Repeat Viewing: Plagiarising Indian Films and the Responsibilities of Creativity in South Asia

A Lecture by Dr. Lotte Hoek (University of Edinburgh).

The lecture

Across South Asia the proliferation of copies and imitations has fuelled recurrent public debate and scholarly discussion. Rather than the much discussed figure of the pirate and the various practices of jugaad, this paper focuses on forms of copying that are described publicly as plagiarism. I explore the debates about the copying of Indian films in Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1960s and today. These debates are marked by an acute discomfort that the idea of the derivative both masks and makes visible. Given recurrent articulations of anxiety around the ‘plague’ of plagiarism, I ask how we might interpret the frequent expressions of hurt and despair that accompanies perceived cinematic copying. I will suggest that the connections between Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi cinema have been mobilised to articulate anxieties about the capacity to be the ‘author’ of one’s own fate and the moral responsibility to act as such, specifically on the part of artists. I will suggest that debates about plagiary and the anger over copying in cinema are an aesthetic criticism deeply rooted in modernist imaginations of the responsibilities of art that are mobilised as part of a torturous ongoing process of decolonization in the region.​

The speaker

Lotte Hoek is a media anthropologist who has been doing long-term ethnographic fieldwork on visual and media culture in Bangladesh. Her research ranges from investigations of photographic activism to a long-term study of cinematic pornography. She is currently working on an ESRC funded research project on film appreciation in Bangladesh. Her book Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (2013) is published with Columbia University Press. She is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. 

The lecture series of the Modern South Asia Seminar is co-funded within the AMT Research Funding scheme, IIAS and LIAS.