The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History (review)

The Cinematic ImagiNation is a significant work that joins several other studies in addressing the lacuna of critical writing surrounding Indian popular cinema, both within cinema studies and by those who study Indian social and political history. As reflected in the book's title, Jyotika Virdi's project involves change in post-independence Hindi films, specifically how the focus within popular cinema 'shifts to emphasize or repress issues of class, gender and religion during different decades.' Using an interdisciplinary approach, positioned between postcolonial, film and cultural studies, the author argues convincingly that popular Hindi cinema, the acknowledged national cinema of India, provides a rich canvas for 'reading social history, and the place of gender, sexuality, class, caste, and religious community in shaping that history.'

The introductory chapters examine the theoretical and historical components, which qualify and also limit Hindi popular cinema in its pan-Indian role of constructing nation. Virdi notes the contradictory nature of 'nation,' and by extension representations of it in popular cinema, which must repress internal differences between linguistic and ideological factors, along with varied interests, in order to present a coherent national identity. Hindi cinema, she argues, provides the role of a catalyst in the homogenizing mission; it skirts regional, cultural, and religious differences, and appeals to the underprivileged by 'building faith in the nation-state's beneficence.'

To support her hypothesis, the author has selected thirty films over the past five decades to explore the way in which popular cinema sustains and reconstructs a myth of nation, with shifting emphasis upon perceived social and political threats, as well as gender politics. Virdi discusses the unique linking of family, hero, heroine, and villain with nation in Hindi cinema. In such films, the family becomes the central ground for manifesting the social conflict and realignments of the imagined nation, both challenging and reinforcing central nationalist narratives that spread from Nehruvian secularism to contemporary capitalist globalization.

The book is at its strongest in exploring how associations with gender roles reflect social issues in the commonly produced comedy-romance and gangster-action films. Enlisting Guru Dutt's film Mr. And Mrs. 55 (1955) as an example, the author examines how the film involving questions of private (love/marriage/family) and public (legal/national/political) space reflected the controversial Hindu Code Bill that was being publicly debated. She also traces the role of heroes and the villains they challenge to protect family and nation during certain decades, finding unprincipled profiteers to be the villains in the 1950s, foreign aggressors in the 1960s, smugglers in the 1970s, separatist terrorists in the 1980s, and authoritarian patriarchs in the 1990s.

Virdi's reading of the female archetype in popular cinema finds a generally conservative agenda within the Hindi film industry, where women's roles are predominantly defined in relation to the hero in the form of stereotypical madonna/whore lover/other, failing to take into account the enormous change in women's lives since independence. In presenting case studies of two popular stars, Meena Kumar and Dimple Kapadia, as their images appeared in films and the press, Virdi argues that in order to write a social history of women, one must look in the margins: 'I read the film texts against the grain of normative culture, as well as against each other, to demonstrate that the films do not present a monolithic discourse. The film texts are also read in conjunction with "star texts," a salient aspect of film culture in India and a site where public and private narratives coalesce in revealing ways. Through this layered reading it is possible to piece together a history of the social text.' Through an analysis of various films, the author finds shifting paradigms in the portrayal of women that include a breaking of taboos regarding explicit sexual scenes, a shift from the 'woman as victim' subgenre in the early 1970s to the emergence of an anti-patriarchal stance and the avenging woman of the 1980s...