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Bollywood's India
A Public Fantasy
by Priya Joshi
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Book Presentation:
Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular culture and postcolonial modernity, Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India.
With dazzling interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. Themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. Summoning India's tumultuous 1970s as an interpretive lens, Joshi reveals the cinema's social work across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-starrer genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. In elegantly crafted studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009), Joshi powerfully conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.
About the Author:
Priya Joshi is associate professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India, winner of the Modern Language Association's Prize for the Best First Book, the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian studies by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award. She is coeditor of The 1970s and Its Legacies in India's Cinemas.
Press Reviews:
Priya Joshi's work is a timely assessment of key films and periods in Bollywood's history. Its wide-ranging literary, theoretical, and sociocultural perspectives, which cut across literature, postcolonial studies, media, and cultural studies, will surely be taken up by other scholars as well as general readers. A fine piece of scholarship. Rajinder Dudrah, University of Manchester
Lavishly illustrated... this volume would be an excellent course text for a semester on Bollywood.... Highly recommended. Choice
A lively, thoughtful writer, Joshi shows how Bollywood films have mirrored India's social, political and economic changes, and how western films have been influenced by Bollywood trends and motifs. Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Well-structured.... Joshi's book perfectly captures the history of Bollywood cinema and its cultural impact for the newcomer and seasoned viewer alike. Film Matters
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
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