Nationalism and Public Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema

3 units

Nationalism, Benedict Anderson has famously argued, can best be understood by aligning it alongside the large cultural systems that preceded it--out of which, as well as against which, it came into being. Using India as a case study, we will examine the extent to which popular Hindi film exerted, diverted, and contorted the many impulses toward nationalism preying upon the purveyed by the country that annually produces the most films in the world. Within months of the cinematograph's debut, the Lumiere brothers' invention arrived in Bombay in 1896 inaugurating an ongoing romance between film and India, one that saw the rise of the anti-colonial movement, the nationalist movement, Independence, Partition, and the almost daily recreation of modern India, that place that Salman Rushdie has called 'a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street.' In a country where full literacy is still a distant dream, we will examine the extent to which popular film is Anderson's 'cultural system' par excellence that deploys and addresses the social, cultural, and political myths of the modern nation. Focusing on Hindi blockbusters largely from the Golden Fifties, the Angry Seventies, and the Saccharine Nineties, we will explore how Bollywood movies construct and critique the grand narratives of Indian nationalism; ask what fantasies and illusions they elicit and project; and interrogate their relationship to India's preoccupations with its emerging modernity. Required screenings.