An "Arranged Love" Marriage: India's Neoliberal Turn and the Bollywood Wedding Culture Industry (original) (raw)

Brides Who Travel: Gender, Transnationalism, and Nationalism in Hindi Film

positions: asia critique, 1999

In this essay I examine Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge [The lover wins the bride], an immensely popular Hindi film about overseas Indians, as a lens for studying how notions of belonging, territoriality, and nation have been reconstructed in contemporary India. Released in I 995, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (which many middle-class viewers know as DDLj), was neither unprecedented nor unique in its depiction of overseas Indians. To my mind, however, the film signaled the reconfiguration of axes of homeland and diaspora, location and identity, occurring in the postliberalization conjuncture in India. In what follows, I explore DDLJ's representations of nonresident Indians in order to examine the constitution of national and transnational subjects at the intersection of discourses of gender, sexuality, capital, and desire. This article is written from the perspective of a feminist critic of popular positions 7:3

The Making of the Man’s Man: Stardom and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism in Hindutva India

2021

In this dissertation, I trace the contours of state control and capital in India, starting from the 1970s and see how the state’s increasingly centralizing tendencies and authoritarianism, in the service of capital, creates cultures of violence, fatalism, desperation, and ultimately, even more desire for authoritarianism. I study male stardom in Bombay cinema, beginning withAmitabh Bachchan (who was the reigning star in the 1970s and 80s), and following up with Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan (who have been successful stars from the early 90s), to understand how changing subjectivities, responding to changing socio-economic reality, were formulated and expressed through these star texts by the film industry. Through the study of these stars, I try to understand how dominant ideas of masculinities were being formulated and how misogyny came to be a prominent aspect of those formulations, because of social structures of caste and patriarchy as well as neoliberal precarity. I also study...

Beyond Crossover Films:Bride and Prejudiceand the Problems of Representing Postcolonial India in a Neoliberal World

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2016

N 2015, A NUMBER OF ESSAYS WERE PUBLISHED BY AMERICANS ABOUT their experiences in India, often depicting the country as a horror zone, and following in a long tradition of representing India as outside human civilization. For example, in "One Hundred Days in India," Jennifer Sinor describes India as a cesspool of leprosy, poverty, and dirt. In "Holding Your Breath in India," Gardiner Harris, a South Asian correspondent, documents the health hazards of living in Delhi. Oindrila Mukherjee observes, in "How to Survive a Visit to India: The Ethics of Representation," that the authors of both essays "seem not to have registered any positive or any enriching experience in India." These negative representations of India contrast with the Indian government's branding of the nation as India Shining in 2004. Bollywood films also support an image of a resurgent and affluent India. If the one-sided representation of India in Western narratives is disturbing, then the image of India formed by the Indian government and Bollywood is equally reductive because the positive effects of economic development, such as an increase in the GDP after liberalization in 1991, has been accompanied by a growth in income disparity, poverty, and unemployment. Both Western and mainstream Bollywood representations are trapped in the endless loops of a shared imperial history and that history's complicated, pervasive effects. Despite the complex history between the United States and India, it is possible to represent India beyond imperial stereotypes and the equally restrictive Indian responses. Director Gurinder

Bollywood and Diaspora Middle Class Hegemony and the Cultural Politics

World Focus, 2013

The themes on Indian diaspora became an integral part of the Bollywood. These movies not only played key role in the identity politics in host countries but also played a significant role in articulating the middle class hegemonisation in the homeland. The present paper explores the inter-connectedness between the home-country and host-country and representation of diasporic identity in all major movies since 1980's. The study would understand the complex dynamics of the cultural politics and negotiation of identities in the transnational spaces.

Bollywood Images: The illusions and realities of arranged marriages, weddings, dowries, and attitudes toward the girl child in the lives of women in India p. 73

Offering audiences a romanticized interpretation of Indian life, the images in Bollywood films present the viewer with loving and supportive families, beautiful wedding rituals and a “happily ever after” point of view that does not quite measure up to the societal realities of life for millions of Indian women. Juxtaposing themes and images from three popular Bollywood films against current attitudes towards women in Indian society, this paper will analyze the issues surrounding women’s choice of marriage partners, the high cost of weddings and dowries, female infanticide, and the violence too often suffered by women and girls in India through dowry-related abuse or murder. This paper will also examine the question of whether the Bollywood film industry and its highly esteemed actors are attempting to improve awareness through films and public remarks, which address these issues present in the greater Indian society.