From Tropicality and Tourist Gaze to Affective Geography: Reclaiming Kochi in Cobalt Blue

Sachin Kundalkar’s 2022 Indian Hindi-language feature film Cobalt Blue, which streamed on Netflix, is an adaptation of his 2006 Marathi novel of the same name, which Jerry Pinto translated into English. While the novel is set in Pune in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Kundalkar deliberately set the film in Kochi in India’s southern state of Kerala. This article problematizes this mislocation of the film’s setting, arguing that it creates a dialectical tension. On the one hand, the narration embodies a continuum between colonial discourse on tropicality (which codified tropical spaces as exotic, erotic, and perilous) and the capitalist spectacle of the tourist gaze (and Netflix gaze); on the other hand, it reduces the city of Kochi to a consumable place devoid of the logic of affective geography. This article traces the genealogy of colonial tropicality in relation to Kochi and examines how it is reproduced in the film as a continuum, with the city being showcased as a consumable place within the circuits of film tourism. It also demonstrates how the film’s narrative subverts this very continuum by engendering an affective geography. A comparative reading of the novel and the film is furthermore conducted to establish how the paying guest (whose grammar in the narrative enables him to navigate the tropes of being a tourist, alongside subcategories such as ‘drifter’ and ‘post-tourist’) acts as a catalyst affecting the protagonists—the brother Tanay and sister Anuja—when the guest becomes their romantic and sexual interest and thus engenders the affective geography. The article draws on the theories of Dean MacCannell, John Urry, Sara Ahmed, and select philosophical frameworks of Alain Badiou.