Overview

A panoramic history of one of India’s greatest pastimes, Bollywood, through the lens of that nation’s distinct brand of secularism. Sheila Nayar provides readers an accessible overview of the vast, fluid complex that is Bollywood, including the off-screen politics often driving that complex, by chronicling how religious pluralism has been cinematically conceived, negotiated, played into, and politicized. From the silent films of the colonial period to the slick blockbusters in the era of globalization and Hindutva, Nayar exposes the strategies that have gone into reflecting India’s ""unity in diversity"" and the threats recurrently embattling that constitutionally enshrined principle. If cinema is the barometer of popular attitudes in India, what better to measure the public’s commitment to its characteristic brand of secularism? In this way, the book offers no less a compelling box-office history of Bollywood than a history of modern India through its films.

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9789004706491

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Sheila J. Nayar (University of Utah) is the author of Cinematically Speaking (2010) and The Sacred and the Cinema (2012), as well as numerous essays on Indian film, including, most recently, in Cinema and the Secular (2024).

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