Lyrical Nationalism: Gender, Friendship, and Excess in 1970s Hindi Cinema

Abstract

The Bombay film industry (Bollywood) is usually considered, along with other state-sanctioned institutions, in its role as a force for cultural and political consolidation within the architecture of postindependence Indian identity. 1 The products of the industry and, indeed, the "filmic system" itself project a fantasy of a homogeneous culture that in fact masks the hierarchy of subject positions and belonging divided along the lines of gender, class, ethnicity, and caste. 2 In this essay I examine one particular feature of the films, the song-and-dance sequences, as they draw attention to the fractious nature of the postcolonial nation while simultaneously attempting to construct a space for the articulation of a consolidated national identity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.