This handbook offers a critical introduction to Indian Indie cinema, exploring its subversion of dominant ideas, aesthetics and narratives; its inclusion of marginal and alternative experiences and ideologies; its relationship with audiences; and its defiance of norms followed by commercial Bollywood cinema.It takes a critical look at independent and alternative films in India that cover a wide range of genres, regions, textual forms and languages. These films may be regional, expe...

Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration engages with Ranjan Ghosh’s concept of trans(in)fusion and critical theory. Trans(in)fusion reexamines critical thinking and considers how thinking across traditions and systems of thought can generate distinct interpretive experiences. The chapters not only analyze Ghosh’s work but provide insight into the authors’ individual positions and critical approaches.

By sensing the fundamental ideas of earth and the earth-thought, this collection seeks to negotiate with and react to the underlying semasiological or psycho-geographical principle of geopoetics that cuts across varied and at times conflicting schools. From reading some geopoetical texts to understanding the idea of earth in Humboldt and Marx-Engels, topolitics in Tintin, reef-thinking, geopoet(h)ics and Asiabodh, the volume tries to perceive how we poetically exist with the earth. Isn’t l...

Following Françoise d’Eaubonne’s creation of the term “ecofeminism” in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that...

Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness focuses on the idea of border and its various geopolitical, sociocultural, and cognitive incarnations. In recent times, border has emerged as a common trope in contemporary language with phenomena such as ‘bordering’, ‘borderless’, ‘building borders’, ‘breaking borders’, ‘crossing borders’, ‘porous borders’, and ‘shifting borders’. Whether concrete or shadow, borders are omnipresent. The volume contains sixteen essays on various aspec...

Although Indian popular cinema has a long history and is familiar to audiences around the world, it has rarely been systematically studied. This book offers the first detailed account of the popular film as it has grown and changed during the tumultuous decades of Indian nationhood. The study focuses on the cinema’s characteristic forms, its range of meanings and pleasures, and, above all, its ideological construction of Indian national identity.Informed by theoretical developments...

Hindi Cinema is full of instances of repetition of themes, narratives, plots and characters. By looking at 60 years of Hindi cinema, this book focuses on the phenomenon as a crucial thematic and formal code that is problematic when representing the national and cinematic subject. It reflects on the cinema as motivated by an ongoing crisis of self-formation in modern India.The book looks at how cinema presents liminal and counter-modern identities emerging within repeated modern att...

Postmodernism has become the Holy Grail that charts 'living' in the present world through speculations, deliberations and negotiations. This collection of scholarly research articles map our dialogues with the intersections that twenty-first century society offers to individuals. Mapping the changing landscape of the Post-modern world is essential as man will not be talked out of finding meaning within meaninglessness. It aims to understand man's predicament of being the perceived and the ...

Haunting Bollywood is a pioneering, interdisciplinary inquiry into the supernatural in Hindi cinema that draws from literary criticism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, history, and cultural studies. Hindi commercial cinema has been invested in the supernatural since its earliest days, but only a small segment of these films have been adequately explored in scholarly work; this book addresses this gap by focusing on some of Hindi cinema’s least explored genres.From Goth...

One of the first serious film studies in India. A contemporary analysis of the central issues contained in Indian films—issues which distinguish this cinema from films of other countries. The book argues that film in India is a genuine cultural expression carrying meaning. The special and valuable insights on Indian cinema that this book offers are enhanced by Dr Valichas own fascination with films.

English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, includi...

Using an interdisciplinary framework, this book offers a fresh perspective on the issues of diaspora culture and border crossings in the films, popular cultures, and media and entertainment industries from the popular Hindi cinema of India. It analyses and discusses a range of key contemporary films in detail, such as Veer Zaara, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, and Dostana.The book uses the notion of travel analytically in and through the cinema to comment on films that have dealt with Indo-P...