The term “Bollywood” appears in both academic and popular discussions and studies in India and beyond. In the past decade, there has been an increase in the analysis and study of Bollywood films. But what, precisely, is “Bollywood”? Gehlawat's book is an attempt to answer this question and to summarize the studies and theories existing so far. He thus compiles a helpful overview for those new to the study of Hindi popular cinema. To do this Gehlawat addresses specific areas of controversy in each of five chapters of the book.
The first chapter explores the structures and applications of theatrical models, which tend to reaffirm a devotional paradigm in which the cinematic (Hindu) viewer is often located in a religious frame. Gehlawat demonstrates in several examples that such older models continue to predominate the field of Bollywood studies, restraining the cinematic viewer to “the Procrustean bed of ‘Indianness’, despite its often conflicting and contested nature” (p. 26). Chapter 2 presents an alternative reading to the perception of the Hollywood musical as forefather of Bollywood films. It argues that Bollywood engages in unique hybrid and reflexive approaches to song and dance sequences. The author stresses popular Hindi cinema's ability to cater to a mass audience also by this uniqueness and by innovative components in general, drawing on, for instance, a Brechtian perspective.
The ideas elaborated in the first two chapters of the book are further developed in Chapter 3, which discusses theories of reception, filmic literacy and subaltern agency especially in the context of film screening in villages. Gehlawat assesses such viewings rather as empowering subaltern audiences instead of reading Bollywood as “oral cinema” and demonstrates his theory using examples of analyzed sequences from the film Guide (1965). In doing so the author also rereads central arguments in subaltern studies.
Chapter 4 focuses on a (hetero)sexual frame. Analyzing the emergence of homosexual subtexts in recent Bollywood films in two examples, Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and Dostana (2008), Gehlawat comes to the conclusion that, even though Bollywood displays (and plays with) homosexual nuances in the past decade of filmmaking, such a recognition of queer issues only comes along within the firmly established frame of heteronormativity. This argument that spells out the gender ambivalence in recent Bollywood draws on Judith Butler's concept of “gender parody,” and also discusses the substantial study of Gayatri Gopinath on South Asian queer viewers of Bollywood in diasporic contexts.
The concluding chapter of the book turns to contemporary trends in Bollywood, to films in which large parts of the plots stage in (mainly geographically, but partly also culturally) non-Indian settings. Such “‘crossover’ films” (p. 121) are directed by Indian Bollywood directors (like Kabhi Khushi, Kabhi Gham (2001) by Karan Johar) as well as by South Asian diasporic directors (like Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) by Deepa Mehta) or non-Indian directors (like The Guru (2002) by Daisy von Scherler Mayer). This chapter aims at discussing them in a transnational, post-modern frame. Gehlawat concludes that crossover Bollywood films staging the NRI (non-resident Indian) explicitly in a non-Indian geographical context reformulate notions of “Indianness” in general and “Indianness” in Bollywood in detail and thus “creates more fluid and transnational forms of cultural identity in the twenty-first century” (p. xxii).
In Reframing Bollywood: Theories of Popular Hindi Cinema, Gehlawat literally tries to re-frame Bollywood cinema, discussing issues from the religious frame, the musical frame, the subaltern frame, the sexual frame, and the “crossover” frame in five subsequent chapters. With such a broad composition of the study, the author inevitably had to stay restricted to selected examples from each field. The thought-provoking study succeeds in its declared intentions—to challenge hegemonic paradigms of dominant discourses in the field of Bollywood studies and to offer oppositional views, as well as to view Bollywood from multiple perspectives. Nevertheless, the work falls rather short in actual analysis to verify the argument. Even though adequate examples are named and presented, they are not discussed using film-analytical methods. While the innovative study courageously and explicitly challenges some of the predominant and partly (out-) dated debates on Bollywood, it would have been improved if it had a more focused approach.
