Screening regions, sightseeing the cities: Touristy gaze, Tollywood aesthetics and the making of a new Bengali-ness in Barfi

Focusing on Anurag Basu’s Barfi (2012) this article attempts to read the changing pattern of portraying Bengali-ness on post millennial Bollywood screen. The article demonstrates how, Barfi widens the Hindi film stereotypes of Bengal and Bengalis in the context of contemporary Bollywood’s drive towards localization. The article argues that the idea of Bengali regional identity in Barfi functions as political constructs which is reflective of the dominant political mood of post 2011 West Bengal and carries the influence of Bengali. ‘Relationship films’. In the 2000s Bengali cinema experienced the rise of Tollywood as a new media industry replacing the earlier modes of popular Bengali cinema and in this. transformation the construction of gentrified Bengali-ness is central. The article demonstrates, how Barfi reflects some of the newer formations associated with Tollywood and can be seen as a text consciously designed to speak to both Bengali and national audiences in its portrayal of city spaces and characters. With reference to this film, I try to argue that the constructs of regionality in the contemporary Bollywood production needs to be understood in them, specificity rather than as a common pattern of representing regions in Indian media texts.