Legal Imaginaries: Citizenship, Violence, and the Law in Contemporary Hindi Cinema

Abstract

My dissertation investigates the pedagogical functions of New Bollywood cinema from the 2010s. Situating the study at a historical juncture of globalised cinema, Hindu nationalist cultural politics, and neoliberalist economic politics, the dissertation studies empowering stories about female and homosexual desire that have previously been absent from mainstream cinema. The dissertation argues that cinema dramatises everyday encounters with the law by bringing legal debates on rape and homosexuality in India into public discourse. Through close readings that bring analyses of the aestheticization of difference in New Bollywood cinema into conversation with feminist critiques of the depoliticization of difference in mainstream social justice movements, the dissertation illustrates how cinema participates in the social processes of law by reframing controversial dynamics as problems that can be solved by the law. By attending to how access to law is conditional on a universalised, middle-class citizen-subject, the dissertation considers how cinema forecloses radical and structural critique asempowerment becomes an individualised project. At the same time, the dissertation offers two critiques of the legal project. Firstly, it demonstrates how law relies on violence, now displaced to the private sphere, secondly, by calling attention to the different iterations of the law and legal institutions across New Bollywood cinema it suggests how cinema produces an imaginary of law through suturing different, often heterogenous encounters of law together.