Fantasy Of Modernity: Romantic Love In Bombay Cinema Of The 1950s Hardcover

India

Aarti Wani

Romantic love overwhelms 1950s Bombay cinema. Love and romance is evident in the themes, lyrics and visual aesthetics of films of the period, as it is in the publicity and gossip surrounding films and film stars. Love in cinema becomes significant when social reality constrains its quotidian experience and expression. By bringing a spectacular imagination of love to centre stage, the 1950s cinema deflected anxieties of 'Indianness' even as the new aesthetic and affect of romance offered an alternative engagement with the contradictions of modernity. Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema of the 1950s explores the films, the songs, the stars and the extra-cinematic discourse of the period to read love and romance as its most productive trope that mobilized a dynamic and contested public sphere.

1107117216

9781107117211

English

Cambridge University Press

29 Feb 2016

227

Aarti Wani teaches at Symbiosis college of Arts and Commerce in Pune, India. She is the founding co-editor and presently lead editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Studies in South Asian Film and Media. Her research interests are Hindi and Marathi cinema, literary criticism, cultural studies, gender and modernity.

Jyotsna Kapur, Southern Illinois University "This is an original, rich and beautifully written account of Bombay cinema's preoccupation with romantic love, which draws on a wide range of archives, including little-known Marathi sources, as well as the author's encyclopaedic knowledge of the cinema of that era. This ambitious project brings genuinely new insights to our understandings of how romantic love - as the sign of the modern - was imagined and given shape in 1950s Bombay films, their songs and star texts. A pleasure to read."