Bollywood Reader

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 select key films of recent years 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 textual elements including musical and dance numbers as well as questions of spectatorship, audience, and institutional formations. The Reader consists of seminal essays as well as new work researched and written by emerging scholars in the burgeoning field of contemporary Hindi cinema.