‘Dangerous Play’ – Masculinity and punishment in Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking: Exploring spectacles of sexuality and surveillance in modern India

In this article, I will discuss Anurag Kashyap’s film No Smoking (2007) in order to explore questions about the nature and limits of masculinities in contemporary India and the ways in which these are refracted through representation in certain kinds of newly emerging popular cinema. In studying a film that seems to capture in the space of two hours a confusing and bewildering proliferation of sexed images (that are nonetheless, and significantly, not really about sex ), I study the devices that popular cinema, in a putatively globalized India, seems to adopt and manoeuvre in order to come to terms with its complex identity, and in doing so what systems of traditional heteronormativity and masculinity it reinforces and/or dispels.