Wesleyan University Press Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary India

The role of popular music in shaping subjectivity and aspiration in neoliberal India /> />Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary India explores how Bollywood music has 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's playback singing schools, reality television studios, and the broader music industry, Anaar Desai-Stephens shows how singers, teachers, producers, and everyday amateurs use film songs to imagine new futures and craft an aspirational selfhood. Through vivid ethnographic stories and sharp cultural analysis, the book reveals how music is a site of both imaginative potential and precarity, promising social mobility while reinscribing inequalities of caste, class, and gender. Desai-Stephens argues that we must take musical dreamwork seriously in order to understand the cultural dynamics of emerging neoliberal economies. Blending media studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology, Voicing Aspiration offers a compelling account of how popular culture shapes both individual lives and collective futures.