Postmodern Bollywood

This chapter examines how the postmodern, as an aesthetic style and fluid cultural practice, manifests in contemporary Bollywood film texts. Drawing upon the various concepts and traits identified by postmodern theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Hayden White, as well as postmodern film theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, Peter and Will Brooker, and M. Keith Brooker, the chapter reveals a variety of postmodern strategies and conventions operating within contemporary Bollywood cinema. It also analyses the films Om Shanti Om, Koi...Mil Gaya and Abhay, as well as several features of postmodernism that are present in them, including depthlessness, blank parody, intertextuality, hyperrealism, metahistory, and the sublime. The chapter concludes by explaining how films such as Abhay may help resolve the conflict between art cinema and mainstream popular Indian cinema.