Bollywood's India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India

Description

Bollywood's India explores the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, now best known as "Bollywood," and its non-realistic depictions of everyday life in India. Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema's interpretations of India over the last two decades are the most reliable guide to understanding the nation's changing dreams and hopes, fears and anxieties. She shows how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, and what that reveals about Indian life and society. Bollywood's India looks at the ways in which Bollywood has imagined and portrayed the unity and diversity of India--what it believes and what it feels; life at home and in public.

Rachel Dwyer is professor of Indian cultures and cinema at the SOAS, University of London.

"As Dwyer shows in her superb book, Bollywood's India, popular cinema has tracked more closely than any artistic or journalistic medium the public and private lives of the New India, perhaps because it almost completely ignores such everyday Indian realities as violence against Dalits, once known as Untouchables. Dwyer describes a broad range of self-perceptions--from class, gender, and caste to geopolitics--both recorded and created by Bollywood's factory of illusions since the early 1990s." -- "Bloomberg View" "This is a must for any movie buff that is curious in obtaining a more critical understanding of Bollywood and its important connection to India as a nation." -- "BollySpice"