Meenakshi Bharat – författare

Filming the Line of Control charts out the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan as represented in cinema, especially in light of the improved political atmosphere between the two countries. It is geared towards arriving at a better understanding of one of the most crucial political and historical relationships in the continent, a relationship that has a key role to play in world-politics and in the shaping of world-history. Part of this exciting study is the documentation of popular responses to Indian films, from both within the two countries and among the Pakistani and Indian diaspora. The motive of this has been to locate and discuss aspects that link the two sensibilities — either in divergence or in their coming together. This book brings together scholars from across the globe, as also filmmakers and viewers on to a common platform to capture the dynamics of popular imagination. Reverberating with a unique inter-disciplinary alertness to cinematic, historical, cultural and sociological understanding, this study will interest readers throughout the world who have their eye on the burgeoning importance of the sub-continental players in the world-arena. It is a penetrating study of films that carries the thematic brunt of attempting to construct a history of Indo–Pakistan relations as reflected in cinema. This book directs our holistic attention to the unique confluence between history and film studies.

Filming the Line of Control charts out the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan as represented in cinema, especially in light of the improved political atmosphere between the two countries. It is geared towards arriving at a better understanding of one of the most crucial political and historical relationships in the continent, a relationship that has a key role to play in world-politics and in the shaping of world-history. Part of this exciting study is the documentation of popular responses to Indian films, from both within the two countries and among the Pakistani and Indian diaspora. The motive of this has been to locate and discuss aspects that link the two sensibilities — either in divergence or in their coming together. This book brings together scholars from across the globe, as also filmmakers and viewers on to a common platform to capture the dynamics of popular imagination. Reverberating with a unique inter-disciplinary alertness to cinematic, historical, cultural and sociological understanding, this study will interest readers throughout the world who have their eye on the burgeoning importance of the sub-continental players in the world-arena. It is a penetrating study of films that carries the thematic brunt of attempting to construct a history of Indo–Pakistan relations as reflected in cinema. This book directs our holistic attention to the unique confluence between history and film studies.

Since the 9/11 attacks terror has established its permeating hold on society’s psyche. Creative writing, a popular and visible cultural witness to the strain, has taken up this destabilization with remarkable regularity. Troubled Testimonies focuses on the Indian novel in English, deriving inspiration from these disturbances, to essay a unique grasp of the cultural make-up of the times and its reverberations on the sense of self and belonging to the nation. This first full-length study of terror in the subcontinental novel in English (from India) places it in the world context and analyzes the fictional coverage of the spread of terrorism across the country and its cultural fallout. The enigmatic coming together of the contemporary with the anguish of loss and betrayal unleashed by terror occasions a significant redefinition of the issues of trauma, conflict and gender, and opens a fresh window to Indian writing and the culture of the subcontinent, and a new paradigm in literary and cultural criticism termed ‘post-terrorism’.Lucid and thought provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, history, politics and sociology.

Shooting Terror highlights the disturbing immediacy of acts of terror and how cinema responds to them. It follows the changing representations of terrorism in Hindi cinema by fielding in-depth textual analyses of films such as Roja, Maachis, Black Friday, Tere Bin Laden, Uri: The Surgical Strike, among others.It traces how terror and the terrorist have come to be viewed in the Indian cultural space and lays the grounds for a multivalent, perspectival reading of cinema and terrorism. Moving from the threat of terror condensed in the Mogambo-esque villain in Mr. India, to the showcasing of terror and the terrorist in their lived-in realities in Haider and Shahid, the book explores the fraught connections between terror and the themes of devastation and trauma; between terror and the urban cityscape. It also seeks to highlight the place of humour and satire in films on terrorism and the presence of the reactionary far right in these films.One of the first books to present a composite picture of terrorism in contemporary Hindi cinema, this volume will be of interest to researchers and academics of cultural studies, media and film studies, and the study of sociopsychological violence in media and culture.

Ever since the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, Mumbai-based Hindi cinema has been returning compulsively to the idea of Pakistan, sometimes as the desirable other, sometimes as the horrifying antagonist. Hindi Cinema and Pakistan traces the genesis and development of this theme in Hindi cinema in the 1950s, showcasing its relevance as a tool that both reflects and shapes how India sees its neighbour, the India–Pakistan relationship, and itself.The book is a serious, multi-platform, multi-pronged exploration of the appearances, invocations, representations and treatment of Pakistan and Pakistanis in Hindi cinema. It follows Hindi cinema’s efforts to come to terms with the ‘idea’ and ‘reality’ of Pakistan. Through in-depth analyses of the enmity and rivalry between the two subcontinental nations in Partition films, thrillers, epic war films and sports films, to screen depictions of the shared cultural past and similarities in films on cross-border love or in films that show a reaching out through humour, this book investigates the visualization of Pakistan and contextualizes these representations within the broader frameworks of India’s political, socio-cultural and popular discourse.The extensive reach of the in-depth textual analyses of Hindi cinema will make this volume interesting and valuable both to the lay reader and to researchers and academics of cultural studies, media and film studies, and the study of socio-psychological violence in media and culture.

Ever since the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, Mumbai-based Hindi cinema has been returning compulsively to the idea of Pakistan, sometimes as the desirable other, sometimes as the horrifying antagonist. Hindi Cinema and Pakistan traces the genesis and development of this theme in Hindi cinema since the 1950s, showcasing its relevance as a tool that both reflects and shapes how India sees its neighbour, the India–Pakistan relationship and itself.The book is a serious, multi-platform multi-pronged exploration of the appearances, invocations, representations and treatment of Pakistan and Pakistanis in Hindi cinema. It follows Hindi cinema’s efforts to come to terms with the ‘idea’ and ‘reality’ of Pakistan. Through in-depth analyses of the enmity and rivalry between the two subcontinental nations in Partition films, thrillers, epic war films and sports films, to screen depictions of the shared cultural past and similarities in films on cross-border love or in films that show a reaching out through humour, this book investigates the visualization of Pakistan and contextualizes these representations within the broader frameworks of India’s political, sociocultural and popular discourse.The extensive reach of the in-depth textual analyses of Hindi cinema will make this volume interesting and valuable both to the lay reader and to researchers and academics of cultural studies, media and film studies, and the study of socio-psychological violence in media and culture.

Shooting Terror highlights the disturbing immediacy of acts of terror and how cinema responds to them. It follows the changing representations of terrorism in Hindi cinema by fielding in-depth textual analyses of films such as Roja, Maachis, Black Friday, Tere Bin Laden, Uri: The Surgical Strike, among others.It traces how terror and the terrorist have come to be viewed in the Indian cultural space and lays the grounds for a multivalent, perspectival reading of cinema and terrorism. Moving from the threat of terror condensed in the Mogambo-esque villain in Mr. India, to the showcasing of terror and the terrorist in their lived-in realities in Haider and Shahid, the book explores the fraught connections between terror and the themes of devastation and trauma; between terror and the urban cityscape. It also seeks to highlight the place of humour and satire in films on terrorism and the presence of the reactionary far right in these films.One of the first books to present a composite picture of terrorism in contemporary Hindi cinema, this volume will be of interest to researchers and academics of cultural studies, media and film studies, and the study of sociopsychological violence in media and culture.

Since the 9/11 attacks terror has established its permeating hold on society’s psyche. Creative writing, a popular and visible cultural witness to the strain, has taken up this destabilization with remarkable regularity. Troubled Testimonies focuses on the Indian novel in English, deriving inspiration from these disturbances, to essay a unique grasp of the cultural make-up of the times and its reverberations on the sense of self and belonging to the nation. This first full-length study of terror in the subcontinental novel in English (from India) places it in the world context and analyzes the fictional coverage of the spread of terrorism across the country and its cultural fallout. The enigmatic coming together of the contemporary with the anguish of loss and betrayal unleashed by terror occasions a significant redefinition of the issues of trauma, conflict and gender, and opens a fresh window to Indian writing and the culture of the subcontinent, and a new paradigm in literary and cultural criticism termed ‘post-terrorism’.Lucid and thought provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, history, politics and sociology.