Bollywood's New Woman

MEGHA ANWER is a clinical assistant Professor in the Honors College at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Review of Education, Pedagogy and Culture, Victorian Studies, Global South, ARIEL, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Short Film Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Wide-Screen.ANUPAMA ARORA is professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She is co-editor (with Rajender Kaur) of India in the American Imaginary 1780s-1880s.

• IntroductionPart I   Family and Nation1. Koel Banerjee and Jigna Desai, "Mompreneur in the Multiplex: Entrepreneurial Technologies of the "New Woman" Subject in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization"2. Sangita Gopal, "Lethal Acts: Bollywood's new woman and the Nirbhaya Effect"3. Baidurya Chakrabarti, "Beyond the Couple Form: The Space of the New Woman in Yash Raj Films"4. Aparajita De, "Mera Saaya: Shadows of the Woman in Bollywood's Cultural Imagination"Part II  Body Matters5. Gohar Siddiqui, "New Womanhood and #LipstickRebellion: Feminist Consciousness in Lipstick Under My Burkha"6. Debadatta Chakraborty, "Queering Bollywood: Sexuality of the disabled Body – A Case Study" 7. Ajay Gehlawat, "Plus-size Femininity: The Multiple Figurations of Bhumi Pednekar"8. Puja Sen, "The Many Bodies of Vidya Balan: The Dirty Picture, Kahaani, and Tumhari Sulu"Part III Geographies of the New Woman9. Anjali Ram, "Out of India: Educating the New Woman in Queen, EnglishVinglish, and Badrinath ki Dulhaniya"10. Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, "Learning to Love The(ir) World: Using Feminist Spaces and Cosmopolitan Impulses against the Heteropatriarchy in Queen and English Vinglish" 11. Namrata Rele Sathe, "Single in the City: The Female Flâneur in Queen"12. Madhavi Biswas, "Dedh Ishqiyaand Ishqiya "Glocal Women: Gender, Genre, and Performance in Abhishek Chaubey's  Part IV New Media and the New Woman13. Kuhu Tanvir, "All Broken Up and Dancing: Looking at Katrina Kaif in eight GIFs"14. Tanushree Ghosh, "Reshaping 'Bollywood': Dissident New Media Femininities and Hindi Cinema"AcknowledgmentsNotes on ContributorsIndex

"A sumptuous and well-rounded volume of essays by leading experts on Indian cinema. This book is recommended for all scholars and students for an in-depth understanding of the gender dynamics in post-globalization Bollywood."— Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, author of Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood"Insightful and wide-ranging, Bollywood's New Woman brings together some of the most exciting new scholarship in South Asian film and cultural studies. The figure of the 'New Woman' has emerged as the site on which many of India's current desires and anxieties come to be rehearsed and executed. This anthology is essential reading for anyone interested in gender, politics, and popular culture in contemporary India and beyond."  — Meheli Sen, author of Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema"The editors... successfully weave together the myriad concerns that intertwine with the figure of the new woman over an unenviable timespan of three decades to produce a cogent text that adds depth to the existing scholarship on Bollywood and brings into the conversation new and hitherto unexplored filmic texts."— Pacific Affairs"There is an emerging gap in classical narrative or textual analysis which marked the early blossoming of film studies in India. Anwer and Arora's edited volume on Bollywood's New Woman addresses precisely this gap by taking the attention back to the text to comment on gender, history and society. This collection of articles, spread across fourteen chapters and four sections attempts to reconfigure screened womanhood from the post-liberalization era."— Studies in South Asian Film and Media"A timely and valuable collection, Bollywood's New Woman offers a critical assessment of nearly three decades of post-economic liberalization India through a focus on the changes and consistencies, in female characters and stars in Hindi cinema. The close readings situate films in diverse industrial formations—big-budget, small films, multiplex, hatke—that shape the many manifestations of these 'new' women. And, the perceptive readings anchored in genres, star texts, and new media skillfully show how these 'new' women navigate, question, and/or embrace the tradition/modern dyad in neoliberal and Hindu nationalist India."— Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema"These authors deconstruct the tools that filmmakers use and how the characters themselves strategize to assert identity and individuality. Localized, globalized, and contextualized within the larger Indian landscape and yet focusing on the intersections of place, class, caste, and age, the book offers an overview of the New Bollywood Woman."— Uma Vangal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video"Essays in this exciting and welcome collection show us how India's economic liberalization ushers in new figurations of women. Tracking Bollywood's New Woman across revised filmic tropes, unconventional screen bodies, emergent technological formats and cosmopolitan geographies, they reveal gender's starring role in the unfolding story of India's neoliberalism and cinema."— Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space