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By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War–era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases—flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions—this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.

Samhita Sunya is Assistant Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.

 

"Samhita Sunya's rich and provocative book offers a much-needed corrective to the contemporary scholarly debates on transnational cinema, translation and co-production practices, and cinephilia by approaching them from a different geographic and historical vantage point. By taking Bombay in the Cold War era as the center from which to consider issues of transnational and transregional film circulation, Sunya provides a fresh and often surprising vision of world cinema. Her analysis is equally attentive to the symbolic and poetic registers of the works she discusses as well as to the material practices and economic and political realities that engender them. A terrific contribution to a growing body of film studies scholarship that is redefining the field as we know it."—Masha Salazkina, author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico

"This elegantly written book remaps the atlas of world cinema by situating the mobile enchantments and cross-border travels of 1960s Bombay cinema at the heart of historical and theoretical debates about cinephilia, excess, world cinema, cinematic translation, and the global popular. Its refreshingly non-Eurocentric perspective on these issues of broad disciplinary relevance, innovative methods for tracing the intersection of material and affective histories of circulation, and transregional scope make Sirens of Modernity a valuable addition to film studies, South Asian studies, and inquiries into the global 1960s."—Manishita Dass, author of Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India

"An ambitious and thoughtful inquiry into the significance of the song in Hindi cinema, Sunya's book is exemplary for its close readings. Her imaginative analyses of this key feature of Indian cinema open up new ways for thinking about feminist and environmentally attuned film histories. Sirens of Modernity uniquely situates Hindi films, and the songs in particular, as a key to understanding both the world and world cinema."—Rochona Majumdar, author of Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures