Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (South Asia Across the Disciplines) - Softcover

Gopal, Sangita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226304264 ISBN 13: 9780226304267

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2012

Synopsis

Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres like science fiction and horror. In this bold study of what she names New Bollywood, Sangita Gopal contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films’ evolving treatment of romantic relationships.

Gopalargues that the form of the conjugal duo in movies reflects other social forces in India’s new consumerist and global society. She takes a daring look at recent Hindi films and movie trends—the decline of song-and-dance sequences, the upgraded status of the horror genre, and the rise of the multiplex and multi-plot—to demonstrate how these relationships exemplify different formulas of contemporary living. A provocative account of how cultural artifacts can embody globalization’s effects on intimate life, Conjugations will shake up the study of Hindi film.

About this title

About the Author

Sangita Gopal is associate professor of English at the University of Oregon. She is the coeditor of Global Bollywood: Transnational Travels of Hindi Film Music.

Review

“Gopal’s thesis is provocative and insightful, and her scholarship is impeccable—each chapter is a resounding success, where we find original insights and illuminating analysis through her crisp and imaginative writing.  Her charting of the changes wrought by liberalization will have a lasting impact on the field.”—Amit Rai, Queen Mary, University of London

(Amit Rai, Queen Mary, University of London)

“Brimming with historical insights and excellent close readings, [Conjugations] succeed[s] in challenging existing frameworks for interpreting representations of love, sex, and romance in Bombay cinema.”
(Journal of Popular Romance Studies)

“Informed by Gopal’s incredible warehouse of knowledge about popular Indian cinemas, Conjugations illuminates diverse dimensions of conjugality and Bollywood through multiple lines of inquiry, including attention to song-and-dance sequences, the emergence of the new genre of horror, and the revitalization of Bengali cinema. This dazzling and wide-reaching book will be of interest to scholars not only in cinema studies, but more generally, those interested in postcoloniality, feminism and gender, and the nation-state in South Asia.”

(Jigna Desai, University of Minnesota)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0226304264
• ISBN 13: 9780226304267
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240