Bollywood’s New Woman

Essays in this exciting and welcome collection show us how India’s economic liberalization ushers in new figurations of women. Tracking Bollywood’s New Woman across revised filmic tropes, unconventional screen bodies, emergent technological formats and cosmopolitan geographies, they reveal gender’s starring role in the unfolding story of India’s neoliberalism and cinema.'
  Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space

A sumptuous and well-rounded volume of essays by leading experts on Indian cinema. This book is recommended for all scholars and students for an in-depth understanding of the gender dynamics in post-globalization Bollywood.'
  Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, author of Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood

Insightful and wide-ranging, Bollywood’s New Woman brings together some of the most exciting new scholarship in South Asian film and cultural studies. The figure of the ‘New Woman’ has emerged as the site on which many of India’s current desires and anxieties come to be rehearsed and executed. This anthology is essential reading for anyone interested in gender, politics, and popular culture in contemporary India and beyond.'
 
  Meheli Sen, author of Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema

A timely and valuable collection, Bollywood’s New Woman offers a critical assessment of nearly three decades of post-economic liberalization India through a focus on the changes and consistencies, in female characters and stars in Hindi cinema. The close readings situate films in diverse industrial formations—big-budget, small films, multiplex, hatke—that shape the many manifestations of these ‘new’ women. And, the perceptive readings anchored in genres, star texts, and new media skillfully show how these ‘new’ women navigate, question, and/or embrace the tradition/modern dyad in neoliberal and Hindu nationalist India.'
  Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

There is an emerging gap in classical narrative or textual analysis which marked the early blossoming of film studies in India. Anwer and Arora’s edited volume on Bollywood’s New Woman addresses precisely this gap by taking the attention back to the text to comment on gender, history and society. This collection of articles, spread across fourteen chapters and four sections attempts to reconfigure screened womanhood from the post-liberalization era. Studies in South Asian Film and Media

These authors deconstruct the tools that filmmakers use and how the characters themselves strategize to assert identity and individuality. Localized, globalized, and contextualized within the larger Indian landscape and yet focusing on the intersections of place, class, caste, and age, the book offers an overview of the New Bollywood Woman. Uma Vangal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video

The editors... successfully weave together the myriad concerns that intertwine with the figure of the new woman over an unenviable timespan of three decades to produce a cogent text that adds depth to the existing scholarship on Bollywood and brings into the conversation new and hitherto unexplored filmic texts. Pacific Affairs