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Abstract
Urban life in India in the past three decades has seen rapid expansion and transformation. The growth of many towns outside the big cities has brought the urban experience to a vast new urbanized population. This includes the experiences of mass crowds, urban violence and chaos, consumption and spectacle and the spread of television. New experiences of shock, anxiety and tactile pleasures of urban life were experienced by millions, something that has accelerated rapidly and radically after globalization. Urban Allegories is about the cinema's ability to archive the experiences of the city.
The period under discussion moves from the 1970's to the end of the millennium. This period witnesses both the crisis of India's post-colonial developmentalist state and the emergence of globalization in the 1990's. Locating the dissertation within the political climate of the last three decades, the city and Bombay cinema form force fields through which the categories of the national, cultural authenticity and globalization are debated. The urban experience provides the privilege of a refracted gaze that enables all the films discussed in the dissertation to emerge as embodied texts that are deeply saturated with issues of the contemporary city in India. Through discussions that range from the spectacles of fashion and consumption, street gestures and performance, suspicion and terror, Urban Allegories presents the cinema as the most innovative archive on the city in India.
