This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalization, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early 1990s as a signature 'Bollywood style' evolved in the wake of liberalization and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, 'window-shopping' ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. Basu theorizes this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic.
Bollywood in the Age of New Media connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalizing process in India. It explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and film and media studies, this book presents a complex account of an India of the present caught between brave new silicon valleys and farmer suicides.
The geo-televisual aesthetic will prove useful not just for scholars of Indian cinema and media, but also for those of Indian political and cultural modernity at large, from visual anthropologists to political scientists. The book is as much about the new globalized imaginary of a national elite as it is about film.
This book has been long in gestation. The idea started in my head during those heady years in the mid-1990s when I was a film critic for The Telegraph in the city then known as Calcutta. It was then, when one was compelled to go beyond the staple Bollywood quota and watch up to four films a day in order to fill columns, that I got a glimpse of a new cinematic idiom. Coming in the wake of mighty barbarisms and equally mighty transformations, it was a different opulence altogether. The rumbles of the new were first adjusted to, engaged with, and theorized in the company of remarkable minds in the political and intellectual scene of Calcutta. Friends and peers like Jayeeta Bagchi, Nandinee Banerjee, Pallavi Banerjee, Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, Saswata Bhattacharya, Gautam Basu-Thakur, Prasanta Chakravarty, Swapan Chakravarty, Suchetana Chattopadhyay, Supriya Chaudhuri, Anirban Das, Amlan Dasgupta, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Mallika Jalan, Bodhisattwa Kar, Udaya Kumar, Bodhisattwa Maity, Amitava Malakar, Aniruddha Mitra, Reshmi Mukherjee, Sajni Mukherjee, Urvi Mukhopadhyay, Kavita Panjabi, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Abhijit Roy, Airindrajit Saha, Amitrajit Saha, Pratim Sengupta, and Ravi Vasudevan have played crucial roles in my development as a scholar during these years. Madhava Prasad has been an inspiring presence and an unerring but gentle guide. Moinak Biswas was the first to teach me how to think about cinema and develop an abiding scholarly love for it; Suman Mukhopadhyay did the same while making exquisite films. For the last two decades, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay has been the single most important influence in my life of the mind. It would be presumptuous to gauge how much I owe him in terms of my thinking and my being.
My doctoral years at the University of Pittsburgh were spent in a vigorous intellectual climate fostered especially by Jonathan Arac, David Bartholomae, Elizabeth Bledsoe, Amy Borden, Malkiel Choseed, Nancy Condee, Petra Dierkus-Thrun, Lucy Fischer, Brenda Glascott, Jeffrey Hole, Melissa Lenos, Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna, Adam Lowenstein, Neepa Majumdar, Amy Mueller-Hurwitz, Dana Och, Vladimir Padunov, Stanley Shoshtak, Anja Ulanowicz, Sergio Villalobos, Chris Warnick, and Stefan Wheelock.
For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist