Of all the popular regional cinemas of India, Hindi or Bollywood film continues to dominate in India and beyond, as Samir Dayal's Dream Machine and Ajay Gehlawat's Twenty-First Century Bollywood illustrate. Since the late twentieth century, analyses of Hindi cinema have been the focus of numerous fine academic books by Madhava Prasad, Ravi Vasudevan, Vijay Mishra, Sumita Chakravarty, Jyotika Virdi, Lalitha Gopalan, and Tejaswani Ganti, among others. The majority of such works explore the world(s) of Bollywood film by examining individual films within larger thematic and theoretical contexts, including hegemonic narrativity, genre construction, gender representation, nationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization. Both books utilize this previous scholarship and extend such models of inquiry. Where the two authors primarily diverge in their analyses is found with Dayal's focus on excavating the fruitful tensions between realism and fantasy in Hindi cinema and Gehlawat's surveying of the trajectories and representations emerging in twenty-first-century Bollywood film. Dayal's text is fairly dense and wide-ranging in its theoretical orientations, including Deleuze, Zizek, Freud, Lacan, Jameson, and Appadurai, while Gehlawat's work, firmly grounded in the theoretical terrain of the Indian film scholars Vasudevan, Rajadhyaksha, and Prasad, is pithy (half the length of Dayal's book) and perhaps more accessible to some readers, particularly undergraduate students, in its prose.
Key to Dayal's analysis is historicizing Indian nationalism and understanding it “as dynamically changing with the increasingly globalized flows of culture, people, goods, and capital” (p. 4). For him, a critical goal of his text is to recognize “the contradictory play of realism and fantasy … as productive, and on tracing the increasing disaggregation of ‘Indianness’ in response to the forces of globalization and economic liberalization” (p. 5). Significantly, the “dream machine” of Dayal's title refers to a stroboscopic (from the Greek, strobos meaning “whirlpool” and skopein meaning “to look at”) apparatus originating in the nineteenth century that uses “flickering light to induce hypnagogic effects on a subject” (p. 17) when the subject's eyes are closed. Once the eyes are opened, the effects cease. As Dayal states, “This suspension between the actual and the hypnagogic is a suggestive image for Hindi cinema's ‘suspension’ between realism and fantasy” (p. 17).
Through the lens of citizenship, the state, and the law, Dayal devotes the first three chapters of Dream Machine to revisiting and disassembling the visual and aural social realist and fantastical details that structure Bollywood classics like Raj Kapoor's Awaara (1951) and Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957) from the immediate post-partition period of the 1950s, to the “Angry Man” and “Avenging Woman” films of the 1970s Emergency era of Indira Gandhi, and the 1980s phase of initial neoliberal economic reforms under Rajiv Gandhi. In Awaara, Dayal's focus is on the dichotomy of the main character, Raj (played by Raj Kapoor), as both ambitious, Westernized, civilized gentleman and downtrodden awaara, junglee, and thief, constituting the dilemma of the postcolonial male Indian subject. He sees Raj “as a figure of a collective fantasy” who “embodies the aspirations for the new Indian male; the fantasy of potential plenitude is the more poignant here because it threatens constantly to reveal itself as impotence” (p. 47). In Mother India, Dayal discerns a certain representational continuity with Awaara in displaying “a somewhat jaded view of the state of the new nation-state, pointing up the gap between the reality of village life or the life of the urban poor—and a prosperous modernity figured as Westernized, an elite fantasy or mythology propagated by the Nehruvian state” (p. 53). The central maternal figure of Radha (played by Nargis) reaffirms “the mother nation over even biological family” (p. 55) and is therefore “caught between two roles: representative citizen and virtuous Indian mother/faithful wife” (p. 56). Finally, in “Angry Man” films, such as Yash Chopra's Deewaar (1975) and Ramesh Sippy's Sholay (1975), both starring Amitabh Bachchan, and a variety of “Avenging Woman” films from the 1980s through the 1990s, Dayal investigates the complicated role and construction of gender. As he critically notes, “Sholay, like Deewaar, reflects and condenses the ‘anger’ defining the 1970s, producing two interlinked manifestations: the obvious one is a crisis of citizenship, but it is imbricated with a crisis of Indian masculinity encoded in the cryptotext of homoerotic ‘bromance’ avant la lettre” (p. 74). Additionally, helpful here to both scholars and students is the breakdown of what thematically and structurally comprises an “Avenging Woman” film and its promulgation of revenge fantasies in the context of the reality of India's rape culture.
Chapter 4, in a section titled “Reimagining the Secular State,” is effective in dissecting several so-called “Terrorist” films of the 1990s and 2000s, including non-Islamist terrorism in films like Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist (1998), as well as Mani Ratman's Roja (1992, part of a trilogy), Gulzar's Macchis (1996), Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Mission Kashmir (2000), and Karan Johar's My Name is Khan (2010), to name just a few of the works discussed. Dayal's historicizing of these films in the environment of India's late twentieth-century rise of a reinvigorated Hindutva through the violent, anti-secular machinations of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and his explication of “the four dimensions of Hindi terrorism cinema” are beneficial. He suggestively observes how “the terrorist imag(in)ed on-screen is demonized and romanticized as object of desire and a totem, a parasite invading the national body from outside or infecting it from within” (p. 102).
In the same section, chapter 5 focuses on the trope of a “revisionist patriotism” in “the constructedness—‘inventedness’—of the national” (p. 120) in Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan: Once upon a Time in India (2001), where the film's “‘realist’ mise-en-scène presents a reinvention of a fantasmatic ‘originary’ India, whose objective correlative is the reinvention of cricket as an ‘Indian’ game” (p. 134).
The final section of the text examines the realistic and fantastical in the arena of Hindi diasporic cinema, including an evaluation of the space for same-sex sexuality, principally in Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), and the evolution of a “new cosmopolitanism” in diasporic South Asian (DSA) cinema with its challenges of “recasting Indianness” on the site of the nonresident Indian subject (p. 165). Dayal critically underscores that “DSA narratives featuring new cosmopolitan attitudes tend to be fissured by ‘roots’ nostalgia, the sting of racism, and class-based exclusion” (p. 173), and through his analysis of multiple films he demonstrates the productive potentiality of DSA. Also in this section, he neatly unpacks the slippery, multifaceted role in Hindi cinema of “poverty porn” films like Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). In his conclusion, “Transnational Translations, Mobile Indianness,” Dayal reasserts and rightly argues for “a bifocal postcolonial transnational analytic to recognize not only the quandaries of early postcolonial Hindi cinema but also the contradictions of films made in the contemporary conjecture” (pp. 219–20).
Gehlawat's concisely presented Twenty-First Century Bollywood stands alone or could serve as a substantive companion to Dayal's text. His book moves the evaluation of the content and context of Hindi film firmly forward into analyzing it in the age of digital reproduction; the brief introduction gives a succinct overview of the recent history of various Bollywood films’ digital visual and sonic manipulations and effects.
As previously indicated, Gehlawat shares a similar theoretical legacy with Dayal, drawing from the popular Hindi cinema writings of Vasudevan, Rajadhyaksha, and Prasad to set up his first chapter, “Disassembling Bollywood,” which wrestles with early twenty-first-century forms, styles, and categorizations, like “Bollylite.” Here he scrutinizes the remaking and reconfiguring of Hindi cinematic classics like Bimal Roy's Devdas (1955), through Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2002 version, to Anurag Kashyap's Dev D (2009). Revealingly, Gehlawat addresses how and why “certain Indian filmmakers are moving towards a Western-styled aesthetic (excluding songs, reducing the overall length, etc.),” and simultaneously how and why “we see Hollywood attempting to reformulate the Bollywood film” (p. 30), with the oft-used Slumdog Millionaire (2008) serving as an example of this particular process of globalized artistic commodification.
In the second chapter, “Reconstructing Femininity,” the arc of what constitutes “the feminine” in Hindi film is traced from the construction of “the vamp” to the “new Bollywood woman,” concentrating on the place of actresses like Zeenat Aman and Helen, as well as the instrumental position of the voice of the female playback singer—from the legendary and prolific higher-pitched vocalizations of Lata Mangeshkar to the more recent lower-registered performances of Sunidhi Chauhan—and the increasingly pronounced use of female direct address to camera and audience.
Chapter 3 extends this investigation of evolving femininity in Bollywood cinema by looking at the articulation and function of race, of whiteness, in the representation of goris (white women) and gori (light-skinned Indian women)—from the iconic actresses “Fearless Nadia” of the 1930s–40s, through Helen of the 1950s–70s, to the beginning of transforming iterations of goriness in films like Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Lagaan (2001), Rang de Basanti (2006), and Marigold (2007), to tackling the creation of the “rebound gori” and the Anglo-Indian women found in several recent films. The third chapter further complements the previous two with its timely concentration on “metrosexual masculinity” in current Bollywood cinema, which emerged in India in the 1990s with the decided imprint of consumerist neoliberalism, forging a profitable space for “the advent of the care of the physical self” (p. 91). The difficulty in reading the bulking up of Hindi film actors—“the (in)ability to distinguish between a particular form and its caricature” (p. 106), which is a consistent thread throughout Gehlawat's text—is outlined by literally gazing at the bodies of Hrithik Roshan, Saif Ali Khan, John Abraham, Ricky Bahl, and Shah Rukh Khan (the black-and-white DVD image grabs are accommodating here), who routinely display meticulously chiseled (and most often shaved) bare chests, arms, and backs in their song-and-dance numbers.
The final, brief two chapters of the book are obligatory reading for anyone presently teaching a Bollywood cinema or, more generally, an Indian film course, or employing Bollywood films in other classes, particularly if at universities in the United States or Europe. In chapter 5, “Bollywood 101: Teaching Hindi Cinema in the West,” Gehlawat offers cogent advice and strategies on how to thoughtfully take on and convey such a complex, diverse “niche” subject matter, which frequently shares the “dual burden” of having to operate as a film and area studies course (pp. 112–13), to undergraduate and graduate students. He poses core questions that require consistent contemplation when teaching Hindi film abroad: “How is Bollywood being framed? And what is it potentially giving up in the process of being assimilated into the Western academic canon?” (p. 125). The concluding chapter muses over changing cinematic elements in and scholarly implications of two recent trends in twenty-first-century Bollywood that encompass “on the one hand, Bollywood stars moving westward, into the world of Hollywood and, on the other, contemporary popular Hindi cinema increasingly reflecting cultural shifts that tend to be associated with a process of Westernization” (p. 127).
In summary, both Dream Machine and Twenty-First Century Bollywood provide nuanced, well-organized, and abundantly detailed analyses of the intricate past and present of the historically important and wonderfully compelling world of Hindi cinema, and are welcome additions to the body of scholarly literature on the subject. These works can be most effectively utilized in undergraduate and graduate university courses on Bollywood film and digital media, Indian cinema, and South Asian culture or area studies. Both books include select black-and-white images from the major films under discussion, and both provide deep bibliographies. Gehlawat also supplies a valuable filmography and fertile footnotes. The availability of both in e-book formats makes them quite appealing as affordable college text options. Finally, both Dayal and Gehlawat demonstrate how and why Hindi film is far from obvious or transparent and requires diligent, rigorous academic attention, specifically transitioning into and through the twenty-first century with the unrelenting manifestations of cosmopolitanism and globalization and their ramifications for the form, content, and future of Hindi cinema.
