Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary India

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Anaar Desai-Stephens, assistant professor at the CUNY Graduate Center.

In this talk, Desai-Stephens explores 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, she traces how upcoming singers, amateur students, teachers and Bollywood producers use Bollywood songs to perform what she calls “dreamwork”: the musical and discursive work of promoting, imagining and striving for desired selves and futures.

Across playback singing schools, reality television shows and the broader music industry, filmi singing is a site of both imaginative potential and precarity, promising social mobility while reinscribing inequalities of caste, class and gender. Rather than dismissing my interlocutors’ aspirational dreams, however, Desai-Stephens argues that we must take their musical dreamwork seriously in order to understand the cultural dynamics of emerging neoliberal economies. Through the lens of dreamwork, she theorizes the efficacy of musical practice as a tool for shaping subjectivity while outlining a political economy of the imagination in relation to musical practice.

Anaar Desai-Stephens is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center, having previously served as a faculty member at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Her research focuses on popular, media economies, and aspirational subjectivity in India and her first monograph, Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary India, will be published with Wesleyan University Press (Spring 2026). Her work has appeared in Twentieth Century Music; Culture, Theory, Critique; and The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Cinema, amongst others. Current research projects focus on the intersection of whiteness, gender and sexuality in the Bollywood culture industry, and how doulas and midwives listen in New York state. Anaar is trained as a violinist and vocalist across a range of genres.