Indian Cinema

In Deepa "Water": Mehta’s Latest Elemental Move

by Stefano Mercanti

Return of the native: Swades and the re-thinking of diaspora

by Suvadip Sinha

Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (Review)

by Rohit K Dasgupta

Published in Transnational Cinema (Bristol: Intellect)
Vol 2. Issue 2 (forthcoming)
ISSN: 20403526

I am Afia, Megha, Abhimanyu, Omar

by Rohit K Dasgupta

Scope: Journal of Television and Film Studies
Vol 21 (October, 2011)
ISSN: 1465-9166

‘ “Buddhas Made of Ice and Butter”: Mimetic Visuality, Transience and the Documentary Image.’

by Anne Rutherford

Third Text 20: 1 (2006)

My Indian Music Site

by Teed Rockwell

According to Academia.edu, someone just did a search with the question "Are there two Teed Rockwells?". The answer is that there are at least two, but that they all live in the same skin. For those who want to meet the musical one, you can connect to this link to see and hear videos of my Indian music. (Both Hindustani and Bollywood). There are also links to my twenty years of columns as Music Critic for India Currents Magazine.

Predicaments of history and mimetic agency: Postcolonial return, repetition and remediation in Rang De Basanti

by Parvinder Mehta

The Road to Rāmarājya: Analysing Shah Rukh Khan's Parallel Text in Commercial Hindi Cinema

by Sunny Singh

From Kuruksetra to Ramrajya: a comparative analysis of the star personas of Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan

by Sunny Singh

New thoughts on the relationship between city and cinema (review article in Bengali language)

by Abhijit Roy

Review of the book 'City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience' (Ed. Preben Kaarsholm, Seagull Books, Calcutta 2004) published in Anandabazar Patrika, Calcutta, December 24, 2005.

Live(li)ness and network publics in post-liberalization Indian popular films

by Abhijit Roy

Published in Journal of the Moving Image, Number 5, December, 2006

Liveness seems to have a mimetic charge that dichotomously disavows the need to prove a point by argument and proof, a... more Liveness seems to have a mimetic charge that dichotomously disavows the need to prove a point by argument and proof, a temporal framework that empowers the protagonist with the invincible prowess of addressing the whole nation at a time, of binding a community with the ‘instantaneous’ or, as one can possibly say, the ‘moment of the Global’. Apart from such orders of engagement with a de-territorialized and networked public by actually objectifying television or radio, Indian popular films have increasingly started employing a certain representational form of liveness or, to be more precise, news television. This paper tries to read the order of the ‘televisual’ in some of the contemporary popular Hindi films, not in the manner of simply tracing ‘influences’ or locating aspects of television represented in films, but of focusing exclusively on the issue of liveness that engenders a certain temporality and ideology. The purpose is to investigate how post-liberalization popular cinema in India positions itself vis-à-vis the emergent public that is networked by the temporal grid of simultaneity. Television figures in this paper as an apparatus that forces a reconsideration of the ways in which the categories of publicness, globality and network have been theorized in Film Studies.

The multiplex in India: a cultural economy of urban leisure

by adrian athique

From cinema hall to multiplex: A public history

by adrian athique

Athique, A. (2011) ‘From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History’, South Asian Popular Culture, 9 (2), July 2011, pp. 147-160.

The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature films takes place, from... more The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature films takes place, from dedicated single-screen large capacity cinema halls to multiplex venues, has progressively transformed cinema exhibition across the world since the 1980s. The rise of the multiplex in India since 1997 has been an integral, and highly visible, component of the general spread of mall culture; with multiplex venues often being housed within shopping mall developments and other new forms of privatized ‘public’ leisure. As such, the multiplex has powerfully altered the nature of cinema as public space and thus, crucially, what it means to be in the cinema hall. While the reconstitution of the cinema crowd within the multiplex might be seen as constitutive of the ‘globalizing’ trends now at work in Indian cities, this article seeks to demonstrate that the particular dynamics of the Indian multiplex at the present time must also be understood within the historical trajectory of the Indian cinema hall and the political struggles that have been played out within its confines.

Changing Landscape of Moral Registers and Urban Pathology in "Bombay" Cinema: Decline of Biological Family and Birth of the Individual through Awara (1951), Deewar (1975) and Satya (1998)

by Akshaya Kumar

Published in the Cinema Journal CINEJ, published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

This article attempts  to map out the changing image of biological family as the central axis of collective moral... more This article attempts  to map out the changing image of biological family as the central axis of collective moral imagination in Bombay Cinema. Tracing the journey of the nation through three iconic films that were massively successful and helped the nation construct its self-projection, Awara (1951), Deewar (1975), and Satya (1998), mark the birth of an individual who disengages from the epic imagination of Ramayana and Mahabharata and arrives in the dark modern metropolis of post-liberalization India, not as a star figure but in a forever exile confronting, heroically indeed, a pathological condition of his exiled larger collective.

“And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian”: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H) Indianization of Hollywood

by Tejaswini Ganti

Mumbai vs. Bollywood: The Hindi Film Industry and the Politics of Cultural Heritage in Contemporary India

by Tejaswini Ganti

Published in Global Bollywood, eds. Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, NYU Press, 2008

Beyond Copyright Industries: Publishing and Digital Futures

by Lucy Montgomery

Downloadable podcasts of Frances Pinter, Tom Cochrane, Lucy Montgomery, Xiang Ren, Vijay Anand, Sampsung Xiaoxiang Shi and Christoph Antons speaking at the event Beyond Copyright Industries: Publishing and Digital Futures on 21 September 2011.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) and Asian Creative Transformations (ACT)... more The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) and Asian Creative Transformations (ACT) hosted the symposium at the Gardens Theatre (QUT Brisbane). The symposium explored the transformation of creative industry business models in response to digital technology in two related sessions. The podcasts are linked under each speaker.

Death and the Maiden: The Floating Courtesan in Pakeezah

by Hugo Ríos-Cordero

Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu cinema after NT Rama Rao

by Srinivas SV

Chapter 1: Whistling Fans and Conditional Loyalty

Author's Note: This chapter revisits the arguments made in "Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity."

[From the blurb] Located in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu film industry is the second largest... more [From the blurb] Located in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu film industry is the second largest in India. The Telugu film industry exhibits particular cultural traits that relate not only to filmmaking, but also to the impact of popular culture on politics.

Megastar is a book on the powerful presence of popular culture and the different ways in which our daily lives are mediated by the circulating power of film. Steering clear of formulations that have reduced a highly complex set of issues to a linear narrative, this book studies the particularities of south Indian cinema: its economics, on-screen manifestations, its consumption, and importantly, the cinema-politics association.

Cardboard monuments: City, language and 'nation' in contemporary Telugu cinema

by Srinivas SV

This paper looks at the manner in which the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh... more This paper looks at the manner in which the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and production centre of the Telugu film industry, has been represented in the recent commercial hit *Okkadu* (Gunasekhar, 2003). The film is thematically interesting in that it re-stages the country versus city in contemporary terms. More importantly, it follows the late 1990s trend in the film industry to recreate entire cityscapes within the studio, ensuring that location shooting in busy city streets and neighbourhoods merely returns us to the grandeur of lavish and ‘realistic’ studio sets. *Okkadu* goes a step further by reconstructing Hyderabad’s most recognizable monument, the four hundred year old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood (Charminar is actually located in congested commercial area). This paper looks at how and why the city of Hyderabad, especially its older parts for which Charminar is a metonym, is rendered into a fantasy space in the film. The paper outlines the history of this mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to de-localize the city. The criminalization of the city’s older inhabitants, who are marked by either religion (Islam) or their ‘non-standard’ dialect of Telugu often accompanies this move. In the processes any claims that they might have on the city are de-legitimized.