Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema by Sangita Gopal (review)

The director Shekhar Kapur recently suggested that Indian cinema is no longer the medium of the masses, as it has often been described, but is increasingly the medium of elites.⁴⁴ In her fascinating book titled Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, Sangita Gopal documents this transition in Hindi language cinema, more widely known by the term "Bollywood." Gopal's monograph is an attempt to trace the coterminous shifts in Hindi cinema's aesthetic form and industrial practices from the "classic" period in the first decades after India's independence in 1947 to the contemporary period since India began to dismantle its socialist economy in 1991. Moreover, she uses the shifts in Bollywood films' depiction of the romantic couple as a lens through which to demonstrate "how classic Hindi cinema has morphed into the New Bollywood" (2).

Gopal observes that while classic Hindi cinema, driven by political and economic pressures, was characterized by a self-imposed homogeneity of genre, "New Bollywood embodies a multiplicity of genres," even as it takes on "the trappings of a culture industry" (3). But despite all this diversity, Gopal suggests that "New Bollywood" has chosen to focus increasingly on the "postnuptial couple," in contrast to classic cinema's primary concern with the depiction of the pre-nuptial couple's negotiation of the social obstacles to their union. Whereas the couple's "right to be" was "contingent and contested" in classic Hindi cinema, this is now taken for granted in the cinema of the economically liberalized, post-1991 India. This shift in "couple form" reflects changes within society but is also enabled by changes in industrial practices -including the organization of the film industry, the mode of exhibition, and the adoption of new technologies.

The monograph is extremely ambitious in its scope and is, for the most part, quite successful at achieving what it sets out to do. Gopal excels in those chapters in which she documents the shift from the old to the new Bollywood through the use of structured comparisons. In these she explicitly connects changes in aesthetics to changes in industrial practices or technology, all the while keeping her language accessible. This is most successfully accomplished in her intriguing discussions of the evolution of the Horror genre and the rise of the multi-plot film (Chapters 3 and 4 respectively). These are without doubt the most compelling chapters in the book and could even stand alone as part of a reading list for a course either on Bollywood or in a more general film studies course. They expertly document not only the historical shift in Bollywood's aesthetics, but also provide powerful and accessible analyses of how changes in social and industrial context come to be reflected in shifts in aesthetic forms.

Two other chapters are almost as successful. In Chapter 2, entitled "Family Matters," Gopal provides an insightful account of the Hindi film industry's transition from a collection of disorganized family businesses to a corporatized industry along with a convincing analysis of how New Bollywood has portrayed the relationship between the romantic couple and the patriarchal family. But while each of these discussions is focused and interesting, the link between the two parts of the chapter seems underdeveloped. Chapter 5, "Bollywood Local," documents the adoption of the practices and aesthetics of New Bollywood by regional language cinema in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. This is another generally convincing chapter although some of the argument could have used more substantiation—the claim, for example, that the film Choker Bali's use of the first stirrings of India's nationalist movement as a backdrop is intended to provide merely a "setting" rather than having any narrative significance. Nonetheless, these two chapters are not only clear, but also provide interesting accounts of the shifts Gopal intends to document.

Chapter 1, entitled "When the Music's Over," is probably the weakest in the book. Although the chapter contains a wealth of historical information...