Formations of the Double: A Poetics of Hindi Cinema

Formations of the Double: A Poetics of Hindi Cinema
Richard Allen in conversation with Tejaswini Ganti
Wednesday, February 18, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
721 Broadway, Room 674

Storytelling in Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2026) seeks to understand the distinctive character of Hindi Cinema through the figure of the double. The double, in the form of the star playing identical twins or look-alikes, or assuming more than one persona, is an ubiquitous feature of post- independence Hindi cinema that continues into contemporary Bollywood. In confounding recognition, the double poses the question of identity, the difficulty of telling who’s who and who belongs to whom, which inevitably reaches beyond the personal to the political, to questions of family, class, nation, gender and sexuality, and allows for the negotiation of conflicting impulses or social identities in the manner of myth. Furthermore, the double serves to articulate performance with narration though the role play, deception, and imposture that is common to melodrama and comedy alike.

Within maya, or the realm of appearances in the Sanskrit tradition, everything can in principle be something else, and this often yields a confusion of identity, for example, in the bedtrick where a god substitute’s himself for a wife’s husband (Ahalya). Yet, when the double is introduced into postcolonial Indian cinema, the immediate inspiration is from the empirically rooted Western tradition where the identical twin or look-alike confounds recognition. It is the double of Shakespearian comedy and 19^th century melodrama, via Hollywood, or through the Benagli tradition via “middle cinema,” which provides Hindi Cinema with its characteristic double tropes, while shadowed by the psychological double as doppelgänger of European romanticism.

This is an in-person event, open to the public. Prior registration is required. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.

Richard Allen is Chair Professor of Film and Media at City University of Hong Kong and former Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is author of four books, including Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony (Columbia, 2007), and editor of seven, including (with Ira Bhaskar) Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories (Intellect 2022), which was nominated for the Kraszna Krausz book award in 2023.

Tejaswini Ganti is Professor of Anthropology and core faculty in the Program in Culture & Media at New York University. She has been conducting research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke 2012) Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2^nd ed. 2013; 3^rd ed. 2026) and the forthcoming Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi: Translation, Creativity, and Value in Indian Media worlds (Duke 2027).