The relationship between cinema and modernity in the Indian context is both complex and multifaceted. In this volume, some of the leading names in film and cultural studies explore its many dimensions.
The essays range from discussions of urbanity and film language to realism and the Indian city in Bengali films of the 1940s; from the cultural resonances of popular Hindi film songs and the idea of the ’city’ to realism and fantasy in cinematic representations of metropolitan Indian life; from cinematic aspects of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary Indian urban action films; from the complexities of female spectatorship to an analysis of the current primacy of Bollywood and finally, to the cultural impact and influence of Indian cinema on audiences outside India.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preben Kaarsholm: Introduction
Unreal City: Cinematic Representation, Globalization and the Ambiguities of Metropolitan Life
Peter Larsen
Urban Legends: Notes on a Theme in Early Film Theory
Moinak Biswas
The City and the Real: Chhinnamul and the Left Cultural Movement in the 1940s
Sudipta Kaviraj
Reading a Song of the City -- Images of the City in Literature and Films
M. Madhava Prasad
Realism and Fantasy in Representations of Metropolitan Life in Indian Cinema
Martin Zerlang
A Close-Up on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
The ’Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena
Manas Ray
Chalo Jahaji: Bollywood in the Tracks of Indenture to Globalization
Brian Larkin
Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema in Nigeria
Vashna Jagarnath
The Politics of Urban Segregation and Indian Cinema in Durban
Ravi S. Vasudevan
The Exhilaration of Dread: Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in Contemporary Urban Action Films
Tejaswini Niranjana
Vigilantism and the Pleasures of Masquerade: The Female Spectator of Vijayasanthi Films
Bibliography
Contributors