Dressing up ‘justice’: The cinematic body and the body of the cinematic medium in Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (2018)

Departing from an endorsement of the idiom of moral superiority that undergirds most Hindi vigilante films, Vasan Bala’s 2018 film Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota presents the vigilante figure itself as an archetype, a product of pop cultural utopias. Further, the film displaces the hegemonic position of the cinematic body of the vigilante hero by focusing attention on the ‘body’ of the cinematic medium and other pre digital media technologies. Bala invests heavily in ‘analog nostalgia’, accounts for media anachronisms by underlining the ‘circulatory flows’ of media materialism and even stages what I argue as the vigilante assertion of the analog media. In doing so, the film successfully manages to fragment the spectators’ affective alliances/loyalties, which are otherwise expected to lie with the vigilante hero. Through a close reading of the film and mapping the paratextual conversations related to it, this article ultimately argues that the film expands on the existing conceptualisation of the Hindi film vigilante or the phenomenon/practice of cinematic vigilantism by making a case for the affective potential and material agency of the inanimate, non-human vigilante.