Bollywood’s Corporeal Turn

“Memories, yearnings, longings, and dreams of the plantation diaspora intersect with global cultural traffic in this superb reading of Bollywood’s past, present, and future travels. Stories, music, language, and bodies swirl through this evocative tale of corporeal aesthetics in a world of blurred borders.” —Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

“A compelling account of how Bollywood’s aesthetic possibilities shaped and sustained the Indian plantation diasporas’ relationship with their ancestral homeland. Theoretically rigorous and rich in archival research, this book presents an insightful and textured analysis of how memory, space, and nostalgia influence Bollywood’s reception beyond the boundaries of the nation.”—Nandi Bhatia, PhD, Professor, English and Writing Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Western Ontario London, Canada

“This wide-ranging, deeply researched, and exquisitely written work radically expands the meanings and pleasures of Bollywood from the vantage of the labourers and their descendants in a former-plantation economy of the Global South and in so doing, provides a roadmap for decolonizing film studies.” —Sangita Gopal, Professor of Cinema Studies at University of Oregon, USA

“Mixing the corporeal and the affective and taking us on a journey through the Kaala Paani/Black Sea with migration stories and pleasures found only in Bollywood cinema, this book offers us an exciting and new reading of the global and popular film form.”—Professor Rajinder Dudrah, Birmingham City University, UK

“Bollywood’s Corporeal Turn is an evocative and theoretically rich meditation on the affective connections forged through Hindi cinema. In their view from the plantation diaspora, Vijay Mishra and Sudesh Mishra astutely connect cinematic form to histories of displacement, longing, and aesthetic experience, offering an original account of Bollywood’s cultural life.” —Rashmi Sadana, Professor of Anthropology, George Mason University, Author of The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure and English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India

“A must read for a peep into the lifeworlds that the Hindi cinema created for the Indian plantation diaspora. The imagined memory and sense of loss of a ‘homeland’ the second generation never belonged to. A homeland mediatized through the Hindi cinema. Its songs of longing, its genres and their genealogies, and the movie theatres in which its fantasies came alive for young Indian-origin adults. The diaspora changed, as did the cinema. The book is an ode to the lifelong fascination for the bewitching chimera of those worlds, and the characters and bodies that were cast on the screen.” —Dr Rashmi Doraiswamy, retired Professor, Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, India

“Bollywood’s Corporeal Turn: Aesthetic Response and Diasporic Memory stands as a significant contribution to the study of cinema and cultural identity. The book challenges conventional approaches to Bollywood by foregrounding the bodily, emotional, and diasporic dimensions of cinematic experience.” —Aparna Sharma, Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Bhupal Nobles’ University, India