1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of South Asian Cinemas
The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Cinemas is the first collection of original contributions to comprehensively analyze one of the most diverse and prolific cinema-producing regions of the world. It features chapters by up-and-coming and established scholars from a diverse array of academic specialties that survey South Asian cinemas, placing an emphasis on new, emerging, and underexplored cinematic terrains.
The handbook is organized in two parts: Regions and Themes. The first part examines the film industries from a regional perspective, including the cinemas of various Indian languages, in conjunction with the cinemas of other South Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The second part examines issues, themes, and practices that cut across regions, including distribution platforms, audiences, song and dance, and gender and sexuality.
A crucial intervention in the field of South Asian Cinema Studies, this handbook is an essential reference work for students and researchers of Asian cinema, film and culture and a significant contribution to South Asian Studies.
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Redefining ‘South Asian Cinema’
Ajay Gehlawat and Jayson Beaster-Jones
PART I: REGIONS
Bangladesh
2. Women, War and Cinema in Bangladesh
Elora Halim Chowdhury
Bhutan
3. Dreams and Illusions: Contemporary Bhutanese Cinema
Ivan Stacy
India
4. Acts of Possession: Gender, Wealth and Spectral Justice in Bengali Cinema
Meheli Sen
5. Anaarkali of Aarah and the Trouble with Being Bhojpuri: Citation and Differentiation in the Formation of Language Industries
Kathryn Hardy
6. Bollywood Cinema
Lucia Krämer
7. The Geopolitics of Kannada Language Cinema
MK Raghavendra
8. Marathi Cinema: Region, Space and Historical Reflexivity
Hrishikesh Ingle
9. Punjabi Cinema
Harjant S. Gill
10. Post-Regional Tamil Cinema
Selvaraj Velayutham and Vijay Devadas
Nepal
11. The Quest for Maulikta in Nepali cinema
Dikshya Karki
Pakistan
12. Martial law and the emergence of a new Pakistani cinema (1970s-1980s)
Syeda Momina Massood
13. Fighters and Monsters in Pakistani Women’s Cinema: Feminocentric Heroism in Urdu and Pashto Genres, 1980s/90s
Esha Niyogi De
14. Constructing Gender in New Pakistani Cinema (2013-2024)
Zebunnisa Hamid
Sri Lanka
15. Beyond Conflict in Sri Lankan CInema
Ian Conrich
PART II: THEMES
Streaming/ Audience/ Politics
16. OTT Services in India
Nandana Bose
17. A Film That Does Not Exist: Tees, Hindutva and the Politics of Streaming
Sarunas Paunksnis
18. Caste In-Visibility: Dalit Representation in Hindi Films and SVOD Content
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis
19. Story, Sound and Spectacle Signifying Everything: Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora
Anjali Ram
20. ‘Jhoome Jo Pathaan’, the Hook Step and the Political Potential of Virality
Anaar Desai-Stephens
Music and Dance
21. Rhythm and Algorithm: Reality TV, Item numbers and the Poetics of Remix
Pallabi Chakravorty
22. Kuchipudi and the Telugu Film Industry
Rumya Putcha
23. Watching Nepali Songs: A Brief History of Music Videos in Nepal
Anna Stirr
Gender and Sexuality
24. The Price of Love: The Feminist Heroine of the Bollywood Romantic Comedy
Namrata Rele Sathe
25. Male Sexuality in South Asian Cinema: Sovereign Masculinity and Its Vicissitudes
Baidurya Chakrabarti
26. Malayalam Soft-Porn and Discursive Networks of the ‘Sex-Siren’
Darshana Sreedhar Mini
27. Conclusion: All the other -ollywoods
Ajay Gehlawat
Index
Biography
Ajay Gehlawat is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Theatre and Film at Sonoma State University, USA. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of several studies of popular Hindi cinema.
Jayson Beaster-Jones is Professor of Music at the University of California, Merced, USA. He is the author of several books, including Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song (2015).
"This milestone collection is the first major effort to recognize that Hindi commercial cinema is just one part of a much larger world of nations, languages, cultures and cinematic styles within South Asia. It will be very useful for future cinema scholars, both of this region and of other cinematic worlds, as they zoom in and out of their local contexts and build a genuinely comparative approach to film studies."
Arjun Appadurai, Emeritus Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University
"Crossing both national and linguistic boundaries and spanning a range of media formats, this handbook appropriately decenters the supposed 'Bollywood' hegemon to offer a provocative and critical guide to modern and contemporary developments across the diverse and vibrant cinescapes of South Asia."
Philip A. Lutgendorf, Professor Emeritus, Hindi and Modern Indian Studies, University of Iowa
