Indian Contemporary Films And Societal Reflection

Film has always acted as a window to the society where it brings out various essences of life. India has always shown prominence in representing its inheritance and rich cultural lineage through different layers of films. Right from “Raja Harishchandra” as a full-length feature film in 1913 to the most contemporary films released on OTT, everything and everyone embedded in any of the films made in India has some level of relevance to the time and society, therefore, they can be called contemporary while projecting some form of social message through their presence. The book “Indian Contemporary Films and Societal Reflection” presents a collection of a list of reviews based on some of the perspectives and concepts portrayed through films like commercialism, gender identity, gender representation, portrayal of power, cinema as a form of art, casteism in cinema, political discourse in cinema, inequality, resilience, relationship, oppression, animation, celluloid reverberations, propaganda and agenda planning, and many more. The twenty-six enthralling chapters from forty-nine authors are collected in this book, which would provide an extensive understanding of different perspectives of films and help identify the societal portrayal of films in various ways.

Cinema in India is an entertainment medium that is interwoven into society and culture at large. It is clearly evident that continuous struggle and conflict at the personal as well as societal levels is depicted in cinema in India. It has become a reflection of society both in negative and positive ways. Hence, cinema has become an influential factor and one of the largest mass communication mediums in the nation. Social and Cultural Dynamics in Indian Cinema is an essential reference source that discusses cultural and societal issues including caste, gender, oppression, and social movements through cinema and particularly in specific language cinema and culture. Featuring research on topics such as Bollywood, film studies, and gender equality, this book is ideally designed for researchers, academicians, film studies students, and industry professionals seeking coverage on various aspects of regional cinema in India.

Contributed articles.

Focus: Popular Music in Contemporary India examines India’s musical soundscape beyond the classical and folk traditions of old to consider the culturally, socially, and politically rich contemporary music that is defining and energizing an Indian youth culture on the precipice of a major identity shift. From Bollywood film songs and Indo-jazz to bhangra hip-hop and Indian death metal, the book situates Indian popular music within critical and historical frameworks, highlighting the unprecedented changes the region’s music has undergone in recent decades. This critical approach provides readers with a foundation for understanding an Indian musical culture that is as diverse and complex as the region itself. Included are case studies featuring song notations, first-person narratives, and interviews of well-known artists and emerging musicians alike. Illuminated are issues of great import in India today—as reflected through its music—addressing questions of a "national" aesthetic, the effects of Western music, and identity politics as they relate to class, caste, LGBTQ perspectives, and other marginalized voices. Presented through a global lens, Focus: Popular Music in Contemporary India contextualizes the dynamic popular music of India and its vast cultural impact.

Haunting Bollywood is a pioneering, interdisciplinary inquiry into the supernatural in Hindi cinema that draws from literary criticism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, history, and cultural studies. Hindi commercial cinema has been invested in the supernatural since its earliest days, but only a small segment of these films have been adequately explored in scholarly work; this book addresses this gap by focusing on some of Hindi cinema’s least explored genres. From Gothic ghost films of the 1950s to snake films of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s globally influenced zombie and vampire films, Meheli Sen delves into what the supernatural is and the varied modalities through which it raises questions of film form, history, modernity, and gender in South Asian public cultures. Arguing that the supernatural is dispersed among multiple genres and constantly in conversation with global cinematic forms, she demonstrates that it is an especially malleable impulse that routinely pushes Hindi film into new formal and stylistic territories. Sen also argues that gender is a particularly accommodating stage on which the supernatural rehearses its most basic compulsions; thus, the interface between gender and genre provides an exceptionally productive lens into Hindi cinema’s negotiation of the modern and the global. Haunting Bollywood reveals that the supernatural’s unruly energies continually resist containment, even as they partake of and sometimes subvert Hindi cinema’s most enduring pleasures, from songs and stars to myth and melodrama.

This book offers a concise and cutting-edge repository of essential information on new independent Indian films, which have orchestrated a recent renaissance in the Bollywood-dominated Indian cinema sphere. Spotlighting a specific timeline, from the Indies’ consolidated emergence in 2010 across a decade of their development, the book takes note of recent transformations in the Indian political, economic, cultural and social matrix and the concurrent release of unflinchingly interrogative and radically evocative films that traverse LGBTQ+ issues, female empowerment, caste discrimination, populist politics and religious violence. A combination of essential Indie-specific information and concise case studies makes this a must-have quick guide to the future torchbearers of Indian cinema for scholars, students, early career researchers and a global audience interested in intersecting aspects of cinema, culture, politics and society in contemporary 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.