Sundarnagar is a city elsewhere

A scene from 'Guide' set in the R K Narayan's fictional town of 'Malgudi'.

The entire film, MPKDH, is what I call a "song-site." A "song-site" is the space where the songs in a generic Hindi-Bollywood film are played out. The song-site is a crucial element in the Bollywood filmic imagination that weaves music, dance, couture, urban and landscape imagery, into a phantasmagoria of dreams and desires. But where is the song-site, the space of this enactment, literally speaking? What is the location of these spaces?

The song-sites have always been picturesque places, places love-locked beings were instantly transported to for extra-curricular reasons. Kashmir was a popular site of that dream topography, as was later Manali, Kanyamumari, Goa, and Simla. They are all places elsewhere, a virtual catalogue for urban escapees. But now more and more, the "song-sites" exist subliminally in an imported place -- charming, picturesque, urbane, or just generally well-formed, from Switzerland, Germany, New Zealand -- that are grafted onto the body of an extremely predictable, super-theatrical narrative that may have a generic setting in some gaon in Punjab, or a chawl in Mumbai.

These places from elsewhere, real and actual, become fictive in the Hindi film narrative because they are not named, they are not located with any amount of precision. The places are literally framed to be "foreign," to be elsewhere, and yet these places are crucial in the cinematic narrative. It is this seamless mixture of reality and alien-ness that makes these sites hyper-real places.

MPKDH is interesting because it takes the elsewhere of the song-site to the entire film. The film is set in a fictional town called Sundarnagar, not unlike Malgudi, but not quite Malgudi (Malgudi is the fictional town created and popularized in R.K. Narayan's novels). Sundarnagar shows what every (idealised) bourgeouise town needs: independent houses, houses with stadium size living room, and of course, gullible grandmothers and servile servants, all in their proper places, and wide lawns, regal driveways, parks, quaint telephone booths, gardens, outdoor spaces to run away to, snow clad mountains, backwaters, sandy beaches…

all in one space. In the film, Sundarnagar is depicted as somewhere in India, but the fact of the matter is the entire film is shot in New Zealand. The Indian city of Sundarnagar may be fictive, but it is depicted from a real place, and that place is elsewhere. That is the common trope in Hindi films: a relentless flight towards elsewhere.

What can one make of the production of these song-sites other than its entertainment value? Are these truly siren songs? Are they a premonition of a larger phenomenon, of things to come?

Can one make an Italo Calvino-like catalogue of these grafted places, as a kind of modern fable of urban imagination? Or, can they be treated as a collective fetish of the Indian urban middle class as it encounters, experiences, and succumbs to new global consumerist desires? Or, are these sites a symptom of a postmodern hybridity manufactured, distributed and consumed filmically? Or, is Bollywood, surreptitiously, unwittingly or unselfconsciously, circulating alternative visions for urban India?

In any case, cinematic imageries are a more recent element in imaging the city. A new expressive confluence is formed by cinema, architecture and spatial fantasy.

In generic Hindi films, the sites of the songs are hyper-real because they are unreal, they are seemingly real. They are not unreal by themselves. A city like that exists somewhere in Germany. A landscape like that exists in Switzerland. And yet they become profoundly unreal and at the same time seemingly real, and hence hyper-real, by the nature of being grafted on the cinematic body, when they are collaged, montaged, cut-and-pasted alongside a normative and urbanistically chaotic landscape, a real city in India. The significance is in the juxtaposition, in the being side by side.

What is being side by side? The messy landscape and dream topography, the normative and the superlative, the place here and now, and the place there, the empirical and the ideal. The former is of a native and the latter of a transnational origin. It is also in this sense that spaces of Hindi film represent a hybridity. And despite what is perhaps conceptually a jarring hybridity, the satisfied audience takes it as a "flow," a flow through diverse, unrelated, discontinuous spaces.

Sundarnagar is also a site of longing; like an utopia, it presents a longing for better things. But is this longing -- the consumption of it -- therapeutic or psychotic? I cannot say either way, but one can surely say that in its lollypop sweetness, saccharine hominess, Sundarnagar lacks a self-reflective edge. In contrast to MPKDH, the Hollywood film The Truman Show also takes up domesticity and hominess as manufactured entities, but at the end in an act of self-reflexivity as much permitted by Hollywood turns them around to expose the dark side of consumptive commonplace utopias.

Malgudi is an Indian town anywhere, Sundarnagar is an Indian town nowhere, and desire is an arc between anywhere and nowhere. Utopias -- banal or radical -- are produced in the shadow of that arc.

What also distinguishes Malgudi from Sundarnagar is the transnational divide, the trope of consumptive desire embedded in the latter, in the frame by frame layering of the elsewhere on to the local, of the presence of a globally charged place that replaces (or at least contests) the last vestiges of the empirical here. Malgudi is a sort of idealisation, not of the cosmopolis, but the stunted "mesopolis," the middle town where life with its existential anguish and messiness, as portrayed by R.K. Narayan, is not of the transnational type but still of an economic reality charged by a socialist and socially restrained order. Is Sundarnagar then the future of Indian cities, a premonition of the destiny of India in the simultaneous collapse of Nehruvian-Gandhian principles and the burgeoning of a global excess?

Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, an architect and writer, currently teaches at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.