Missing in the Original: Twin Dragons Remade in India S.V. Srinivas Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Bangalore. Indian film industries, like their counterpart in Hong Kong, frequently remake films produced by other industries. All films sourced from abroad are ‘unofficial’ remakes in that no royalties are ever paid and no acknowledgement made of the fact that the film at hand is based on another. It is a part of the film reviewer’s job to track the sources and educate the readers/viewers on the extent and brazenness of the borrowing. 1 I discuss below the instance of a remake and its source circulating in the celluloid versions in the same context to show how the original is made over into an incomplete or inadequate object, whose gaps various agents are required to fill. I do not intend to make a case for ‘reception studies’ or radical readings of films by particular (subaltern) audience groups. The larger point of this examination is to identify a set of questions that have to do with the material effects of industrial contexts of circulation and take them to the examination of films themselves. In disciplinary terms, the task at hand is to make the fact of celluloid films’ susceptibility to mutation, as they travel down the distribution and exhibition ladders, a problem for film studies. As of now the film studies conception of the filmic text is for the most part insensitive to the routine nature of object’s physical transformation in the course of circulation. In this essay I will look at the Hong Kong film Twin Dragons (Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, 1992) and its Telugu remake to make my point. Telugu film industry, one of the four south Indian industries, is second only to Hindi in size. Andhra Pradesh, the state which houses the industry, is the single largest market for cinema in India. It is also the state where Hong Kong films have had a significant presence. There are two stages to my investigation into what happens to the original. I begin with the circulation of Twin Dragons in the theatrical circuit in Andhra Pradesh. I then move on to this film’s Telugu remake, Hello Brother (E.V.V. Satyanarayana, 1994) and discuss how and why Twin Dragons became the occasion for addressing a set of issues that affected the Telugu film industry. In the latter part of the essay I will argue that the original and remake foreground key questions of stardom and how it works in specific contexts. I will also show that the original presents itself as a candidate for remake by reworking the conventions of melodrama. This exercise carried out by the Hong Kong film opens up new possibilities for the Telugu film industry, resulting in the rapid makeover of the dominant local genre. 1 Tejaswini Ganti’s description of how the Bombay film industry remakes Hollywood films is useful to understand the general picture even in other film industries in India. Ganti states: “Bombay filmmakers regard box-office successes of ‘hits’ in other Indian languages as attractive remake material because, having already succeeded with a set of audiences, such films are perceived as having a higher probability of succeeding with Hindi film audiences as well. Hollywood films, however, are not selected only on the basis of box-office outcome but are chosen for plots that seem novel and amenable to adaptation. Although remakes from other Indian languages resemble the original screenplay, adaptations of Hollywood films barely do because they have been transformed—or ‘Indianized,’ in industry parlance—to conform with the conventions of Hindi cinema.” Tejaswini Ganti, “And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood,” in L. Abu-Lughod, F. Ginsburg and B. Larkin eds, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 282.