Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the ‘New Woman.’ On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siEcle phenomenon of the ‘New Woman’ in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

The emergence and popularization of the New Woman trope is intimately tied to Bollywood’s countless iterations of this figure. She is as much a creation of the film industry’s post-liberalization overhaul - the ‘Bollywoodization of Hindi cinema’ - as she is its prized subject of representation and investigation. Whether it is films from the 1990s such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Damini, and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai or films from the last decade like Cocktail, Tanu Weds Manu, Revolver Rani, and Dear Zindagi, what is obvious in each case is Bollywood’s fascination, and endless experimentation, with the many avatars of the New Woman. Sometimes derided as a whittled down remnant of the old filmic ‘vamp,’ at other times lauded for her ‘glocal’ mobility and chic capacity to juggle contradictions, the New Woman is an enigmatic figure and Bollywood is consumed by a desire to trace her fate.

This edited volume brings together scholarship on the ‘making of neoliberal India’ with research on new trends in the Hindi film industry, locating the cinematic New Woman at the intersections between the two.