2In Show Business, Tharoor conjures up cinematic screen images by transposing filmic episodes from Indian cinema to construct a postmodern ‘thematic’ and ‘cinematic’ retelling of the impact of cinema on postcolonial India. The author’s postmodernist ‘cinematic’ retelling underlines the possibilities of new ways of ordering experience as a means of emphasising disorder, a way of legitimising randomness, a new and enticing reason to assume that ‘art’ can and should duplicate the ‘real’. Tharoor draws on this idea of the real, within the creative metaphor of cinema where fact and fiction seem interchangeable, and shows how the portrayal of illusion serves the novel’s purpose of giving the reader a different perspective on real life. It is interesting to see how the postmodern device of undermining authorial authority draws attention to the nature of reality itself, thus suggesting there is no ‘real’; everything that exists is created within another reality that Jean Baudrillard describes as “hyperreal” in Simulacra and Simulation (1-2). Jean Baudrillard defines “hyperreality” as “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operational double, a programmatic metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short circuits all its vicissitudes” (Baudrillard 2). Baudrillard posits that there are three levels of simulation: the first level is an accurate portrayal of reality; the second level’s reproduction is one that blurs the boundaries between reality and representation; and the third order of simulation configures a virtual reality or a ‘hyperreality’ where the model comes before the constructed world. He contends that in a postmodern culture dominated by TV, films, news media, and the Internet, the whole idea of a true or a false copy of something has been erased, as all we have now are simulations of reality, which are neither more or less ‘real’ than the reality they simulate. This idea of the ‘loss of the real’ in which different forms of the media and low manifestations of popular mass culture influence us is evident in Show Business. The postmodern vision of multiple realities is evident in the novelistic intent of portraying the coexistence of the ‘real’ and the ‘apparent,’ between the ‘actual world’ and the ‘camera’s world,’ between ‘dreams’ and ‘art,’ emphasising the idea that we live in a postmodern world where ‘illusion’ is the only reality and nothing is what it seems. Through a cinematic ‘flashback’ the protagonist views his fantasies, his half-waking states of mind through varied Technicolor images of ‘real’ and ‘unreal,’ ‘past’ and ‘present’. The novel is structured as ‘cinematic takes’ and not chapters. As in film time in which motions slow down, speed up and freeze, in Show Business, Tharoor’s narrative structure adopts the motion of cinematic ‘takes’ to manipulate time in the novel. Each one of the six ‘takes’ in the novel freezes specific events in the life of the superstar. Flashforwards push the story forward, flashbacks in the form of monologues rewind time back in the novel, and intervals typical of Indian cinema theatres force time to stand still in Show Business. The novel’s exposition shows the protagonist rewinding the Technicolor film of his life to establish the retrospective tone of the narrative. The ‘rising’ action in the form of ‘takes’ of different cinematic episodes serves to intensify the original situation and moves towards the ‘climax’ where Ashok Banjara emerges as a superstar politician. The ‘downward’ or ‘falling’ action in the novel shows his simultaneous fall in filmdom and politics, leading to the final crashing episode when the film catches fire and crumbles to ash: “I am seeing you all now in flash forward, and you are out of focus, the print is overexposed, the celluloid has caught fire” (307). Tharoor uses these cinematic devices with the aim of manoeuvring and recasting chronological order in the novel so as to elicit emotional reactions such as surprise or to build suspense or contrive an impending sense of doom. Through flashbacks, the reader views episodes simultaneously as in a film narration, thus showing how time can be manoeuvred, adjusted, tailored to authorial whims, and controlled in the novel.

3In Show Business, the readers are constantly reminded that events are filtered through the single consciousness of Ashok Banjara. To complement the first-person narration, Tharoor resorts to the use of the narrator’s voice in a cinematic ‘voiceover’ that provides the background or commentary on screen images. The ‘offscreen voice’ juxtaposes visual strategies to identify the camera with the narrator’s perspective. Ashjok Banjara recalls events from the past through the first-person retrospective narrative. The ‘transition’ from present to past is handled by a ‘voiceover’ and a ‘dissolve’ where “the end of one shot is superimposed on the beginning of another” (Desmond 23). The opening shots in the novel reveal a film shooting with the protagonist describing the bizarre choreography of the dance director on the set. The scene is alive with the diegetic sounds of “Lights! Camera! Action! (5). The voiceover prepares the reader for his transition from the diegetic terrain of the novel into the sets of filmdom. “Ah, the magic of the worlds! I suppose that’s what brought me into this business in the first place,” he says, as the film set dissolves into an exterior scene at college showing Ashok Banjara’s entry into Bombay’s Bollywood that his ‘voiceover’ explains as the “only real world” (5). Tharoor uses the narrative frame of ‘voiceover,’ and ‘dissolve’ to establish and sustain the first-person narration in the novel. He uses these camera techniques to convey ‘exposition’ economically and to highlight the narrator’s perspective through a ‘camera point of view’. The ‘voiceover’ hovers throughout the novel to remind the reader of the ‘camera point of view’. The use of the narrative frame of ‘voiceover’ and ‘dissolve’ helps to establish and sustain the cinematic first-person narration in Show Business. Tharoor’s ‘voiceover’ technique can be compared to the cinematic strategy of having the camera follow a character who is in every scene and focussing the viewer’s attention to only what this character can see. The ‘voiceover’ in the opening ‘take’ is vividly present in the final concluding ‘shot’ in the novel when the description of the shooting flames of the pyre prepare the reader for the death of the protagonist. In the final fall of the cinematic curtain, the embers move, the picture dissolves, the dream sequence in the film goes up in smoke to announce the novel’s dramatic end.

4In Show Business, Tharoor uses ‘film imagery’ to portray an imaginary sequence of images. Through the use of a ‘long movie scene’ at the start of the novel, Tharoor alerts the reader to the movie techniques with which the book abounds.

Scene: a nightclub, of the kind found in Hindi films. A large stage, bedecked with gilt and a dazzling mosaic of multicoloured mirrors, faces a valley of white-clothed tables. Seated at these, their expressions bedecked with guilt, is an indeterminate collection of white-clothed diners, none of whom look as if they can afford a place like this. (Indeed they can’t; they are all extras, or ‘Junior Artistes’ as the trade prefer they be called, roped in at seventy rupees a day.) They seem remarkably uninterested in the food before them; that is because they are under strict instructions from the executive producer not to consume it (their own, somewhat more frugal repast, awaits them in the studio canteen after the shift)…. The lights dim; a single spotlight appears on the stage illuminating a man with a narrow, red-stained mouth and drooping moustache” (27-28).

Like the filmmaker who has total control over point of view enabling him to dictate exactly what shall be portrayed, Tharoor directs the point of view by presenting the scene through the ‘camera eye’ where the motion of the camera changes the camera’s perspective on the subject. The ‘camera eye’ pans and scans the scene horizontally revealing the multi-coloured set of a Hindi-movie night club; camera movements of ‘tilting’ result in the gaze moving upward and downward taking in the white-clothed attire of the extras on stage; ‘tracking’ and ‘travelling’ camera techniques result in lateral vision encompassing the backdrop of the set; and finally ‘craning’ camera angles result in the ‘camera eye’ zooming down to a single spotlight to focus on the protagonist on the set, thus executing a parallel ‘high-angle shot’ to diminish the vilain, casting him at disadvantage by proding the cinematic reader-viewer to focus on his unappealing looks. Further parenthetical metafictional inserts of the ‘voiceover’ gauge and cover the subjective aspects of the ‘extras’ on the scene being shot and consider simultaneously the reactions of the cinema goers and the cast of extras. The ‘camera eye’ follows the eye-contact of the protagonists: “Our hero looks at the girl on the stage, the girl on the stage looks at him, the camera looks at her looking at him, the camera looks at him too” (28). Here the camera angle in relation to the subject being photographed begins as a ‘straight-on’ or ‘eye-level angle’ suggesting neutrality toward the subject in which the camera looks straight ahead of the subject capturing the characters on the set. The ‘camera eye’ proceeds to assemble ‘graphic matches’ where the two similar shots of the exchange of looks between the hero and the heroine are joined together. The ‘camera eye’ further executes an ‘eyeline match,’ in which the girl in one shot is shown looking in one direction and in the next shot the space toward which the girl is looking is shown and captured as a shot by the camera. The reader participates further in this cinematic game by matching the varied shots and assembling them into logical sequence of connected ideas as presented by the all-seeing ‘camera eye’.

5Through further juxtapostion of ‘dissimilar’ shots, the narrator calls the attention of the reader to the conscious connections among the ever-changing images. He adopts the method of ‘composition by juxtaposition’ – a technique of “cutting, editing, or montage which is the most characteristic feature of film form” (Richardson 91). The voiceover insists: “There are directors here who make movies without scripts, contenting themselves with storylines on ever-changing scraps of paper” (77). The protagonist’s Technicolor dream unfolds in a different studio, on a different set as a different dream sequence each day, and he refrains from getting involved in the storyline, mouthing meaninglessly the formulaic scripts. The assemblage of contrasting and conflicting images achieves a significance that goes beyond the meaning implicit in any of the individual shots as the reader discovers the ‘hyper-real’ world of Indian cinema. In the final re-run of his life when critically ill, Ashok Banjara hears voices of visitors pleading with him to rise from his coma, but the prisoner of the never-ending Technicolor film remains trapped in a web of ‘cinematic high drama,’ where he sees the re-enactment of his meteoric rise to fame. As in ‘cinema space’ where the camera allows the viewer to see the same subject from different points of view, the ‘voiceover’ narration expressed by the protagonists ‘off-screen’ reveal the varied views of filmdom through a ‘mélange’ of viewpoints.

6The various voices in the novel vie with one other to be heard in the multi-layered fictional space. The polyphonic narrative voices deliver monologues in the form of ‘your stories’ in the novel revealing various views on Indian cinema as ‘Life imitating art’. The villain rants, “What you did was crime, Ashok Banjara. You deprived India …” (64), thus foregrounding the impact of Bollywood on the common man and the presence of a sea of signs composed of cinematic images that appeal to the cinema goers. The paternal voice expresses disapproval: “It is strange, isn’t it, how so many of the events of your life seemed to parallel your films, and vice-versa. Life imitating art, perhaps – if Hindi films can be called art” (122). The disapproving tone highlights the postmodern mingling of the ‘private’ and the ‘public,’ the thin line between ‘real’ and ‘reel’ life events, and the synthesisation of ‘filmy’ episodes with ‘lived’ experiences. These ‘lived experiences’ are ‘real’ or ‘hyper-real’ or ‘realer’ than the ‘real’ or ‘hyper-real’ reflections created by the flow of the film in the novel. I would like to highlight how the metafictional text differs from a realistic text, in that it often contains both contradictions and coincidences that force readers to question the ‘reality’ of the universe created by the writer. In a realistic text, there is an agreement between the writer and the reader that the reader will believe the world the writer has created as long as the writer stays within the conventions of that fictional world. The alert reader also hears the authorial insert that proposes the idea of Hindi films being elevated to the status of art. The heroine comments on the ‘ever-changing’ script: “So you get the script, and what do you do to it? You let that wife of yours take it over, change the story, destroy my part, control the film and drive it to ruin” (187). The ‘ever-changing’ scripts and scenarios in the fictional space insist on the portrayal of reality as ‘varied’ and insist on the existence of ‘multiple reality’ in postmodern vision. As in a film, in the novel, ‘storylines’ are altered to suit the requirements of ‘episodic structure’ and ‘dramatic’ form. In the final ‘take,’ the voices swell and drown the protagonist’s voice: “The voices fill it, merge, rise, withdraw, return; they swell to fill the spaces between my ears, between my ears and my heart, between my heart and my head. Through them I try to interpose my own, clamorous, insistent, screaming, voice. But they do not hear me” (303). The final mingling of divergent voices that clamour to be heard can be considered as an intentional postmodern strategy of configuring modes of ‘chaos,’ ‘disharmony’ and ‘confusion’. The voices express myriad views and varied ideas and this can be considered as a ‘deliberate’ mode used by the author to rearrange narrative elements. Tharoor’s postmodern artifice configures cinematic equivalents in the novel’s fictional space by contemporizing filmic anecdotes and references. His experimental sleight of hand adjusts the plot and the ending of the novel to fit the cinematic diegesis, and thus captures the attention of a vast reading public.

7As in the film’s narrative economy where emphasis is on visibility and sound, Tharoor’s novel abounds with ‘sight’ and ‘sound’ montages where bits and pieces of sound float in and register themselves, thus showing the author’s constant concern with the uses of sound in Show Business.

Interior: a huge cavernous hall. Two nervous men walk across a marbled floor. The sound of their shoes on the marble is the only intrusion on the silence. Then the music builds up: at first slow, then with mounting tempo, danger in every note (23).

The shot begins as a dead track (the total absence of sound in a scene). The absence breaks the expected sound pattern of dialogue, music, and effects established in the film up to that point, surprises the audience, makes the audience concentrate on the image; and creates anxiety and anticipation in the audience as it waits for sound to resume” (Desmond 32). The narrator uses this film technique of featuring ‘voids of silence’ by highlighting the ‘ambient’ sound intrusions like the sound of shoes on the marble floor. The reader concentrates on the ‘silent’ image and like the film viewer who anticipates and waits for sound to resume, the reader awaits the resumption of sound in the fictional space. The ‘diegetic’ sound of shoes is followed by the ‘nondiegetic’ inclusion of music. The music score intended only for the reader and not the protagonist is ‘nondiegetic’ music that helps the reader to imagine emotions experienced by the protagonist. The music tempo spells danger and alerts the reader of the mounting tension in the camera shot. The scene becomes thus ‘visible’ and ‘audible’ to the reader. The song sequences in the novel serve to establish further structural patterns of the shots as they provide ‘continuity’ or ‘smooth transitions’ and flow from take to take in the novel.

As the song continues, the scene keeps changing to depict the evolving courtship. In one verse they are by the beach; in the next running through a park; in a third, swaying on his motor cycle. Through each change of costume and locale, the song goes on:
     I am the long arm of the law,
     You needn’t ask for any more,
     No one will hurt you,
     Nothing can dirty you,
     You are what I’m fighing for!
     …There are six different shots of Abha running to Ashok’s arms in six different parts of town and being clasped in six different tight embraces. When the last note fades away, the camera catches them thus, and lingers on Abha’s face, the side that is not pressed into the hero’s chest. She is smiling: but is it the smile of a woman in love, or of a villainness in victory?” (32)

The narrator edits and chooses the best ‘camera shots’ and then assembles them together to build the scene, the sequence, and finally the complete film. The song thus consists of a series of episodes and are hence set in mere ‘cinematic episodic plotting,’ where images are linked together through stray and loose shots capturing the presence of the romantic couple in varied romantic shots in almost similar postures. The ‘transitions’ are however apparent in the changing locale of a beach, a park and a motor cycle ride. The connecting link in these ‘joins’ is provided by the song. Each shot is superimposed with the beginning of the next shot as ‘dissolves’. As the song fades away, the camera wipes and cuts the final romantic scene by performing a ‘jump cut’ (in which one shot is replaced abruptly with another shot that is mismatched in a way that calls attention to the cut and jars the viewer: see Desmond 29), revealing the ‘villainness’ smile of the heroine that is mismatched from the readers’s expectation of a ‘woman in love’.

In all Hindi films there is one theme – the triumph of good over evil. The actual nature of the evil, the precise characteristics of the agent of good, may vary from film to film […] there is no duality between the actor and the heroes he portrays. He is all of them, and all of them are manifestations of the Essential Hero. Therein lies the subconscious appeal of the Hindi film to the Indian imagination, and the appeal, along with it, of the Hindi film hero (213).

Like Indian films that transfer onto celluloid what the common man yearns for, Tharoor’s Show Business offers the readers parodies of box office commercial entertainers. The narrator wisely points out, “I have given each Indian the chance to reinvent his life, to thrill to the adventurous chase, to chase the unattainable girl, to attain the most glorious victory, to glory in the sheer joy of living. I have brought dignity to innumerable lives, doctor; more, I have brought hope” (305). Keeping in mind the idea that the Indian film industry is built on the ignorance of the cinemagoers and on their willing suspension of disbelief, Tharoor’s portrayal of the ‘unreal’ in Indian cinema in Show Business challenges the boundaries that separate ‘private’ and ‘public’ life. Ashok Banjara’s Technicolor re-run of his life speaks of how every ‘private’ matter becomes ‘public’. In Show Business, the life of Ashok Banjara is shown in ‘thematic’ and ‘cinematic’ fragmentation. Through the technique of fragmentary presentation, the reader views different moments in the life of the protagonist like the ever-changing scenes in song sequences, his entry into the dark world of politics, the enactment of one of his mythical dramas, in his myriad roles as mechanic or monkey peddler or snake charmer. All these ‘fragmentations’ portrayed in illogical sequence efface the boundaries of time. The final ‘take’ in the novel is cinematically post-modern. The Technicolor film ends with the protagonist journeying from the past to the deeper past, and in the final take the protagonist discovers that he lives in a ‘hyperreal world’ of a perpetual present.

9Tharoor’s postmodernist literary artifice which embraces ‘diversity’ and ‘contradiction’ and celebrates the ‘melange’ of genres and art forms like cinema and literature seems to be inspired by the very reality of India. Elsewhere in an article entitled “An adventure called India,” Shashi Tharoor comments on how the Indian identity celebrates diversity: “If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast” (3). Similarly in India: From Midnight to the Millennium, Tharoor examines India’s unity in diversity and describes the country as “a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive” (From Midnight to the Millennium 1). Unlike modernist tenets that hoped to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, and which considered film as a mere basis for “new techniques of representation” (McHale 128), Tharoor’s postmodernist approach elevates the importance of cinema in artistic and intellectual discussions, placing it thus on a peer level with fine arts and literature. Through the appropriation of popular cinematic media, Tharoor rejects rigid genre boundaries, favours ‘fragmentation,’ and promotes ‘playfulness,’ ‘irony’ and ‘parody’ in Show Business. By elevating the ‘trivial’ into centre focus, he creates a multiplicity of messages in the fictional space. As in a film in which the audience’s suspension of belief is destroyed, Tharoor toys with the reader’s suspension of disbelief by using cinematic metaphors. It is interesting to consider Brian McHale’s contention that in postmodernist fiction “the distinction between literal reality and metaphorical vehicle becomes increasingly indeterminate, until we are left wondering whether the movie reality is only a trope after all, or belongs to the ‘real’ world of this fiction” (McHale 129). By insisting on the ‘artificiality’ of the cinematic experience, the author presents the readers with a new view of the subject matter, where he highlights how cinema as a ‘visual culture’ represents the ambitions of the masses, showing them what they want to see, believe and enjoy. By resorting to parody, Tharoor shows the reader the ‘hyperreal’ world of entertainment films where stories of love, sex, myth, violence, pleasure and hope offer the film viewers images of the ‘unpresentable’ that do not exist in daily life.