{"id":12139,"date":"2015-11-21T11:30:54","date_gmt":"2015-11-21T11:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/?p=12139"},"modified":"2018-10-01T16:23:59","modified_gmt":"2018-10-01T16:23:59","slug":"bollywoods-india-a-public-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/2015\/11\/21\/bollywoods-india-a-public-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Bollywood’s India: A Public Fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Priya-Joshi\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[ensemblevideo contentid=GFQI3XQLvk6aLAJET4Cg6A audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]<\/p>\n

During the 1950s the young Indian nation faced\u00a0immense challenges but was, as Professor Priya Joshi explains in this interview, still innocent and optimistic. By the 1970s the bloom of youth had faded as Indians suffered under widespread political and economic corruption and malaise, most visible in the\u00a022 months’\u00a0“Emergency”\u00a0which gave Prime Minister Indira Gandhi the power to limit democratic governance and civil liberties. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, India charted a new course of economic liberalization that led to dynamic growth and increased engagement with the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

In Bollywood\u2019s India: A Public Fantasy<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>(Columbia University Press, 2015), Priya Joshi chooses these three historical periods\u00a0\u2013 the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s –\u00a0to illustrate\u00a0how, in critiquing the state, Bollywood blockbuster films have performed a kind of “social work” for the Indian nation. Popular throughout India and globally, Bollywood films feature a rich mixture of romance, comedy, melodrama, social themes, and exuberant singing and dancing.\u00a0Professor Joshi focuses her analysis on the serious social commentary flowing through these films, such as Awara<\/em> (The vagabond, Raj Kapoor, 1951), Sholay<\/em> (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975), and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun?<\/em> (Who am I to you?, Sooraj Barjatya, 1994).\u00a0She looks at the themes of crime and punishment in the 1950s, the family and romance in the 1970s, and the emergence of\u00a0“Bollylite” in the 1990s. Throughout this entire period, however, Joshi\u2019s Bollywood turns a sharp edge to the Indian state in the secure and safe fantasy world of the cinema.<\/p>\n

I spoke to Priya Joshi on September 16, 2015, about her new book Bollywood\u2019s India: A Public Fantasy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Audio Download<\/a><\/strong> (mp3)<\/p>\n

—Fred Rowland<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  [ensemblevideo contentid=GFQI3XQLvk6aLAJET4Cg6A audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true] During the 1950s the young Indian nation faced\u00a0immense challenges but was, as Professor Priya Joshi explains in this interview, still innocent and optimistic. By the 1970s the bloom of youth had faded … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":805,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[108,190,3,81],"tags":[170,109,177,23],"class_list":["post-12139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-books","category-human-sciences","category-rowland","tag-history","tag-interview","tag-talking-about-books","tag-top-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/805"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/humansciences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}