A Companion to Indian Cinema

Majumdar, Neepa / Mazumdar, Ranjani (Editor)

CNCZ - The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas

1. Edition October 2022
624 Pages, Hardcover
Handbook/Reference Book

ISBN: 978-1-119-04819-0

John Wiley & Sons

Wiley Online Library Sample Chapter

Further versions

A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India

In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film.

Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema.

Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India's moving image cultures.

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction 1
Ranjani Mazumdar and Neepa Majumdar

Part I Production Cultures and Circulation 35

1 Risky Business: The Structure and Practice of Formal Film Distribution in the Hindi Film Industry 37
Tejaswini Ganti

2 Spectators from the Past: Remakes, Development, and the Bhojpuri Audience 60
Kathryn Hardy

3 (Not So) Far from Bollywood: Videocinemas of India 78
Bhaskar Sarkar

Part II Cinema and Material Traces 101

4 Shifty Outfits: Envisioning the Hindi Film Villain 103
Clare M. Wilkinson

5 Archival Conjugations: Queer Traces of Love and Loss in Bombay Cinema 122
Debashree Mukherjee

6 Excavating Movie Queens: The Curious Case of the James Burke Photographs 147
Sabeena Gadihoke

7 Scenes of Horror: Reading the Documents of Indian Film Censorship 170
Kartik Nair

Part III Voices, Bodies, and Figures of Influence 197

8 Dance and Ludic Queerness: A Genealogy of Gestures from Bhagwan to Bachchan 199
Usha Iyer

9 Performing the Bhadramahila: Suchitra Sen and Popular Bangla Cinema 219
Smita Banerjee

10 Volatile Scales, Contingent Bodies: The Many Voices of Asha Bhosle 239
Shikha Jhingan

11 Contemporary Bengali Cinema: Nostalgia, Politics, and the Ghosts of Satyajit Ray 260
Meheli Sen

12 The Tamasha Film: Gender, Performance, and Melodramatic Form 281
Aarti Wani

Part IV The Nonfiction Impulse 303

13 The Shikar Film and Photograph: Hunting in Colonial India 305
Veena Hariharan

14 Moving Images: Documentary, Sexual Dissidence, and Vectors of Desire 319
Shohini Ghosh

15 The Other Song: Gender, Performance, and Aurality in Documentary Film 339
Anuja Jain

16 Infrastructures of Political Address: The Film and Media Archive 360
Ravi Vasudevan

Part V Transnational and Transregional Circuits 387

17 In and Out of Alignment: Cold War Sentiment and Hollywood-Bombay Film Diplomacy in the 1950s 389
Nitin Govil

18 Coming into Cinema: Critical Cosmopolitanisms of Malayalam Cinema (1930-1955) 412
Bindu Menon

19 Affective Logics: Re-making Fidelity and Homosociality in Kaante 433
Monika Mehta

20 The "Conscience of Bollywood" in China: Aamir Khan and Transnational Spreadable Media 456
Krista Van Fleit

21 "Get on the Train, Baby!" Joining Kashmir and Kanyakumari through Hinglish and English Accents and Language in Chennai Express (2013) 473
Helen Ashton and Rachel Dwyer

Part VI Reflections on the Medium/Media Inscriptions 493

22 Staging the Screen, Screening the Stage: Mediation and the Problem of Cinematic Self-Reflexivity 495
Neepa Majumdar

23 Radical Time: 1971 and Art 514
Ashish Rajadhyaksha

24 Technological Obsolescence and Space in Bombay Cinema 540
Ranjani Mazumdar

25 From Unattainable to Distantly Watched Films: Film Archives and their Digital Futures 569
Lawrence Liang

Index 590

Neepa Majumdar is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Her research interests include film sound, star studies, South Asian early cinema, and documentary film. She is co-editor of the journals [In]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and guest editor of a special issue of Bioscope on cinema and techno materiality (2013). Her current research interests include globalization and film culture, intermedial encounters, and the intersection of technology, travel, design, and color in 1960s Bombay Cinema.

N. Majumdar, University of Pittsburgh; R. Mazumdar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi