[Urbanstudy] Bunty Aur Babli-Framework, Analysis

[pawas bisht]

Hi, 

We are part of the Student Research Stipendship Program and our 
research is titled “Situating ‘Small Town’ Desire: Space and Memory in Bunty Aur 
Babli”
This is our first posting and we’d like to chart out a framework, flagging briefly the key 
coordinates that will structure our examination of the text. Operating within the outlined 
framework there is a brief analysis of some of the opening sequences of the film and at 
the end there is a list of probable questions for a questionnaire, we are preparing. 
Comments and suggestions are eagerly sought on both the framework and the 
questionnaire.

Regards,
Pawas Bisht and Sukanya Sen


Cinema and Space

Celebrating the “spatial turn” in social and cultural theory since the 1970’s, Mark Shiel 
and Tony Fitzmaurice in the introduction to their book, Cinema and the City- Film and 
Urban Societies in a Global Context, posit cinema as a peculiarly spatial form of culture.

Mapping cinema through the organization of space, two aspects present themselves:

“
Space in films- the space of the shot; the space of the narrative setting; the 
geographical relationship of various settings in a sequence in a film; the mapping of a 
lived environment on film
”

“
Films in space- the shaping of lived urban spaces by cinema as a cultural practice; the 
spatial organization of its industry at the levels of production, distribution, and exhibition; 
the role of cinema in globalisation.” 

Both these aspects will be examined in the course of our research, which will attempt to 
understand,

” how relations of power and discipline are inscribed onto the apparently innocent 
spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology 
(Soja, 1989)” 

and through the examination of a particular filmic text (Bunty Aur Babli),  

“how power and discipline are spatially inscribed into cultural texts and into the spatial 
organization of cultural production (Shiel and Fitzmaurice, 2001)”




Cinema and the City

The “spatial turn” in social and cultural theory coincided with an intensified recognition 
within film studies, of the city (and the city-film) as the archetypal ground for 
examination of visual and sensory experience, form and style, perception, cognition, and 
the meaning of the filmic image and filmic text. 

Tracing back the link between cinema and the city, much of film theory ends up at Walter 
Benjamin's much discussed and much debated metaphor for urban modernity, the flaneur, 
whose wandering scopophilia emerges with the conditions and landscape of the 
metropolis and predicts the perceptive mode and apparatus of the film camera.

The “swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” that characterizes the 
metropolis for Simmel and the 'experiences offered by the flickering, virtual presence of 
the city' highlight a shared language. The language spoken by film is not just a new “form 
language”- it is the language of the city.

The cinema clearly not only represented the changes of modern urban life, it also 
provided a new perceptual framework through which it could be articulated. 

(This argument is qualified by the historical coincidence between the invention of 
moving pictures and explosive urbanization in the last decades of the 19th century- a 
happy coincidence of historically specific events)

The city symphonies, Walter Ruttmann’s, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: 
Symphony of a Great City, 1927), tracing a day of urban activity in Berlin, Dziga 
Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera, chronicling Moscow, Jean Vigo and Boris 
Kaufman’s A propos de Nice (On the Subject of Nice, 1930) certainly affirm and attest 
this relationship.

What is interesting, however about these early city films, in the context of the present 
research and discussion, is the fact that these very first cinematic representations of the 
city already carried within them an element of critique.

They have however been read as failures at a critical analysis of the city, city life or 
modernity representing instead a fascination evidenced by a series of images that simply 
reflect, rather than comment upon, the city. These have been read as failures of 
modernity’s desire to see everything, to exorcise the uncanny, to make everything 
transparent, in part because the camera and the metropolis itself were the protagonists of 
the film. The camera became an instrument for amusement only.  For example, 
Ruttman’s emphasis in promoting his film on the formal innovation of its rapid montage, 
designed to capture the speed of life in the city, was criticized by Siegfried Kracauer for 
failing to look below the surface of the city and distinguish between technological 
development in the city and its representation.

Since then the city has been a constant preoccupation of cinema and there has been an 
easy equation of modernity with the metropolis.
At the risk of gross simplification the cinematic representations of the city might be 
broadly divided into two categories Utopian or Dystopian.

The Case of Bunty Aur Babli

We’ll trace out the cinematic representation of the city over time and across genres in our 
next posting, especially exploring the spatial binary: city-small town, city-country with 
particular emphasis on Indian cinema. 
This is particularly important because Bunty Aur Babli is a text that displays a degree of 
self-reflexivity and is consciously in a dialogue with past cinematic representations. This 
dialogue is not in terms of mere nods, quotations or songs from earlier films, but is 
reflected in an intelligent condensation of a whole tradition of cinematic representation 
that allows the film to lay out its characters and conflicts with great economy, clarity and 
resonance- as the films popularity affirms.
The fact that the characters and the title “Bunty Aur Babli” have entered the lexicon and 
popular discourse suggests that the film has been able to cleverly tap into conflicts, 
dilemmas and dreams that have at least a popular imaginative resonance. 
Any examination of desire, space, memory and representation in the filmic text would 
have to begin by first identifying this larger idea, conceptual or belief system, abstract 
value, opinion, prejudice, narrative or fantasy that the film has been able to tap into.
And a very good answer is the coexistence and conflict between “the dynamics of 
modernity and tradition.”


Modernity and Tradition: Coexistence and Conflict

M. Madhava Prasad in his book, The Ideology of the Hindi Film- A Historical 
Construction, locates the specificity of Indian Cinema in what he terms the “the 
ideology of formal subsumption”, and further posits at the centre of this ideology 
“an ideologeme - whose conceptual expression most frequently takes the form of 
the co-existence of modernity and tradition”

The notion of an ideologeme-loosely defined as “the minimal unit of class 
discourse” is particularly helpful in discussing cinema because of its susceptibility 
to ‘to both a conceptual description-as a pseudo idea, belief, value, opinion or 
prejudice and as a narrative manifestation-a fantasy about collective characters, 
all at once. ( Jameson, The Political Unconscious,1981)

Prasad argues that the binary modernity/ tradition, whether employed to indicate conflict 
or complementarity, amounts to an explanation, “a conceptual or belief system” which 
regulates thinking about the modern Indian social formation. At the same time the binary 
also figures centrally both thematically and as an organizing device, in popular film 
narratives.

The disavowal of modernity on the ideological plane- co-exists with the contrary drive to 
modernization and the establishment of bourgeois hegemony. And there is a state of 
uneasy equilibrium between these two dynamics.
Spatially this dynamic has often manifested itself in a split between the city and the 
countryside or the city and the small town. In our subsequent postings we’ll be examining 
this spatial binary in cinematic representations within the modernity-tradition framework.

In Bunty Aur Babli, this ideologeme of the co-existence and conflict between modernity 
and tradition manifests itself most completely right from the opening sequence.

Analysis of the Opening Sequence


The Big City- Abstraction

The film opens with a clockwise pan of the Mumbai skyline gleaming in the blue of the 
late evening. We are out on the sea, looking at a city of lights beckoning us towards it, 
surrounding us on all sides- vast, silent, alluring- an abstraction. Amitabh Bachchan’s 
voice tells us, 

“This is India. Gleaming, glittering, beckoning you, ‘Come to me if you have a dream. 
Come and fulfil it. Are you hungry for success? Come to me. Fortune, fame and power 
will befriend you and your life will be transformed into a never-ending golden dream.’ 
Yes this is India. The India of Bunty and Babli’s dreams.”

The camera lingers lovingly on the city, skimming the surface of the gently rolling sea, it 
expresses a fascination with the vastness of this alluring entity that completely fills the 
frame. The sun, the moon, and the sea are elements that are subservient to the city-framed 
by the camera as its playful companions. The sequence ends with an anti-clockwise pan 
that turns into whipping streaks of the blue of the sky and the sea, divided by the black, 
yellow and red of the glowing city. The city is rendered into a complete abstraction-of 
speed and light and colour. A dream city. There are only seven cuts in the minute long 
sequence and there’s a repetition of the same basic elements- the skyline, the distant 
buildings and lights, the sea, the sun, the moon.

Presented as the India where dreams come alive, as a space of opportunities, a space 
promising fulfilment and happiness-the city can only be presented as an abstraction of 
speed, lights and colour- the teeming humanity that it contains is necessarily excluded.
It’s an abstraction of modernity. 


Plunging Into “the small town”


This is immediately juxtaposed with the “reality” of Bunty and Babli’s lives.

The camera rises slowly above a torn kite stuck in an old-fashioned television antenna. It 
rises above the roofs of the low houses spread out along the riverside. The minute long 
sequence of the small town is divided into thirty shots. We see everything from goats, 
naked children, dark galis, old gates, small shops, craftsmen, dirty ghats, policeman, 
army cyclists, women at prayers, mendicants, louts, holy men, trains, kites and more 
goats. We do not see “a small town” we see “the small town”. The film names them- by 
photographing the milestones- Lucknow, Bulandshahar, Banda, Mirzapur, Agra, 
Rishikesh. They are the names on the highway you zip by on your way to the big city. 
Fursatganj and Pankinagar are “the small-towns”- constructed with the fragments of all 
these separate spaces.
The camera here moves right into the heart of the town-since it can rise above it and 
master it visually in a single gaze- it does not have the fear of being overwhelmed. This is 
a space that is easy to dissect.
The dream space of the city might have come crashing down upon such a dissection, but 
here this fragmentation is mastered by the accompanying monologue, making sure 
everything fits into its proper place. 

The monologue defines this space for us,
“This is the space of small dreams, of small lives, of small needs. Progress can only be 
collective. Honesty, respect, and the brotherhood are the cherished values. Yes, this too is 
India. This is the India where Bunty and Babli grew up and where they felt stifled” 

The sequence includes a shot of the sun going down but there are no glittering lights and 
beautiful blue evenings for the small town, remarkably even for a small town, there are 
no lights at all-absolute darkness.

The film succeeds in presenting the City- Small Town dichotomy with a great economy. 
In the opening two minutes-it has not only managed create and present physically the two 
spaces but has also succeeded in assigning them the values, which correspond to the 
modernity-tradition framework proposed by Prasad.

It has also managed to immediately suggest the central conflict of the film spatially- 
without even moving into the characters or their specific stories.
The conflict suggested spatially is immediately reinforced by the song (Dhadak 
Dhadak
) that follows the opening sequence introducing us to the characters and 
their dreams and further by the very first interactions that introduce us to the protagonists 
and their families.

The song is a tightly packed segment- visually dense and needs a detailed analysis, along 
with a textual analysis of the lyrics. This will follow in subsequent postings. 

The confrontations of the protagonists with their families- Rakesh’s “chit-fund” schemes 
rebel against his father’s life of respectable drudgery and Vimmi’s “beauty queen” 
dreams come up against a boring marriage to a dull clerk. Both these sequences reaffirm 
the modernity-tradition framework and will be analysed in subsequent postings. How the 
film spatially presents their escape from their predicament will also be analysed.

Memory and Space will be tackled in a subsequent posting, which will also analyse the 
potential of cinema to preserve the identity-forming collective memory- examining the 
particular text in question. 


A comparative analysis will also be attempted with other contemporary films about small town life like “Main Meri Patni Aur Woh” and “Main Madhuri Dixit Banana Chahti Hoon”.
---





We are planning a screening of the film followed by a focus group discussion involving 
students in Jamia Millia Islamia University campus (many of them come from small 
towns in Northern India). These are some of the questions, which we thought could 
structure the discussion. We will be happy to receive any suggestions.


Questionnaire- Bunty Aur Babli


1.	Do you identify with Bunty/ Babli?
2.	Are they real? Do you think they are an accurate representation of the dreams, 
aspirations and anxieties of the youth in the smaller towns of India or do you 
think they are stereotypes?
3.	Can you think of any other cinematic representations that were more accurate 
both in terms of characters and spaces?
4.	Did you enjoy the film?
5.	Did you enjoy it more because it was filmed in spaces that you are familiar with? 
Was there a special kind of joy in identifying the “real-lived spaces” within the 
film?
6.	Were the representations of these spaces accurate?
7.	Were they unchanged within the film-were they as you “remembered” them?
8.	If they had were changed, what did you feel about these changes?
9.	Were you excited about revisiting these spaces after seeing the film? Did you try 
and relive/recreate the experiences of the protagonists of the film? Were you 
successful? Were you disappointed?
10.	Do you agree with the presentation of Mumbai/ the big city as the space offering 
opportunities and fulfilment?
11.	Do you agree with the Amitabh Bachchan monologue at the beginning of the film 
about life in small towns? What is your response?
12.	Would you say that the kind of conflict that is portrayed between the aspirations 
of the youth and the ideals of the older generations in the film, exists in small 
towns?
13.	Did the film change how you viewed your town?
14.	Do you think it has changed how other people view small towns?
15.	Have people begun to refer to you as Bunty or Babli after the film? If they are 
using these names, in what context are they using it- what are they referring to?
16.	Do you like or resent this nomenclature? 








 
 
 



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