Untimely Bollywood is in a sense a philosophical “encounter,” inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and a host of other kindred theorists (e.g., Henri Bergson, Lalitha Gopalan, Félix Guattari), with contemporary Bollywood. Bollywood—the informal term popularly used for the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, India—is known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines. Indian audiences especially gravitate to what are called “masala” movies, so-called for the spice mixture. Masala movies have everything: song and dance, love interest, comedy, and thrilling action, all spicily mixed up. That Amit S. Rai focuses on “untimely” Bollywood signals his intent to privilege Deleuze's notion of “becoming.” Deleuze, the first important philosopher to write on cinema with detailed attention, is quoted by Rai thus: “There are two ways of considering events: to follow the course of the event, or to take one's place in it as in a becoming… . Becoming isn't part of history; history amounts [to] only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the ‘untimely’” (p. vii).
Channeling Deleuze and his later collaborator Guattari, Rai explains his decade-in-the-making project: “I wrote Untimely Bollywood as an act of joy, struggle, critique and creation. Its basic assumption throughout is that the regime of representation—the arbitrary sign so dear to contemporary literary and cultural critiques—has begun to fracture, fray, wobble. What will take its place? The wager of this book and my ongoing research is that forms of (capitalist and non-capitalist) media mutation are felt perceptually, bodily and that these ecologies of sensation (body + media + energy) will draw contemporary criticism to creatively engage with the nonlinear life of the new media, not just in India, but globally. This creative engagement will be a form of what I am calling (after Lucretius and Prigogine) ‘clinamedia’” (http://www.english.fsu.edu/news/arai.html).
Rai interprets Bollywood in a manner true to the belief that we live today in the age of partial objects, where seeming wholes are actually shattered to bits and bytes. Rai especially deploys the concept of “assemblage.” An assemblage is the dynamic interconnection of congruent singularities that remove the subject/object interface, yet retain elements of specificity; a singularity is the specificity of a particular component or assemblage, that is, its special, distinctive quality, as well as its infinite potential. He necessarily grounds his interpretations in his own experiences and fieldwork to understand Bollywood cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure.
Rai further extends his interpretation to a critique of capitalist enterprises in new media, focusing, for instance, on insurance, piracy, new modes of media consumption, the development of “malltiplexes” in India, and global marketing. Indeed, the mutability and “viral” nature of marketing in this new world of digital media lead him to interpret media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading. To illustrate these theories, Rai provides narrative examples to explicate his key concepts drawn from his fieldwork, including interesting vignettes of colorful characters such as the “cosmopolitan DJ,” a Sharukh Khan fan(atic), and even a queer diasporic grandson of a prominent Delhi talkie owner.
The audience for this type of book will be at once limited and diverse. To understand what Rai is attempting to say about the outcomes generated by the “intuitive shock” that led him to adopt a “method of diagramming nonlinear processes of an assemblage” (p. 3) requires drinking prodigious quantities of Deleuzean Kool-Aid. So long as a person is sufficiently buzzed and experienced, the book may intrigue. And the topics in Untimely Bollywood are diverse. The book will intrigue scholars of Indian cinema, modern India, and globalism.
Rai discusses changing trends in Bollywood: jump cuts, faster narratives, extracted song sequences never simply resembling but diverging from each other (p. 212). As a technophiliac, I found fascinating Rai's points on how to understand the nature of digital inventions such as the MPEG, BitTorrent, cryptography, Dolby digital sound forms, and Virtual Reality Modeling Language. And, of course, he uses Deleuze to explicate engagement with these newer modes of digital technology—perhaps you could call his “Clinamedia” Deleuze 2.0. Deleuze, like Bergson, understands cinematic images as movement-images, flowing-matter. In Deleuze's interpretation, frames move on the screen via a projector and flickering movements of light, with the viewer's eyes moving as “mobile machines” that modify and reflect the film's movement-images. The human “living image” that encounters the film turns virtual movement-images into actual, intensive movements. In Untimely Bollywood, Rai explains how these new media function as movement-images/flowing-matter, and in so doing, he updates Deleuze's concepts of anomaly, becoming, and machinic assemblages within the context of Bollywood. And if that last sentence sounds intriguing, this book may be for you.
