Bollywood S India

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 Dur 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.

Bollywood movies have long been known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But these exciting and often amusing films rarely reflect the reality of life on the Indian subcontinent. Exploring the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, the strikingly illustrated Bollywood’s Indiaexamines its nonrealistic depictions of everyday life in India and what it reveals about Indian society. Showing how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema’s interpretations of India over the last two decades are a reliable guide to understanding the nation’s changing hopes and dreams. She looks at the ways Bollywood has imagined and portrayed the unity and diversity of the country—what it believes and feels, as well as life at home and in public. Using Dwyer’s two decades spent working with filmmakers and discussing movies with critics and moviegoers,Bollywood’s India is an illuminating look at Hindi cinema.

This work provides an introduction to the enormously successful world of Bollywood - the biggest film industry on the planet. It includes a selection of writings by some of the most prominent voices in Indian film writing and criticism.

This book is a collection of incisive articles on the interactions between Indian Popular Cinema and the political and cultural ideologies of a new post-Global India.

How do we define the globalized cinema and media cultures of Bollywood in an age when it has become part of the cultural diplomacy of an emerging superpower? Bollywood and Its Other(s) explores the aesthetic-philosophical questions of the other through, for example, discussions on Indian diaspora's negotiations with national identity.

Central to the plot of one of the biggest releases of 2016—Inferno—was Irrfan, and the star of the hit American TV series Quantico is our very own Priyanka Chopra. From Raj Kapoor to Amitabh Bachchan to Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood has been India’s best cultural ambassador, be it in Russia, Africa or East Europe, and now in the UK and the US. In Bollywood Boom, National Award–winner Roopa Swaminathan explores the spectacular success of Bollywood in the twenty-first century and its rapidly rising power to influence the world. She argues that besides international goodwill, Indian cinema brings to the country real income through trade and tourism, and also enhances its global standing. Extensively researched and peppered with fun anecdotes, this remarkable book shows how Bollywood has the power to mould India’s fortunes by winning the hearts of people across continents.

"Bollywood s India" explores the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, now best known as Bollywood, and its non-realistic depictions of everyday life in India. Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema s interpretations of India over the last two decades are the most reliable guide to understanding the nation s changing dreams and hopes, fears and anxieties. She shows how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, and what that reveals about Indian life and society. "Bollywood s India" looks at the ways in which Bollywood has imagined and portrayed the unity and diversity of Indiawhat it believes and what it feels; life at home and in public. The book is based on twenty years of watching, teaching and writing about Hindi films, working with filmmakers and discussions with critics and fans. Featuring 80 striking images, the book has much to say to scholars and students of Indian cinema who are curious about the ways in which aspects of Indian life and culture are shown on screen, as well as the general reader and fan of world cinema."

Bollywood film is the national cinema of India, describing movies made in Mumbai, distributed nationally across India and with their own production, distribution and exhibition networks worldwide. This informative screen guide reflects the work of key directors, major stars and important music directors and screenplay writers. Historically important films have been included along with certain cult movies and top box office successes. No guide to Hindi film would be complete without discussing: Mother India, the national epic of a peasant woman's struggle against nature and society to bring up her family; Sholay, a 'curry western' where the all-star cast sing and dance, romance and kill; Dilwale Dulhaniya le jayenge, the greatest of the diaspora films, in which two British Asians fall in love on a holiday in Europe before going to India where they show their elders how to incorporate love into family traditions; Junglee, showing how love transforms a 'savage' (junglee) who yells 'Yahoo!' before singing and dancing like Elvis, creating a new youth culture; Pyaasa, dramatically shot in black and white film with haunting songs as the romantic poet suffers for his art in the material world; Fans of Bollywood film can debate Rachel Dwyer's personal selection of these 101 titles while those new to the area will find this an invaluable introduction to the best of the genre.