During the decade of its existence in India, the multiplex cinema has been very much a sign of the times – both a symptom and a symbol of new social values. Indicative of a consistent push to create a ‘globalised’ consuming middle class and a new urban environment, multiplex theatres have thus become key sites in the long-running struggle over cultural legitimacy and the right to public space in Indian cities. This book provides the reader with a comprehensive account of the new leisure infrastructure arising at the intersection between contemporary trends in cultural practice and the spatial politics that are reshaping the cities of India. Exploring the significance, and convergence, of economic liberalisation, urban redevelopment and the media explosion in India, the book demonstrates an innovative approach towards the cultural and political economy of leisure in a complex and rapidly-changing society. Key arguments are supported by up-to-date and substantive field research in several major metros and second tier cities across India. Accordingly, this book employs analytical frameworks from Media and Cultural Studies, and from Urban Geography and Development Studies in a wide-ranging examination of the multiplex phenomenon.

Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.

India is the largest film producing country in the world and its output has a global reach. After years of marginalisation by academics in the Western world, Indian cinemas have moved from the periphery to the centre of the world cinema in a comparatively short space of time. Bringing together contributions from leading scholars in the field, this Handbook looks at the complex reasons for this remarkable journey. Combining a historical and thematic approach, the Handbook discusses how Indian cinemas need to be understood in their historical unfolding as well as their complex relationships to social, economic, cultural, political, ideological, aesthetic, technical and institutional discourses. The thematic section provides an up-to-date critical narrative on diverse topics such as audience, censorship, film distribution, film industry, diaspora, sexuality, film music and nationalism. The Handbook provides a comprehensive and cutting edge survey of Indian cinemas, discussing Popular, Parallel/New Wave and Regional cinemas as well as the spectacular rise of Bollywood. It is an invaluable resource for students and academics of South Asian Studies, Film Studies and Cultural Studies.

Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation. In Untimely Bollywood, Amit S. Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are emblematic of the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. Through analyses of contemporary media practices, Rai shifts the emphasis from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of audiovisual media to the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage as a model for understanding the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media practices. Exploring the ramifications of globalized media, he sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy. Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.

India is the largest producer and consumer of feature films in the world, far outstripping Hollywood in the number of movies released and tickets sold every year. Cinema quite simply dominates Indian popular culture, and has for many decades exerted an influence that extends from clothing trends to music tastes to everyday conversations, which are peppered with dialogue quotes. With House Full, Lakshmi Srinivas takes readers deep into the moviegoing experience in India, showing us what it’s actually like to line up for a hot ticket and see a movie in a jam-packed theater with more than a thousand seats. Building her account on countless trips to the cinema and hundreds of hours of conversation with film audiences, fans, and industry insiders, Srinivas brings the moviegoing experience to life, revealing a kind of audience that, far from passively consuming the images on the screen, is actively engaged with them. People talk, shout, whistle, cheer; others sing along, mimic, or dance; at times audiences even bring some of the ritual practices of Hindu worship into the cinema, propitiating the stars onscreen with incense and camphor. The picture Srinivas paints of Indian filmgoing is immersive, fascinating, and deeply empathetic, giving us an unprecedented understanding of the audience’s lived experience—an aspect of Indian film studies that has been largely overlooked.

This is the first-ever book on the rise of the new wave of independent Indian films that is revolutionising Indian cinema. Contemporary scholarship on Indian cinema so far has focused asymmetrically on Bollywood—India’s dominant cultural export. Reversing this trend, this book provides an in-depth examination of the burgeoning independent Indian film sector. It locates the new 'Indies' as a glocal hybrid film form—global in aesthetic and local in content. They critically engage with a diverse socio-political spectrum of ‘state of the nation’ stories; from farmer suicides, disenfranchised urban youth and migrant workers to monks turned anti-corporation animal rights agitators. This book provides comprehensive analyses of definitive Indie new wave films including Peepli Live (2010), Dhobi Ghat (2010), The Lunchbox (2013) and Ship of Theseus (2013). It explores how subversive Indies, such as polemical postmodern rap-musical Gandu (2010) transgress conventional notions of ‘traditional Indian values’, and collide with state censorship regulations. This timely and pioneering analysis shows how the new Indies have emerged from a middle space between India’s globalising present and traditional past. This book draws on in-depth interviews with directors, actors, academics and members of the Indian censor board, and is essential reading for anyone seeking an insight into a current Indian film phenomenon that could chart the future of Indian cinema.

The 1970s was a pivotal decade in the Indian social, cultural, political and economic landscape: the global oil crisis, wars with China and Pakistan in the previous decade, the Bangladesh war of 1971, labour and food shortages, widespread political corruption, and the declaration of the state of Emergency. Amidst this backdrop Indian cinema in both its popular and art/parallel film forms flourished. This exciting new collection brings together original research from across the arts and humanities disciplines that examine the legacies of the 1970s in India’s cinemas, offering an invaluable insight into this important period. The authors argue that the historical processes underway in the 1970s are important even today, and can be deciphered in the aural and visual medium of Indian cinema. The book explores two central themes: first, the popular cinema’s role in helping to construct the decade’s public culture; and second, the powerful and under-studied archive of the decade as present in India’s popular cinemas. This book is based on a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.