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This book explores the complex relationship between Indian nationalism and Hindi cinema, examining how film serves as a crucial medium due to its visual narrative power and connections to traditional cultural forms including Parsi theatre, folk traditions, and mythological storytelling.
While Hindi films have often been positioned as embodiments of nationalism, they simultaneously present alternative, more inclusive, and liberal conceptions of national belonging. The collection investigates the multifaceted construction, dissemination, and reception of Indian nationalism across four decades of Hindi cinema, from the 1980s through the 2020s.
The contributors analyze how Hindi cinema, as both a discursive and popular medium, not only portrays various forms of nationalism but also shapes the politics of film production through nation-building narratives and industry power dynamics. The volume demonstrates how films have served as mouthpieces for those in power, showcasing both majoritarian perspectives and critical challenges to hegemonic thinking. Covering a deliberately broad timeline and diverse genres-from war epics and sports dramas that exemplify muscular nationalism to biopics, comedy-dramas, and spy thrillers-this collection offers a nuanced examination of nationalist messaging across different periods of India's socio-economic development and political leadership.
This book is essential reading for academics, researchers, and students in film studies, cultural studies, regional studies, and nationalism studies focused on Indian cultural landscapes.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of
National Identities.
List of contents
Introduction Nation, Nationalism and Indian Hindi cinema
1. Invisible reformation: understanding the construction of nation in select Bollywood films
2. From domestic guardian to the national militia: the familial, the national and the middle class in 1980s popular Hindi films
3. Historicising the colonial past of India and Hindi cinema
4. Bollywood in the neoliberal era: changing discourses on multiculturalism, terrorism, and nationalism in '
Dil Se ... ' (1998) and 'Fanaa' (2006)
5. The changing dynamics and othering of Muslims in Bollywood films: rereading
Sarfarosh (1999) and
New York (2009)
6. Reframing nationalism and national identity in
Anek 7. Politics of apoliticality and the Indian citizen in popular Hindi cinema
8. Beyond good and evil: imagined nation in Hindi films
9. No country for sex workers, then or now: Srijit Mukherji's
Begum Jaan (2017) and its many imagi-nations
10. Leveraging history to invoke nationalism: from the annals of history to social engineering of present and future in Hindi cinema
11. Nation, family and trauma: techno-nationalism and conflicts of loyalty in the Indian Hindi-language espionage thriller
Mission Majnu 12. The changing dynamics of Indian nationalism in contemporary Hindi movies
About the author
Goutam Karmakar is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad, India. He is Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany. In addition to these academic engagements and positions, he is also an honorary research associate at the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. Karmakar's research interests include Global South literary studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, environmental studies and cultural studies. Karmakar is also a Series Editor for the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.
Pippa Catterall is Professor of History and Policy in the School of Humanities, University of Westminster, UK. She has published extensively on religious, political, constitutional, diplomatic, intelligence and media history.
