Meenakshi Bharat

Nirmal Kumar

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.

The Indo–Pak Relationship through the Cinematic Lens

Filming the Line of Control

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 socio-psychological violence in media and culture.

Terrorism in Hindi Films

Shooting Terror

Madhu Grover

The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process”, as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a “first world” from a “third world”, the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.

Politics and perception in literature

Representing the Exotic and the Familiar

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.

Meenakshi Bharat

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