Notes

1. The success of cop-films has in turn also spawned other related sub-genres tackling law enforcement and national security (such as spy and detective films). One of India’s biggest production houses, Yash Raj Films (YRF) has churned out blockbusters in its “spy universe” franchise, focusing on RAW agents (referring to the foreign intelligence agency of India, its Research and Analysis Wing): Ek Tha Tiger, 2012; Tiger Zinda Hai, 2017; War, 2019; Pathaan, 2023. [return to page 1]

2. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1. For more on the angry young man, read: Fareeduddin Kazmi, “How Angry is the Angry Young Man? ‘Rebellion’ in Conventional Hindi Films,” in The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. Ashis Nandy (London: Zed Books, 1998), 134-156.

3. Samir Dayal, Dream Machine: Realism and Fantasy in Hindi Cinema (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 70.

4. M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 158.

5. M.K. Raghavendra, “A Renewal of Faith: Dabangg and its Public,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no.6 (Feb 5-11, 2011): 33-35.

6. M.K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Popular Indian Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2012), 130-32.

7. Prasad, Ideology, 95-96.

8. Anustup Basu, “Encounters in the City: Cops, Criminals, and Human Rights in Hindi Film,” Journal of Human Rights, 9, no. 2 (2010): 175-190.

9. Arunima Paul, Unraveling Countrysides: Provincial Modernities in Contemporary Popular Indian Cinema. PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2014.

10. Sanjay Srivastava, Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India (Routledge India, 2018), 99.

11. Paul, Unraveling Countrysides.

12. Paul, Unraveling Countrysides

13. Sanjay Srivastava, “Modi Masculinity,” Television & New Media 16, no. 4 (April 2015), 331.

14. Srivastava, “Modi Masculinity,” 331-338; and Jyotirmaya Tripathy, “The Character of Modi’s Masculinity,” https://indiachapter.in/index.php?/user/article/2/2/69

15. Priya Chacko, “Gender and Authoritarian Populism: Empowerment, Protection, and the Politics of Resentful Aspiration in India,” Critical Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (2020), 219. [return to page 2]

16. Stuart Hall, “Authoritarian Populism: A Reply,” New Radical Review I/151, June 1, 1985,https://newleftreview.org/issues/i151/articles/stuart-hall-authoritarian-populism-a-reply

17. Basu, “Encounters.”

18. Ranjani Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The ‘Angry Man’ and the ‘Psychotic Hero of Bombay Cinema,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed., Ravi S. Vasudevan (Oxford University Press), 245.

19. Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia,” 246.

20. Akshaya Kumar, “Cinema and its Spatial Predicates: Landscapes of Debt in Search of Justice,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 60 (Spring 2021).

21. On 16 December, 2012, a 23-year old woman, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was gangraped and left to die by the side of the road in Delhi; the brutal nature of the event sparked nation-wide protests. The name of the raped young woman in Simmba, Aakruti, resonates with Jagruti (means awakening) which was one of the symbolic names (in addition to Nirbhaya) that Jyoti was given by the media to “honor” her, before her father made the decision to reveal her name.

22. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (University of California Press, 1998).

23. Shakuntala Banaji, “Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India,” Javnost - The Public (Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture) 25, no.4 (2018): 335.

24. Megha Anwer, “Cinematic Clearances: Spaces of Poverty in Hindi Cinema’s Big Budget Productions,” The Global South 8, no.1 (Spring 2014): 91-111.

25. A survey in India found that “over half the population preferred extrajudicial actions by the police to legal action.” Roshni Chakraborty, “Sanctioning Abuse,” Harvard International Review (Fall 2020), 65.

26. Krupa Shandilya, “Nirbhaya’s Body: The Politics of Protest in the Aftermath of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape,” Gender and History 27, no. 2(August 2015), 467.

27. “India’s Daughter” was the title of a controversial 2015 documentary made by Leslee Udwin, “India’s Daughter” on the 2012 rape case, which featured interviews with one of the convicted rapists and his lawyer, and was banned in India.

28. Cited in Shandilya, “Nirbhaya’s Body,” 472.

29. Of course, this sort of construction both leaves non-Hindu women out of the category of Indian women even as it silences how poor women, Dalit women, non-Hindu women are disproportionately subject to sexual assault and other forms of violence.

30. “Beti Bachao: Government’s Efforts to Eradicate Female Infanticide and Sex-Selective Abortion are inadequate,” Economic and Political Weekly (Engage), November 22, 2019, https://www.epw.in/engage/article/beti-bachao-eradicate-female-infanticide-violence-against-women-girls-abortion

31. Tithi Bhattacharya, “India’s Daughter: Neoliberalism’s Dreams and the Nightmares of Violence,” International Socialist Review 97, https://isreview.org/issue/97/indias-daughter/

32. Damien Gayle, “‘A Decent Girl wouldn’t be out at Night,” Daily Mail, March 2, 2015, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2975989/A-decent-girl-wouldn-t-night-says-one-men-convicted-gang-rape-left-Indian-girl-dead.html [return to page 3]

33. Banaji describes how the fascist consciousness that pervades these “vigilante publics” is “in turn, a necessary base for state fascism.” The vigilante publics and their “spectacular violence” “can at once be endorsed and disavowed by the state, whose purposes are furthered through participatory violence (335).

34. Here, one needs to mention a grotesque case of life imitating Simmba’s fictional narrative in the widely publicized 2019 Hyderabad police’s extra-judicial killing of the men who gang raped a young veterinarian, allegedly when they visited the crime scene to recreate it. While this episode in the nation’s recent history of macabre rape-murder crimes and the extra-judicial killings as shocking, what was even more disturbing was the celebratory wave of public support for the cops, much like the description in Simmba that publicly legitimizes state vigilantism as justice. See, “Hyderabad case: Police kill suspects in rape and murder of Indian vet” (BBC, December 6, 2019). https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50682262

35. Stuart Hall, cited in Coates, “The Language of Authoritarian Populism.”

36. In her review of the film, Nandita Singh notes, that the “premise, plot and even the dialogue of Simmba sounds a lot like a 2 hour 45-minute-long justification of Yogi Adityanath’s ‘Encounter Pradesh.’ If the system doesn’t work, “Thok do (shoot them).” Nandita Singh, “Ranveer Singh’s Simmba is everything that is wrong with this country,” The Print, 28 December 2018, https://theprint.in/opinion/ranveer-singhs-simmba-is-everything-that-is-wrong-with-this-country/170391/

37. Stuart Hall, cited in Wynn Coates, “The Language of Authoritarian Populism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, (November 1, 2021).

38. Samir Dayal, Dream Machine, 71.

39. Singham calls cops like himself and Simmba “ede policewale” who aren’t afraid to engage in encounters to rid the nation of sexual predators, criminals, and terrorists.

40. Ajay Gudavarthy, India After Modi: Populism and the Right (Bloomsbury, 2021).

41. In 2019, Sunita Singh Gaur, leader of the BJP’s Mahila Morcha is reported to that “There is only one solution for them (Muslims). Hindu brothers should make a group of 10 and gang rape their (Muslims) mothers and sisters openly on the streets and then hang them in the middle of the bazaar for others to see.” Gaur was subsequently expelled from her post. https://thewire.in/communalism/bjp-mahila-morcha-leader-says-hindus-should-gangrape-muslim-women-gets-expelled. [return to page 41]

42. Basu, “Encounters.”

43. Basu, “Encounters.”

44. Basu, “Encounters.”

45. Gudavarthy, India After Modi.

46. Gudavarthy, India After Modi.