Brief Description
"Looks at the role of love and romance in the Bombay cinema of the 1950s in terms of its cultural function and social significance"--
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Romantic love overwhelms 1950s Bombay cinema. Love and romance is evident in the themes, lyrics and visual aesthetics of films of the period, as it is in the publicity and gossip surrounding films and film stars. Love in cinema becomes significant when social reality constrains its quotidian experience and expression. By bringing a spectacular imagination of love to centre stage, the 1950s cinema deflected anxieties of 'Indianness' even as the new aesthetic and affect of romance offered an alternative engagement with the contradictions of modernity. Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema of the 1950s explores the films, the songs, the stars and the extra-cinematic discourse of the period to read love and romance as its most productive trope that mobilized a dynamic and contested public sphere.
Review Quotes
1. Advance praise: 'This is a page-turner and a breath of fresh air. Written lucidly and clearly, well aware of contemporary debates in Indian and global film studies, which it both summarizes and takes forward, Aarti Wani offers a new take on a much written area of film history, the popular Bombay cinema of the 50s. While film studies have been preoccupied with the construction of the nation in cinema in this period, Wani suggests that this cinema was also simultaneously helping construct a modern sensibility premised on freedom, one built upon ideas of romance and erotic desire, not exactly congruent with the construction of a bourgeois and patriarchal nationhood.The insights she offers are so logical that one is struck at how we missed them so far.' Jyotsna Kapur, Southern Illinois University"
2. Advance praise: 'An original contribution to South Asian film studies that is a pleasure to peruse, Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema of the 1950s, is studded with valuable theoretical insights and instigations, and with many stellar readings: frame by frame analyses; thorough unravelings of haptic mise en scene that elaborate a 'dramaturgy of or for the spatiotemporal'; closely unpacked musical and song sequences folded into and rigorously integrated into narrative dynamics as well as extra diegetic threads, graded through visual and techno-filmic nuances; carefully elaborated meldings of delicately parsed visual and aural film material with extra-filmic events and contexts gleaned from archival sources such as Marathi and English language newspapers, magazines, posters, fiction and poetry, nonfiction accounts conversations with practitioners and commentators. Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema of the 1950s is also enlivened and substantially thickened by its extensive engagement with Euro-American and South Asian cinema studies, with philosophical questions that emerge from both these contexts as well as the historical literature from the period that sets the stage. At the heart of this project is the question of love firmly located in the semantics of the 1950s world of cinema. For Aarti Wani, love is seminal to this universe. Taking on an area such as love that has often been left by the wayside in some excellent works on Bombay cinema, Wani asks the reader to consider the following questions rendered in various cinematic and extra cinematic keys: Why love in the 1950s? What is so striking about 1950s cinematic love and romance? What renditions do these particular forms of love assume? How do they escape or continue the registers that love takes in earlier periods and in subsequent cinematic engagements? Where might we encounter love, come upon it? What are its architectonics, what are its subtleties and contours? W"
3. Advance praise: 'This is an original, rich and beautifully written account of Bombay cinema's preoccupation with romantic love, which draws on a wide range of archives, including little-known Marathi sources, as well as the author's encyclopaedic knowledge of the cinema of that era. This ambitious project brings genuinely new insights to our understandings of how romantic love as the sign of the modern was imagined and given shape in 1950s Bombay films, their songs and star texts. A pleasure to read.' Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster"
4. Advance praise: 'The originality of this delightfully written book lies in its focus on the relatively neglected 1950s as a pivotal moment in the evolution of Indian popular cinema, bridging the political event of Independence, and the technological innovation of colour cinematography. Identifying the theme of romantic love as the signature of modernity, the author cuts across conventional film genres to explore this conjunction in the three domains of 'urbanity'; of film songs; and through the phenomenon of stardom. It is rare to find a work that succeeds in stitching these separate discourses so elegantly together.' Patricia Uberoi, Formerly, Institute of Economic Growth
5. "This is a page-turner and a breath of fresh air. Written lucidly and clearly, well aware of contemporary debates in Indian and global film studies, which it both summarizes and takes forward, [this book] offers a new take on a much written area of film history, the popular Bombay cinema of the 1950s. While film studies have been preoccupied with the construction of the nation in cinema in this period, Wani suggests that this cinema was also simultaneously helping construct a modern sensibility premised on freedom, one built upon ideas of romance and erotic desire, not exactly congruent with the construction of a bourgeois and patriarchal nationhood. The insights she offers are so logical that one is struck at how we missed them so far."
Jyotsna Kapur, Southern Illinois University
6. "This is an original, rich and beautifully written account of Bombay cinema's preoccupation with romantic love, which draws on a wide range of archives, including little-known Marathi sources, as well as the author's encyclopaedic knowledge of the cinema of that era. This ambitious project brings genuinely new insights to our understandings of how romantic love - as the sign of the modern - was imagined and given shape in 1950s Bombay films, their songs and star texts. A pleasure to read."
Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster
7. "The originality of this delightfully written book lies in its focus on the relatively neglected 1950s as a pivotal moment in the evolution of Indian popular cinema, bridging the political event of Independence, and the technological innovation of colour cinematography. Identifying the theme of romantic love as the signature of modernity, the author cuts across conventional film genres to explore this conjunction in the three domains of urbanity'; of film songs; and through the phenomenon of stardom. It is rare to find a work that succeeds in stitching these separate discourses so elegantly together."
Patricia Uberoi, Institute of Economic Growth"
