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Aviation, tourism and dreaming in 1960s Bombay cinema

In the history of Bombay Cinema, the 1960s is a peculiar world marked by a reworking of nationalist anxieties, sovereignty, the place of the woman and the world of location and mobility. India’s defeat in the 1962 border war against China jolted the Nehruvian consensus of the 1950s. This was followed by food shortages, a currency crisis and the eventual turn to the US for grants to purchase food grain. It was as if the vast controlled regime whose most visible signs were the five-year plans, sovereignty, and self-sustainability, started to crack. The wild abandonment of the 1960s seemed to lift this mood of the middle class, acknowledging their dreams of travel. This article returns to 1960s cinema to track both the opening of the global and a fascination for infrastructure, tourism, fashion and consumption. The arrival of colour, the widespread circulation of travel imagery, the expansion of railway tourism and aviation congealed in creating a kind of cinematic tourism that was unique in the history of Bombay cinema. Many of these films travelled to spectacular global cities like Paris, London, Tokyo, Rome and Beirut (An Evening in Paris, Love in Tokyo, Around the World). Through this mobility, the films encountered the global currents of the 1960s and also played out anxieties around questions of love, marriage and erotic desire. This peer-reviewed article is the first substantial academic writing on 1960s Bombay cinema and forms part of Mazumdar’s current research project for her Marie Curie European Union Fellowship (2013-14). Mazumdar combines original archival research at the National Film Archive (NFAI) and the South Asia Archives in the US with ethnographic research in Bombay to locate this material within the cultural politics of the 1960s as well as within the body of work on cinema’s worldwide transition to colour.