Bollywood in the Age of New Media : The Geo - televisual Aesthetic (Paperback)

This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalization, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early 1990s as a signature Bollywood style evolved in the wake of liberalization and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, window-shopping ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. Basu theorizes this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic.

Bollywood in the Age of New Media connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalizing process in India. It explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and film and media studies, this book presents a complex account of an India of the present caught between brave new silicon valleys and farmer suicides.

The geo-televisual aesthetic will prove useful not just for scholars of Indian cinema and media, but also for those of Indian political and cultural modernity at large, from visual anthropologists to political scientists. The book is as much about the new globalized imaginary of a national elite as it is about film.

About the Author
Anustup Basuis Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Part I: Introduction
1. Cinematic Assemblages: The 1990s and Earlier
* The Realism Debate
* What is an Assemblage?
* Assemblages of Totality
* Assemblages of Temporality
* Postulated Resolutions
* The Thing-in-the-Assemblage
* The Body-in-the-Assemblage: The Dalit
* The Body-in-the-Assemblage: The Woman
* Conclusion

2. The Geo-televisual and Hindi Film in the Age of Information
* Introduction
* The Geo-televisual in the Age of the All-India Film (194788)
* The Geo-televisual as Informatic (19912004)
* Informatic Modernization

Part II: Informatics, Sovereignty, and the Cinematic City
3. Allegories of Power/Information
* The First Story of the Nation: The Metropolis Comes to the Village
* The Second Story of the Nation: How Mumbai Can Become a Metropolis
* The Traffic Jam
* Cleaning up the Cinematic City
* The State of Information
* Iconic Genealogies
* Sovereignty as Melodrama: The Lalloo Assemblage
* Nayak as Allegory

4. The Music of Intolerable Love: Indian Film Music,
* Globalization, and the Sound of Partitioned Selves
* Toward a Lyric: History of India
* The Song Sequence
* The Music of Intolerable Love

Part III: Myth and Repetition
5. Technopolis and the Ramayana: New Temporalities
* Introduction
* Epic Melodrama
* Digital Inscription and the Mythic Depths of Time
* Temporality
* The Sacralization of Special Effects
* The Aryan Brahmin
* Translation
* Hodology
* Vedic Computation
* Global Terror and Vedic Sublime
* Conclusion
6. Repetitions with Difference: Mother India and her Thousand Sons
* Introduction Mother India: Repetitions of a National Monotheme Mother India Deewar (The Wall) Aatish (The Mirror) Vaastav (Reality) Encounters of the State and the Twilight of the Mythic Natality Epilogue Bibliography Index