The Shape of Life: Reading Space in Sai Paranjpye's Cinema (1980-2009)

This thesis is an interdisciplinary spatial exploration of the films of Indian director Sai Paranjpye. The thesis examines the aesthetic and narrative strategies of spatial representation in seven of Paranjpye’s films – Sparsh (1980), Chashme Baddor (1981), Katha (1982), Disha (1990), Papeeha (1993), Choodiyan (1993) and Suee (2009). Employing a mixed methodology drawn from the disciplines of human geography, urban studies, sociology, feminist theory and gender studies in reading spaces, I suggest that Paranjpye depicts fragmented Indian life at the intersection of the spatial and the social in this body of films. This encounter of spatial and social is crucial in structuring the ideas of identity, inter-personal relationships and the experience of modernity. Through a textual analysis of each film, the thesis argues that it is essentially the lived space and architectural form that structures life and manifests lived experience in this selected body of films. The thesis identifies five major themes – border crossing, perceptions of home, marginality, private/public divisions and the potential of Mazaa (fun) – that bind together these lived filmic geographies and determine the texture of life.

The thesis contextualises Paranjpye’s body of work in relation to the medial environment of the 1970s-80s. It also traces the influence of the cinematic forms of middle cinema and India’s new wave film movement on Paranjpye’s cinema to discover continuities, discontinuities and the subversive potential of these films. In this regard, I argue that Paranjpye’s cinema disrupts the genre orthodoxies that regard middle cinema as middle ‘class’ cinema. This exploration reveals that these films are in constant dialogue with various visual forms that evolved during the 1970s-80s and that they revel in aesthetic fluidity, challenging the strict generic borders.