This book combines multiple theoretical approaches to provide a fresh perspective on Bollywood and challenges the homogenizing tendencies in much of the ongoing scholarship in the field. It covers five areas of controversial theorization: the religious frame, the musical frame, the subaltern frame, the (hetero)sexual frame and the ‘crossover’ frame. By deconstructing each of these hegemonic paradigms, it reshapes the understanding of a Bollywood film and restructures its relationships with multiple disciplines including film and theatre studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, queer studies, and transnational studies.

This fusion of approaches is also representative of the larger objective of this work, namely, to destabilize Bollywood’s position within any one sphere of reference and, instead, to illuminate how several realms of meaning are at play in its construction. The aim in doing so is to demonstrate how a variety of critical methodologies can enable a more comprehensive reading of the films making up this corpus.



Table of Contents:

Introduction: Reframing Bollywood Bollywood and its Implied Viewers The Bollywood Song and Dance, or Making a Culinary Theatre from Dung-cakes and Dust Can the Bollywood Film Speak to the Subaltern? Ho Naa Ho: The Emergence of a Homosexual Subtext in Bollywood Usage Problem: Simulation and Hyper-assimilation in the (Crossover) Bollywood Film Conclusion: Travelling Bollywood Bibliography Filmography Index