ABSTRACT
Indian popular films often use European locales as spectacular backdrops for song and stunt sequences. These European locales are as much about India’s imagination of Europe, as they are about producing a ‘Europe’ for the Indian imagination, and is created through visually rich geographies of mountains, rivers, fjords, valleys, and forests teeming with wild animals. Can we read these geo-scapes as more than just backdrops, rather as complex ecologies of extraction – of human and non-human habitats, labour, resource, and capital? Bollywood location scouts, cinematographers, and directors identify optimum outdoor lighting conditions, state-of-the-art infrastructure, expert know-how that includes working with performing animals, and freedom from bureaucratic red tape, as key attractions for shooting in European locations. In this chapter, I focus on a recent animal film shot in Europe – Tiger Zinda Hai (Ali Abbas Zafar 2017) featuring wild wolves and the superstar Salman Khan. Through a textual and contextual analysis of the film, I show the entanglements of script-writers, producers, directors, stars, production crew, and VFX artists with wranglers, animal trainers, and performing animals in producing the film’s non-human geographies.
