The Bollywood Reader

by Dudrah, Rajinder; Desai, Jigna

• ISBN13: 9780335222131
• ISBN10: 0335222137
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-01
• Publisher: Open University Press

Summary

The reader provides a road map of the scholarship on modern Hindi cinema in India, with an emphasis on understanding the interplay between cinema and colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. The book attends to issues of capitalism, nationalism, Orientalism, and modernity through understandings of race, class, gender and sexuality, religion, and politics as depicted in Indian popular films. The book additionally focuses on the films and their representations in relation to current social and political issues, including the role of Bollywood cinema in the public culture of India and its diasporas. In doing so, it forwards essays that seek to understand the relationship between popular culture, political economy and the social imaginary of the nation-state. The essays also raise a variety of issues specific to the medium itself, including the development of particular genres, narrative forms, and exegetic and textual elements including musical and dance numbers as well as questions of spectatorship, audience, and institutional formations.

Author Biography

Rajinder Dudrah is Head of Drama and Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.

..Jigna Desai is Associate Professor in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, USA.

Table of Contents

'The essential Bollywood'	p. 1
Theoretical frameworks
'Indian cinema: pleasures and popularity'	p. 21
'Towards a theoretical critique of Bombay cinema'	p. 32
'The economics of ideology: popular film form and mode of production'	p. 45
'In the throes of change: exhibition, production and distribution'	p. 57
'Introduction: Indian popular cinema as a slum's eye view of politics'	p. 73
'The national-heroic image: masculinity and masquerade'	p. 84
Recent trajectories
'Avenging women in Indian cinema'	p. 97
'Figuring Mother India: the case of Nargis'	p. 109
'What is behind film censorship? The Khalnayak debates'	p. 122
'The home and the nation: consuming culture and politics in Roja'	p. 134
'Inside and out: song and dance in Bollywood cinema'	p. 146
'Invisible representation: the oral contours of a national popular cinema'	p. 158
'Imagining the family: an ethnography of viewing Hum Aapke Haiti Koun'	p. 172
Bollywood abroad and beyond
'The "Bollywoodization" of the Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena'	p. 190
'Bollywood and the frictions of global mobility'	p. 201
'Itineraries of Indian cinema: African videos, Bollywood, and global media'	p. 216
'"Ever since you've discovered the video, I've had no peace'": diasporic spectators talk back to Bollywood Masala	p. 229
'Queer as Desis: secret politics of gender and sexuality in Bollywood films in diasporic urban ethnoscapes'	p. 243
'On the media assemblage of Bollywood: time and sensation in globalizing India'	p. 264
Select keywords	p. 276
Select timeline	p. 283
Further reading	p. 286
Index	p. 289
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