Dream Machine

Popular Hindi films offer varied cinematic representations ranging from realistic portraits of patriotic heroes to complex fantasies that go beyond escapism. In Dream Machine, Samir Dayal provides a history of Hindi cinema starting with films made after India’s independence in 1947. He constructs a decade-by-decade consideration of Hindi cinema’s role as a site for the construction of “Indianness.” Dayal suggests that Hindi cinema functions as both mirror and lamp, reflecting and illuminating new and possible representations of national and personal identity, beginning with early postcolonial films including Awaara and Mother India, a classic of the Golden Age. More recent films address critical social issues, such as My Name is Khan and Fire, which concern terrorism and sexuality, respectively. Dayalalso chronicles changes in the industry and in audience reception, and the influence of globalization, considering such films as Slumdog Millionaire.  Dream Machine analyzes the social and aesthetic realism of these films concerning poverty and work, the emergence of the middle class, crime, violence, and the law while arguing for their sustained and critical attention to forms of fantasy.

“Dayal does an excellent job of bringing together diverse films, theorists, and critics on such issues as cosmopolitanism, secularism, terrorism, gender, and sexuality, often linking his analyses with contemporaneous historical events to provide fuller context. The most exciting aspect of Dream Machine is its new engagement of psychoanalytic theories of fantasy and the production of ‘Indianness’ in transnational Bollywood cinema. This is a fascinating book.”—Kavita Daiya, Associate Professor of English at George Washington University , “Dayal’s writing is bright and supple, and his reading of films is consistently interesting and entertaining. The meshing of realism and fantasy in prominent Bollywood films and genres argues that the fantasy elements are integral to imagining ‘Indianness’ over a range of interruptions that trouble a coherent national identity. Dayal avers that fantastic imagination is far more than mere escapism. A very engaging, rewarding project and a solid scholarly book, Dream Machine is also an interesting read for the non-expert cinephile.”— Henry Schwarz, Professor of English at Georgetown University

Samir Dayal is a Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University in Massachusetts. He is the author of Resisting Modernity: Counternarratives of Nation and Masculinity in Pre-Independence India; a co-editor, with Margueritte Murphy, of Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization; and the editor of the Cultural Studies Series, which includes Julia Kristeva’s Crisis of the European Subject.