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? This talk will focus upon milestones in Hindi cinema (called Bollywood after liberalization of the 1990s) to demonstrate implicit and explicit interaction between cinema and sociopolitical 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.

Rita Kothari is a professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India.

Location:	303 International Center [map]
Price:	free
Sponsor:	public
Contact:	Asian Studies Center asiansc@isp.msu.edu
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