This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalisation, new media and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early 1990s as a signature ‘Bollywood style’ evolved in the wake of liberalisation and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, ‘window-shopping’ ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations fre ... More

This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalisation, new media and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early 1990s as a signature ‘Bollywood style’ evolved in the wake of liberalisation and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, ‘window-shopping’ ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. One example is the film Haqeeqat, which featured poor, working-class protagonists, but in which romantic musical sequences transported them abruptly to Switzerland, with the actors now dressed in designer suits. The book theorises this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic. The book connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalising process in India. It argues that ‘Bollywood’ is not so much indicative of a uniquely Indian modernity coming into its own than it is symptomatic of a pure techno-financial modernisation which comes without a political modernity. It therefore explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and film and media studies, the book presents a complex account of an India of the present.