"This volume of seven essays on themes of family and gender in Indian popular culture seeks to commend popular culture as an important resource for sociological insights into contemporary social issues and processes. Drawing its material from three popular media - 'calendar art' (popular chromolithography), commercial 'Bollywood' cinema, and magazine romance fiction - the essays bring a gender-sensitive perspective to bear on the representation of the family, of childhood, of courtship and conjugality, of arranged and love marriage, of femininity and masculinity, and of sexuality within and outside marriage, as well as on the wider dilemmas and dynamics of Indian modernity and nation-building."--BOOK JACKET.