This ethnography of everyday policing practices in Lucknow, a major Indian metropolis, demonstrates how police authority and its assumed afflictions are refracted through a multi-dimensional field of social relationships in which power positions and moral boundaries are continually contested and shifting. This field generates among police what legal anthropologist Beatrice Jauregui calls provisional authority, a fractured and contingent form of capability and subjectivity that is not always immediately visible or comprehensible. Provisional authority may provide a social good, but with questionable and transmutable efficacy or legitimacy. Drawing on scholarship from anthropology, legal history, sociology, and political theory, Jauregui considers prevalent problems like routinized corruption, bureaucratized cronyism, evidence fabrication and extralegal violence among police as expressions of strategic adaptation and often a sincere if failing attempt to perform what officers themselves consider real police work in the face of interference, incapacity, disaffection and fragmented knowledge. This analysis of the fraught nature of police authority in India pushes contemporary theories of state power, legality and legitimacy, and postcolonialism and decolonization in different and provocative directions, opening new vistas for understanding policing as a global historical practice hybridizing local, statist, and transnational modes of producing and performing authority and order. Provisional Authority offers an innovative and challenging read of classical and contemporary theories of the postcolonial state, and an incisive perspective on public order in relation to police authority as co-configured by practice and subjectivity."

The book is a detailed and wonderful study on the Offbeat cinema in India. The author through the title says that the offbeat genre, more than the mainstream, truly reflects the conscience of the Indian people.

Bollywood, a popular nomenclature for India's “national” film industry in the Hindi language, along with the Taj Mahal, yoga, Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi, is one of the best-known introductions and universally recognized associations with India across the world today. Despite its predominant narrative styles not confirming to the First World European and/or American cinema structure, Indian cinema is increasingly viewed as the world's second-most important film industry, after Hollywood, with box-office influence crossing over with European cinema. Bollywood FAQ provides a thrilling, entertaining, and intellectually stimulating joy ride into the vibrant, colorful, and multi-emotional universe of the world's most prolific (over 30 000 film titles) and most-watched film industry (at 3 billion-plus ticket sales). Bollywood blockbusters are simultaneously screened in theaters and cinemas in over 100 nations from the USA to Japan, New Zealand to the Netherlands, and Peru to Pakistan. Every major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros., Fox Star, Disney, Sony Pictures, and Viacom 18) is now making or distributing Bollywood films. Yet much of Indian cinema continues to amuse and confuse audiences and critics outside of India, including during their first/occasional introductions to its, in the words of Salman Rushdie, “epico-mythico-tragico-comico-super-sexy-high-masala-art form in which the unifying principle is a techni-color-storyline.” Bollywood FAQ explains and explores the above myths and magic. It introduces India's maharajah-like stars and their cult-commanding stardom. Movie buffs will find a ready reckoner on iconic Bollywood films, with a bonus must-watch listing of the cinema's most spectacular song-and-dance moments, highlighting the pleasures and popularity of a national cinema that has come to be a genre in itself. This book is a reader-friendly reference to everything one has ever wanted to know about the spectacular, robust, humongous, colorful, and dramatic multi-generic cinematic being called Bollywood. The narrative is enriched with insider insights culled from its author's long career as a film writer and critic in the city of Bollywood, Bombay (now Mumbai).

In the last several decades, the number of films featuring female protagonists has increased significantly. Many of these films reflect the vast cultural and sociological changes that have taken place since the early 1960s, highlighting not only a wide spectrum of female characters depicted onscreen, but the creative work of women behind the camera as well. In Reel Women: An International Directory of Contemporary Feature Films about Women, media librarian Jane Sloan has assembled an impressive list of more than 2400 films—from nearly 100 countries—that feature female protagonists. Each entry includes a brief description of the film and cites key artistic personnel, particularly female directors, producers, and screenwriters involved in its production. Reel Women also contains a critical survey in which Sloan charts the changes women have undergone both on screen and off, as moviemaking and audience sensibilities have evolved in the last forty-plus years. Listing many more films on the subject of women than can be found in any other source, this reference brings together important titles from area studies and genre markets along with titles associated with women's cinema and feminist film. In addition to title and actor indexes, the book contains a subject index that provides detailed access to place names, historical characters, time periods, and storylines, as well as the backgrounds—religious, racial, and ethnic—of the main characters. This directory is an ideal reference tool for researchers studying the evolution of female characters in films around the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It is also a resource for casual viewers who are looking for films that reflect the diversity of women's roles that can be found in independent and national cinemas as well as commercial blockbusters.

Provides a road map of the scholarship on modern Hindi cinema in India, with an emphasis on understanding the interplay between cinema and colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. This book attends to issues of capitalism, nationalism, orientalism, and modernity through understandings of race, gender and sexuality, religion, and politics.

A framework for understanding the distinctiveness of Indian cinema as a national cinema within a global context dominated by Hollywood is proposed by this book. With its sudden explosions into song-and-dance sequences, half-time intermissions and heavy traces of censorship, Indian cinema can be identified as a 'Cinema of Interruptions'. To the uninitiated viewer, brought up on the seamless linear plotting of Hollywood narrative, this unfamiliar tendency towards digression may appear random and superfluous, yet this book argues that such devices assist in the construction of a distinct visual and narrative time-space. In the hands of imaginative directors, the conventions of Indian cinema become opportunities for narrative play and personal expression in such films as 'Sholay' (1975), 'Nayakan' (1987), 'Parinda' (1989), 'Hathyar' (1981) and 'Hey Ram!' (1999). 'Cinema of Interruptions' places commercial Indian film within a global system of popular cinemas, but also points out its engagement with the dominant genre principles implemented by Western film. By focusing on the action-genre work of leading contemporary directors J.P. Dutta, Mani Ratnam, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, brazen national style is shown to interact with international genre films to produce a hybrid form that reworks the gangster film, the western and the avenging woman genre. Central to this study is the relationship Indian cinema shares with its audience, and an understanding of the pleasures it offers the cinephile. In articulating this bond the book presents not only a fresh framework for understanding popular Indian cinema but also a contribution to film genre studies.