| Summary: | The paper strives to explore various facets of reincarnation as a theme or device in popular Indian cinema. Reincarnation has been a popular theme in Indian cinema since the early days of Indian film industry. The take of Indian cinema on the subject is very different from that of World cinema or Hollywood; its root can be traced back to traditional Indian philosophy professing Karma and the concept of rebirth. The cyclic pattern of birth and death as professed in Indian philosophy is reflected in a number of ways in the reincarnations movies: through the repetitive usage of various tropes of music, image and also by adopting a cyclic narrative structure. Reincarnation as a theme attributes to the scope of retelling love stories and revenge sagas, thus enhancing the melodramatic ‘masala’ nature of popular Indian cinema. The movies largely dwell upon and invest in the concept of immortality of the soul and eternal love between the lovers spanning over births. Through the revenge theme, violence is again justified on the pretext of Karma and duty towards keeping the natural order intact. Unearthing of the past life takes place by means of recollection of the protagonist’s past life memory, which can be triggered by a number of elements (“memory triggers”), and popular Indian cinema employs a number of tropes in this regard. Although largely conforming to the traditional Indian philosophy, popular Indian cinema has not altogether overlooked the clinical and psychological side of revisiting one’s past life either. Besides, Indian reincarnation movies have been regarded to be influenced by Gothic romances; but, growing out of that influence, they seem to subsume a number of conventions of literary and cultural Romanticism.
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