Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!
Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s
Publication Year: 2009
Published by: University of Illinois Press
front cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
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pp. v-vi
List of Illustrations
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pp. vii-viii
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-xii
I am grateful to the many institutions and individuals without whose generous support this book could not have been written. A Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies enabled me to conduct initial research at the National Film Archive of India, and a grant-in-aid of research from Indiana University ...
Introduction: Translocating Hollywood Stardom in India
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pp. 1-14
Cinema arrived in India on 7 July 1896, just six months after the first public screening by the Lumière brothers in Paris. By the 1930s, alongside the material technology of filmmaking, such as raw film stock, cameras, projectors, lighting equipment, and, most recently, sound systems, ...
Part I. “India Has No Stars”
1. The Split Discourse of Indian Stardom
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pp. 17-49
In the 1932 annual Puja issue of the English-language film weekly, Filmland, director Charu Roy complains that in nearly fifteen to twenty years of filmmaking in Bengal, “there was never a film whose market value was mainly due to its feature player.” ...
2. The Morality and Machinery of Stardom
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pp. 50-70
The film “star” in India was constituted out of the competing demands of a Western model of celebrity derived from Hollywood, which defined identity in terms of interiorized private lives, and an Indian model of public identity, with its deep-rooted avoidance of a written discourse of gossip. ...
3. Real and Imagined Stars
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pp. 71-92
In writings about the bad reputation of cinema, there was usually a slippage between the loose morals of individual actresses (never named, but referred to in generalized insinuations) and of the cinema as an institution (in the form of lewd producers and directors). ...
4. Spectatorial Desires and the Hierarchies of Stardom
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pp. 93-122
In the preceding chapters I argued that the dominant cinematic and extra-cinematic discourse on female stardom in 1930s film worked from an implicit structure of oppositions. On one side, there was low-class status aligned with public performance, and implications of sexuality and immorality, ...
Part II. “This Stardom Racket”
5. Monopoly, Frontality, and Doubling in Postwar Bombay Cinema
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pp. 125-149
In the 1930s cinematic stardom in India had been figured primarily as an absence, a recurrent complaint being the perceived lack of “genuine” stars, who were understood in the context of a general discourse of improvement of Indian cinema. ...
6. Nargis and the Double Space of Female Desire in Anhonee
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pp. 150-172
Nargis was a major star for roughly a decade from 1948 to 1958, when she retired at the peak of her career at the age of twenty-nine.1 But the public narrative of Nargis did not end with her retirement. The post-1958 Nargis star persona was one of the earliest to exemplify the paradoxical relationship between star persona and film text ...
7. The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Bomby Cinema
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pp. 173-202
Thus far I have considered the implications of the public circulation of the female body in star discourses in India cinema. The demands of a cinematic form that privileges song sequences produced the imperative to technologically separate singing voices and acting bodies. ...
Notes
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pp. 203-234
Works Cited
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pp. 235-248
Index
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pp. 249-258
back cover
E-ISBN-13: 9780252091780
Print-ISBN-13: 9780252034329
Page Count: 272
Publication Year: 2009
