Indian Literature And Popular Cinema

This book is about the popular cinema of North India ("Bollywood") and how it recasts literary classics. It addresses questions about the interface of film and literature, such as how Bollywood movies rework literary themes, offer different (broader or narrower) interpretations, shift plots, stories, and characters to accommodate the medium and the economics of the genre, sometimes even changing the way literature is read. This book addresses the socio-political implications of popular reinterpretations of "elite culture", exploring gender issues and the perceived "sexism" of the North Indian popular film and how that plays out when literature is reworked into film. Written by an international group of experts on Indian literature and film, the chapters in this book focus on these central questions, but also cover a wide range of literary works that have been adapted in film. Each part of the book discusses how a particular genre of literature has been "recast" into film. The individual chapters focus on comparisons and close studies of individual films or film songs inspired by "classics" of literature. The book will be of interest to those studying Indian film and literature and South Asian popular culture more generally.

This is an engaging introduction to a fascinating national cinema that is little known in the west.It is the first survey both to cover the full range of Indian film -- popular, artistic and regional -- and to provide the historical and cultural dimensions to enable the reader appreciate its distinctive forms.This book offers both general readers and students of film a succinct and informative guide to the key developments, themes, films and figures of Indian film; and the necessary background to understand India and its influences."Bollywood" and India s regional filmmakers produce more films than any other country. While it has remained peripheral to western cinema buffs, Indian popular film wields immense influence as the main form of entertainment enjoyed by Indian audiences and the Indian Diaspora, who represent at least a sixth of the world s population. The authors begin with an overview of the historical development of Indian cinema, its key characteristics and points of distinctiveness; and then explore the themes and concerns which are pertinent to a critical understanding, through discussion of a wide range of films. A key chapter considers how women are represented, and represent themselves, on screen.Covering the nine decades of Indian cinema, their range of reference includes both films which have achieved classic status, such as Mother India, Awaara and Sholay, and the lesser known films which are recognized landmarks in the development of the industry. They equally embrace recent developments and the contributions of British Asian filmmakers.The book includes a glossary of Indian terms.

This book analyses the novels of Salman Rushdie and their stylistic conventions in the context of Indian popular cinema and its role in the elaboration of the author’s arguments about post-independence postcolonial India. Focusing on different genres of Indian popular cinema, such as the ‘Social’, ‘Mythological’ and ‘Historical’, Stadtler examines how Rushdie’s writing foregrounds the epic, the mythic, the tragic and the comic, linking them in storylines narrated in cinematic parameters. The book shows that Indian popular cinema’s syncretism becomes an aesthetic marker in Rushdie’s fiction that allows him to elaborate on the multiplicity of Indian identity, both on the subcontinent and abroad, and illustrates how Rushdie uses Indian popular cinema in his narratives to express an aesthetics of hybridity and a particular conceptualization of culture with which ‘India’ has become identified in a global context. Also highlighted are Rushdie’s uses of cinema to inflect his reading of India as a pluralist nation and of the hybrid space occupied by the Indian diaspora across the world. The book connects Rushdie’s storylines with modes of cinematic representation to explore questions about the role, place and space of the individual in relation to a fast-changing social, economic and political space in India and the wider world.

This book investigates the millennial history of the Indian subcontinent. Through the various methods adopted, the objects and moments examined, it questions various linguistic, literary and artistic appropriations of the past, to address the conflicting comprehensions of the present and also the figuring/imagining of a possible future. The volume engages with this general cultural condition, in relation both to the subcontinent’s current “synchronic” reality and to certain aspects of the culture’s underlying diachronic determinations. It also reveals how the multiple heritages are negotiated through the subcontinent’s long-term sedimentational history. It scrutinizes both conservative interpretations of heritage and a possibly incremental enrichment, and the additional possibility of a mode of appropriation open to a dialectic of creative destruction, in which the patrimonial imperative is challenged, leaving room for processes of renewal and rejuvenation. The collection is organized around four major topics: Orientalism, addressed by way of the Tamil Epic Manimekalai, through the evocation of the Hastings Circle and views on a possible Hindu-Muslim unity sketched out by Sayyid Ahmed Khan; modernism in Indian and Burmese texts written in English; pictorial art, through a consideration of the work of British Asian and Indian film directors; and, finally, the current state of a body of critical thinking on gender.

The book is co-authored by a social scientist and a film historian. It is the first of its kind in the literature. India produces more films than any other country but its popular cinema has remained peripheral to western cinema buffs. It provides for the first time a historical and cultural survey of Indian cinema popular, artistic and regional and introduces readers to its distinctive forms. The book reviews nine recent Indian films.

Popular Indian Cinema is clearly a worldwide phenomenon. But what often gets overlooked in this celebration is this cinema’s intricate relationship with global dynamics since its very inception in the 1890s. With contributions from a range of international scholars, this volume analyses the transnational networks of India’s popular cinema in terms of its production, narratives and reception. The first section of the book,Topographies, concentrates on the globalised audio-visual economies within which the technologies and aesthetics of India’s commercial cinema developed. Essays here focus on the iconic roles of actors like Devika Rani and Fearless Nadia, film-makers such as D G Phalke and Baburao Painter, the film Sant Tukaram, and aspects of early cinematography. The second section, Trans-Actions, argues that the ‘national fantasy’ of Indian commercial cinema is an unstable construction. Essays here concentrate on the conversations between Indian action movies of the 1970s and other genres of action and martial arts films; the features of post-liberalisation Indian films designed to meet the needs of an ‘imagined’ global audience in the 1990s; and the changing metaphor of ‘the vamp’ as portrayed through desirous women in films with examples of the Anglo-Asian, the westernized Indian woman of ‘low character’, and the contemporary figure of the ‘heroine’. The final section, Travels, focuses on the overseas reception of Indian cinema with ethnographic case studies from Germany, Guyana, the USA, South Africa, Nigeria and Britain. The contributors highlight various issues concerning modernity, racial/ethnic identity, the gaze of the ‘mainstream Other’, gender, hybridity, moral universes, and the articulation of desire and disdain.

What remains of the “national” when the nation unravels at the birth of the independent state? The political truncation of India at the end of British colonial rule in 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which roughly one million people died and ten to twelve million were displaced. Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema over the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia and that its representation on screen enables forms of historical engagement that are largely opaque to standard historiography. Sarkar tracks the initial reticence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse, revealing both the silence and the eventual “return of the repressed” as strands of one complex process. Connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma’s disjunctive temporal structure, Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning. He relates the proliferation of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements, and he discusses how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema that interrogates the national (a central category organizing cinema studies) and participates in a wider process of mourning the modernist promises of the nation form.