This collection of essays by subject specialists examines the politics of violence, communalism, and terrorism as negotiated in cinema; the representations of identitarian politics; and the complex ideological underpinnings of literary adaptations.

This book offers a historical understanding of the Indian Audio-Visual media as well as examines and deconstructs the relationship between fact and fiction, history and imagination, nationalism and communalism, nation and gender, history and war, media and mentality and cinema and social identities particularly in Hindi cinema.

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.

The book reviews nine decades of Indian popular cinema and examines its immense influence on people in India and its diaspora. Since it was published in 1998, Indian film has developed in new directions. As films today vie with Indian soap operas for popularity, film making in India has acquired 'industry status' and consequently has greater accountability to its public. All this is reflected in this new and extensively revised edition of "Indian Popular Cinema". It tracks the rise of "designer cinema," reviews the increasingly significant Tamil cinema, and considers films made by Indians in the diaspora.

This is the first edited volume on new independent Indian cinema. It aims to be a comprehensive compendium of diverse theoretical, philosophical, epistemological and practice-based perspectives, featuring contributions from multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners across the world. This edited collection features analyses of cutting-edge new independent films and is conceived to serve as a beacon to guide future explorations into the burgeoning field of new Indian Cinema studies.

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 attempts to re-enact traumatic national events so as to redeem the past and restore a normative structure to happenings. Establishing structure and event as paradigmatic poles of a historical and anthropological spectrum for the individual in society, the book goes on to discuss cinematic portrayals of violence, gender embodiment, religion, economic transformations and new globalised Indianness as events and sites of liminality disrupting structural aspirations. After revealing the impossibility of accurate representation of incommensurable and liminal subjects within the historiography of the nation-state, the book highlights how Hindi cinema as an ongoing engagement with the nation-state as a site of eventfulness draws attention to the problematic nature of the thematic of nation. It is a useful study for academics of Film Studies and South Asian Culture.

This book examines cinematic practices in Bollywood as narratives that assist in shaping the imagination of the age, especially in contemporary India. It examines historical films released in India since the new millennium and analyses cinema as a reflection of the changing socio-political and economic conditions at any given period. The chapters in Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India: Cinematic Representations and Nationalist Agendas in Hindi Cinemas also illuminate different perspectives on how cinematic historical representations follow political patterns and market compulsions, giving precedence to a certain past over the other, creating a narrative suited for the dominant narrative of the present. From Mughal-e-Azam to Padmaavat, and Bajirao Mastani to Raazi, the chapters show how creating history out of myths validate hegemonic identities in a rapidly evolving Indian society. The volume will be of interest to scholars of film and media studies, literature and culture studies, and South Asian studies.