Once upon a Time in Bollywood: The Global Swing in Hindi Cinema (review)

Once upon a Time in Bollywood begins with the assertion that ‘Bollywood has long been a site where Indians have negotiated their “global” affiliations,’ and the chapters that follow attempt to examine how globalization affects the aesthetics, production, and consumption of Indian popular cinema. The analyses focus on Bollywood films from the 1990s onwards and revolve around discussions of neo-realist traditions, melodrama, the representation of outsiders and insiders, negotiations of modernity and tradition, spectatorship, and so on. However, the book lacks breadth: the predominant focus is on a select number of films produced in the 1990s, and many of the chapters offer similar kinds of readings on melodrama, family films, and economic liberalization, making them repetitive. The collection also features work already published and thus dates many of the articles. Ahmad Saidullah’s very astute analysis of the Indian films screened at the 1994 Toronto Film Festival and his interview with Sekhar Kapur, the director of the controversial film Bandit Queen, stand out in particular. Why include a review of films from the 1994 Film Festival in a 2007 publication? The articles could have also done with some careful proofreading, such as those by Benjamin and Thomas.

Of the new essays in this collection, Susan Dewey’s on Bollywood Darshan skilfully traces the transformations in Bombay’s cityscape and in the functioning of the film industry it houses following economic liberalization in India; Radhika Desai’s exploration of militaristic films offers new critical insights on the tangled relationship between Bollywood representations and Hindu Right discourses; and Vsamah Ansari offers a thought-provoking analysis of his subject position as a diasporic North Indian Muslim for whom Bollywood cinema becomes a site that provides an imaginary ‘nostalgia of “home” which is not fulfilled by a geographical home.’ The other essays are either too limited in scope or lack in-depth critical analysis. Nitin Decka’s claim that Bollywood is articulating ‘a new model of masculinity . . . for the burgeoning South Asian consuming classes’ rests on detailed readings of Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Salaam Namaste (2005), and Parineeta (2005). Yet the period that he focuses on also produced films as varied as Lagaan (2001), with peasants temporarily turned cricketeers, and Swades (2004), where the hero, a nasa scientist, returns to his natal village in India and tries to usher in modern technology. These (and many other) films of this era contradict his argument that ‘Bollywood is creating heroes whose inclinations and ambitions seem decidedly antitechnological.’ Sonia Benjamin’s essay draws critical attention to the dynamics between regional and ‘national’ cinema, but does not meet the stated claims of the collection as articulated in the introduction. The ambivalence of the title also remains unresolved at the end of the chapter, as it is unclear if Roja would be less devout a wife devoid of her Brahmin-ness. Roja’s Brahmin-ness does not receive enough critical attention in the essay, and Brahmin often functions as a synonym for Hindu. Jennifer Thomas’s analysis of online Bollywood fan discourse on Preity and Rani often splits into an exploration of their off-screen rumours and on-screen roles, rather than both being tied together into a nuanced formulation. A careful exploration of the viewer responses to the films analyzed (similar to Salaam Namaste) would have strengthened the argument further. The final chapter by Florian Stadtler on the intertext of Mother India and Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh unfortunately has nothing new to offer to readers who are already familiar with available scholarly work on Mother India or Vijay Mishra’s chapter, ‘The Texts of Mother India,’ in Bollywood Cinema: Temple of Desire (2002).

Although scholarly readers and connoisseurs of Hindi cinema might find a few chapters of this book useful, the book would appeal primarily to Bollywood-informed or Bollywood-interested members of the general populace.