The Cinematic ImagiNation [sic]: Indian Popular Films as Social History"This book makes an important contribution to the field of Asian film criticism, Indian film history, cultural studies, and gender studies. The Cinematic ImagiNation provides readers with valuable insight into the relationships between nation-building, gender, sexuality, the family, and popular cinema, using post-Independence India as a case study." --Gina Marchetti, author of Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction India produces more films than any other country in the world, and these works are avidly consumed by non-Western cultures in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and by the Indian communities in Australia, Britain, the Caribbean Islands, and North America. Jyotika Virdi focuses on how this dominant medium configures the "nation" in post-Independence Hindi cinema. She scrutinizes approximately thirty films that have appeared since 1950 and demonstrates how concepts of the nation form the center of this cinema's moral universe. As a kind of storytelling, Indian cinema provides a fascinating account of social history and cultural politics, with the family deployed as a symbol of the nation. Virdi demonstrates how the portrayal of the nation as a mythical community in Hindi films collapses under the weight of its own contradictions--irreconcilable differences that encompass gender, sexuality, family, class, and religious communities. Through these film narratives, the author traces transactions among the various constituencies that struggle, accommodate, coexist uneasily, or reconstitute each other over time, and, in the process, reveal the topography of postcolonial culture. |
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The Cinematic ImagiNation [sic]: Indian Popular Films as Social History Jyotika Virdi No preview available - 2003 |
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Amitabh Bachchan Anand Anita Aradhana argues audience Bharat Bombay Bombay film bourgeois caste colonial conflict context cultural death Delhi desire Dilwale discourse dominant father female feminist feudal fiction figure film industry film's Geeta gender genre Gumrah Guru Dutt hero heterosexual romance Hindi cinema Hindi films Hum Aapke husband Ibid identity ideology imagination Indian Insaaf ka Taraazu Kali Kapoor Kumar literary lover Madhavi Madhumati male marriage masculinity Meena Kumari melodrama Mother India Muslim narrative national cinema nationalist patriarchal Phoolan Phoolan Devi pleasure police political popular cinema popular films popular Hindi cinema postcolonial Prasad Pratighaat Pritam protagonist Qyamat Radha Raj Kapoor Raja Ramesh rape relationship represent representation role romance films romantic love Routledge screen Seeta Seeta aur Geeta sexual Shekhar Shri Singh Sita Devi song stars symbolic tion tradition trope Ugra Narain University Press Upkaar Urdu Vijay villain woman women