Author: Jyotika Virdi
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 258
ISBN/UPC (if available): 817824098X
Description
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 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.
REVIEW
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 insights into the relationships between nation-building, gender, sexuality, the family, and popular cinema, using post-Independence India as a case study.
-Gina Marchetti
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Nation and Its Discontents
CHAPTER 2
The Idealized Woman
CHAPTER 3
Heroes and Villains: Narrating the Nation
CHAPTER 4
Heroines, Romance, and Social History
CHAPTER 5
The Sexed Body
CHAPTER 6
Re-reading Romance
Conclusion
Notes
Index