This volume of seven essays on themes of family and gender in Indian popular culture seeks to commend popular culture as an important resources for sociological insights into contemporary social issues and processes. Drawing its material from three popular media-'calendar art' (popular chromolithography), commercial 'Bollywood' cinema and magazine romance fiction- the essays bring a gender-sensitive perspective to bear on the representation of the family, of childhood, of courtship and conjugality, of arranged and love marriage, of femininity and masculinity and of sexuality within and outside marriage, as well as on the wider dilemmas and dynamics of Indian modernity and nation-building.
While Much has been written on the figure of the woman as icon of the national society and on the Hindu pantheon as a template for visualizing gender roles and relationship, the author also takes up here the iconization of the child and the family in the national imaginary, illustrating her arguments with stunning visuals from her personal collection of Indian calendar art.
Freedom and Destiny explores the contradictions in the moral economy of Indian family life as these are projected in the contemporary popular media. Particularly salient is the tension between the expression of female desire and culturally normative expectations of feminine deportment. But the volume also addresses the insistent challenges of modernity in the domain of private life whereby for men and women alike, the ideals of individual autonomy and freedom of choice and action are seen to be constrained by a social ethic that privileges the value structure of the joint family over the individual needs and desires of its members and the lure of romance.
Written over the last dozen years since the institutionalization of policies of economic liberalization in the early 1990s, and revised in the present context some of these pioneering essays have now become classics in their own right. By bringing them together the author underlines their essential thematic unity across several distinct genres of popular culture. The effort has been to achieve accessibility and to avoid sociological jargon, without sacrificing either disciplinary rigor or, for that matter, the underlying feminist standpoint.
Addressed primarily to a sociological audience this book should also be of interdisciplinary interest to students of media and visual culture studies, gender studies, family studies and cultural history and to a wider reading public.
About the Author:
Patricia Uberoi is Professor of Sociology at the institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.
Acknowledgements | Vii | |
Preface | Ix | |
List of Illustrations | Xvii | |
1 | Beautyfull Wife, Danger Life: Engaging with popular culture | 1 |
I . A Moving Message | 1 | |
Beautyfull Wife, Danger Life | 1 | |
II. Reading Popular Culture | 3 | |
The Concept of Popular Culture | 3 | |
The Semiotics of Popular Culture | 7 | |
Imagining the Nation | 10 | |
III. Gender and Genre | 12 | |
Visual Culture and the Controlling 'Gaze' | 13 | |
Reading the Romance | 16 | |
IV. Rethinking the Family | 20 | |
The Kinship Map of India | 20 | |
The Indian Joint Family | 22 | |
Arranged Marriage | 24 | |
Dowry and Brideprice | 26 | |
The Limits of Family Change | 28 | |
The moral economy of the Indian Family | 29 | |
V. Dharma and Desire, Freedom and Destiny | 33 | |
2. | Feminine identity and national Ethos in calendar art | 48 |
I. Woman/Goddess/Nation: A Contemporary Controversy | 48 | |
II. Defining Calendar Art | 49 | |
III. Ravi Varma and the Invention of Calendar Art | 52 | |
IV. Deciphering the Archive: Gender and Calendar Art | 58 | |
Objects of desire/Commodities on Sale | 60 | |
Icons of Nation | 62 | |
Plurality and Difference | 66 | |
V. Trajectories of change? | 68 | |
3. | 'Baby' Icons: Forms And Figures of a New Genration | 85 |
I. Introduction | 85 | |
II. Envisioning Childhood | 87 | |
III. South Asian Childhoods | 90 | |
Child Socialization as Pathology | 91 | |
Childhood between Tradition and Modernity | 93 | |
Cosmologies of Childhood | 95 | |
IV. Representing the Child | 97 | |
God-baby | 98 | |
Welcome-baby | 100 | |
Citizen-baby | 102 | |
Hero-baby | 103 | |
Customized-baby | 104 | |
4. | Desire and Destiny: Rescripting the Man-Woman Relationship in Popular Cinema | 114 |
I. Prologue: On a Personal Note | 114 | |
II. The Body Language of Popular Cinema | 117 | |
III. the Problematics of Romance | 119 | |
Dharma and Desire | 121 | |
Freedom and Destiny | 123 | |
IV. A Paradigm of Desire | 124 | |
Jabba and Bhoothnath | 125 | |
Chhote Sarkar and the Courtesan | 126 | |
Chhoti Bahu and Chhote Sarkar | 127 | |
Bhootnath and Chhoti Bahu | 129 | |
V. Happy and Unhappy Endings | 130 | |
5. | Imagining the Family: An Ethnogorphy of Viewing Hum Aapke Hain Koun! | 138 |
I What Makes a Clean Movie? | 143 | |
The Lack of Vulgarity | 143 | |
The Display of Affluence | 148 | |
The Sprit of Sacrifice | 150 | |
The Family as Tradition | 152 | |
II. the Constitution of the Ideal Indian Family | 155 | |
The Ideal of the Joint family | 156 | |
Affinity as a Value | 158 | |
The Truth- telling Voice | 159 | |
III. The Pleasures of Viewing: Voyeurism, Narcissism and a Happy Ending | 162 | |
IV. The Emblematic Family | 168 | |
6. | The Diaspora Comes Home: Discipling Desire in DDLJ | 180 |
I. Prologue | 180 | |
II. Indianness: At Home and Abroad | 181 | |
III. Diwale Dulhania Le Jayenge | 185 | |
IV. Romance, Indian Style | 189 | |
V. The Tyranny of 'Trdition' | 196 | |
VI. Pardes: Reinstititing the Contradiction of India and the West | 200 | |
VII. 'American Dreams, Indian Soul' | 204 | |
VIII. Indian Dreams, Transnational Location | 206 | |
7. | Learning to AdjustL The Dynamics of Post-Marital Romance | 217 |
I. Domesticating Romance Friction | 217 | |
II. Woman's Era | 220 | |
III. Twenty Tales of True Romance | 222 | |
Tales of Courtship | 223 | |
Tales of Conjugal Love | 224 | |
Sources of Material Tension | 226 | |
Mediation | 227 | |
Resolution | 227 | |
IV. True-lifeTales of Material Breakdown | 232 | |
V. Prescription for a Happy Marriage | 235 | |
VI. Conclusion | 238 | |
8. | Scripting Romance? Tribulations of Courtship in Popular Fiction | |
I. Introduction: Constructing the Problematic | 248 | |
II. Narrative Trajectories | 252 | |
Making 'Love' Respectable | 252 | |
Putting 'Love' into Arranged Mariage | 256 | |
III. Conclusion | 261 | |
References | 264 | |
Index | 301 |
This volume of seven essays on themes of family and gender in Indian popular culture seeks to commend popular culture as an important resources for sociological insights into contemporary social issues and processes. Drawing its material from three popular media-'calendar art' (popular chromolithography), commercial 'Bollywood' cinema and magazine romance fiction- the essays bring a gender-sensitive perspective to bear on the representation of the family, of childhood, of courtship and conjugality, of arranged and love marriage, of femininity and masculinity and of sexuality within and outside marriage, as well as on the wider dilemmas and dynamics of Indian modernity and nation-building.
While Much has been written on the figure of the woman as icon of the national society and on the Hindu pantheon as a template for visualizing gender roles and relationship, the author also takes up here the iconization of the child and the family in the national imaginary, illustrating her arguments with stunning visuals from her personal collection of Indian calendar art.
Freedom and Destiny explores the contradictions in the moral economy of Indian family life as these are projected in the contemporary popular media. Particularly salient is the tension between the expression of female desire and culturally normative expectations of feminine deportment. But the volume also addresses the insistent challenges of modernity in the domain of private life whereby for men and women alike, the ideals of individual autonomy and freedom of choice and action are seen to be constrained by a social ethic that privileges the value structure of the joint family over the individual needs and desires of its members and the lure of romance.
Written over the last dozen years since the institutionalization of policies of economic liberalization in the early 1990s, and revised in the present context some of these pioneering essays have now become classics in their own right. By bringing them together the author underlines their essential thematic unity across several distinct genres of popular culture. The effort has been to achieve accessibility and to avoid sociological jargon, without sacrificing either disciplinary rigor or, for that matter, the underlying feminist standpoint.
Addressed primarily to a sociological audience this book should also be of interdisciplinary interest to students of media and visual culture studies, gender studies, family studies and cultural history and to a wider reading public.
About the Author:
Patricia Uberoi is Professor of Sociology at the institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.
Acknowledgements | Vii | |
Preface | Ix | |
List of Illustrations | Xvii | |
1 | Beautyfull Wife, Danger Life: Engaging with popular culture | 1 |
I . A Moving Message | 1 | |
Beautyfull Wife, Danger Life | 1 | |
II. Reading Popular Culture | 3 | |
The Concept of Popular Culture | 3 | |
The Semiotics of Popular Culture | 7 | |
Imagining the Nation | 10 | |
III. Gender and Genre | 12 | |
Visual Culture and the Controlling 'Gaze' | 13 | |
Reading the Romance | 16 | |
IV. Rethinking the Family | 20 | |
The Kinship Map of India | 20 | |
The Indian Joint Family | 22 | |
Arranged Marriage | 24 | |
Dowry and Brideprice | 26 | |
The Limits of Family Change | 28 | |
The moral economy of the Indian Family | 29 | |
V. Dharma and Desire, Freedom and Destiny | 33 | |
2. | Feminine identity and national Ethos in calendar art | 48 |
I. Woman/Goddess/Nation: A Contemporary Controversy | 48 | |
II. Defining Calendar Art | 49 | |
III. Ravi Varma and the Invention of Calendar Art | 52 | |
IV. Deciphering the Archive: Gender and Calendar Art | 58 | |
Objects of desire/Commodities on Sale | 60 | |
Icons of Nation | 62 | |
Plurality and Difference | 66 | |
V. Trajectories of change? | 68 | |
3. | 'Baby' Icons: Forms And Figures of a New Genration | 85 |
I. Introduction | 85 | |
II. Envisioning Childhood | 87 | |
III. South Asian Childhoods | 90 | |
Child Socialization as Pathology | 91 | |
Childhood between Tradition and Modernity | 93 | |
Cosmologies of Childhood | 95 | |
IV. Representing the Child | 97 | |
God-baby | 98 | |
Welcome-baby | 100 | |
Citizen-baby | 102 | |
Hero-baby | 103 | |
Customized-baby | 104 | |
4. | Desire and Destiny: Rescripting the Man-Woman Relationship in Popular Cinema | 114 |
I. Prologue: On a Personal Note | 114 | |
II. The Body Language of Popular Cinema | 117 | |
III. the Problematics of Romance | 119 | |
Dharma and Desire | 121 | |
Freedom and Destiny | 123 | |
IV. A Paradigm of Desire | 124 | |
Jabba and Bhoothnath | 125 | |
Chhote Sarkar and the Courtesan | 126 | |
Chhoti Bahu and Chhote Sarkar | 127 | |
Bhootnath and Chhoti Bahu | 129 | |
V. Happy and Unhappy Endings | 130 | |
5. | Imagining the Family: An Ethnogorphy of Viewing Hum Aapke Hain Koun! | 138 |
I What Makes a Clean Movie? | 143 | |
The Lack of Vulgarity | 143 | |
The Display of Affluence | 148 | |
The Sprit of Sacrifice | 150 | |
The Family as Tradition | 152 | |
II. the Constitution of the Ideal Indian Family | 155 | |
The Ideal of the Joint family | 156 | |
Affinity as a Value | 158 | |
The Truth- telling Voice | 159 | |
III. The Pleasures of Viewing: Voyeurism, Narcissism and a Happy Ending | 162 | |
IV. The Emblematic Family | 168 | |
6. | The Diaspora Comes Home: Discipling Desire in DDLJ | 180 |
I. Prologue | 180 | |
II. Indianness: At Home and Abroad | 181 | |
III. Diwale Dulhania Le Jayenge | 185 | |
IV. Romance, Indian Style | 189 | |
V. The Tyranny of 'Trdition' | 196 | |
VI. Pardes: Reinstititing the Contradiction of India and the West | 200 | |
VII. 'American Dreams, Indian Soul' | 204 | |
VIII. Indian Dreams, Transnational Location | 206 | |
7. | Learning to AdjustL The Dynamics of Post-Marital Romance | 217 |
I. Domesticating Romance Friction | 217 | |
II. Woman's Era | 220 | |
III. Twenty Tales of True Romance | 222 | |
Tales of Courtship | 223 | |
Tales of Conjugal Love | 224 | |
Sources of Material Tension | 226 | |
Mediation | 227 | |
Resolution | 227 | |
IV. True-lifeTales of Material Breakdown | 232 | |
V. Prescription for a Happy Marriage | 235 | |
VI. Conclusion | 238 | |
8. | Scripting Romance? Tribulations of Courtship in Popular Fiction | |
I. Introduction: Constructing the Problematic | 248 | |
II. Narrative Trajectories | 252 | |
Making 'Love' Respectable | 252 | |
Putting 'Love' into Arranged Mariage | 256 | |
III. Conclusion | 261 | |
References | 264 | |
Index | 301 |