Routledge Handbook of Indian Indie Cinema

Jayjit Sarkar is assistant professor at the Department of English, Raiganj University, India. He is the author of the monograph Illness as Method: Beckett, Kafka, Mann, Woolf and Eliot (2019) and the editor-contributor of Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration (2023).Anik Sarkar is assistant professor of English at SRM University Sikkim. His research areas and interests include philosophy of technology, surveillance, film studies and videogames. His recent work is The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2024).

‘A vibrant collection, The Routledge Handbook of Indian Indie Cinema will prompt and inform multifaceted inquiry into the filmic inventions and societal fabulations which are catalyzed by, and steadfastly emerging from, the regional, cultural, and linguistic peripheries of India today. Co-editors Anik Sarkar and Jayjit Sarkar have made a thoughtful selection of chapters, many of which discuss indies that circulate primarily in festivals and independent theaters. By gathering the chapters loosely in clusters such as “Nation and Narration,” “Gender and Sexuality,” “Making and Unmaking”, and “Memory and Desire,” the editors illuminate the flexibility and versatility of the indie as a dynamic creative and critical process.The Handbook is an invaluable resource that will be consulted time and again by scholars, critics, and a broad readership engaging with Indian, global South, and world cinemas in the plural.’—Jeffner Allen, State University of New York, USA

• 1.Foreword 2. Introduction 3. Interface between Forest and City: Ecofeminist Evaluation of Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) 4. Two Women and a Film Crew: Female Relational Dynamics and Double Standards of Parallel Cinema in Rituporno Ghosh’s Bariwali (2000) 5. Dancing Rain and Marigolden Marriages: Monsoon Wedding (2001) Twenty Years On 6. Wearing the Motley in Rituparno Ghosh’s Lear (2007) 7. Manorama Six Feet Under (2007): Understanding the making of a star through the culture of independent cinema 8. Connection and Separation: Art as a Life and Life as an Art in Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat (2010) 9. The Ghat of the Only World: Trauma, Dignity, Marginalisation and the City in Onir’s I Am (2010) 10. Against Commodification of Films in South Asian (Indian) ‘Media-Scape’: A Reading of Q’s Gandu (2010) 11. “Exotic, Intense, Explosive, Erotic”: Gandu (2010) and the Flesh of Cinema 12. A brief inquiry into the ontology of the voyeur in Banerjee’s Love, Sex and Dhoka (2010) 13. Beyond the Conventional binary: Rituparno Ghosh’s Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012) 14. Ankhon Dekhi (2013): A Curious Case of Objectivity 15. The Lunchbox (2013): A narrative about loneliness and emotional wiltedness 16. Fandry (2013): An act of resistance and assertion 17. Intersectionality and Gender Performativity in Margarita with a Straw (2014) 18. Aligarh (2015): New Cartographies of (Anti)Intimacies in Indian Cinema 19. Masaan (2015): A Cathartic Journey of Reconciliation with Destiny 20. Vituperating the Female Body and Violence in a F-rated Indie Movie Parched (2015) 21. The Male Malady: Confined Spaces and Social Exclusion in A Death in the Gunj (2016) 22. Village Rockstars (2017): Micronarratives of the Nation 23. Angamaly Diaries (2017): Intersectionality and Politics of Violence and Food 24. A camera into the human life: Reading the Ethos of Angamaly Diaries (2017) 25. “Can the Transgender Speak?”: A Critical Analysis of Kaushik Ganguly's Nagarkirtan (2017) 26. Silence and Chaos in Nishil Sheth’s Bhasmasur (2017) 27. The Poetics, Politics and Patriarchies of Bulbul Can Sing (2018) 28. On Mixing Memory and Desire: Reading Sengupta's Jonaki (2018) as a Chronotope of Nostalgia 29. Striking a fine balance: Duty, Dreams and being true to self in Rohena Gera’ Sir (2018) 30. The Organs of Darkness: Horror and Desire in Rahi Anil Barve and Adesh Prasad’s Tumbbad (2018) 31. The Fiasco at Funeral: An Insight on the Theme of Death in Pellissery’s Ee.Maa.Yau (2018) 32. "When the Reel Represents the Real": Mapping Resistance and Agency against the Post-truth Regime in Anand Patwardhan's Vivek (2018) 33. Widow of Silence (2018) and its Action in Silence 34. Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis (2019): A Tale of Visceral Journey and Vorarephilia 35. Unruliness of Desire and Consumption in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis (2019) 36. Food and politics of othering of Northeastern experiences in Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone (2019) 37. Cargo (2019): Life after Death in Indian Space 38. Gamak Ghar (2019): A Common Story Uncommonly Told 39. Gamak Ghar (2019): The House that Lived in Memory 40. Jallikattu (2019) and the Demise of Multi-species Sociality 41. Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019): A new zoo story 42. Stewing Rebellion in The Great Indian Kitchen (2021)