Media Dynamics in South Asia – serie

Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess - simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing - to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's'underdevelopment'. Bhojpuri media therefore demands that it is assessed not merely for its internal content but within the comparative media crucible, marked by interpenetrating forms and histories as diverse as those of ecological distress, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate, urban resettlements, and highway modernities. Foregrounding the libidinal excess, language politics, and curatorial informalities, Provincializing Bollywood synthesizes Bhojpuri media's spectacular public insubordination and its invocation of a shared debt, which is by no means regional in its provenance.

From the impassioned defence counsel of Damini to the avenging vigilante of Sholay, popular Hindi cinema has long served as the primary socio-cultural site through which ordinary people form their expectations of justice and understanding of legal institutions. One of the first scholarly works to bring together law and cinema in an Indian context, Objection, M'Lord argues that both are crucial archives of Indian modernity, and that Hindi cinema is not merely a mirror of legal culture but an active participant shaping social and legal consciousness. Drawing on a diverse archive of films spanning seven decades, the book traces the many registers in which cinematic justice operates: the Constitutional imagination of the Nehruvian era, the melodrama of the courtroom, the ethics of revenge, the murky world of encounter killing, and the relationship between law and the senses. Central to the book's argument is the concept of cinemality, a porous boundary where cinema, legality, and criminality fold into each other. Moving beyond representation, Objection, M'Lord also examines cinema's life in law--as property, speech, and a contested object of regulation. Questions of censorship, copyright, and the evidentiary status of the moving image reveal that law and cinema are not merely thematic neighbours but intertwined institutional forces that significantly shape people's social perceptions and experiences.