The Bengali novel originated in the nineteenth century as a product of the colonial encounter, though it drew upon a multiplicity of literary traditions, indigenous as well as foreign. Like its counterpart in Europe, it is linked to the social, domestic and intellectual aspirations of a new bourgeoisie, the spread of print culture, the growth of urban centres and the formation of a middle-class readership hungry for novelty and diversion. But the conditions for its inception and development in colonial Bengal are clearly distinct from those of eighteenth-century Europe, making the novel both witness to and participant in the creation of a distinctly Indian modernity. In its representational function, it records not just the self-imposed compulsions of this process, but its fissures and uncertainties, opening up a space for moral, emotional and intellectual debate. At the same time, it becomes the site for an entirely new set of experiments with literary language and the techniques of representation.

Print, the public sphere and public culture

The coming of print and the consequent opening up of the public sphere is clearly the inaugural moment of this history. The first Bengali typefaces precede the novel by little more than half a century, with the publication of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed's A Grammar of the Bengal Language at Hooghly in 1778, using moveable metal type designed by Charles Wilkins. From 1800 onwards, missionary activity at Serampore and the establishment of the College of Fort William make printing in Bengali a necessary part of the colonial project, and contribute to the development of discursive prose through early narratives such as the Raja Pratapaditya Charitra (1801) composed by Ramram Basu for his students at Fort William.

The Neo-Russian style

To assert that a particular historical moment marks the beginning of a particular cultural movement is a hazardous proposition inasmuch as any such moment is only one link in a chain of preceding and subsequent conditions that characterize or define such a movement. However, while precedents to, and consequences of, a “magic moment” (e.g. 1917) can always be found, there is often a constellation of events and circumstances that hastens or emphasizes what may have been a latent action, giving rise to its manifestation as a cultural expression (e.g. constructivism after the October Revolution) and there is at least a conventional wisdom in pursuing this method. The decade of the 1850s is such a moment, for it marked an important juncture in the evolution of Russian culture and gives us a strategic date for establishing a division between what could be called the “classical” and “modern” eras of the Russian visual arts.

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the Russian school of painting and sculpture, as opposed to the Moscow and regional schools of icon painting, had been centered in St. Petersburg, where the Imperial Academy of Arts held sway, supporting the neo-classical, idealist canon. Distant from the wellsprings of native culture, the St. Petersburg Academy had elaborated its artistic ideal according to the techniques and aesthetic canons of classical antiquity and cultivated the models set by the old masters.

The first thing to say about comics – plural in form, used with a singular verb – is that it is a medium, not a genre. While comics has often been understood to be a lowbrow genre it is increasingly recognised as a powerful form of expression and communication in its own right, fashioning words and images, and, crucially, panels and ‘gutters’, on the printed page. In technical terms, panels are the framed moments in which a comics story unfolds, and they are separated by the blank space of the gutter, a space that allows the reader to project causality between frames. As for any medium, such as film, it is now standard to treat comics as singular. And, like other media, comics has given rise to a variety of different formats – including comic strips, comic books and graphic novels – and also a profusion of genres, from superhero and war stories to teen romances. However, while there is a booming commercial (i.e. genre-based) comics market, today the form is remarkably unconstrained by genre expectations. Comics narratives exist in spaces both esoteric, as in the recent growth of the abstract comics movement, and wholly public, such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, and Frank Miller's Sin City, both recently popularised by Hollywood film adaptations.

No less than other peoples, Russians have traditionally been open to the proposition that there is a logical meaning and significance to be read into their geographical position in the world. And because they are further inclined to believe that this significance of location has direct implications for the most basic questions about their national identity and destiny, it has commonly been the object of rather intense preoccupation. In the case of Russia, “location” is to be understood first and foremost in terms of a gradient running east to west, that is to say from the Orient to the Occident. The country, it is well appreciated, had the peculiar historical–geographical fate to emerge and develop in a vast intermediary space between highly differentiated zones of global civilization, and the ensuing sense of occupying some sort of critical middle ground has been pervasive, throughout modern Russian history at least. To be sure, Russia is not the only society to see a significance in its intermediate position (one thinks immediately of Germany, or indeed Turkey) but it is fair to say that in no other country has this awareness worked to provoke such an enduring and profoundly disquieting ambivalence in the national psychology. In Russia, this ambivalence assumes the form of a sort of existential indeterminacy between East and West, a veritable geo-schizophrenia which for nearly three centuries has penetrated irresistibly and tormentingly to the very core of the society's self-consciousness.

When the bedside telephone in his Paris hotel room rings in the middle of the night, Robert Langdon, the hero of Dan Brown's bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, awakes slowly and is at first confused.

Next his eyes focus on ‘a crumpled flyer on his bedside table’:

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS

proudly presents

AN EVENING WITH ROBERT LANGDON

PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLOGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

A famous academic as well as an accidental detective, it is not surprising that Robert Langdon orientates himself through reading. He is prodigiously well read, supplying much of the overload of information for which Brown's thrillers are notorious. But Langdon's love of reading does not make him unusual amongst fictonal sleuths. A very different detective, Mikael Blomkvist, the left-wing, journalist hero of Stieg Larsson's ‘Millennium Trilogy’, is also a voracious reader, getting through piles of documents, obtained both legally and illegally, as he tracks down murderers, sex traffickers and rogue spies in the Swedish secret service. The reading skills of his partner and sometime lover, Lisbeth Salander, are facilitated by a photographic memory. Easy Rawlins, the self-educated detective in Walter Mosley's series of novels, betrays his reading by his speech: ‘Why Easy … I do believe that you have read a book or two,’ remarks one of the many femmes fatales he encounters on his investigations in Los Angeles.

‘Brand new bestseller’

A train arrives at the station of a provincial English town. A dozing passenger glances out of the window of a second-class carriage. His eye is caught by a poster advertising a work of fiction: most of the sheet is taken up by an image of the book's cover, a shadowy figure (possibly a woman) looking provocative or threatening from beneath the wide brim of a dark hat over which the title (Killing Time or Fatal Passion ?)is boldly splashed. A writer's name is highlighted at the bottom (possibly that of a man). It, too, barely registers. The passenger's gaze is held by an untidy strip cutting diagonally across the poster, as if it were pasted on separately and in haste, the urgency of the style designed precisely to urge passers-by to pay attention to the information on display: ‘the brand new bestseller out on …’. Like the title and the writer's name, the date is forgotten, only the fact that it is a short while in the future is noted: this bestseller is yet to be published.

‘Brand new bestseller’: everything about bestselling fiction can be found in the phrase, in the setting, and in the (forgotten) details of its advertisement. The latter makes its appeal to readers on the basis of a familiar and instantly recognisable genre: the half-remembered cover and clichéd titles, connoting ‘sex’, ‘mystery’ and ‘danger’, suggest thriller/detective fiction (‘killing’ and ‘fatal’) or romance (‘passion’).

What is popular fiction?

‘Popular fiction’ is a deceptively simple phrase, at once indispensable and commonplace, yet often left unsettlingly vague. One of the problems with finding a clear definition of popular fiction is that the object of study is not always clear. The cultural formation designated by ‘popular fiction’ has changed over time and varies according to its cultural and geographical situation. In this volume, we identify the late nineteenth century as the period when the genres that constitute so much of popular fiction emerge; but we recognise that the reception of these genres is in a state of continuous evolution. A key factor in this evolution has been the productive relationship between popular fiction and new media technologies from radio, to cinema, to the internet. This amounts to a wide view of culture and this means that when we study popular fiction we are studying just such a broad cultural field rather than a single object or objects.

But let us start with the simplest definition: popular fiction is frequently thought of as those books that everyone reads, usually imagined as a league table of bestsellers whose aggregate figures dramatically illustrate an impressive ability to reach across wide social and cultural divisions with remarkable commercial success. In itself, this open-ended definition tells us very little, since it suggests that popular fiction is merely an empty box within which almost any novel might find a highly lucrative place.

The visual field in India underwent rapid transformation from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. This was due to an increased circulation of pictorial techniques and images from Europe and elsewhere, and to the introduction of technologies of mass-reproduction such as lithographic printing, photography and eventually cinema. New pictorial forms developed through a relay of three distinct elements: existing iconographic and artistic traditions, modern practices of fine art introduced in the colonial era and – in the twentieth century – elements of both local and global popular cultures. These forms were enthusiastically taken up as part of a growing Indian culture industry, particularly in the vernacular business arena that emerged from the trading communities of what historians have called the ‘bazaar’. Mass reproduction and commodification allowed images to become more mobile and thus circulate in an arena delinked from the territorial and symbolic control of temples and courts. As naturalism and realist techniques provided an alternative to strict iconographic codes, and access to images no longer depended exclusively on the intercession of priests or membership of a particular caste or class, commercially available images came to address – and indeed to constitute – differently composed audiences. These newly commercialized images then became available to the various projects of identity formation that have come to characterize Indian modernity – projects of nation, region, sect, caste and language, as well as the political and ideological projects of the nascent nation-state.

Introduction: problems of terminology

Russian peasants, factory workers, artisans, and small traders have, by tradition, lived in a world made colorful by endless shades of difference, one not easily demarcated under the typical definitions and categories of popular culture. Their first loyalties have been to kinship groups, to work collectives, to the villages or districts where they lived, rather than to their own class or social group in a broad sense. For those traditional villagers who lived all their lives close to home, the opposition svoi/chuzhoi (“our own/strange,” but close to the English polarization “us and them”) was fundamental to organizing life. Nenash (“not-ours”) was one of the many dialect terms for the Devil, and considerable hardship awaited the nevesta (bride, but literally “unknown woman”) displaced by patrilocal tradition to her husband's parents' family, and treated there as a stranger, though she might herself come from a village only a few miles away, or even from a household in the same village.

The industrialization of Russia, which led to a massive population movement from villages into cities, did much to soften conservatism, but did not erode it entirely; nor did peasants who went to the cities necessarily change attitudes overnight. Loyalty to a particular village was replaced by the wider, but still extremely concrete, affiliations of krai (land) and rodina (birthplace).

In an interview on a leading Hindi news channel in 2009, Congress Member of Parliament Ambika Soni remarked that she had never watched as much television in her life as she had in the five months since taking office as the Minister of Information and Broadcasting. ‘You never know when an NGO or fellow MP might raise a complaint about a programme being unsuitable for broadcast.’ Her remark referred in part to complaints against specific shows that had been aired on private television channels in 2009; their content had been criticized as being unsuitable for Indian audiences. Soni went on to say that most of the complaints related to the depictions of women or children, and the publicization of issues that Indians consider ‘extremely private’. ‘There are things,’ she said, ‘that Indians are not mentally prepared to publicise in front of everybody … even if we don't do it ourselves, seeing somebody else do it is hurtful.’ The complaints addressed two reality shows that were aired in July and October 2009, both adaptations of foreign reality shows: Sach Ka Samna (‘Facing the Truth’; hereafter SKS) was the Indian version of US television giant Fox's The Moment of Truth and Pati, Patni, aur Woh (Husband, Wife, and the Other; hereafter PPW) was the Indian version of the BBC 3 reality show Baby Borrowers.

Background material

Introduction

Among the Slavs, as among many other peoples, cultural identity tends to be defined by language: in a way that would be difficult for a Québecois, a Mexican, or an American to understand, to be Russian is primarily to have Russian as one's mother tongue. This is especially true in a pre-literate society with its limited comprehension of time and space, but remains substantially accurate as a society develops into a modern nation. Historical and geographical awareness, the ability to respond to psychological and aesthetic dimensions of literature, the challenge and pleasure of intellectual interchange, even the possibility of truly understanding non-verbal experience like music and art – all are mediated by language. Some, perhaps exaggerating, have averred that the form of our language determines the form of our thought, while others, more convincingly, maintain that language is the primary modeling system through which we view all our surroundings and through which all other systems must be filtered. At the very least, it is obvious that language plays an essential role in culture, and in defining culture. This is especially true of Russian cultural history.

Russian and Slavic

Russian, like Belarusian and Ukrainian, is an East Slavic language, distinct from West and South Slavic. West Slavic includes Polish, Czech and Slovak, Sorbian, and a few minor or extinct languages, while South Slavic includes Slovene, Serbian and Croatian, Bulgarian and (since 1945) Macedonian.

Introduction

As opposed to countries easily demarcated by geographical boundaries such as mountain ranges, seas, and oceans, Russia coalesced and developed in the liminal geography of the Eurasian plains. Without natural borders for protection and definition, Russia throughout its history has been caught between East and West, mediating between the two, belonging to neither, yet implicated in both. The underlying and fundamental duality of Russia's position in the world has naturally led to recurrent alternations in its attitude toward the outside world and toward the West in particular.

These alternations tend to follow recognizable cultural patterns: firstly, change in attitudes toward the West, like all other cultural change in Russia, is maximalist. That is to say, when change occurs, the new is experienced as absolute acceptance or rejection. As Lotman and Uspensky have argued, “Duality and the absence of a neutral axiological sphere led to a conception of the new not as a continuation, but as a total eschatological change.” Secondly, when change comes, it comes from the top down. Time and again throughout Russian history, it is the Tsar's edict that enforces or rejects Western cultural norms. Thirdly, this enforcement from the top down almost always leads to a bifurcation in social response, particularly in the upper classes.

The Russian musical tradition has grown from three basic sources over the last one thousand years: the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, folk culture, and the Western classical tradition. Running side by side, the first two streams have provided a rich flow of melodic and emotional inspiration to many generations of composers, eventually intertwining in the Western-informed music of nineteenth-century Russian masters such as Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksandr Porfir'evich Borodin and Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In the twentieth century, liturgical and folk sources, now the inspiration for a leading edge of Western musical culture, continued to be essential ingredients of such composers as Sergei Vasil'evich Rachmaninov, Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky, Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev and Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich.

Particularly in works like Mussorgsky's historical operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina; Rimsky-Korsakov's The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia; and Prokofiev's score to Sergei Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible, the materials of Russian folk and liturgical music were combined and transformed through the techniques of Western harmony and counterpoint into what has become immediately recognizable as the Russian classical tradition.

But post-1917 Russian music (like all areas of Russian culture) was also profoundly affected by the cultural policies of the Soviet communist regime. Of particular importance for the musical tradition was the official persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In the film Shankarabharnam (Telugu, 1979), a drama about a south Indian classical singer and a young prostitute's devotion to him, there is a scene which epitomizes the way ‘classical’ music and ‘film’ music came to be opposed to each other in post-colonial south India. The larger theme of the film, the backdrop against which its events take place, is the destruction of south Indian, or Karnatic, classical music at the hands of charlatan gurus and hypocritical concert organizers, and through the steady encroachment of Westernized musical tastes. In this particular scene, the hero, Shankara Sastri, is fast asleep one night in his house when he is suddenly awakened by the strains of electric guitars being played Western-style. He opens his door to find a band of ruffians mocking his devotion to Karnatic music. ‘Our music is an ocean’, they sneer, parodying what is often said about Karnatic music to invoke its depth and complexity. Shankara Sastri challenges them to a musical contest. The ruffians sing their song, and Shankara Sastri proceeds, to their utter astonishment, to convert it into the syllables used to sing Karnatic music and sing it back to them. Then, improvising a short piece of Karnatic music, he challenges them to reproduce it, leaving them completely at a loss. Shankara Sastri scolds them: ‘While so many foreigners recognize the greatness of Indian music, how can you mock it? It is like making fun of your own mother.’ To make his point, apparently too important to be uttered merely in Telugu, he switches into English: ‘Music is divine, whether it is Indian or Western.’

Introduction: gender and sexuality in the field of popular fiction

Popular fiction has always had an intricate connection with questions of gender and sexuality. In order to attend to this connection, it is necessary to consider not only the content of popular fiction (its representations of women and men and of sexual relationships and behaviour, for example), but also its motivations and effects, the readerships it constructs for itself, the reading practices and communities it institutes, the critical responses to it, the gendering of particular genres (and of popular culture itself), and the material contexts of the production and consumption of the popular. Although there are many texts and topics that could be covered in an essay such as this one, my necessarily selective focus here will range across: theories of reading and the perceived effects of popular fiction upon women readers in particular; the complex ideological work of popular fiction in constructing our conceptions (and, therefore, shaping our lived experience) of masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality; the appropriation and subversion of popular genres for new or alternative ideological ends (for example, in 1970s feminist science fiction, and 1950s lesbian pulp); the popular response to, and elucidation of post-feminism through chick lit (viewed as a development of contemporary romance fiction) from the 1990s onwards; and recent developments in the dissemination of popular narratives of gender and sexual identity and practice due to new technologies (e.g. internet blogs about female sexuality), which suggest that in any consideration of popular writing we must continue to attend to the shifting modes of production, distribution and consumption which put these texts into circulation and partly determine their effects for us.

Introduction

In essence, food is a way of fulfilling a biological need – nutrition – within an ecologically and culturally defined context. At the same time, it is a way of expressing one's sense of self – individually and collectively – in relation to the past, present and future. Concerns about authenticity and belonging, taste and distinction, health and safety converge when food is at issue, as do embodied feelings like comfort, pleasure, craving and deprivation. This constellation of ideas and emotions makes food a particularly rich site for exploring the diverse ways in which Indians construct cultural identities at the cusp of imagined traditions and desired modernities. This chapter explores these processes of social formation – cultural being and becoming – by relating them to shifts in the modes of producing and consuming food. It attempts to analyse some of these shifts through a selective discussion of changing food practices in post-Independence India. It locates these changes in the context of the political economy of agriculture since the Green Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, a programme that radically reconfigured how and which foods are cultivated and consumed. The chapter goes on to delineate the widening circuits of food as a commodity form within the home and outside, spanned by the growth of processed foods and the practice of ‘eating out’. And it examines the multiple meanings that food conveys for different social groups by drawing upon three ethnographic vignettes from western India.

The history of Russian film raises central questions about boundaries. The subject cannot encompass all of the production of the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union, still less that of all the countries that arose following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, among the Fathers of Soviet film, is a fact of the Russian and Ukrainian cinemas; Mikhail Chiaureli, in the Stalinist generation, a fact of the Georgian and Russian cinemas; and later, Sergei Paradzhanov, from the generation that reached artistic maturity after Stalin's death, of the Armenian, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Russian cinemas. Iakov Protazanov is a pre-revolutionary Russian filmmaker and a post-revolutionary Soviet one. At times films that could not be made in Moscow or Leningrad were made in the outlying republics. The work of film artists in emigration or temporarily working in France, Germany, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere enters into various constructions of the subject. Ivan Mozzhukhin, Andrei Konchalovsky, and Andrei Tarkovsky are candidates for inclusion in histories in international contexts. Remaining links between filmmaking in Russia and in other former Soviet republics call for exploration in post-Soviet histories. At the same time, the meaning of “Russian film” becomes a self-reflexive and existential question owing to the collapse of the notion of Russia as an imperial power, as well as to the changing meanings of “culture,” which are especially relevant for film, a distinctly “popular” art.