In this article I trace how the Hindi horror genre with its evolving narrative strategies has itself been an area of conflicting ideas and ideologies in imagining the Indian state. However Post-Independence wars with Pakistan and China, and the eruption of various separatists’ movements in the North-East, Sikh’s Khalistan movement and Kashmiri Muslims engendered narratives and counter-narratives to the state-sponsored scientific secularist discourse. Hindi cinema itself emerged in a charged environment of nascent nationalist politics, and early Indian filmmakers saw themselves and their on-screen projections as part of the patriotic scheme. While Hindi cinema has often been critically engaged as a narrative form while ‘writing’ the nation, the role of Hindi horror genre in imagining this nation is under-explored. 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. Bollywood in the Age of New Media therefore explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Basu argues that 'Bollywood' is not so much indicative of a uniquely Indian modernity coming into its own rather it is symptomatic of a pure techno-financial modernization that comes without a political modernity. This book connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalizing process in India.
Basu theorises this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic. One example is the film Haqeeqat that featured poor working class protagonists, but romantic musical sequences transported them abruptly to Switzerland, with the actors now dressed in designer suits. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. 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. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early nineties as a signature 'Bollywood style' evolved in the wake of liberalization and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India.
"This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalisation, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004.
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