Popular Hindi cinema metamorphosed unrecognizably in the new millennium. An expanding urban middle-class viewer base, ever growing in its Anglophone cultural absorption, fuelled the multiplex boom at home. A slew of popular movies in tune with the sensitivities of the diasporic Indians came to define 'Bollywood' as a powerful global brand and a lifestyle banner. Another kind of mainstream cinema emerged in opposition to the dominant 'elitist' presence, a cinema meant less for multiplexes but still not 'traditional' in the old way. The Hindi film industry itself changed radically post 1990s, and so did the meanings, mores, and ideologies embedded in Hindi cinema.
Going beyond the conventional theory- laden mode of analysing the political moorings of mainstream cinema, M.K. Raghavendra accords primacy to their 'text', treating them as rich reflections of the goings on in contemporary society. Taking cinema and cinema-viewing as a conjoined site of enquiry, he brings together a revealing and enlightening analysis of 28 Hindi blockbusters from the 2000s. With a close reading of films such as Rang De Basanti, Veer-Zaara, Bunty Aur Babli, 3 Idiots, Dabangg, Rajneeti, and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Raghavendra untangles the threads of myriad new imaginaries of contemporary India and Indian-ness, embedded in a transformed Bollywood.
This book would not have been possible without help and suggestions from people, the nature of which is too varied and difficult to enumerate: Sharadini Rath, Usha K.R., Rammanohar Reddy and the Economic and Political Weekly, and the editors at Oxford University Press, who have been deeply understanding, helpful, and prompt. The book also owes a deep debt of gratitude to the anonymous readers whose perceptive and useful suggestions I promptly implemented.
This is an introduction to a collection of essays devoted to mainstream Hindi cinema after 2000. If the impact of globalization began to be experienced almost universally in India in the new millennium. a principal vehicle utilized to propel a largely pre-modern society into the global age was the English language. This being the case, it is logical to suppose that the social impact of English would be registered by mainstream Hindi cinema which after 1947 had been instrumental in the imagining of India by its citizens as a cohesive community.
The thrust of the essays in this book is broadly political, which has been the approach of much of the writing on the subject in India. Where the present approach differs, however, is in the analysis offered being almost entirely textual. The tendency in the most ambitious academic writing on film in India has been to examine its 'effects"," that is, the uses to which cinema has been put and the consequences of its interactions in the public space. While this is certainly legitimate, it cannot be unrelated to scholars being uncomfortable with admitting that the popular film text is anything but innocuous. But the Indian popular film has been a treasure trove of signifiers and I hope to show not only that politics has had a bearing on cinema but also that cinema shows us new ways in which political issues can be understood.
This book is primarily a work of film interpretation but this needs clarification since different kinds of meaning can be made of any film. The meaning of a film to the audience which consumes it locally is not the meaning that a national film jury would ascribe to it, and an academic studying it would construct a third kind of meaning. It is now a truism to say that media texts are not only authored by their creators but also 'co-authored' by audiences. If one supposes that there is a 'natural selection' of patterns and motifs in the popular cinema of any period depending on their pertinence, the role of the consumer co-author is made more significant and this places a greater value upon popular cinema. Popular cinema can therefore be broadly considered an utterance by the constituency it is addressing and interpreted accordingly. This is not to assert that this interpretation is the same as the one that audiences will voice but neither is it the kind of meaning that academic studies of Indian cinema have generally excavated. While the most sensitive of cinephiles will ascribe a surface meaning to any film, Indian audiences perhaps respond most readily to the 'relayed meaning' of popular cinema and academics seek out deep meanings. It should be noted here that 'depth' in the context of deep interpretation has little to do with profundity. While 'surface' interpretations presume that authors as agents are still in some privileged position with regard to what the representations are, deep interpretations presume that they have no such privilege. Deep interpretations, apart from being symptomatic, seek to get at the structure underneath. They are not content with establishing and interpreting relationships within texts and are reliant on pre-existent theoretical approaches in psychology and the social sciences with which they align themselves.
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