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Popular Hindi cinema metamorphosed unrecognizably in the new millennium. An expanding urban middle-class viewer base, ever growing in its Anglophone cultural absorption, fuelled the multiplex boom at home. A slew of popular movies in tune with the sensitivities of the diasporic Indians came to define `Bollywood` as a powerful global brand and a lifestyle banner. Another kind of mainstream cinema emerged in opposition to the dominant `elitist` presence, a cinema meant less for multiplexes but still not `traditional` in the old way. The Hindi film industry itself changed radically post 1990s, and so did the meanings, mores, and ideologies embedded in Hindi cinema.
Going beyond the conventional theory-laden mode of analysing the political moorings of mainstream cinema, M.K. Raghavendra accords primacy to their `text`, treating them as rich reflections of the goings on in contemporary society. Taking cinema and cinema-viewing as a conjoined site of enquiry, he brings together a revealing and enlightening analysis of 28 Hindi blockbusters from the 2000s. With a close reading of films such as Rang De Basanti, Veer-Zaara, Bunty Aur Babli, 3 Idiots, Dabangg, Rajneeti, and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Raghavendra untangles the threads of myriad new imaginaries of contemporary India and Indian-ness, embedded in a transformed Bollywood.
ISBN - 9780199450565
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Pages : 312
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