In a work of stunning archival recovery and interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi illuminates the cultural work performed by two kinds of English novels in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers and writers, empire and nation, consumption and production, In Another Country vividly explores a process by which first readers and then writers of the English novel indigenized the once imperial form and put it to their...

The 1970s was a pivotal decade in the Indian social, cultural, political and economic landscape: the global oil crisis, wars with China and Pakistan in the previous decade, the Bangladesh war of 1971, labour and food shortages, widespread political corruption, and the declaration of the state of Emergency. Amidst this backdrop Indian cinema in both its popular and art/parallel film forms flourished.This exciting new collection brings together original research from across the arts ...

Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular culture and postcolonial modernity, Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India.With dazzling interpr...

Hitherto, the academic study of Indian cinema has focused primarily on Bollywood, despite the fact that the Tamil film industry, based in southern India, has overtaken Bollywood in terms of annual output. This book examines critically the cultural and cinematic representations in Tamil cinema. It outlines its history and distinctive characteristics, and proceeds to consider a number of important themes such as gender, religion, class, caste, fandom, cinematic genre, the politics of identit...

'Bollywood' is the dominant global term to refer to the prolific Hindi language film industry in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). Characterised by music, dance routines, melodrama, lavish production values and an emphasis on stars and spectacle, Bollywood films have met with box-office success and enthusiastic audiences from India to West Africa to Russia, and throughout the English-speaking world.In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a gui...

A study of the impact of the Beat Generation poets on the development of the haiku form, with a focus on the poetry of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Snyder. This ebook looks at the parallels that exist between the original haiku poets and modern western poets.It does this by exploring the nature of beat generation spirituality, and assessing the ways in which the original Japanese haiku has been altered.

One film out of every five made anywhere on earth comes from India. From its beginnings under colonial rule through to the heights of Bollywood , Indian Cinema has challenged social injustices such as caste, the oppression of Indian women, religious intolerance, rural poverty, and the pressures of life in the burgeoning cities. And yet, the Indian movie industry makes only about five percent of Hollywood's annual revenue. In this Very Short Introduction Ashish Rajadhyaksha delves ...

Shohini Ghosh: Shohini Ghosh is Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in New Delhi. Tales of the Night Fairies, her documentary on the sex workers rights movement, made a strong intervention in debates on sex work. She writes on contemporary media practices and sexuality.

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...

While we have become familiar with the idea of "Bollywood" here in the West, we know little about the industry's films beyond a certain celebration of kitsch. Bollywood, the latest in Wallflower Press's Short Cuts introductory series, surveys this style of filmmaking from its origins in colonial times to the present, tracing its impact on both the Indian and global imagination. Chapters explore the history and workings of the industry, the narratives and aesthetics of its films, v...

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...

Reel World explores what happens to life when everything begins to look and feel like cinema. Drawing on years of fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers, artists, musicians, and craftsmen in the south Indian movie studios of "Kollywood," Anand Pandian examines how ordinary moments become elements of a cinematic world. With inventive, experimental, and sometimes comical zeal, Pandian pursues the sensory richness of cinematic experience and the adventure of a writing true to these sensatio...