Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! maps out the early culture of cinema stardom in India from its emergence in the silent era to the decade after Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. Neepa Majumdar combines readings of specific films and stars with an analysis of the historical and cultural configurations that gave rise to distinctly Indian notions of celebrity. She argues that discussions of early cinematic stardom in India must be placed in the context of the general legitimizing discourse of colonial "improvement" that marked other civic and cultural spheres as well, and that "vernacular modernist" anxieties over the New Woman had limited resonance here. Rather, it was through emphatically nationalist discourses that Indian cinema found its model for modern female identities. Considering questions of spectatorship, gossip, popularity, and the dominance of a star-based production system, Majumdar details the rise of film stars such as Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Lata Mangeshkar, and Nargis.| Table of Contents Acknowledgements................................................i Introduction Translocating Hollywood Stardom in India........................1 Part I: ?India Has No Stars? Chapter One The Split Discourse of Indian Stardom..........................34 Chapter Two The Morality and Machinery of Stardom.........................110 Chapter Three Real and Imagined Stars.......................................155 Chapter Four Spectatorial Desires and the Hierarchies of Stardom...........199 Part II. ?This Stardom Racket? Chapter Five Monopoly, Frontality, and Doubling in Post?War Bombay Cinema.....................................261 Chapter Six Nargis and the Double Space of Female Desire in Anhonee (1951)............................323 Chapter Seven The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Bombay Cinema...................369 Works Cited...................................................427 | Received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Best First Book Award, 2011. — Society for Cinema and Media Studies
|Neepa Majumdar is an associate professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh.