| Summary/Abstract |
Sanjay Srivastava’s rational, scientific hero, who emerged in the immediate post-colonial Hindi cinema of the 1950s, was strongly linked to the Indian government’s Soviet-style Five-Year Plans. Rigorous town planning and large-scale socio-urban experiments created the conditions for the cosmopolitan, Westernised filmic hero to acquire a hegemonic position within the discursive practices of the Nehruvian state. However, he was by no means the only embodiment of masculinity on offer. Employing narrative analyses of two key Hindi films of the period, I posit that there were competing visions of masculinity, not aligned with, but rather opposed to, the hegemonic discourse of metropolitan culture and cosmopolitan outlook of Nehruvianism.
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