Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary India

Talk by Anaar Desai-Stephens (Music, CUNY) In this talk, I explore how Bollywood songs have become a powerful medium for dreaming, striving, and self-making in twenty-first-century India. Once dismissed as escapist fantasy, Bollywood’s emotionally charged songs now serve as tools for self-transformation in what has been dubbed “Aspirational India.” Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork in Mumbai, I trace how upcoming singers, amateur students, teachers, and Bollywood producers use Bollywood songs to perform what I call “dreamwork”: the musical and discursive work of promoting, imagining,