Bollywood's India: A Public Fantasy

by Priya Joshi

Overview

Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular culture and postcolonial modernity, Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India.

With dazzling interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. Themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. Summoning India's tumultuous 1970s as an interpretive lens, Joshi reveals the cinema's social work across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-starrer genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. In elegantly crafted studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Durga Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009), Joshi powerfully conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231169608
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	03/03/2015
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Priya Joshi is associate professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India, winner of the Modern Language Association's Prize for the Best First Book, the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian studies by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award. She is coeditor of The 1970s and Its Legacies in India's Cinemas.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments
Preface: The Social Work of Cinema
1. Bollywood's India
2. Cinema as Public Fantasy
3. Cinema as Family Romance
4. Bollywood, Bollylite
Epilogue: Anthem for a New India
Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

In Bollywood’s India, Priya Joshi has produced a thoughtful meditation on commercial Hindi cinema in the second half of the twentieth century, further underlining our scholarly romance with this form of mass-produced culture and its role in managing the fantasies surrounding the nation in India since Independence.

South Asian History and Culture - Richard Delacy

Priya Joshi's work is a timely assessment of key films and periods in Bollywood's history. Its wide-ranging literary, theoretical, and sociocultural perspectives, which cut across literature, postcolonial studies, media, and cultural studies, will surely be taken up by other scholars as well as general readers. A fine piece of scholarship.

Rajinder Dudrah

A lively, thoughtful writer, Joshi shows how Bollywood films have mirrored India's social, political and economic changes, and how western films have been influenced by Bollywood trends and motifs.

The Philadelphia Inquirer - Steven Rea

Lavishly illustrated... this volume would be an excellent course text for a semester on Bollywood.... Highly recommended.

Choice

Well-structured.... Joshi's book perfectly captures the history of Bollywood cinema and its cultural impact for the newcomer and seasoned viewer alike.

Film Matters