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The wide choice of exhibition practices ranging from the multiplex to B- and C-grade stand-alone theatres has facilitated the production and exhibition of a new kind of small budget film with realistic representation targeted at a small, niche middle-class audience. This chapter argues that the films indicate Hindi cinema's return to the local through the representation of theatrical forms that exist on the cultural margins. It examines some of these films' appropriation of local theatrical traditions such as nautanki to represent contemporary social realities.

Assemblages in A-grade popular Indian films became irresistibly geo-televisual from the beginning of the 1990s. The nation's overall media space gradually began to open up to a global dispensation of electronic satellite exchanges after the beginning of liberalisation in 1991. This chapter elaborates on why geo-televisual exchanges come with uneven kinetic distributions and why these processes coincide with a planetary regime of power and governance. It is often noted that compared to an earlier epoch of the ‘all-India film’, the big-budget ‘Bollywood’ of the 1990s later ‘virtualised’ India. This chapter focuses on the period between 1991 and 2004 to examine the geo-televisual as informatic in Hindi cinema. First, it provides a brief historical account of transformations in the media and film industries. It then traces a critical genealogy of the geo-televisual in relation to Hindi film, selecting two transformative periods for detailed examination: first, a nationalist monitoring of the geo-televisual in relation to an ‘Indian culture’ (1947–1988), and second, the age of globalisation and new media (1991–2004).

This chapter examines the presence of the Persio-Arabic qissa (story) of Majnun Laila in Hindi cinema. Given that much of Hindu tradition is not focused on stories of romantic love, or in presenting a template for the idealised marital union through the figures of Rama and Sita in the epic Ramayana, the Persio-Arabic qissa has come to provide a template for the hero in Hindi films in the form of the infatuated Majnun, and the object of his desire in the garb of Laila — creating a sensual image of the Muslim female as a site of forbidden desire. As such, the qissa of Majnun Laila is used to disrupt the dharmic principle, with the lovers meeting a tragic end because of this, but the story has been reincarnated so many times in Hindi cinema that it shows the deep implication of the Islamic in the Hindu.

This book is an inquiry into the new Indian media world of the 1990s and the concomitant universe of commercial Hindi film. How did this period of titanic, techno-financial modernisation also witness paradoxically the rise of a ‘pre-modern’ ideology of Hindutva, hitherto languishing among the urban petit bourgeois and some agrarian-feudal quarters of north India? What is the assembling process in popular Hindi cinema, and what exactly happens when cinematic assembling becomes ‘informatic’ in a global sense? This book is not just an excursion into film and media theory, but also a political analysis of the globalisation of culture and urban life in a third world situation. It first examines the philosophy of the Indian cinematic assemblage and indicates how the assembling processes have always responded to ecological shifts in politics, media and fields of knowledge. First, it considers the realism debate and the definition of cinematic assemblage before discussing assemblages of totality and temporality as well as the thing-in-the-assemblage. It also looks at the body-in-the-assemblage, focusing on Dalit and the woman.

This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.

This chapter focuses on the singer Ila Arun to elucidate how economic ‘liberalisation’ transformed the Indian cultural landscape in the 1990s, dramatically altering representations of women in Bombay cinema. The postliberalisation period saw the waning of playback singer Lata Mangeshkar’s decades-long monopoly, and the rise of singers with very different styles and strengths. With her coarse timbre, full-throated folk style, and uninhibited vocal and visual presence, Arun articulated the opposite of the good Indian woman Mangeshkar represented. While the bawdiness and bodily sound of her voice earned her great fame as the ethnic woman, the chapter argues that Bombay cinema’s audiovisual contract was mostly intact during this transitional period. In specifying how this contract worked and how ideas about voice and body integral to it were being transformed, the universalist thrust of Michel Chion’s theoretical construct is tempered while the historiography of women’s voices in Indian cinema is also extended.

This chapter examines the process of imagining into existence a sense of nationhood by a specific diaspora of Indian origin (namely, the Fiji Indians) in Australia and the role that Bollywood plays in this. It focuses on how mass images of India can be made to speak and/or represent history outside the geographical limits of India and the place of viewers in that history. For this, two separate but related journeys are brought together: one, the cultural trajectory of this twice-displaced people—from indenture to subsistence farming to their participation in urbanization of Fiji, and finally, the coup of 1987 that resulted in a big exodus to Western cities and placed the struggle for cultural identity in a new vortex of power; two, this journey is interlaced with another, that of the images of Bollywood over the decades and how it impacted lives far beyond the shores of India.

Noir is not a familiar genre in Hindi cinema, but film theorists point to the proliferation of noir motifs in Hindi cinema of the 1950s. This chapter examines the recurrence of noir motifs in the early years of the new millennium, especially that of adultery and murder for greed in films like Jism, an adaptation of the Hollywood neo-noir film Body Heat (1981). The discourses in Jism and its progeny suggest a threat to the family and there are indications that this is attributed to the erosion of traditional values among ‘global’ Indians. The chapter concludes with an examination of Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, in which adultery is not a noir motif but one pertaining to romance. What does this film say about the changing mores of Hindi cinema?

This chapter explores the links between the construction of the theatre actress in socio-political discourse in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and her representation in literature and cinema. The first part analyses Premchand's short story ‘The Actress’ to show how this ‘progressive’ writer formulated and imagined the story of the theatre actress, whose real life story involved complicated transactions with prevailing social ideologies and expectations. The second part returns to the ‘actress question’ by means of her representation in Hindi cinema in the post-Independence era. It looks at two films that deal with the nautanki dancer-actress: Basu Bhattacharya's Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow, 1966) and Chandan Arora's Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (I Want to Become Madhuri Dixit, 2003).

This chapter explores the particular public fantasies embedded in Hindi cinema. Public fantasies are tools for managing desire—either to conceal, reveal, revise, or renew them—sometimes, all at the same time. The Hindi film blockbusters in this chapter convey a set of public fantasies that condense into the idea of India. The first of these Hindi film blockbusters comes from Bombay legendary filmmaker, Raj Kapoor. His films, which span the period of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehrus’ administration, address his engagement and disengagement with Nehru’s beautiful dream. Secondly, film director Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975) examines popular cinema’s depiction of crime and justice during the 1970s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the ways in which Hindi popular cinema exposes public fantasies and revises the notion of “India” across the first quarter century following India’s Independence.

This chapter argues that Malayalam cinema emerging in the 1930s consolidates and enforces the patrifocal ideologies of a society that sought to erase a matrilineal past by imposing a normative, ‘native’ femininity. Early Malayalam cinema provides useful insights into the construction of the Malayali modern, whose logic runs counter to the Indian modern. In contrast to the deification of the mother in Hindi cinema that becomes a metaphor for the nation, Malayalam cinema has been torn between the positive and negative stereotype and preoccupied with the figure of the stepmother.

This chapter discusses the use of music and song sequences in Hindi cinema, along with globalisation and the sound of partitioned selves. It first frames the terms of engagement by attaching an aesthetic-political question of lyricism to that of Indian nationalism. In discussing the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Aamir Mufti has posed an important question in relation to third world modernities: instead of a more conventional format of aligning categories and events into a narrative of constitution, is it possible to understand historicity as a lyrical assemblage of expressions that are obtuse and eliding in their relational meaningfulness? The work of Faiz has regularly featured in dialogues and lyrics in countless films in India and Pakistan. This chapter examines the lyrical as that which can infuse exiling and errant powers of language and contaminate hard artifacts of historical narration. It looks at some exemplary uses of cinematic musicality in the works of Mani Ratnam, including his 1997 Hindi film Dil Se (From the Heart) whose title track sequence is an anticipatory coupling of affects of violence and love.

This chapter explores the extent to which the traumas of the 1970s were displaced onto the family and crisis in the political culture of popular Hindi cinema. It considers the blockbuster trilogy: Deewaar (1975), Trishul (1978), and Shakti (1982). The narrative of Deewaar, which focuses on child violence, is widely understood to symbolize the States upon its citizens. The narratives of Trishul and Shakti exposed both the cinemas social work in India and the social work it did for the nation. The chapter proposes the social function of cinema as Family Romance, where India’s nation plays the role of the mother and the family plays the role of the India’s nation.

This chapter explores the Hindi film orchestra in historical, social and cinematic contexts. It charts the place, meaning and status of the western orchestra in Indian cinema from the silent era through the post-Independence period to the marked changes that have occurred since India’s liberalization from the 1990s. Although western classical music was not adopted and institutionalized in the mainstream in India (unlike East Asia, for example), this chapter demonstrates how it nevertheless became interwoven with Indian postcolonial modernity in a powerful yet largely background and thus unseen form through the cinema. Recently, with India’s intensive globalization, the orchestra is showing signs of acquiring a more visibly mediated status in Indian film music and in India more generally.

Rakesh Roshan’s Khoon Bhari Maang (Blood-Smeared Forehead, India, 1988) is closely modelled on the iconic Australian television 3-part, mini-series Return to Eden (Karen Arthur, Kevin James Dobson, 1983), itself a self-conscious appropriation and strategic indigenisation of the melodramatic conventions and “feminised address” of the prime time American soap opera. In Return to Eden, a treacherous tennis champ marries a meek and dowdy heiress, Stephanie Harper, and throws her into alligator-infested waters; she survives, has plastic surgery, becomes a supermodel, and returns to exact revenge on her husband. In the transnational film remake, Khoon Bhari Maang, the heroine’s transformation is more extreme – in accordance with her revenge, which is more violent – and also more complex, in terms of cultural identity, since her journey, from frumpy Aarti to the sultry Jyoti, necessitates a negotiation of traditional/modern and Indian/non-Indian modes of womanhood (and this also resonates with the ‘reinvention’ of its star, Rekha, in the late 1970s). Drawing on recent discussions of the anxious “assemblage” of femininity in popular Hindi cinema this chapter focuses on issues raised by Khoon Bhari Maang’s presentation of the make-over conceit.

Bollywood musical sequences circulate widely but they have inspired very few analyses that consider dance, costume, and cinematography in relation to song. This chapter argues that the musical numbers in Ratnam’s Yuva problematize both North American music videos and traditional Hindi cinema—two traditions that are already hybridized. The chapter acknowledges the limits to these cross-cultural intersections and mutual influences in order to get at each practice’s specificity. Musical sequences in Hindi cinema contain genre markers that may not be compatible with North American videos, including rapid shifts among lush locations, sharply etched choreography, an iconography of textiles, layering of figures in the frame, and characters who focus on each other rather than address the viewer. Many features of North American music video appear in Hindi cinema, although music video’s reliance on sexual display has not been adopted.

This chapter connects the theory of geo-televisual informatics and the concomitant question of a national being-in-the-world to a theme of sovereignty in contemporary India. It examines some cinematic moments that express a new metropolitan habit of thought by which state-of-the-art informatisation is immediately and inextricably tied to the desired arrival of a novel regime of power. How and for what reasons must we reconsider (in our new media age) the long talked-about nexus between axiomatic modern instruments of communication (printing press, telegraph, even the railroad) and the invention of the nation as an ‘imagined’ time-space continuum? How do pertinent questions of production, ideology and interest change in an era of aggravated informatics? This chapter explores some films in which ‘information’ itself appears as a narrative theme connected to a larger allegory of the nation. Two such films are Apoorva Lakhiya's Mumbai Se Aya Mera Dost (2003) and Shankar's Nayak: The Real Hero (2001). These films form a small batch within the annals of popular Hindi cinema that explicitly deal with an overall informatisation/capitalisation of ‘traditional’ contexts.

The chapter theorizes the emergence of new Hindi cinema and looks at the methodological problems arising from understanding new Hindi cinema as a cinematic phenomenon. What is “new” in new Hindi cinema? How should we understand the emergence of this film form? Is it a mere extension of indie cinema, or is it something else? Is it a part of Bollywood, or is it outside of it? The chapter criticizes the dominant approaches to new Hindi cinema, and provides new theoretical tools for understanding this cinematic phenomenon as the result of neoliberal transformations in India.

This chapter begins with a few observations and questions about Ashish Rajadhyaksha's theory of the ‘epic melodrama’. The objective is to further complicate the notion of mythic impelling, to historicise some such instances, and to understand how exactly and through what pains the ontological constant of Dharma can be upheld amidst the duress of modernisation or financialisation. Commercial Hindi films periodically recycle old stories. The volatile sphere of religiosity and the concomitant question of a mythography of the self as the cornerstone of the nation and its state undeniably left a lasting imprint on popular culture as a whole and Hindi cinema in particular. This was particularly evident in the cinematic expressions of what is called a Nehruvian sensibility toward secularism and tolerance. The plot that was first witnessed in Mehboob Khan's Aurat (Woman, 1940) has been recycled, in various historical settings, involving a range of cultural formations and social identities, in a body of films across the decades. Two of these films are Mehboob's own 1957 retelling in Mother India and Yash Chopra's Deewar (The Wall, 1975).