Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay by Samhita Sunya (review)

Reviewed by: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay by Samhita Sunya Rakesh Sengupta (bio) Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay by Samhita Sunya University of California Press. 2022. 270 pages. $34.95 paper; also available in open access e-book. The globality of Hindi cinema is often an anecdotal entry point into alternative internationalisms. When Indians based in cosmopolitan spaces of the Global North strike up a conversation with fellow emigrants from Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East, the discussion is likely to revolve around their mutual fondness for Hindi cinema, its stars, and its songs. Oral and anecdotal histories of Hindi cinema's popularity in non-Anglophone parts of the world abound in such multicultural encounters in the West. Nonetheless, these auto-ethnographic accounts rarely inform the theoretical basis for research in film studies where the influence of Holly-wood, European arthouse, and international festival cinema largely continues to obscure other transnational flows and fandoms. Samhita Sunya's recent book, Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, addresses this lacuna, one sustained by archival challenges as well as scholarly disdain for Hindi cinema's formal, capital, and libidinal excesses.1 Understandably, Sunya's book returns to some of the foundational concepts and theories of film studies to reorient our understanding of how ideas of world cinema, cinephilia, gender, excess, and circulation might operate and interrelate outside of a bipolar world order. At the very outset, Sunya deploys an eccentric Hindi song called "Akira Kurosawa" to tease out broader [End Page 190] questions about Hindi cinema's contemporaneity with postwar art cinema in the 1960s while also inquiring into its political accountability as a mass cultural form.2 The transnational and the regional are mutually constitutive vectors operating in the backdrop of Cold War–era worldmaking as well as secessionist movements in postcolonial India. Sunya also discusses the traffic of ideas across the Bombay and Madras film industries in that decade, which anticipates the rest of the book's investment in the underexplored traffic of personnel, capital, and technology across these regional industries. In chapter 1, Sunya opens the discussion of world cinema through "problems and possibilities of distribution in translation," with a critical emphasis on how the category of world cinema excluded commercial Indian films despite their extensive circulation in "not only the Indian Ocean regions of East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and Southeast Asia but also Fiji, the Caribbean, Central Asia, West Asia, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and East Asia."3 The constricted geography of world cinema, Sunya argues, was a result of "auteur-derived nationality and unity" as well as "racialized, (neo)colonial hierarchies" of spectatorship.4 The idealization of film spectators as literate and cosmopolitan was adopted in reformist state discourses of "film appreciation" as well.5 Additionally, Sunya excavates an interesting history of the establishment of the Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation (IMPEC) in 1963, which aimed to nationalize overseas distribution and regulate commercial cinema's circulation in the image of the state.6 The film song was paradoxically decried as the most unexportable element of an Indian film, but Sunya shows how, on the contrary, it was often the most beloved constituent of a film for audiences overseas. The author offers a much-needed corrective to such civilizing discourses through her meticulous study of the disaggregated Indian film text that offers no authorial or national unity. She also vindicates the "willingly seduced spectator" whose "cinephilic reciprocities" create a more agential understanding of commercial film audiences.7 Chapter 2 historicizes the topos of prem nagar (city of love) in Bombay film songs, whose anti-caste utopian origins lie in the folk songs and poetry of saint-mystics such as Kabir in the fifteenth century and Bulleh Shah in the eighteenth. The author's encyclopedic knowledge of Hindi film song lyrics and careful attention toward their textual genealogies show how the lyrical trope of prem nagar in Bombay cinema reveals a unique utopianism vis-à-vis its postcolonial possibilities and capitalist excesses, contributing to "an alternate formation of the progressive that ensues out of participatory cinephilic engagements."8 The concept of "love-as-cinephilia," despite its seemingly plain trappings, seeks to explore...