ABSTRACT

Gandu’s subversion of the pedagogical national narrative could be framed through the thesis that the film imagines a hitherto unrealised indigenous national youth subculture or counter-culture. Gandu’s obsession with the radical British-Asian band Asian Dub Foundation is shorthand for contemporary India’s heightened access to global cultural production. Gandu’s reference to an imagined or virtual ‘Indian’ rap culture is undergirded by the real example of the earlier-mentioned Bangalore rock subculture. The intruding sequence is a bricolage of multiple split screens containing filmmaking credits, visuals of Gandu rapping, subtitled lyrics, all simultaneously occupying screen space. This jarring dissonance of audience expectation is foregrounded by Gandu’s rapping excoriation at having witnessed his mother and Das Babu in flagrante delicto. The apparently casual almost anodyne inclusion of the ‘political voice’ in Gandu could be indicative of the disjunctures endemic in the lives of the state’s marginalised objects, Gandu, his mother and Ricksha, at the micro-level.