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“Watch It Again and Again, Watch It a Thousand Times”: Riffing Off Appadurai’s Views on Repeat Viewing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2019

Ananya Jahanara Kabir
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Abstract

This response to Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm piece “The Ready-Made Pleasures of déjà vu” turns on the example of the classic Bollywood song ‘Baar baar dekho’ (“Watch it again and again,” Chinatown, 1962), to elaborate on the pleasures of cinematic repetition captured by Appadurai’s interest in “repeat viewing,” or “watching as if for the second time.” By proffering the template of “call and response,” which derives from Africanist kinesthetic principles, in dialogue with Appadurai’s appeal to an Indic investment in “re-call and re-turn,” I examine how the protocols and structures of “spontaneous” improvisation constitute a shared yet divergent basis for a global, modern politics of pleasure. Through this strategy of placing in percussive play two cultural systems of rhythmic repetition, I posit the redemptive potential of repetition as difference as an answer to political mobilizations of repetition against difference.

Keywords

Repeat viewingcall and responseoral formulaic compositionimprovisationscopophilia
Type
Responses to Appadurai Paradigm Piece (Issue 6.1)
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 366 - 370
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019 

Prelude

While reading Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm piece on the peculiar pleasures generated by the repeat viewing of Indian cinema, Footnote 1 a particular tune insinuated itself into my mind. Initially something of a low hum, background muzak to my reading, it was gradually but steadily amplified by something akin to memory’s dial. Midway through the piece, the dial now turned up full volume as it were, it burst through my consciousness. Words and melody came together as “Baar baar dekho, hazaar baar dekho . . .” (Watch it again and again, watch it a thousand times); a quick search on YouTube, pharmakon and panacea for the sensory overload of our times, prevented the momentary pleasure of remembering from dissolving into the frustration of partial recall.Footnote 2 I rediscovered the lyrics, the melodic modulations, and even the original context of the film it appeared in (for, like all memorable Indian film songs, it had long detached itself from that context to float free in the sea of popular culture). All this flooded me with a powerful satisfaction and happiness that immediately rendered Appadurai’s piece something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In a film industry where the proliferation of iconicity takes that quality to a wholly new level, what makes this particular song from a 1962 film ( Chinatown) iconic? I whittle it down to its catchy melody, quick rhythm, and wholehearted, happy endorsement of scopophilia.Footnote 3 Mulling over its lyrics brings me to an additional quality: the ever-mysterious object of the gaze it urges on its “dilruba” (beloved). “Watch it again and again, watch it a thousand times,” it declares, “and you’ll appreciate what a thing we have here for you to enjoy.” But what exactly is “it”? That “it” is qualified by the generic words cheez (thing) and baat (talk, stuff ), which compounds the mystery. Yes, countless lovers, aficionados, and connoisseurs may present themselves, but where else will they find this particular thing, this stuff? The lyrics solicit the high register of courtly love-longing in Urdu to conjure up this bewitching, but never quite clarified—“it.” The visualization of the song—an endearing homage to the Elvis and Teddy Boy mania of the 1960s as manifested in the hip-swiveling, quiff-bearing figure of Shammi Kapoor—leaves us none the wiser as to the specificity of its address.Footnote 4

One is led to conclude that it is the stuff of cinematic repetition itself that the song celebrates. Watch me, it exhorts, watch me over and over again, watch me a thousand times. The film it belonged to soon slipped from popular consciousness. But there is more to this fate than mere irony. There is every chance that the memory of the song will reawaken in us the urge to revisit it, trawling through the cavernous archive of the internet in the wake of the melody’s return. Whereupon we, as Appadurai astutely observes, will watch the film precisely as if we are watching it for the second time.

Call

In “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu,” Appadurai pins down the popular Indian film’s demand on the viewer to watch it, again and again, not for the thrill of being “touched for the very first time,” but the very opposite: repeat viewing that confirms the delight and satisfaction of foreknowledge. Moreover, his intention is to go beyond mere articulation of this core principle and offer us its fitting theoretical explication. Here, he is faced immediately with the basic challenge of repetition’s poor reputation in the high domain of Western theory. Briskly moving through Freud, Marx, and the Frankfurt School as the most prominent elaborators of post-renaissance intellectual suspicion of repetition as a valid aesthetic mode for cultural production and consumption, Appadurai settles on Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of “repetition and difference.”Footnote 5 The Deleuzean endorsement of repetition not as recurrence of the same experience but an “always becoming” proves to be the most useful paradigm for his task: to rehabilitate repetition through an exegesis of its valorization within Bollywood and its sister film industries in South Asia. Repetition, then, is not merely the experiential unfolding of difference. It is actually “a motor of a different sort of time.”

Appadurai executes two moves to articulate together meaningfully the Deleuzean and Bollywood paradigms. First, he posits the song in Bollywood as analogous to the percussive line in music and the narrative dimension as analogous the melodic line. Building on this understanding of the production of pleasure through the interrelationship of percussion and melody, he finds the predictability of the song that recurs as offering the percussive grounding of viewerly experience. By the same token, the narrative that it punctuates moves us forward in an experiential vector that is analogous to the unfurling of melody. Upon the intersection of these two vectors, Appadurai constructs a vertiginous assemblage of star texts, images, and aural cues. This assemblage, which in fact comprises what he calls a complex acoustic and visual ecology, nourishes the repetition-led production and consumption of the popular film. Although the brevity of the piece does not allow him to elaborate on pre- or paracolonial genealogies for this ecology, it enables his second move: the attribution of a deep Indic reflex of “re-cognition, re-call, and re-turn” aligned to traditional forms of public narration and performance, both so-called “folk” and “classical,” as explanation for the pleasures of repeat viewing.

Response

I want to riff off these two moves that I outlined previously with two counter-moves: a percussive dialogue, if you will, that in South Asia we call a jugalbandi. Footnote 6 There are, of course, other modes of percussive play that circulate in global culture, and my own section headings (“call” and “response”) highlight one such mode derived from Africanist kinesthetics.Footnote 7 Through this allusion, I draw attention to what I will call the difference in repetition of percussion—while Indic percussive logic thrives on convergence, what I will call its Africanist counterpart revels in divergence. The polyrhythms produced by layered and superimposed timelines are not merely a challenge to Western-trained musical ears, as many an ethnomusicologist has pointed out; from a different direction, they challenge Indic rhythm principles of convergence on the beat known as the samm as absolute truth.Footnote 8 This distinction was recognized by the late choreographer Geoffrey Holder, whose masterpiece Dougla (1974) presents a mythopoesis of cultural union between “African” and “Indian.”Footnote 9 Created for the Dance Theater of Harlem, it relies precisely on an understanding of abundant repetition as manifested in rhythmic convergence, Footnote 10 that Holder, a self-identified Afro-descendant Trinidadian, had absorbed from the Indo-Trinidadian expressive and sacred culture of his island.

Appadurai’s analogical reading of the Bollywood song’s repetition as percussive line thus arises out of the very cultural milieu that it seeks to explicate. The resultant theoretical integrity of his first move also consolidates the relationship of repeat viewing’s pleasures to the domain of the sacred and expressive, established through his second move. Here, we note the opposite ramification—from the particular to the universal. His analysis of the pleasures of mnemonic anticipation recognizes the importance of the “formula” to “epic sensibility,” which ensures, in the words of his late teacher A. K. Ramanujan, “that no one in India hears a story from the great epics as if for the first time.” This connection between the formulaic composition and epic storytelling had already been studied intensively by the school of oral traditional scholarship on comparative heroic narrative that by the 1990s had developed into oral formulaic studies.Footnote 11 Although now as passé as other structuralist approaches to textual analysis, it has nevertheless left us with rigorous demonstrations of how, across cultures, “spontaneous” improvisation depended on rhythmically driven repetition of verbal formulas. The unpredictable filling of these predictable “slots” generated a specific pleasure and sustained the audience as a community through that shared pleasure.

Coda

The most suggestive move that Appadurai makes comes to us at the end of his piece as ruminations on “repetition as postcolonial experience.” If the early decades of decolonization had been fueled by a socialist vision that nevertheless consigned India to be stuck indefinitely on repeat mode, playing an endless game of catch-up with Western forms of modernity, India’s participation in global liberalism has been more about inserting itself as coeval partner of the West. In the process, he seems to suggest, the new leaders of Hindu India have shifted the percussive line within the repeat viewing pleasure principle by yoking it to the rhythms of an ever-hardening Hindutva. Will this be a flop or a hit, he asks in closing, invoking thereby the parlance of the Bollywood industry and its investment in producing the successes that solicit repeating viewing and, in so doing, ensure the industry’s economic sustainability. What this final set of observations brought to my mind was the anxiety around Fordism, imminent fascism, and repetition evident in early twentieth-century commentary on “modern times” such as Siegfried Kracauer’s essay collection, The Mass Ornament, and Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times. Footnote 12 The conveyor belt and the chorus girl line alike signaled an exhilaration as well as fear of where such flawless repetition could lead humanity. In the improvised play with time that was the hallmark of jazz dance lay the answer of that era.Footnote 13 Appadurai reminds us that solutions to these philosophical problems of repetition without difference lie not just in jazz dance, but in various culture-specific modes of collective enjoyment. That realization, demonstrated here through his ruminations on (and defense of ) the ready-made pleasures of déjà vu, is itself a validation of repetition with difference and its enduring necessity.

References

1 Appadurai, Arjun, “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6.1 (2019): 140–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 “Baar baar dekho,” with lyrics by veteran songwriter Majrooh Sultanpuri, score by prolific music director Ravi, and sung by the memorable playback artist Mohammed Rafi, is from the film Chinatown (director Shakti Samanta, 1962).

3 On scopophilia in Bollywood, see, for instance, Dissanayake, Wimal, “Globalization and Cultural Narcissism: Note on Bollywood Cinema,” Asian Cinema 15.1 (2004): 143–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 On Shammi Kapoor’s theatrical antics, see Mishra, Sudesh, “Yahoo! Shammi Kapoor and the Corporeal Stylistics of Popular Hindi Cinema,” Continuum 26.6 (2012): 815–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Elvis Presley’s influence on him, see Sewlall, Harry, “‘Image, Music, Text’: Elvis Presley as a Postmodern, Semiotic Construct,” JLS/TLW 26.2 (2010): 44–57.Google Scholar

5 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

6 On Jugalbandi as cultural expression modulated by modernity, see for instance, Yousuf Saeed, “Jugalbandi: Divided Scores,” Himal SouthAsian, February 2011. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://old.himalmag.com/component/content/article/3607-divided-scores.html.

7 “Call and response” as an African and African-heritage kinesthetic principle has been much written about. A classic remains the discussion in Thompson’s, Robert Farris Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy ( New York: Vintage, 2010)Google Scholar. For a slightly more sceptical approach to its meaningfulness that balances critique of essentialism with technical rigour, see Agawu, Kofi, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions ( New York: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.

8 I have discussed this point with reference to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s magnificent rendition of the traditional qawwali phrase “haqq Ali” (Ali is the truth) in Kabir, Ananya J., “The Dhantal’s Irreverence: Off-beat as the In-between Time of Indenture,” in Social and Cultural Dimensions of Indian Indentured Labour and its Diaspora: Past and Present, eds. Hassankhan, Maurits S., Roopnarine, Lomarsh, and Mahase, Radica ( New York: Routledge, 2016), 305–15Google Scholar.

9 “When African and Hindu tangle, their offspring are known as Dougla”: the byline for Geoffrey Holder’s magnificent Dougla (1974), which I saw three performances of during its revival by the Harlem Dance Theater at its New York April 2018 season. The most striking characteristic of Dougla is its driving, repetitive, and convergent rhythm, secured by the percussive line of tassa drums and the melodic line of the Indian flute. Through this rhythmic framework, Holder conveys the idea of a self-enclosed community that draws its identity from the Indic sacred. The word dougla itself, derived from Hindustani dugla, is a common Caribbean term to denote the creolized offspring of parents with African and Indian heritages. In some Caribbean islands, it is more pejorative than others.

10 In Dougla, a grand and earthy mainstay of Dance Theater of Harlem’s repertory for years, repetition is used in abundance as dancers—and their costumes—spin in sync. Gia Kourlas, “Bringing Back ‘Dougla’ is a Family Affair,” New York Times, March 30, 2018. Accessed December 4, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/arts/dance/dougla-dance-theater-of-harlem-geoffrey-holder-carmen-de-lavallade.html/.

11 The articulation of what became oral formulaic theory began with Milman Parry’s work deducing Homeric compositional techniques through analysis of living epic singers in the former Yugoslavia, starting with his “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–147. His student Lord, Albert Bates worked further on the “Serbo-Croatian Return Song Tradition,” in Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, eds. Parry, Milman, Lord, Albert Bates, and Bartók, Béla (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954)Google Scholar and passed the baton on to the Germanicist John Miles Foley, who orchestrated its transformation into oral formulaic studies; see his Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research (New York: Garland, 1985). For a still-useful overview of the formula-driven nature of heroic poetry, see Auty, Robert and Hatto, Arthur Thomas, Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry: Characteristics and Techniques, vol. 2 ( London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1989)Google Scholar.

12 Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. This edition is a reprint of essays roughly co-terminous with the film Modern Times (director Charlie Chaplin, 1936). On the centrality of the chorus girl’s precision routines within this shared imaginary, see Burt, Ramsay, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race,” and Nation in Early Modern Dance ( London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar.

13 This is an argument I make more fully through the work of Russian dancer, documenter, and theorizer of New York jazz dance Mura Dehn in my monograph in progress, Alegropolitics.