Unraveling countrysides: provincial modernities in contemporary popular Indian cinema

This dissertation examines the reappearance of provincial and rural spaces within post-Liberalization Indian cinema across a range of 'hatke' (or 'off-center') film genres, namely, the national cop film, the provincial cop film, the provincial youth film, and the new rural film. It argues that this 'provincial corpus' complicates political mythologies about governance, electoral democracy and political agency that emerge in India through the 1990s at the historical conjuncture of financial Liberalization, Mandal (or the democratization of caste) and Mandir (the rise of Hindu nationalism). This engagement is evident in the ways in which different subjects are shown to relate to institutional, civic and geographical spaces of the provincial small-town and the rural countryside. Successive chapters explore the particular ways in which these encounters bring into view the disavowed historical evolutions of structures of caste, gender, political power and crony capitalism within the edifices of the developmental state, statist capitalism and electoral democracy. In doing so, it is argued, this corpus pluralizes the conception of the postcolonial modern. The dissertation assesses the critical effectivity of these cinematic interventions along twin axes of—previous iterations of the 'countryside' in commercial, New Wave and transnational rural films; as well as contemporary film-genres centered in the global or domestic metropolises.