The cinematic imagi(n)ation: Gender, class, and community in popular Hindi films in postcolonial India (1950-1995

Hindi films as the most dominant media form in India have assumed the status of a national cinema. In this dissertation I examine approximately thirty popular films between 1950 and the present, to examine the construction of the "new nation." The nation figures prominently in the Hindi film and centers its moral universe. As a form of story telling, it narrates a fascinating social history.;The "nation" is a particularly abstruse idea and recent theorization about it explains its origin, spread, varying patterns of development, and current resurgence in global politics. Popular Hindi cinema constructs the nation through a complex apparatus of metaphors, discourses, and modes of address. The family is unarguably the most important trope for the nation in Hindi films. Confrontations arising from class, patriarchy, community, and sexuality are staged within the family. Each of these denominators interacts with the others in complex ways and seemingly simple narratives inform, produce, and image contemporary culture.;I use femininity and masculinity as the main template to trace the topos of postcolonial politics and history. Against the chief coordinates of gender, I plot the heterosexual romance, family, class, and community in the films' utopian imag(in)ing of the nation. My exegesis points to hierarchical relations within and across these denominators that strain the concept of the nation. Powerful patriarchy, entrenched class relations, and violent communal divisions continue to thrive even today in India. The hallmark of Hindi cinema is to "resolve" these unresolvable contradictions of class, religious communities, and sexism; these are articulated and then contained within film narratives. I trace the representation of these constituencies as they cut across, struggle, accommodate, coexist uneasily, or reconstitute each other to reveal the topography of postcolonial culture, tell a history of the Indian nation, and account for Hindi cinema's place within the national-popular.