Fantasy of Modernity Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema of the 1950s

Wani, Aarti

doi:10.1017/cbo9781316338131

Cited by 9 publications

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“…Baweja (2015) argues that the waterfronts that played an important role in the representation of urban subjectivities are made to function as metaphors for the city's cosmopolitanism through the establishment of certain norms in Hindi cinema. Marine Drive, in particular, is the most celebrated landmark image of the city and the 'classic Bombay mise-en-scène' (Prakash, 2010) or mise-en-scène of love (Wani, 2016). The cinematic Marine Drive and its iconic art deco buildings occupied by wealthy industrialists, film stars and professionals are drenched in the romance, freedom and cosmopolitanism that they embodied for the walkers, including struggling filmmakers, lyricists and actors invited to parties and soirees, fans gathering below to catch a glimpse of the stars, tourists and city's residents promenading, which is memorably dramatised in an iconic scene in Deewar (1975).…”

Section: A Cinematic Regime Of Signsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Building on the idea of the role of 'the imagination' in producing the experience and understanding of the modern city (Donald, 1995) and of cinematic representations of the city as influencing both outsiders' and dwellers' perception of the city, it could be argued that the urban cinematic space of Bombay, like that of other cinematic cities, has been produced in the pan-Indian as well as the Bombay resident's imaginary through its visual, verbal, sonic and spatial representations in Hindi commercial cinema. However, this urban space or cinetopia (Dass, 2017), produced through negotiating the real and iconic spaces of the city and the cinematic design that are welded into the city's iconic spaces (Wani, 2016), must not be confused with the real city or viewed as an authentic representation of real-life locales (Dass, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan: Requiem for a Cosmopolitan City

Roy¹

2022

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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Critical toponymies, instead of viewing place names as transparent signifiers that designate places as ‘objects’ or ‘artifacts’, have foregrounded the necessity for understanding place naming as ‘a contested spatial practice’ and attempted ‘a critical interrogation of the politics of place naming’. In view of the frequency of colonial erasures and appropriations of the spaces of the colonised, post-colonial reclamations of place resort to technologies of toponymic cleansing, founding and restoration as acts of resistance. Toponymic resistance can occur on both the creation and deployment of alternative names and the use of alternative pronunciations for established names. Viewing ‘pronunciation to be an important element of the cultural politics of place naming within post-colonial societies’, Kearns and Berg argue ‘that even when widespread agreement on the name of a place prevails, the way the name is pronounced reflects, and contributes to, the constitution of imagined communities’. Arguing that plural pronunciations of the city’s names – Bombay, Bambai and Mumbai – evoke multiversal cosmopolitan urban imaginaries that are sometimes disjunctive, this article shows that Hindi cinema employs ‘multiplicity of means’, amalgamating the linguistic tools of toponymy with paralinguistic and extralinguistic codes, to produce the myth of the cosmopolitan city or ‘the Bombay Dream’.

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Section: A Cinematic Regime Of Signsmentioning

confidence: 99%