ABSTRACT
For tens of thousands of years, human breath was the most profound expression of human being. It’s true, of course, that reading remains intimately, and even inextricably, bound to speech, even when the people no longer move our lips in the exercise of the skill. An image will be accompanied by the soaring and, yes, emotion-ascribing harmonies of a musical soundtrack, with assorted clamorous sound effects frequently auguring the arrival of the human utterance. In the 1970s–1990s masala film context, such oath-exhorting scenes often come aurally accessorized with a sudden blustering of wind, or of temple bells or some other natural or religiously tinged totemic force that signals the oath’s existence as truth-incarnate. Equally noteworthy is that these films’ climactic showdowns—typically the consequence of those earlier-delivered oaths—transpire in settings that explicitly conjure sacred space.
