Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments 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 allowed me to view the Library of Congress’s collection of early Indian films. I am also thankful to the Film Studies Program at Indiana University for a dissertation fellowship and to the University of Pittsburgh for its Third Term Research Stipend, which enabled me to return for further research to the NFAI. The generous assistance of Mr. Suresh Chabria during my first visit to the NFAI, and of Mr. K. Shashidharan during my second visit, enabled me to use my limited time at the archive efficiently. I extend grateful thanks also to the librarians at NFAI, especially Ms. Eyer, Ms. Joshi, and Ms. Kshirsagar, for their helpful suggestions during the research process, and to Mr. Kiran A. Dhiwar for his help in arranging video screenings for me. Mr. M. D. Bhandare and Bhagyashree Bhandare of the American Institute of Indian Studies provided indispensable logistical help in Pune. During the time I have spent working on this book, James Naremore has been unfailing in his support and encouragement. Without his example and direction, I would not be the scholar I am today. Jim’s course on stars and his scholarship on stardom and acting strongly influenced my own thinking on film stars and performance. It was in a class on theories of mass culture taught by him and Patrick Brantlinger that I first encountered the heady excitement of engaging what might otherwise x Acknowledgments be viewed as culturally debased texts. This was at a time when Indian commercial films were not yet fashionable, instead epitomizing lowbrow culture, and this class gave me my first opportunity to write on my own guilty pleasures. Similarly, if I am in film studies today, it is entirely thanks to Barbara Klinger’s energizing film courses, which enticed me into film studies against my original intentions. At Indiana University, Purnima Bose was one of my earliest readers, and conversations with her helped shape the direction of my research. I thank her and Radhika Parameswaran for their friendship and their suggestions on the earliest draft of chapter 4, which I presented at the “Materializing India” conference they organized at Indiana University. My colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh have provided a supportive and intellectually engaging environment, and I thank Lucy Fischer and Marcia Landy for their feedback on my work. I am grateful to Shalini Puri for giving up precious time from her leave to read every word of the first full draft of this book. Her meticulous comments and suggestions helped me rethink key areas of my argument. Corey Creekmur has been equally important to the final shape of this book, and I thank him for his insightful reading of many incarnations of my manuscript and for his generosity in sending me films and other materials that I did not have access to. Corey and Philip Lutgendorf were the original instigators of what eventually became chapter 7 of this book, and over the years they have been important interlocutors on various portions of the book that I have presented at conferences in Iowa and Wisconsin. During the finishing stages of this book, I have been the grateful recipient of generous suggestions and feedback from colleagues working in Indian cinema, including Manishita Dass, Sangita Gopal, and Priya Jaikumar. I thank Rashmi Bhatnagar for always being ready to give up her time to read any fragment I needed a second pair of eyes for. Gayatri Chatterjee, Rosie Thomas, and Ravi Vasudevan generously shared hardto -find films with me, and Ranjani Mazumdar took it upon herself to obtain most of the photographs for this book. Without her help and the efficiency of NFAI in finding most of the images I wanted, this would have been a dull book indeed! I thank my students Ben Herstrom, for his research assistance with microfilms of Bombay Chronicle, and Usha Iyer, for bringing me some of the book’s images. For their support over the course of writing this book, I thank Pravu Mazumdar, Deepa Majumdar, Yifen Beus, Katrina Boyd, Millie Elliot, and Arti Mehta. This book would quite simply not exist without the support of Mark Best, Ila Majumdar, and Maya Best. I thank Mark for...