Body

Abstract

The body is a contested site that can mobilise an array of historically, culturally and socially specific meanings. While legal regimes conceive of bodies as fixed entities, they are malleable and respond to the social and ideological conditions that shape them. Varying scales of normativity and visibility make the body simultaneously a performative projection of desires and aspirations, and a space where the friction between tradition and modernity plays out. Embodied performances and practices become crucial to understanding the materiality of social arrangements that surround us, particularly those of power, relative privileges and knowledge systems (Foucault, 1978/1990). Here, the body is both a certain kind of biopolitical imaginary (an idea) as well as an ocular surface on which these imaginaries are played out (a form of visuality or representation). Bodily signifiers can also hint at a desiring subject shaped by commodified fantasies (Mazumdar, 2007; Ramamurthy, 2006). The body then can be read as a series of sedimented layers of signification (Schneider, 1997, p. 4) that are ruptured and mediated by varied extraneous factors (Sen & Basu, 2013). In the South Asian context, the body is a forcefield of caste, gender and class relations, as well as histories of colonial oppression which condition how they are represented and narrativised. These hierarchies often determine what kind of bodies are allowed to take up screen space (and time), tying represented bodies to the social worlds from where they emerge. Cinematic conventions of frontality, song and dance sequences (Iyer, 2015; Mukherjee, 2018b), and fight sequences (Vitali, 2008) employ the actor’s body for specific ends. For instance, the display of physical agility and male muscularity has been shown to appeal to a range of transnational as well as nonmetropolitan, local desires (Bose, 2013; Ghosh, 2020), while the normalisation of the aesthetics of whiteness has helped make seemingly ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’ female bodies palatable for the Indian audience (Basu, 2013; Chatterjee, 2017; Osuri, 2008; Rahman Niazi, 2018). The ideological proclivity to pronounce certain bodies as inadmissible within the realm of pleasurable film viewing creates exceptional figures who deviate from normative expectations. For example, the overweight female body of Tun Tun has been exploited as a repository of humour as such fat bodies can only fit certain imaginations of grotesqueness or ludicrousness in the hegemonic imagination (Sinha, 2017). Or certain bodies – disabled bodies and lower-caste bodies for example – disappear in the