Unruly Cinema

History, Politics, and Bollywood

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by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > India

Keywords

Hindi cinema, history of cinema, politics

Publishing date

2020

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 248 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-252-08499-7

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Book Presentation:
A course-ready study of the crises that shaped Indian film

Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond.
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

About the Author:
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta is an assistant professor of comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a coeditor of Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora.

See the publisher website: University of Illinois Press