The Spectral Archive: On Bombay Horror with Kartik Nair and Vibhushan Subba
On Saturday, 27 July 2024, ASAP | art organised a discussion with Kartik Nair and Vibhushan Subba on Hindi-language horror films, a form that was cemented through productions of B and C grade cinema, which saw its heyday in the 1980s in India. Also known as ‘Bombay horror’, the films exemplified an era of low-budget productions, furtive distribution and a constant tussle with censorship. Examining the histories and afterlives of Bombay horror, Nair and Subba expanded on their scholarship to consider the many possibilities that lie in a materialist reading of Bombay cinema and its genre histories.
The discussion also considered recent scholarship and writing on horror cinema from India, including Nair’s book Seeing Things (UC Press, 2024). Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched make-up effects, continuity errors and celluloid damage found in these movies. Reading the Bombay horror film industry from its inception in the 1970s until its decline in the 1990s—bracketed between a post-Independence golden era and the current form of global culture industry that is Bollywood—Nair reads such "failures" not just as failure of the films but of the production of history itself. The book reads the films as clues to the conditions in which they were made, censored and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture.
A ‘materialist aesthetics’ of cinema has allowed for many films—both popular and specific genres such as Bombay horror—to be informed by the codes of censorship, budgets (or lack thereof) and a dismissal of the form. To consider the expanded archive of cinema is also to closely read the film as an archive itself. Here, we consider a filmic archive of failures and the material conditions behind a film’s production, the physical forms of censorship, wear and tear that leave its traces onto the film itself. While the production of Bombay horror may have dissipated with the onslaught of “Bollywood,” they are far from disappearing. A sustained afterlife of once-forgotten but cultic films now exists as bootlegged copies uploaded onto video-sharing platforms, the fandom around ‘cult films’ informing individual and often amateur efforts to sustain and grow cinephilia around these films. Through the discussion and responses to the audience’s questions, Nair and Subba enumerated how a consideration for the discarded and junk as well as the unconsidered histories of filmic past also informs our present forms.
Kartik Nair is a professor of film studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. He has a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University, and an M.Phil. in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he began researching 1980s horror cinema. His first book, Seeing Things (UC Press, 2024) which came out earlier this year, explores the production, censorship, and circulation of horror films made in 1980s Bombay.
Vibhushan Subba teaches cinema studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research focuses on marginal filmmaking practices such as low-budget exploitation cinema, cult film studies and digital fan cultures. He is currently working on a book manuscript on low-budget Bombay cinema of the B and C circuit.
(Featured image: Cover of Seeing Things (UC Press, 2024) by Kartik Nair.)
To learn more about ASAP | art’s public programming, watch our previous recordings with Abeer Gupta and Natasha Ginwalla discussing curating in South Asia, Naeem Mohaiemen discussing his book Midnight’s Third Child, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Vazira Zamindar and Shuddhabrata Sengupta discussing How Secular is Art?, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha discussing his book John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky.
To learn more about cinema made in India during this period, read Silpa Mukherjee’s essays on 3D experiments on celluloid and the arrival of the video moment.
