Event Details:

If nations are imagined, how does popular and mainstream cinema in India contribute to that imagination? What relationship does the fantastic and make-believe world of Bollywood  do to the idea of India? My talk will focus upon milestones in Hindi cinema (called Bollywood after liberalization of the 1990s) to demonstrate implicit and explicit interaction between cinema and socio-political contexts in India. In doing so, it will move back and forth between the nation's anxieties about gender, caste, religion, class and cinematic representations to show the real and reel cannot be seen in discrete terms but mutually constitutive entities. In  doing so I argue for cinema as an intersectional site that enables an understanding of both consolidation as well as diffusion of nation and its avowed goals.

Rita Kothari is a professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India. She is the author of Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English (St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester, rvd ed. Cambridge University Press, New Delhi) and The Burden of Refuge (rvd.ed. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi). She has co-translated Modern Gujarati Poetry (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi) and Coral Island: The Poetry of Niranjan Bhagat (Sahitya Akademi, Gandhinagar). Her translations of note are The Stepchild: Angaliayat (Oxford University Press, New Delhi), Speech and Silence: Literary Journeys by Gujarati Women (Zubaan, New Delhi) and Unbordered Memories: Partition Stories from Sindh (Penguin). She has co-edited Decentring Translation Studies: India and Beyond (John Benjamin Press, Amsterdam) and Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish (Penguin, forthcoming).