Krista Van Fleit (University of South Carolina)

After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the late 1970s and early ‘80s saw a Chinese obsession with Indian films. Members of the generation that came of age in this time have such fond memories of the foreign and exotic Hindi films that many Indian visitors to China are still serenaded with songs from the handful of films that were screened in that period. In this talk, popular Hindi films that were hits in China during this period, parallel cinema of directors such as Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, and finally the cassette culture that enabled the circulation of Hindi film songs will be examined primarily for what they meant to Chinese viewers. My goal is to show how India functioned in a changing Chinese view of global culture. The contemporary rethinking of the 1980s in China serves as the larger framework of the paper, emphasizing how the India craze of the early 1980s challenges the ways in which 21st century scholars see 1985 as marking China’s entry to “world culture.”