The place of location(s): Milieus and regions of Gunga Jumna and Mukkabaaz

This paper focuses on the evolution of the emblems and stereotypes that have represented the milieu of the ‘regional’ in Hindi films from the 1960s to its post-millennial Bollywood form. Taking two melodramas, Gunga Jumna and Mukkabaaz, ostensibly set in Uttar Pradesh but separated by nearly six decades, this paper attempts to illustrate how (regional) locations get shaped as bearers of cultural features and theatres of action through the social, institutional, industrial, and, ultimately, political processes that Hindi cinema emerges from. As the paper shows, while Gunga Jumna frames its regional setting as an existing milieu belonging to a rural world, Mukkabaaz frames its setting as a new, previously unavailable milieu which must be revealed through the film’s staging of a theatre of action(s). Such newness is emergent from the transformed location of (Hindi) cinema itself, placed as it is at the intersection of economic, industrial, state, material, and cultural logics different from those that cut through it in the 1960s. Through the example of these two emblematic films, then, this paper argues that this transformation in the imagination of the regional in the Hindi film is an artefact and index of the changed situation of (Hindi) cinema in India today. The ‘ethnolinguistic realism’ of the post-millennial Hindi film is, therefore, an artefact and index of an imagination of the regional/provincial as a new milieu – a location that must be birthed and revealed through new stories that we, as audiences, already know.