Mother India in Six Voices: Melodrama, Voice Performance, and Indian Films in Siam

Abstract

The most successful period of circulation of Indian movies in Siam (Thailand) was from the 1950s to the 1970s. Vernacularizing them meant, in this case, transforming them into melodramatic cinema experience through the “versioning” art of the film narrators or voice performers. This article traces the enmeshment of popular Indian films within a local, plebeian cinema dispositive, in which film exhibition was subsumed under the paradigm of the oral and improvisatory theatrical entertainment. What became “melodramatic” about Indian (largely Hindi) movies as a result of their metamorphosis within this particular arrangement of technology, voice, text and bodies is the first question to address. The second is what it means now to redeem an experience of affective intensity occasioned by the circulation of Indian movies in Siam during the Cold War.

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