Abstract
‘My son, a marriage takes place not between two individuals; it’s between two families’; so is the response of an Indian mother to her son who has just expressed his decision to marry a white, Mauritian woman in the film Dil Jo Bhi Kahey (2005). He is disrupting the familial structure by bringing in an outsider in all senses, racial, religious and cultural; his mother cannot bear his choice and is devastated. The parameters that dictate the possibilities within the moral universe that popular Hindi films operate in have placed romantic relations with white men and women beyond the scope of possibility. As a taboo, these relationships make engaging narratives, entertaining a forbidden desire. And in due course many post-millennial interracial diasporic romance films eliminate these potential threats through various narrative devices and mechanisms. There are examples of interracial diasporic romance films in which this taboo is broken; however, this is done so in such a way as to mitigate its potential for transformation of the romantic landscape in popular Hindi film.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Dasgupta, C. (1991) The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Roli Books Pvt. Ltd).
Dudrah, R. K. (2006) Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (London: Sage).
Ganti, T. (2002) ‘“And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian”: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood’, in F. D. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod & B. Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (London: University of California Press), 281–300.
Govil, N. (2008) ‘Bollywood and the Frictions of Global Mobility’, in R. K. Dudrah & J. Desai (eds), The Bollywood Reader (Berkshire: Open University Press), 201–15.
Hansen, K. (1999) ‘Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross-Dressing in the Parsi Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 51.2, 127–47.
Kaarsholm, P. (2007) ‘Introduction: Unreal City––Cinematic Representation, Globalization and the Ambiguities of Modern Life’, in P. Kaarsholm (ed.) City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience (London: Seagull Books), 1–25.
Kabir, N. M. (1999) Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Kasbekar, A. (2001) ‘Hidden Pleasures: Negotiating the Myth of the Female Ideal in Popular Hindi Cinema’, in R. Dwyer & C. Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 286–308.
Mazzarella, W. & Kaur, R. (2009) ‘Between Sedition and Seduction: Thinking Censorship in South Asia’, in R. Kaur & W. Mazzarella (eds), Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 1–28.
McGowan, T. (2004) The End of Dissatisfaction?––Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (New York: State University of New York Press).
Pinney, C. (1995) ‘Hindi Cinema and Half-Forgotten Dialects: An Interview with Ashish Nandy’, Visual Anthropology Review, 11.2, 7–16.
Punathambekar, A. (2005) ‘Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora: Mediating a Transitive Logic of Cultural Citizenship’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8.2, 151–73.
Rajadhyaksha, A. (1999) ‘Viewership and Democracy in the Cinema’, in R. S. Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 267–96.
Thomas, R. (1995) ‘Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream Hindi Film’, in C. A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (London: University of Minnesota Press), 157–82.
Thomas, R. (1985) ‘Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity—An Introduction’, Screen, 26.3–4, 116–32.
Vasudevan, R. S. (2000/2003) ‘The Politics of Cultural Address in a “Transitional” Cinema: A Case Study of Indian Popular Cinema’, in C. Gledhill & L. Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold Publishers), 130–64.
Young, L. (1996) Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London: Routledge).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Sarah A. Joshi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Joshi, S.A. (2014). Transgressing the Moral Universe. In: Kishore, V., Sarwal, A., Patra, P. (eds) Bollywood and Its Other(s). Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426505_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426505_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49085-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-42650-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)