Needham, which I had always found strangely fascinating, not least for its modesty in claiming so little for his insight about percussion and transition. I now see that Needham’s insight can provide a useful way to look at my own argument about repetition and difference in Bollywood and Kabir’s valuable suggestion that percussion can have different patterned structures in different socio-historical settings. It is relatively easy to realize that transition or passage is virtually the central trope for the experience of Black people subjected to European power in the Afro-Atlantic world, notably in the slave economies. Transition and passage were the perennial backdrops of the slave experience, the always present possibilities even in the context of confinement in plantations. Thus it is possible to appreciate how percussion in Afro-Caribbean musical forms could serve as a creative subversion of the cruelties of forced transition. But what about repeat viewing in Bollywood? What does percussion have to do with transition in this case?
For Indian film-goers, too, transition is a perennial and ubiquitous condition. They are frequently in transition between rural and urban backgrounds. They frequently have transitional (even ephemeral) jobs, houses, and possessions. They are also told that they are the citizens of a nation in perennial transition, notably in the permanent transition to an ever-remote modernity. This transitional condition is most markedly the case for poor, vulnerable, and subaltern populations, which account for at least 50 percent of film audiences in India, where the middle classes and the rich still constitute an emergent reality. Poverty or the prospect of poverty is the lived experience of the indigent, subaltern, and even working classes in urban and semi-urban India. This is not a world of plantation slavery, but it is a world of discrimination, dispossession, and systemic violence. It is certainly a world of permanent transition.
In this setting, it is possible to see that the relationship between repetition and difference, reconceived as the relation between percussion and transition, can fit into the wider connection that Needham saw between noise and rites of passage in small-scale societies throughout the world. Needham did not have the skills or training to examine different patterns and traditions of percussion (in the way that Kabir proposes) nor did he have a capacious understanding of transition. But his insight does allow us to open a broader and deeper analysis of the relationship between percussion and transition as features of performance and entertainment cultures, especially in the global south.
Repetition and difference not only vary in different historical settings, they also work differently in different artistic genres as Troy Thomas Wong so provocatively suggests in his response to my essay. Wong offers a meditation on the relationship between reading (books), viewing (films), and seeing (paintings), taking off from Nabokov’s epigrammatic observation that all readings of books are in fact rereadings because we have no organ that can read and grasp a book in one swoop, unlike our capacity to “see” a painting immediately, completely, and all at once. Wong implies that my own Deleuzian take on repeat viewing of films in India could be seen as a midpoint between the characteristics of seeing and reading as Nabokov views them. Wong then goes on to offer a richly suggestive discussion of the relationship between artist, art student, and art viewer, which I will not directly address in this short response.
Picking up on Wong’s insight from Nabokov prompts me to reflect on genres of viewing, seeing, and reading and on how they might create a specific fabric of inter-generic experiences in postcolonialist, developmentalist nations like India. Indian film viewers are also readers, of books, of newspapers, of magazines, as well as of letters and other written materials. They are not viewers of paintings (in the contemporary museum/gallery sense) but they do “see” billboards, advertisements, political posters, and other visual objects that they can grasp in a single look. What we do not understand is the way that the experience of film viewing, of the seeing of static visual objects, and the reading of newspapers, magazines, and other printed materials, cohabit to produce hybrid cultures of repetition and difference in India.
In this respect, we are in uncharted territory because there is not yet any theory of how the different genres (of reading, viewing, and seeing) coexist in different cultural settings, and we are even further from understanding how they build on different logics of the relationship between repetition and difference. This is a space worthy of serious collective effort. It does not simply hold promise for understanding the cultures of seeing, viewing, and reading in a global perspective. It also holds promise for the study of nationhood, globalization, imitation, and innovation in the world after empire because readers and viewers are also voters, workers, students, and activists. These are not separate worlds, and the future of democratic politics lies in a better understanding of the recollections, revisitations, and reformulations that connect them.
