Unruly Cinema

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta is an assistant professor of comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a coeditor of Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora.