Monsoon Wedding Fever

Monsoon Wedding Fever
Author: Shoma Narayanan
Publisher: Harlequin
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0373178441

Riya is shocked to find the man who broke her heart, Dhruv, has returned to India for her roommate's wedding and a possible arranged marriage.

Beyond Bollywood

Beyond Bollywood
Author: Jigna Desai
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2004
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780415966849

Table of contents

New Cosmopolitanisms

New Cosmopolitanisms
Author: Gita Rajan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2006-02-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804767842

This book offers an in-depth look at the ways in which technology, travel, and globalization have altered traditional patterns of immigration for South Asians who live and work in the United States, and explains how their popular cultural practices and aesthetic desires are fulfilled. They are presented as the twenty-first century’s “new cosmopolitans”: flexible enough to adjust to globalization’s economic, political, and cultural imperatives. They are thus uniquely adaptable to the mainstream cultures of the United States, but also vulnerable in a period when nationalism and security have become tools to maintain traditional power relations in a changing world.

Postcolonial Cultures

Postcolonial Cultures
Author: Simon Featherstone
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781578067718

An overview of postcolonial studies and current thought on literature, tourism, and popular culture

The Films of Mira Nair

The Films of Mira Nair
Author: Amardeep Singh
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2018-09-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1496819128

The Films of Mira Nair: Diaspora Vérité presents the first, full-length scholarly study of her cinema. Mira Nair has broken new ground as both a feminist filmmaker and an Indian filmmaker. Several of her works, especially those related to the South Asian diaspora, have been influential around the globe. Amardeep Singh delves into the complexities of Nair’s films from 1981 to 2016, offering critical commentary on all of Nair’s major works, including her early documentary projects as well as shorts. The subtitle, “diaspora vérité,” alludes to Singh’s primary theme: Nair’s filmmaking project is driven aesthetically by her background in the documentary realist tradition (cinéma vérité) and thematically by her interest in the lives of migrants and diasporic populations. Mainly, Nair’s filmmaking intends to document imaginatively the experiences of diasporic communities. Nair’s focus on the diasporic appears in the long list of her films that have explored the subject, such as Mississippi Masala, So Far from India, Monsoon Wedding, The Perez Family, My Own Country, The Namesake, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. However, a version of the diasporic sensibility also emerges even in films with an apparently different scope, such as Nair’s adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Nair began her career as a documentary filmmaker in the early 1980s. While Nair now has largely moved away from the documentary format in favor of making fictional feature films, Singh shows that a documentary realist style remains active in her subsequent fictional cinema.

The Millennial Woman in Bollywood

The Millennial Woman in Bollywood
Author: Maithili Shyam Rao
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2020-11-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9354974597

The subtitle says it all: how and why Bollywood found it worthwhile to explore the reality of the millennial women who are thriving in India - small part of the demographics but very influential. Advertising discovered women as The Hindi film Heroine is a brand and brand ambassador. The market met contemporary women who are independent, with freer attitudes to relationships, including pre-marital sex, Rom coms of the new millennium reflect this new-found freedom, defying patriarchy that still defines our society. Globalisation is culturally irreversible. From the 1990s onwards, Bollywood has responded to globalisation with fear of loss of identity and desire to integrate with global trends. It results in popular cinema becoming glocal. Bollywood celebrates nonconformists, subversives woman as the hero, stories in their own way unequivocally said No means No. Most daringly. Iconic characters like Choti Bahu, Paro and Chandramukhi transformed into today’s women with the power to change their lives. This happened with the energy infused into the mainstream by indie filmmakers with vision and the will to tell stories in their own way.

Mercy in Her Eyes

Mercy in Her Eyes
Author: John Kenneth Muir
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781557836496

(Applause Books). This the first book to examine the films of the acclaimed and popular Indian-born and Harvard educated filmmaker, Mira Nair. A unique voice in cinema today, she is one of the few female directors who made it to the top of a male-dominated profession. Her films feature an incomparably sensuous visual style yet at the same time often record the injustice of the disenfranchised and the cross-pollination of East and West. Her twin themes of realism and romance make for dazzling cinema. John Kenneth Muir analyzes all of Nair's work, including: Salaam Bombay! (1988), the groundbreaking story of a young boy abandoned by his family on the streets of Bombay; Mississippi Masala (1991), an interracial small town romance between an Indian woman (Sarita Choudhury) and an African American businessman (Denzel Washington); Monsoon Wedding (2001), featuring a Bollywood carnival atmosphere, one of the most successful foreign films ever released in the United States; Hysterical Blindness (2002), the HBO film featuring Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis, looking for love in all the wrong places; The big-budget Hollywood adaptation of the Thackery novel Vanity Fair (2004), starring Reese Witherspoon, Gabriel Byrne, and Eileen Atkins.

Bollywood Weddings

Bollywood Weddings
Author: Kavita Ramdya
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2010
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9780739138540

Bollywood Weddings examines how second-generation Indian-American Hindus of the middle and upper classes negotiate courtship and wedding rituals. Kavita Ramdya integrates the stories of twenty couples, showing the ways and means by which a subcommunity falls in love and expresses their identity. She provides readers with a window into these Indian-American couples who are navigating identities through a major rite of passage in their lives-marriage. She affirms that this community flaunts all things Indian as a way to assert their American identity. Many of these couples are occasional Hindus, displaying their Hindu religious background only on important occasions. Instead of choosing either India or America, or arriving at a compromise between the two, this community embraces both cultures simultaneously.

Gender and Popular Culture

Gender and Popular Culture
Author: Kusha Tiwari
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2019-11-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527543463

This collection of essays explores contemporary reflections on interactions between gender and culture. The 11 contributions focus on varied dimensions of popular culture that define, interpret, validate, interrogate and rupture gender conventions. There are discussions on how children react to gender expectations and how this reaction is reflected in their activities like drawing and games. There are also investigations of films, female bodybuilding in the USA, transgender identity in Greek and Indian mythology, and women breaking glass ceilings and pioneering social movements in developing countries like India. Specific chapters are devoted to British TV series and Hindi films that address issues related to masculinity. Essays on challenges that women face in the corporate world and the real world of social inequalities, especially in developing countries, give this volume rich thematic diversity. The collection will be of interest to literary critics, film critics, gender studies scholars, and poets.

Global Migration, Social Change, and Cultural Transformation

Global Migration, Social Change, and Cultural Transformation
Author: E. Elliott
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2007-11-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230608728

The essays in this collection work toward a larger goal of separating 'globalization' from strictly economic considerations. The authors instead look at globalization as a force that produces profound social and cultural consequences, including migration, struggles for social change, and the transformations of aesthetic practices.