India’s superhero recreations: inhabiting the Elseworld of Malegaon’s Superman

ABSTRACT This essay explores how Mollywood cinema mediates trauma in the Malegaon region, with a focus on the superhero spoof genre. Mollywood, native to the town of Malegaon in Maharashtra, India is a highly localised film industry infamous for its low budget DIY aesthetic, with its products often being reduced to their ‘ironic’ spoof value. I argue that films like Malegaon ka Superman/Malegaon’s Superman (2009) are in fact successful adaptations for a local market, which reimagine an international franchise for their cultural contexts, thereby adding to the ‘thick text’ of the transnational canon of globally recognised characters. Following the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992, the region continues to experience the ongoing legacy of political conflict, religious violence and economic depression. This essay outlines how Malegaon ka Superman confronts this legacy of violence and poverty, and the impact on the community. I explore how the film weaves the popular lore of Superman and the canon of Superman from Hollywood into the Bollywood narrative tradition, to create a hybridised product for the Mollywood market. Alongside the transnational processes involved in adapting a global franchise for a specialised cultural context, including an address to the disruptions and disconnections from the ‘original’ text, this paper will also reveal how such adaptations offer a means of negotiating trauma for local audiences.