Indian and South Asian Films

Global Bollywood shows how this currency in popular culture and among diasporic communities marks only the latest phase of the genre's world travels.

The subjects of this ethnography are hijras or the "third sex" of India, individuals who occupy a unique space between male and female, sacred and profane. Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality.

Based on extensive, original research, details the changing lives of youth living in slum communities (bustees) in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta).

Film scholars, anthropologists, and critics discuss star-making in the contemporary Hindi-language film industry in India, also known as "Bollywood." Draws on theories of stardom, globalization, transnationalism, gender, and new media studies.

Same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic.

Presents 100 significant Indian films that impacted the Indian film industry.

Surveys Bollywood from its origins in colonial times to the present, tracing its impact on both the Indian and global imagination.

Also available in print: JPL 3rd Floor PN1993.5.I8 B5925 2012
Outlines the theoretical issues relevant to the spread of popular Indian cinema and emergence of India's growing soft power.

Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are explored in Indian commercial cinema.

Discusses not just villains but also the evaluation of villainous characters vis-à-vis sociopolitical conditions in the country and the actors who played them.

Argues that Indian film production and reception is shaped by the desire for national community and a pan-Indian culture linking their form and content to broader issues of national identity, epic tradition, popular culture, history, and the implications of diaspora.

Brings together a group of international scholars to analyze the globalized networks of Indian cinema.

Illuminates this intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period.
Also print: JPL 3rd Floor PN1993.5.I8 J28

Focus on the development of Bombay-based commercial cinema since 1913, exploring the symbolic role of settings and costumes in staging the nation and the function of makeup and hairstyles in defining notions of beauty, sexuality, and consumption.

Eye-catching song and dance sequences, colourful imagery and glamourous costumes are just some of the factors that create the distinctive style of a Bollywood film. The book charts the historical, political and cultural changes experienced by the country, as seen through the eyes of the Bollywood film industry.

Examines the role and depiction of religion in Indian cinema, showing that the relationship between the modern and the traditional in contemporary India is not exotic, but part of everyday life.
Also available in print JPL 3rd Floor PN1993.5.I4 D88 2006

International movies have been inventive in their fantastical imagining of India. In fact, images of India in these films have always said more about the filmmakers than they have about India.

Brings together leading scholars to examine the transnational and transmedia terrain of Bollywood.

With a backdrop of religious violence and escalating regional tensions in South Asia, probes the urgent topic of secularism and tolerance in Indian culture and life. Explores Partition as the founding trauma of the Indian nation-state and traces the consequences of its marking off of "Indian" from "Pakistani" and the positioning of Indian Muslims as strangers within the nation.
Also available in print: JPL PK5407 .K86 2008

Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, follows the shifting traces of the birth of the independent Indian state in Indian cinema over the next six decades.

The changing image of the Indian Patriot's war for India's Independence and its reflection, which were shown during the Cold War period on the screens of commercial British films and TV.

Combines multiple theoretical approaches to provide a fresh perspective on Bollywood: the religious frame, the musical frame, the subaltern frame, the (hetero) sexual frame and the 'crossover' frame.

Megastar actor Shah Rukh Khan's larger-than-life tale through the colorful and idiosyncratic Bollywood movie industry.

Saga about the biggest timeless Indian blockbuster which swayed the silver screen for nearly 5 years in the mid-seventies.

Critically examines the cultural and cinematic representations in southern India’s Tamil cinema.
Also available online.

This anthology aims to portray the "soft" power of Bollywood, which makes it a unique and powerful disseminator of Indian culture and values abroad.

Maps out the early culture of cinema stardom in India from its emergence in the silent era to the decade after Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century.
Also available in print: JPL 3rd Floor PN1993.5.I8 M34 2009

This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalisation, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004.

Analyzes the novels of Salman Rushdie and their stylistic conventions in the context of Indian popular cinema in relation to post-independence India.

Examines the changes in Hindi film production from the 1990s until 2010.

Bollywood Weddings examines how second-generation Indian-American Hindus of the middle and upper classes negotiate courtship and wedding rituals.

Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India.

Exploring the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, examines its nonrealistic depictions of everyday life in India and what it reveals about Indian society. Showing how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema.

Delves into the controversial 1996 lesbian love story by Indian-born director Deepa Mehta. Set in contemporary middle-class Hindu household in the heart of Delhi.

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.
Also in print PN1993.5.I8 B424 2013

An innovative and multi-perspective exploration of the Bollywood 1977 Bollywood movie classic and touchstone of Indian popular culture.
Also print: PN1997.A3415 E55 2016

Using multiple theoretical perspectives from Anthropology, Performance Studies, and Film and Media studies, this book locates, historicizes, and analyzes the dance reality show both as an aesthetic-cultural product, and as a lived reality of a new generation of middle-class viewers and performers.

"Pauwels delivers editorial wizardry in this lucid, diverse, yet synchronized collection of essays that tracks the relationship between the “classics” of Indian literature and performance (primarily from northern India) and their reinventions in Hindi film" -- Christian Lee Novetzke (review)

Covering the full range of Indian cinema, from Hindi musicals to the impressive diversity of regional Indian Art Cinemas including expanded coverage of mainstream productions from 1970s to the 1990s.