Bollywood?s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies

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. 

MEGHA ANWER is a clinical assistant Professor in the Honors College at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Review of Education, Pedagogy and Culture, Victorian Studies, Global South, ARIEL, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Short Film Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Wide-Screen.

ANUPAMA ARORA is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She is co-editor (with Rajender Kaur) of India in the American Imaginary 1780s-1880s.