Explores Bollywood cinema’s aesthetic, cultural and corporeal dimensions across foundational genres, iconic performers and diasporic narratives, highlighting the interplay of narrative, poetry, the body and national and transnational identities. The first substantive chapter of the book recovers the special allure of Parsi theatre and the role of the Muslim courtesan in Bollywood cinema. If the first provided a foundational cinematic scaffolding, the Muslim courtesan films gave the cinema its very special quality, more immediately the language of poetry in Urdu. There was nevertheless a tragic quality to the Muslim courtesan films and that tragic quality was given structural form through the ‘Devdas’ movies of the sentimental man of feeling whose life is marked by loss, failure to find the object of love and finally sacrifice in death. Beginning with Chapter Two the book offers three genres that are foundational to any serious reading of Bollywood cinema. The first, dealt with in Chapter Two, is the genre of the Arabian Nights tales in as much as these fantasies provided a narrative base that emphasised India’s own inter-connected and diverse cultural heritage. The second, Bollywood mythologicals, examined in Chapter Three express what may be called the religio-cultural dominant of the nation. The third, examined in Chapter Four, is the disturbing fantasy of the darker, Gothic, side of humanity. However, when it came to the latter’s transformation in the established melodramatic genre of Bollywood, the Gothic took the form of reincarnation tales. The book is defined by the correspondence between cinema and one’s passionate, sensual and even libidinal relationship to it. The corporeal aesthetic is read through two exemplary actors: Helen and Shammi Kapoor. They occupy Chapters Five and Six of the book, and both chapters have as their central theme precisely the question of the body in cinema and its articulation or representation either as an allegory of lived experi
This book, titled Bollywood’s Corporeal Turn: Aesthetic Response and Diasporic Memory, prizes Bollywood cinema out of its local and national context and brings a phenomenological critical awareness of it as cinema qua cinema.
