Bollywood in the Age of New Media: the Geo-televisual Aesthetic

Abstract

Anustup Basu's book is a theorization of the mainstream Hindi cinema that emerged between roughly 1991 and 2004. Hindi films blend an assortment of local and international genres (spaghetti Western plus mythological plus action), dramaturgical modes (action, melodrama, comedy), song–dance sequences, aesthetic systems, even seemingly incommensurable epistemes, in what the film industry itself calls the ‘masala film’ – the word ‘masala’ denoting a spice mixture. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's thought, Basu contends that these ‘assemblages’ and eclectic combinations are neither contradictions nor a sign of postcolonial India's incomplete engagement with modernity. Instead they are part of the very historicity of the Indian postcolonial situation. While Hindi cinema has always been ‘both infra- and international’ in its stylistic exchanges, the broader globalization-related transformations since the 1990s have added a new dimension. Three decisive developments since the 1990s provide historical context to Basu's study: economic liberalization, a resurgent Hindu nationalism, and the ushering in of a ‘borderless’, global system of ‘electronic media exchanges’. Obviously these developments have profound implications for Indian statehood, national becoming, and the relation between the citizen/subject, sovereignty and the law. Basu's interest, then, exceeds the cinema to encompass ‘a political analysis of the globalization of culture and urban life in a third world situation’ (p. 6). Indeed, there is a significant engagement with political theory and philosophy in the book as a whole, and especially in the first part, which sets the conceptual ground for the readings of particular films in what follows.