Volume 57, Issue 1

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

This paper places feminist documentary film-making in the context of the women’s movement in India. More specifically, it examines some of the widely-debated concerns and strategies that have animated feminist documentary film-making in India through an analysis of two important films: Deepa Dhanraj’s Something Like a War and Reena Mohan’s Skin Deep

Although Indian film has drawn on several different cultural sources from its beginnings, the rise of a global Indian diaspora has had a special impact on its topics and styles. Not only have Non-Resident Indians and their relationship to Indian and Western culture become central issues in many Hindi films since the 1990s, the trans-national aspect of Indian identity is also reflected in the visual and musical features of many films. In an attempt to grasp how this trans-national identity is represented in film, this study combines an analysis of narrative and visual elements with a close inspection of the musical idiom. Selected scenes from English Babu, Desi Mem and Pardes are analysed in detail. They show that India itself is not portrayed as a purely traditional but rather as a hybrid culture, i.e. one that is partly Westernised around a core of traditional Indian values. NRIs are also often constructed in ambiguous ways varying from the parody of a romanticising love of India to a celebration of the truly Indian moral core of otherwise Westernised protagonists. Hybridity appears to be a main feature of characters, visual culture and film music, thus representing the new trans-national Indian identity

This article positions Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) as part of the ‘Jane Austen cult’ phenomenon of the 1990s and later. While superficially adhering to the conventions of Bollywood films, Chadha additionally works with the visuals of both Hollywood romances and the British heritage film in her appropriation of the Austen classic. Her film, this article argues, can therefore be seen as truly trans-national in negotiating the common ground of established conventions and fruitfully merging them in order to create something new. As it contrasts and combines the aesthetic and narrative conventions of three seemingly distinct genres of film-making, Bride and Prejudice asserts its status as a hybrid product of ever-shifting trans-national identities, while at the same time celebrating the potential of Austen’s classic to accommodate an ever-growing body of (post)modern appropriations

Gurinder Chadha’s homage to Bollywood, Bride and Prejudice (2004), synthesises the conventions of Indian, American and (to a lesser degree) British film-making. This paper investigates its status as a cross-over film in the two senses of the term: as a fusion of different cinematic traditions and as a product addressed at international mainstream audiences. The film’s hybrid aesthetics is put in relation to the depiction of intercultural relations on the level of the story on the one hand and the film’s distribution in America, Europe and India on the other hand. The main aim of this paper is to work out the conflicting conceptual and ideological forces of the film operating in its production and distribution

Cricket, once the English gentlemen’s sport par excellence, has been adopted by formerly colonised nations with amazing passion and to great international success. In India and the West Indies cricket has even developed into the national sport, forming an important aspect of national identity. No wonder film makers have been intrigued by the ambivalent (trans)cultural connotations of this sport. The essay sets out to compare two films focussing on cricket as a symbolic battleground for national identity in post-colonial times: Indian director Ashutosh Gowariker’s international success Lagaan, Once Upon a Time in India (2001), set in a pseudo-historical 19th century India, and black British director Horace Ové’s comedy Playing Away (1986) addressing contemporary British society. After a brief overview of the history of cricket in Britain, India and the West Indies, both films are analysed with a view to filmic means and political messages. Finally their symbolic use of sport is compared

Inspired by Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), the director of Vanity Fair, Indian-born Mira Nair, has set out to ‘Indianise’ Thackeray’s prototypically English narrative - and thus to make us see the Victorian world from a critical Indian and anti-colonial perspective. Thackeray’s novel is a merciless satire on a capitalist age characterised by conspicuous consumption, by an obsession with money and status, by cruelty and gender discrimination. The detached narrator shows us in great detail the surface of this superficial society - its luxurious commodities, including many items of Indian origin. Nair multiplies these elements, introduces new scenes set in India and systematically develops a contrast between a colourful and spontaneous India against a grey and petrified England. But by introducing the stylistic strategies of Bollywood, she undermines her own critical ambition: Thackeray’s disillusioned and cold picture of Victorian society becomes sentimentalised; the heroine is transformed from a young woman without scruples into a likeable woman; even a happy ending Indian (or Bollywood) style is conceded