ABSTRACT
This chapter reads I.S. Jauhar’s popular spoof on celluloid Nasbandi as an important intervention in the cultural discourse in the aftermath of the Indian Emergency of 1975-77. The supposed exceptional aberration that the emergency represented in the default democratic discourse, still remains the reference point for all things aberrational. Popular cinema is indeed a crucial barometer of general public sentiment, since it is the very site of the ‘national’ narrative’s unfolding in the domain of popular imagination: the space where narratives of the political imaginary get variously and relentlessly imagined, enacted and consolidated in collective memory. The pitched political crisis of the nation under siege, so painstakingly elaborated in the inaugural song is pushed completely out of the picture as it were. Instead of any real presence, political authority is represented through the telephone: the modern means of communication over which decrees are ordered and assurances are given.
