A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India
In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film.
Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema.
Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India's moving image cultures.
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xiv
Introduction 1
Ranjani Mazumdar and Neepa Majumdar
Part I Production Cultures and Circulation 35
1 Risky Business: The Structure and Practice of Formal Film Distribution in the Hindi Film Industry 37
Tejaswini Ganti
2 Spectators from the Past: Remakes, Development, and the Bhojpuri Audience 60
Kathryn Hardy
3 (Not So) Far from Bollywood: Videocinemas of India 78
Bhaskar Sarkar
Part II Cinema and Material Traces 101
4 Shifty Outfits: Envisioning the Hindi Film Villain 103
Clare M. Wilkinson
5 Archival Conjugations: Queer Traces of Love and Loss in Bombay Cinema 122
Debashree Mukherjee
6 Excavating Movie Queens: The Curious Case of the James Burke Photographs 147
Sabeena Gadihoke
7 Scenes of Horror: Reading the Documents of Indian Film Censorship 170
Kartik Nair
Part III Voices, Bodies, and Figures of Influence 197
8 Dance and Ludic Queerness: A Genealogy of Gestures from Bhagwan to Bachchan 199
Usha Iyer
9 Performing the Bhadramahila: Suchitra Sen and Popular Bangla Cinema 219
Smita Banerjee
10 Volatile Scales, Contingent Bodies: The Many Voices of Asha Bhosle 239
Shikha Jhingan
11 Contemporary Bengali Cinema: Nostalgia, Politics, and the Ghosts of Satyajit Ray 260
Meheli Sen
12 The Tamasha Film: Gender, Performance, and Melodramatic Form 281
Aarti Wani
Part IV The Nonfiction Impulse 303
13 The Shikar Film and Photograph: Hunting in Colonial India 305
Veena Hariharan
14 Moving Images: Documentary, Sexual Dissidence, and Vectors of Desire 319
Shohini Ghosh
15 The Other Song: Gender, Performance, and Aurality in Documentary Film 339
Anuja Jain
16 Infrastructures of Political Address: The Film and Media Archive 360
Ravi Vasudevan
Part V Transnational and Transregional Circuits 387
17 In and Out of Alignment: Cold War Sentiment and Hollywood-Bombay Film Diplomacy in the 1950s 389
Nitin Govil
18 Coming into Cinema: Critical Cosmopolitanisms of Malayalam Cinema (1930-1955) 412
Bindu Menon
19 Affective Logics: Re-making Fidelity and Homosociality in Kaante 433
Monika Mehta
20 The “Conscience of Bollywood” in China: Aamir Khan and Transnational Spreadable Media 456
Krista Van Fleit
21 “Get on the Train, Baby!” Joining Kashmir and Kanyakumari through Hinglish and English Accents and Language in Chennai Express (2013) 473
Helen Ashton and Rachel Dwyer
Part VI Reflections on the Medium/Media Inscriptions 493
22 Staging the Screen, Screening the Stage: Mediation and the Problem of Cinematic Self-Reflexivity 495
Neepa Majumdar
23 Radical Time: 1971 and Art 514
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
24 Technological Obsolescence and Space in Bombay Cinema 540
Ranjani Mazumdar
25 From Unattainable to Distantly Watched Films: Film Archives and their Digital Futures 569
Lawrence Liang
Index 590
