D Ravi S. Vasudevan 24. Hindustan Times, 7 May 1995. 25. Pioneer, 9 April 1995. Thackeray also noted that actors like Mcona Kumari, Dilip Kumar and Madhubala were Muslims and no one had objected when they took Hindu names. This again fits the rules of a Hindu nationalist hegemony, in which it is perfectly acceptable that minority negate their identity and assume the majority one. ..- 26. Cf. Javed Akhtar's eloquent elaboration of the problem of popular cinema's inability to represent Hindu-Muslim romance: 'This is actually part of a larger taboo area in popular cinema.... The real taboo is that a high-caste Hindu girl will never be shown marrying an outcaste boy. Never. If at all the great caste divide has to be bridged, it will be done via a high-caste boy falling in love with an outcaste girl as in Achoot Kanya, Sujaata or Parineeta. Similarly, the one who rebels against the Hindu-Muslim divide will never be the Hindu woman, it will be the Hindu man. Ratnam's Bombay bears this out.' The Great Evasion', Times of India, Sunday Review, 23 April 1995. 27. The other side of this indulgence is the hero's offer to give up his religion to compensate for his father's attitude. The offer is a gesture rather than a belief, and so does not compromise the modem transcendance of religious identity. 28. Sadanand Menon, 'Bombay is political dnema at its best!'. Economic Times, 16 April 1995. 29. For a suggestive consideration of the problems surrounding the distinction between public and private in the constitution of the Indian cinema, see the work of Madhava Prasad, e.g., 'Cinema and the desire for modernity'. Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 25-26,1994. 30. Lenseye, 'Truth or dare'. Times of India, Sunday Review, 2 April 1995. 31. Iqbal Masud, 'A Damp Squib', Indian Express, 14 May 1995. Masud castigates Mani Ratnam for not being able to understand and represent Muslim culture; one wonders if this is not to mistake the project of the film. Strangely, he advises viewers to see Nana Patekar in Krantiveer (1994) for a better representation of the riots. To my mind this is a film which underwrites Hindu male authority much more brutally than Bombay. 32. Peter Brooks, The melodramatic imagination: Balzac, Henry James, melodrama and the mode of excess. New York,1985. 33. This is of course followed by the much more ambiguous and for me repulsive act of Shekhar cutting Shailabano's arm for a blood-bonding. 34. But, unlike Roja, it is not primarily a Tamil film. In its conception from the outset as a multiple version film, it is a new type of film which is also an old one, harking back to the 1930s practices. A more considered analysis of this feature is necessary to situate the film market as a critical component in Mani Ratnam's 'nation'. 35. For a remarkable examination of this phenomenon, see En Uyir Thozhan (Bharatiraja, 1989), introduced to me by Venkatesh Chakravarthy. 36. Cf., for example, Dincsh Mohan, 'Imitative suicides?' and Harsh Sethi, 'Many unexplained issues: the anti-Mandal "suicides" spate', in Manushi, 63-64, March-June 1991, pp. 31-33 and 69-72. 37. There is, of course, an important difference in the structure of the act. Instead of inflicting hurt on himself, the hero invites others to burn him, colouring the projected negation with an emphasis on difference from the socially given self. 38. Significantly, the Muslim is a modern too, one who has denied rationality but can be recovered into it; the hero and the extremist leader can speak the same language, not only Tamil, but intellectually, too. 39. 'Bombay is political cinema at its best!' 40. Asghar Ali Engineer, 'A controversial film on Bombay riots'. Mainstream, 6 May 1995, p. 6. Number 29