Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India

Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India
Author: Sikata Banerjee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317226127

Interpretations of manhood have unfolded in India within a middle class cultural milieu shaped by an assertive self-confidence fuelled by liberalisation, a process by which India has been integrated into the global political economy and the prominence of Hindutva or Hindu nationalist politics. This book unpacks a particular gendered vision of nation in the modern Indian context by drawing on popular films. This muscular nationalism is an intersection of a specific vision of masculinity with the political doctrine of nationalism. The idea of nation is animated by an idea of manhood associated with martial prowess, muscular strength and toughness, but coupled with the image and construct of virtuous woman – a gendered binary of martial man and chaste woman. The author skilfully and convincingly draws together issues of political economy, including globalization and neoliberalism with majoritarian politics and popular culture, thus showing how disparate strands intersect and build on each other. Using interpretive methodologies and popular media, the book presents new interpretations of Bollywood films through the lenses of gender, masculinity and nationalism. It will be of interest to scholars of South Asian politics and culture, in particular Indian nationalism, popular culture, media and gender studies.

The Cinematic ImagiNation [sic]

The Cinematic ImagiNation [sic]
Author: Jyotika Virdi
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2003
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780813531915

Pivoting on the nation as a central preoccupation in Hindi films, Virdi (communication and film and media studies, U. of Windsor, Canada) contends that Hindi cinema appropriates familiar Hollywood cinematic strategies for its own distinctive aesthetics and poetics. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Bollywood and Globalization

Bollywood and Globalization
Author: Rini Bhattacharya Mehta
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2011-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0857288970

This book is a collection of incisive articles on the interactions between Indian Popular Cinema and the political and cultural ideologies of a new post-Global India.

Muscular Nationalism

Muscular Nationalism
Author: Sikata Banerjee
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814789773

Concerned chiefly with views and events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Discusses deviations from a putative ideal of femininity characterised by chastity and inactivity.

Nationalism in Indian Cinema

Nationalism in Indian Cinema
Author: Shri Krishan Rai
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2023-06-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527512509

Cinema is one of the most influential instruments in opinion building, and Indian cinema is no exception to this case. Indian cinema explores the niche of nationalism at the heart of the collective consciousness of several generations of Bharat’s (India’s) people. The contribution made to nation and opinion building by the Indian cinema community is not adequately acknowledged, and so this book celebrates these unsung heroes' contributions and ponders the power of cinema in perception building. This collection of essays examines the role played by Indian cinema in narrating, inspiring, determining, and challenging our comprehension of India as a nation.

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society
Author: Caroline Starkey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 823
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 042988317X

In an era which many now recognise as ‘post-secular’, the role that religions play in shaping gender identities and relationships has been awarded a renewed status in the study of societies and social change. In both the Global South and the Global North, in the 21st century, religiosity is of continuing significance, not only in people’s private lives and in the family, but also in the public sphere and with respect to political and legal systems. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society is an outstanding reference source to these key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject area. Comprising over 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into 3 parts: Critical debates for religions, gender and society: theories, concepts and methodologies Issues and themes in religions, gender and society Contexts and locations Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including activism, gender analysis, intersectionality and feminism, oppression and liberation, equality, bodies and embodiment, space and place, leadership and authority, diaspora and migration, marriage and the family, generation and aging, health and reproduction, education, violence and conflict, ecology and climate change and the role of social media. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and gender studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, area studies, politics, sociology, anthropology and history.

Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity

Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity
Author: Nadira Khatun
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2024-01-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0198891016

The book captures the changing image of Muslims in popular Bollywood films through seven decades. Khatun argues that such cinematic representation has always been informed by the country's contemporary political landscape, a largely Hindu-dominant discourse.

Gendered Modernity and Indian Cinema

Gendered Modernity and Indian Cinema
Author: Devapriya Sanyal
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2021-12-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000509192

This book analyses the role of women in the films of one of the leading filmmakers of the ‘Third World’ in the 1950s, Satyajit Ray, a national icon in filmmaking in India. The book explores the portrayal of women in the context of the creation of national culture after India became independent. Gender issues were very important to India under Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s – with the enactment of inheritance and divorce laws. Ray’s portrayal of women and his films anticipate much of the theorizing of later-day feminism. This book analyses cinematic texts with special reference to the women characters using feminist film theory and representation along with a study of the socio-political and economic conditions pertinent to the times – both relevant to the film’s making and its setting. The primary texts studied are films spanning over four decades from Pather Panchali (1955) to his last trilogy and are based on a categorization of the broad feminine ‘types’ represented in the films – based on the socio-political situations in which they are placed – and their relationships with the other characters present. Ray’s portrayal of women has an enormous bearing on our understanding of how modern India evolved in the Nehru era and after, and this book explore just that: the place of the woman as it is and should be in a young nation encumbered by patriarchy. Gendered Modernity and Indian Cinema will be of interest to academics in the field of World cinema, Indian and Bengali cinema, Film Studies as well as Gender Studies and South Asian culture and society.

Bollywood’s New Woman

Bollywood’s New Woman
Author: Megha Anwer
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1978814461

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

Women and Indian Shakespeares

Women and Indian Shakespeares
Author: Thea Buckley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350234346

Women and Indian Shakespeares explores the multiple ways in which women, and those identifying as women, are, and have been, engaged with Shakespeare in India. Women's engagements encompass the full range of media, from translation to cinematic adaptation and from early colonial performance to contemporary theatrical experiment. Simultaneously, Women and Indian Shakespeares makes visible the ways in which women are figured in various representational registers as resistant agents, martial seductresses, redemptive daughters, victims of caste discrimination, conflicted spaces and global citizens. In so doing, the collection reorients existing lines of investigation, extends the disciplinary field, brings into visibility still occluded subjects and opens up radical readings. More broadly, the collection identifies how, in Indian Shakespeares on page, stage and screen, women increasingly possess the ability to shape alternative futures across patriarchal and societal barriers of race, caste, religion and class. In repeated iterations, the collection turns our attention to localized modes of adaptation that enable opportunities for women while celebrating Shakespeare's gendered interactions in India's rapidly changing, and increasingly globalized, cultural, economic and political environment. In the contributions, we see a transformed Shakespeare, a playwright who appears differently when seen through the gendered eyes of a new Indian, diasporic and global generation of critics, historians, archivists, practitioners and directors. Radically imagining Indian Shakespeares with women at the centre, Women and Indian Shakespeares interweaves history, regional geography/regionality, language and the present day to establish a record of women as creators and adapters of Shakespeare in Indian contexts.