Bollywood Travels

This title offers a cultural and social analysis of contemporary Bollywood films over the past decade, exploring the ideas of nation, race, religion, gender and sexuality, cinema and public spaces, diaspora and globalization.

From Bombay (Mumbai) and other production centres on the Indian subcontinent, Indian popular cinema has travelled globally for nearly a century, culminating in the Bollywood-inspired, Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. This volume brings together perspectives on Indian popular cinema, universally known as Bollywood now, from different disciplinary and geographical locations to look afresh at national cinemas. It shows how Bollywood cinema has always crossed borders and boundaries: from the British Malaya, Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, Mauritius, and East and South Africa to the former USSR, West Asia, the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia. While looking at the meanings of nation, diaspora, home, and identity in cinematic texts and contexts, the essays also examine how localities are produced in the new global process by broadly addressing nationalism, regionalism, and transnationalism, politics and aesthetics, as well as spectatorship and viewing contexts.

Using an interdisciplinary framework, this book offers a fresh perspective on the issues of diaspora culture and border crossings in the films, popular cultures, and media and entertainment industries from the popular Hindi cinema of India. It analyses and discusses a range of key contemporary films in detail, such as Veer Zaara, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, and Dostana. The book uses the notion of travel analytically in and through the cinema to comment on films that have dealt with Indo-Pak border crossings, representations of diaspora, and gender and sexuality in new ways. It engages with common sense assumptions about everyday South Asian and diasporic South Asian cultures and representations as expressed in Bollywood cinema in order to look at these issues further. Moving towards an innovative exploration beyond the films, this book charts the circuits and routes of Bollywood as South Asian club cultures in the diaspora, and Hindi cinema entertainment shows around the world, as well as its impact on social media websites. Bollywood Travels is an original and thought provoking contribution to studies on Asian Culture and Society, Sociology, World Cinema, and Film, Media and Cultural Studies.

This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when Bollywood has evolved as a part of India’s cultural diplomacy. Avoiding a linear, developmental narrative, the book re-examines the developments through the ruptures in the course of cinematic history. The essays in the volume critically consider transformations of the Hindi film industry from its early days to its present self-referential mode, issues of gender, dance and choreography, Bombay cinema’s negotiations with the changing cityscape and urbanisms, and concentrate on its multifarious regional, national and transnational implications in the 21st century. One of the most comprehensive volumes on Bollywood, this work presents an analytical overview of the multiple histories of popular cinema in India and will be useful to scholars and researchers interested in film and media studies, South Asian popular culture and modern India, as well as to cinephiles and general readers alike.

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

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 in Britain provides the most extensive survey to date of the various manifestations and facets of the Bollywood phenomenon in Britain. The book analyzes the role of Hindi films in the British film market, it shows how audiences engage with Bollywood cinema and it discusses the ways the image of Bollywood in Britain has been shaped. In contrast to most of the existing books on the subject, which tend to approach Bollywood as something that is made by Asians for Asians, the book also focuses on how Bollywood has been adapted for non-Asian Britons. An analysis of Bollywood as an unofficial brand is combined with in-depth readings of texts like film reviews, the TV show Bollywood Star (2004) and novels and plays with references to the Bombay film industry. On this basis Bollywood in Britain demonstrates that the presentation of Bollywood for British mainstream culture oscillates between moments of approximation and distancing, with a clear dominance of the latter. Despite its alleged transculturality, Bollywood in Britain thus emerges as a phenomenon of difference, distance and Othering.

Key changes have emerged in Bollywood in the new millennium. Twenty-First Century Bollywood traces the emerging shifts in both the content and form of Bollywood cinema and examines these new tendencies in relation to the changing dynamics of Indian culture. The book historically situates these emerging trends in relation to previous norms, and develops new, innovative paradigms for conceptualizing Bollywood in the twenty-first century. The particular shifts in contemporary Bollywood cinema that the book examines include the changing nature of the song and dance sequence, the evolving representations of male and female sexuality, and the increasing presence of whiteness as a dominant trope in Bollywood cinema. It also focuses on the increasing presence of Bollywood in higher education courses in the West, as well as how Bollywood’s growing presence in such academic contexts illuminates the changing ways in which this cinema is consumed by Western audiences. Shifting the focus back on the cinematic elements of contemporary films themselves, the book analyses Bollywood films by considering the film dynamics on their own terms, and related to their narrative and aesthetic usage, rather than through an analysis of large-scale industrial practices. It will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Film Studies, and Cultural Studies.