All you want is money, all you need is love - Rachel Dwyer

An examination of India's bourgeois, its lifestyle and aspirations as manifested in fiction and film. It begins by looking at heroines and notions of idealized womanhood in a historical perspective, and examines how these are reworked in modern narratives, how conflicts are resolved and new models developed. A major theme is the redefinition of love and romance among the Indian middle classes, as part of the creation of a bourgeois individual revolving around love, romance and marriage. The book concentrates on the most radical of India's metropolitan bourgeoisies, that of the city of Mumbai (Bombay).