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Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction • Mirror and Lamp 1 I Postcolonial Hindi Cinema: Bad Subjects and Good Citizens 1 The Wish to Belong, the Desire to Desire: The Emergent Citizen and the Hindi “Social” in Raj Kapoor’s Awaara 29 2 A Bad Son and a Good Enough Mother? The Paradoxical Maternal Romance in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India 53 3 Sexploitation or Consciousness Raising? The Angry Man, the Avenging Woman, and the Law 68 II Reimagining the Secular State 4 Terrorism or Seduction 97 5 Patriot Games, Unpatriotic Fantasies 120 III Diasporic Cinema and Fantasy Space: Nonresident Indian Aliens and Alienated Signifiers of Indianness 6 The Powers of the False: Fantasy Spaces for Same-Sex Love? 143 7 The New Cosmopolitanism and Diasporic Dilemmas: Rehabilitating the “NRI” 165 viii Contents 8 Poverty Porn and Mediated Fantasy in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire 190 Conclusion • Transnational Translations: Mobile Indianness 213 Notes 235 Bibliography 265 Index 287 Acknowledgments riting this book has been, in the main, a solitary exercise. Still, along the way, I incurred many debts that deserve acknowledgment, and indeed it is Wa pleasure to name some of the many influences, friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers who have, in both particular and general ways, left an imprint on my thinking. Even those I mention here who did not see drafts of the mate- rial that found its way into this book have been helpful in various other ways. The people I am able to acknowledge here are named more according to a sense of their personal significance than anything else. Some of these acknowledg- ments will surprise the named parties. Needless to say, responsibility for any shortcomings rests with me alone. A first important debt is to students with whom I have been able to test some of the ideas presented in this book, and I am deeply grateful for their helpful comments and enthusiastic engagement. Teaching them was itself an education. More generally, I have learned much from scholars in the fields of postcolonial studies and literary and cultural theory, including Cyrena Pondrom, Martin Schwab, Dilip Gaonkar, Hortense Spillers, W.J.T. Mitchell, and R. Radhakrish- nan. Through his personal example, Hans Robert Jauss taught me something about the practice of scholarship, even though our acquaintance was brief. I had the good fortune to attend a seminar on literary theory at Georgetown University, where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose work has been important to my own, was a presence. Another seminar on theory was also a source of inspiration: although, considering the evolution of this project since that time, Homi Bhabha and members of a seminar he led at the Dartmouth School of Theory and Criticism may not recognize a direct link, they helped me formulate some of my initial questions and theoretical framings for this book. x Acknowledgments Another valuable collaboration was with Ann Kibbey, editor in chief of Gen- ders; I enjoyed working with her as a member of the journal’s editorial board, and I vividly remember our productive discussions of various ideas that, though transformed, found their way into this book. I feel fortunate to have been able to collaborate on other scholarly projects—sometimes directly related to the arguments presented in this book—with colleagues such as John Hawley, Deep- ika Bahri, Lavina Shankar, and particularly Margueritte Murphy. Colleagues in more distant places also provided productive collaboration, including Jopi Nyman in Finland; Mina Karavanta in Greece; Bent Sorensen and Camelia Elias in Denmark; and Monika Mueller, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Monika Fludernik, and Heike Raphael-Hernandez in Germany. Older debts also deserve acknowledgment: to Vikram Poddar and particularly to Akumal Ramachander, both of whom were early interlocutors in the best tradition of the passionately argumentative Indian. Colleagues and friends in Boston who have lent support and been generous in providing intellectual companionship include Arindam Dutta (to whom I gratefully acknowledge an early debt that dates from even before he came to MIT and that, in his generosity, he has probably forgotten). This collaboration resulted in the creation of the South Asian Studies Consortium, which I co- founded along with Arindam, Jyoti Puri, Jalal Alamgir, and others and which has been a source of intellectual stimulation, though it also invariably evokes great sorrow at the memory of Jalal’s devastating and untimely death in 2011. I express my enormous gratitude to another Boston-area colleague and co-con- spirator, Rajini Srikanth, who has been an indefatigable and unfailing comrade on many projects over the years. I cherish her realistic idealism and, most of all, her friendship. Other friends and colleagues who have, in large and small ways, been sup- portive include Tuli Banerjee, Miriam Chirico, Ayesha Jalal, Amitava Kumar, Geeta Patel, and Lakshmi Srinivas. I am particularly grateful to Harleen Singh for her warm friendship over many years and for inviting me to teach a class at Brandeis University. A special thank-you goes to Judith Feher Gurevich for her hospitality and for her encouragement, both personal and professional, and especially to Frances Restuccia, whose passion for rigor and commitment to clarity I admire and whose exhortations I deeply appreciate. Frances’s intellec- tual alacrity and friendly goading helped move this book along; she reminded me frequently that while getting it right was important, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Judith, Frances, and Kalpana Seshadri were important presences at the Psychoanalysis Seminar at Harvard University’s Humanities Center, which has been crucial in helping me refine some of the arguments I put forward in this book. Early versions of some chapters, or related material, were presented as conference papers and invited lectures. Many audiences at a variety of insti- tutions offered valuable comments and questions that served to improve this book. These early versions of chapters and associated material were delivered at Acknowledgments xi a variety of institutions both within the United States, ranging from the Uni- versity of Illinois at Chicago (at the invitation of Rocio Davis) to the Harvard Film Archive (where at the kind invitation of Meena Hewitt, of Harvard’s South Asia Initiative, I introduced a retrospective on the films of Raj Kapoor), and at a variety of non-U.S. locations, including the University of Porto in Portugal, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Padua in Italy, the University of Riga in Latvia, the University of Belgrade in Serbia, the University of Madrid- Complutense in Spain, and the University of Warsaw in Poland. I express my special gratitude to Ewa Łuczak for inviting me to deliver a keynote speech at the University of Warsaw in May 2010 and a lecture to a different audience in May 2011. On both occasions I received warm hospitality and productive feedback from the responsive audiences; Ewa’s energy and spirit were as impressive as they were infectious. I gratefully acknowledge travel and research grants and support from Bentley University: this support was invaluable in enabling me to complete the research for the book and travel to conferences and archives. I thank the library staff at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune and at the National Film Archive of India in Bangalore. Travel to both was made possible by grants from my home institution. I also express my deep gratitude to Amy Galante at the Baker Library for her resourcefulness in finding obscure inter- library loan materials and to other librarians for acquiring materials on very short notice. I thank Caitrin Lynch for her insightful and constructive comments on an early draft of a chapter that I presented as a fellow of the Valente Center at Bentley University. I gratefully acknowledge the Valente Center’s generous underwriting of a leave to complete the chapter and thank members of the Valente Seminar for stimulating conversation. I am fortunate to have supportive colleagues within my own institution, and especially within my department; on several occasions they offered commentary on ongoing work. It is a great joy to be a member of a department of scholars with such wide-ranging interests and strengths. I am particularly grateful to the anonymous readers for Temple Univer- sity Press, whose detailed reports pushed me to compress, refine, and recast my arguments. Some readers saw the manuscript more than once, and their suggestions helped make this a better book. Kim Vivier and, at Temple Univer- sity Press, Sara Cohen, Joan Vidal, Gary Kramer, and most particularly Janet Francendese were a pleasure to work with. I feel blessed to have had Janet’s assis- tance; she was especially helpful and responsive at every phase of the process, shepherding the book through to publication. My deepest thanks go to my family. Vineeta and Purshotam Dayal, my par- ents, and my siblings, Ronnie and Vandana, have been extremely supportive. I thank Deven and Mira for putting up with me as I wrote this book and for their love and unquestioning faith. It was Mira who, at my special request, created the design concept for the cover of this book. And finally to Laura, who has never wavered, I dedicate this book. Dream Machine Introduction M ir r o r a n d L a m p n 2013 India celebrated a hundred years of cinema. During its century this cinema, and in particular Hindi-language popular cinema, arguably the Imost important of several cinema industries in the Subcontinent, has been both mirror and lamp—reflecting “Indianness” back to Indians at home and abroad, but also shaping Indianness. Movie-going in India is a special sort of pleasure—for many affording rare access to privacy, a sometimes three-hour- long respite from noise and heat in an air-conditioned, carpeted interior, where one can be alone with oneself among others, in the dark.

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