LECTURE – 9 Cinemavideo MA 2nd Year (English) “The Social Practice of Cinema and Video Viewing in Kathmandu” - Mark Leichy Min Pun, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Tribhuvan University, PN Campus

THE AUTHOR: Mark Leichy Mark Leichy is Associate Professor of History and Anthropology at University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. He is a South Asian scholar whose research focuses on Nepali history and society. His research and teaching interests include class theory and social organization, mass media, consumer culture, cultural history, tourism, and South Asian history. He is also one of the editors of Studies in Nepali History and Society, a research journal published by Mandala Book Point, Kathmandu.

THE BOOK: Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society The book by Mark Leichy was published in 2003. The present book under review has three goals: a) to describe the cultural contexts and historical processes out of which a new middle class culture has emerged in Kathmandu, b) to provide a detailed account of the practices that make up contemporary middle class life c) drawing on the ethnographic insights, to offer a new approach to conceptualizing to middle class culture in Nepal.

Drawing from both Marx and Weberian tradition, the book argues that in comparison to caste, class better accounts for the new socio-cultural patterns that have come to dominate urban life in Kathmandu. This book is based on sixteen months field research conducted from 1988-1991, plus the follow up visits in 1996 and 2001.

The book as a whole provides interesting but lengthy ethnographic accounts of consumer culture, mass media, and youth culture in Kathmandu. Several case studies were collected to justify the relative position of middle class in Kathmandu. There are five parts organized in ten chapters in the book, containing one to three chapters in each part.

THE ARTICLE: "The Social Practice of Cinema and Video Viewing in Kathmandu" This article is the 6th chapter of the book Suitably Modern. It focuses on electronic visual mass media, commercial cinema and video, that explores the changing class and gender dynamics of electronic media consumption in Kathmandu. The essay portrays Nepal as a pre-mass media society before 1990 political change, but after 1990 Nepal enters the mass-media age.  

CINEMA AND VIDEO BOOM IN KATHMANDU During Juddha Shamsher’s time, the Janaseva Cinema around 1949 was the first cinema hall opened in Kathmandu’s New Road. Cinema halls provided a common consumer space, though the class system was always there. A number of cinema halls sprang up by 1970s. Cinema halls in Kathmandu during the 1960s and 1970s were featured by Hindi movies, very occasionally Nepali films and in the 1990s English-language films were shown to the people of Kathmandu.

Equally important in the middle class was the move from "hall to home" a shift in this key domain of consumer practice from public to private. New film fashions instantly shaped fashions in Kathmandu that was boosted by videos during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Video boom in the early 1990s in Kathmandu find video parlors in almost every residential area of Kathmandu. The VCR ownership became more and more essential to claim to middle class status.

FILM PREFERENCE: GENDER AND AGE WITHIN A CLASS There are film preferences that correspond to gender and age categories within the middle class. Middle class viewers in particular divide films into many different genres: art, social, action, love and blue. For the most part, middle class Hindi film viewers are women, both young and middle ages, who watch video films at home.

Younger women often included love stories whereas older and married women usually liked religious and domestic serial films. The viewing of English films, on the other hand, points out some of the reasons for the male symbolic rejection of Hindi cinema. Watching English films is not only for learning the language but also for understanding the European culture and civilization and so on. English film is watched mostly by men. Media consumption helps to produce and reproduce relations of class and gender dominance.

REALIZATION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS Mark Leichy, in this essay, is trying to define the cinematic/film realism. Many middle class viewers can’t distinguish reality from fiction. In films, realism is an effect produced by a variety of cinematic and narrative techniques, making the things plausible. So the power of film realism lies in convincing people not that filmic representations are real but that they are interreferentially possible.  

South Asian commercial movies, by means of hero/heroine/villain, convert all political, social and economic dilemmas into personal dramas. In this way, middle class media consumers in Kathmandu identify films as realistic and begin to experiment with new understandings of themselves and their social lives.

According to the cultivation theory, the more time people spend consuming mass media, the more they will tend to hold specific and distinct conceptions of reality. So the more time people spend watching movies, the more they perceive the real world as being similar to that of movies. The emphasis on realism among middle-class film viewers is part of a dual process in which they are at once ‘realizing’ their own lives and attempting to ‘naturalize’ a certain middle-class culture of ‘reality’.

CONCLUSION In this way, as their lives become more and more ‘realized’, members of the middle class seek to elevate their new lifestyle (their new culture of realism) to a privileged position. So middle class ‘realization’ is about naturalizing the cultural practice and values of the middle class: the material logics of consumerism, labor, democracy, freedom, individual achievement, and responsibility.  

Thus, the essay shows how media and media consumption help to produce and reproduce relations of class and gender dominance, making the middle class people culture look different from others. For example, the study of cinema and video viewing by the middle class viewers in Kathmandu indicates that the middle class culture is ideologically reconciled realism.  

Dr. Min Pun Associate Professor, Department of English Tribhuvan University, PN Campus, Pokhara minpun@gmail.com minpun@pncampus.edu.np www.minpun.com.np www.pncampus.edu.np