The Indian viewer is being asked to participate in the business of nation-making as a citizen subject.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 14, 2009.
Jokes and comedy are often culturally specific: the ability to make and understand a joke—to “get it”—often marks us as belonging to a particular community. When we laugh and what we find funny tells both insiders and outsiders to the scene of the joke where we belong or resist belonging and how. Drawing on Hindi cinema, Anuradha Needham delves into the cultural specificity of laughter and Bollywood's famously entrancing song-and-dance sequences.
