prasad1
Active member
In 2014, a What Each Country Leads the World In map went viral, capturing the imagination of people around the world looking to find out what their country produced more of, than any other, ostensibly based on research. India’s was, unsurprisingly, movies.
Home to the world’s most prolific film industry, India produces up to a thousand films a year, with the most recent statistics from a trade paper released last year, stating that India released 1,602 productions in 2012 from all its various language industries – with Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu language cinema industries producing the highest number of films. However, it is Hindi cinema, known by its brand name Bollywood, which has an unparalleled global reach, hegemony in South Asia, and is widely synonymous with ‘Indian cinema’.
Cognizant of these perceptions and expectations, Professor Rachel Dwyer from the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London, has compiled a perfect primer meant for the newly enamored neophyte: Bollywood’s India. She convinces us to remain hooked on Bollywood cinema’s fictions as a “modern mythology” that conjoins the various epics, fables, and legends that together constitute the rich cultural foundations of the subcontinent.
If there’s a need for an introduction and initiation into an industry in the business of myth making, seen by some as a religion of sorts too, Bollywood’s India is certainly it. The subtitle “Hindi Cinema as a guide to Contemporary India” is misleading because it offers a great deal more. Dwyer has distilled and synthesized most of her research from anthropology, sociology, and film studies into a lighter, more palatable, journalistic style for a non-academic audience. To achieve this, she alternates between formalistic considerations of the film and film magazine-type descriptions of the industry (in the last chapter, she compares Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan’s character in Agneepath emerging out of the sea and walking on the beach to screen siren Ursula Andress’ famous introduction in Dr.No), at times even injecting non-sequitur humor into her analysis.
...................................................
Bollywood’s India? While the latter does delineate its investigative ambit very clearly by suggesting that regional cinemas such as Tamil cinema, Telugu cinema, or Bengali cinema have a “different sphere of reference” with more predominant associations with local and regional politics rather than Bollywood’s national aspirations, it appears to be a conspicuous – if even erroneous—exclusion. Given that the central conceit of the entire discursive enterprise is to underpin the nexus between cinematic fantasy and India’s collective dreamscapes with mutually reinforcing directionality, the decision to leave out regional cinemas, which constitute big markets and fiercely loyal fan bases to rival Bollywood’s, appears antithetical and contradictory. It appears as if the project to identify the configurations of the Indian dream is severely circumscribed by merely looking at Hindi-cinema’s version when there are expanses of territory with people who have resisted Hindi dominance, let alone allow Hindi cinema to thrive there.
How Representative of India is Bollywood? | PopMatters
Attachments
Last edited:
