Introduction

Abstract

As we celebrate a century of Indian cinema, it seems like an opportune moment to take stock of the continuities as well as breaks that have attended to the formation.¹ A hundred years after D. G. Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra first dazzled Indian audiences (1913), the notion of the figural, we suggest, continues to offer especially fecund points of entry. Consider, for example, the recent Hindi film OMG: Oh My God (2012) in which Bollywood star Akshay Kumar, quite literally, plays god. His new avatar, “Krishna Vasudev Yadav from Gokul,” wears designer suits, speaks in English, and in a particular sequence, watches the proceedings in the world below perched atop a skyscraper, rather like Batman. Like the Marvel superhero, Krishna swoops down the side of the building on a motorized vehicle—a gigantic motorcycle—and, via some rather clunky special effects, rescues the hapless (potential devotee) Kanji Lalji Mehta (Paresh Rawal) from a pursuing mob of would-be assassins. While this particular imbrication of the cosmic and the cosmopolitan may be somewhat novel,² Indian cinema has a long history of locating the transcendental within the everyday, as in early mythologicals and devotionals, and it did so especially by mobilizing a figural mode.