Anustup Basu – författare

This volume brings together a series of essays that interrogate the notion of figuration in Indian cinemas. The essays collectively argue that the figures which exhibit maximum tenacity in Indian cinema often emerge in the interface of recognizable binaries: self/other, Indian/foreign, good/bad, virtue/vice, myth/reality and urban/rural.

The emergence of new media today in South Asia has signalled an event, the meaning of which remains obscure but whose reality is rapidly evolving along gradients of intensity and experience. Contemporary media in and from South Asia have come to sense a new arrangement of value, sensation, and force - new forms of becoming that might be usefully termed as 'media ecologies'. This evolution from nation-based forms of communication (Doordarshan, All India Radio, the "national" feudal romance) to simultaneous global ones conform and mutate the structures of feeling of local, national, diasporic and transnational belonging. This collection of original essays is concerned with understanding how people are making meaning from the new media and how subaltern tinkering (pirating, peer to peer file sharing, hacking, noise jamming, indymedia, etc.) does things to and in the new media. This exciting works helps us to make sense of the creation of new publics, new affects and new experiences of pleasure and value in convergences of intermedia in a fast developing South Asia context.This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

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. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early nineties as a signature 'Bollywood style' evolved in the wake of liberalization and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, 'window-shopping' ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. One example is the film Haqeeqat that featured poor working class protagonists, but romantic musical sequences transported them abruptly to Switzerland, with the actors now dressed in designer suits. Basu theorises this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic.This book connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalizing process in India. Basu argues that 'Bollywood' is not so much indicative of a uniquely Indian modernity coming into its own; rather it is symptomatic of a pure techno-financial modernization that comes without a political modernity. Bollywood in the Age of New Media therefore explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and film and media studies, this book presents a complex account of an India of the present caught between brave new silicon valleys and farmer suicides.

The emergence of new media today in South Asia has signalled an event, the meaning of which remains obscure but whose reality is rapidly evolving along gradients of intensity and experience. Contemporary media in and from South Asia have come to sense a new arrangement of value, sensation, and force - new forms of becoming that might be usefully termed as 'media ecologies'. This evolution from nation-based forms of communication (Doordarshan, All India Radio, the "national" feudal romance) to simultaneous global ones conform and mutate the structures of feeling of local, national, diasporic and transnational belonging. This collection of original essays is concerned with understanding how people are making meaning from the new media and how subaltern tinkering (pirating, peer to peer file sharing, hacking, noise jamming, indymedia, etc.) does things to and in the new media. This exciting works helps us to make sense of the creation of new publics, new affects and new experiences of pleasure and value in convergences of intermedia in a fast developing South Asia context.This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

This volume brings together a series of essays that interrogate the notion of figuration in Indian cinemas. The essays collectively argue that the figures which exhibit maximum tenacity in Indian cinema often emerge in the interface of recognizable binaries: self/other, Indian/foreign, good/bad, virtue/vice, myth/reality and urban/rural.

In Hindutva as Political Monotheism, Anustup Basu offers a genealogical study of Hindutva-Hindu right-wing nationalism-to illustrate the significance of Western anthropology and political theory to the idea of India as a Hindu nation. Connecting Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology to traditional theorems of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood, Basu demonstrates how Western and Indian theorists subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith. Basu exposes the purported “Hindu Nation” as itself an orientalist vision by analyzing three crucial moments: European anthropologists’ and Indian intellectuals’ invention of a unified Hinduism during the long nineteenth century; Indian ideologues’ adoption of ethnoreligious nationalism in pursuit of a single Hindu way of life in the twentieth century; and the transformations of this project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and new media. Arguing that Hindutva aligns with Enlightenment notions of nationalism, Basu foregrounds its significance not just to Narendra Modi's right-wing, anti-Muslim government but also to mainstream Indian nationalism and its credo of secularism and tolerance.