Religious and Nationalist Trends in Modern Bollywood Cinema
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Kasturi Dadhe
Abstract
Identities in India are to a large extent defined by religion. In this context recent Hindi cinema has been acting as a medium to project and reinforce the dominant Hindu, upper caste, upper class ideology. The paper shows how Bollywood cinema in the last decade has been systematically promoting the Hindutva ideology in the name of protecting ancient (Hindu) societal tradition and national pride and integration. The construction and depiction of (male) Hindu protagonists and their relations to characters belonging to minority religions are discussed with the examples of two film genres that developed in the 1990s: the clean family cinema and the nationalist or cine-patriotic Hindi cinema. This perspective includes a discussion of the roles of women in these movies, and the films’ support of a patriarchal structure in the family and society. The paper presents these themes in the context of issues like gender and class equality, modernity, globalisation, diaspora. It includes a contrasting look at the recent Realist Indian cinema
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Introduction: Globalisation, the National-Popular, and Contemporary Indian Cinema
- Religious and Nationalist Trends in Modern Bollywood Cinema
- Feminist Interpretations of Reality: Documentary Cinema and the Women’s Movement in India
- Towards a Trans-National Indian Identity? Versions of Hybridity in Bollywood Film and Film Music
- Spicing up the Austen Cult: Negotiating Bollywood, Hollywood, and Heritage Aesthetics in Bride and Prejudice
- Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Commodified Hybrid Utopia’: The Programmatic Transculturalism and Culture-Specific Audience Address of Bride and Prejudice
- Their Own Game: Cricket as a Symbolic Postcolonial Battlefield in Film
- Currying the Victorian Novel: Mira Nair’s ‘Indianised’ Version of Vanity Fair
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Introduction: Globalisation, the National-Popular, and Contemporary Indian Cinema
- Religious and Nationalist Trends in Modern Bollywood Cinema
- Feminist Interpretations of Reality: Documentary Cinema and the Women’s Movement in India
- Towards a Trans-National Indian Identity? Versions of Hybridity in Bollywood Film and Film Music
- Spicing up the Austen Cult: Negotiating Bollywood, Hollywood, and Heritage Aesthetics in Bride and Prejudice
- Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Commodified Hybrid Utopia’: The Programmatic Transculturalism and Culture-Specific Audience Address of Bride and Prejudice
- Their Own Game: Cricket as a Symbolic Postcolonial Battlefield in Film
- Currying the Victorian Novel: Mira Nair’s ‘Indianised’ Version of Vanity Fair
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
