This volume brings together new studies and interdisciplinary research on the changing mediascapes in South Asia. Focusing on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, it explores the transformations in the sphere of cinema, television, performing arts, visual cultures, cyber space and digital media, beyond the traumas of the partitions of 1947 and 1971. Through wide-ranging essays on soft power, performance, film, and television; art and visual culture; and cyber space, social media, and digital texts, the book bridges the gap in the study of the postcolonial and post-Partition developments to reimagine South Asia through a critical understanding of popular culture and media. The volume includes scholars and practitioners from the subcontinent to foster dialogue across the borders, and presents diverse and in-depth studies on film, media and representation in the region. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of media and film studies, postcolonial studies, visual cultures, political studies, partition history, cultural studies, mass media, popular culture, history, sociology and South Asian studies, as well as to media practitioners, journalists, writers, and activists.

The Partition of British India in 1947 set in motion events that have had far-reaching consequences in South Asia – wars, military tensions, secessionist movements and militancy/terrorism. This book looks at key events in 1947 and explores the aftermath of the Partition and its continued impact in the present-day understanding of nationhood and identity. It also examines the diverse and fractured narratives that framed popular memory and understanding of history in the region. The volume includes discussions on the manner in which regions such as the Punjab, Sindh, Kashmir, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow) and North-East India were influenced. It deals with issues such as communal politics, class conflict, religion, peasant nationalism, decolonization, migration, displacement, riots, the state of refugees, women and minorities, as well as the political relationship between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Drawing on major flashpoints in contemporary South Asian history along with representations from literature, art and popular culture, this book will interest scholars of modern Indian history, Partition studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, international relations, politics, sociology, literature and South Asian studies.

This work seeks to examine the event and concurrent transition that the inauguration of India and Pakistan as ‘postcolonial’ states in August 1947 constituted and effectuated. Analysing India and Pakistan together in a parallel and mutually dependant reading, and utilizing primary data and archival materials, Svensson offers new insights into the current literature, seeking to conceptualise independence through partition and decolonisation in terms of novelty and as a ‘restarting of time’. Through his analysis, Svensson demonstrates the constitutive and inexorable entwinement of contingency and restoration, of openness and closure, in the establishment of the postcolonial state. It is maintained that those involved in instituting the new state in a moment devoid of fixity and foundation ‘anchor’ it in preceding beginnings. The work concludes with the proposition that the novelty should not only be regarded as contained in the moment of transition. It should also be seen as contained in the pledge, in the promise and the gesturing towards a future community. Distinct from most other studies on the partition and independence the book assumes the constitutive moment as the focal point, offering a new approach to the study of partition in British India, decolonisation and the institutional of the postcolonial state. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, South Asian studies and political and postcolonial theory.

Over the past 20 years we have seen critical design studies emerge as a springboard for scholars, activists, and those working in the creative industries. Design studies has enabled critics to link the relationship between constructions of knowledge and the emotional commitments that both practitioners and audiences bring to the making and uses of design work. A critical focus on these practices can reveal issues such as the distribution of power and emotional evocations and experiences in and through different designs. At the same time, the use of design studies has drawn on diverse fields such as art history, architecture, public policy, and Geographic Information Systems. This collected volume, the first of its kind, engages with these fields of critical inquiry with ideas and debates in post-colonial studies, and in media and cultural studies. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines material culture and its relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on South Asia. The chapters pose questions about colonial history, colonial and postcolonial cultural practices, and the aestheticization of South Asian art, design, and media forms as they inform identities in a deterritorialized global culture. The sites of the investigation by the contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity of design studies and share the insistence on emphasizing the vernacular: Indian fashion design, lithographic design in Muslim princely states, and Indian floor drawings live alongside museum exhibitions, shopping malls, and film spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

A wide-ranging survey of the Indian sub-continent, Modern South Asia gives an enthralling account of South Asian history. After sketching the pre-modern history of the subcontinent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries from c.1700 to the present. Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, Modern South Asia offers a rare depth of understanding of the social, economic and political realities of this region. This comprehensive study includes detailed discussions of: the structure and ideology of the British raj; the meaning of subaltern resistance; the refashioning of social relations along lines of caste class, community and gender; and the state and economy, society and politics of post-colonial South Asia The new edition includes a rewritten, accessible introduction and a chapter by chapter revision to take into account recent research. The second edition will also bring the book completely up to date with a chapter on the period from 1991 to 2002 and adiscussion of the last millennium in sub-continental history.

This text discusses the principal political and constitutional questions that have arisen in the states of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka following fifty years of independence. In Sri Lanka the pressing problems have been around the inter-ethnic civil war, experiments with constitutional designs, widespread prevalence of corruption and the recrudescence of Buddhist militancy. In India it has been corruption, Hindu nationalism and general political instability. In Bangladesh and Pakistan it has been the role of the military, the state and religion. A general theme is an analysis of the malaise that is prevalent and how and why this was inherited, despite the colonial legacy of parliamentary democracy, the steel framework of a trained bureaucracy, the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law.

The fifth edition of Modern South Asia draws on the newest historical research and scholarship in the field to interpret and debate key developments in modern South Asian history and historical writing, covering the diverse spectrum of the subcontinent’s social, economic and political past. Jointly authored by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, this definitive study offers a rare depth of historical understanding of the politics, cultures and economies that have shaped the lives of more than a fifth of humanity. This new edition on the 75th anniversary of independence and partition brings the narrative up to the present day, discussing recent events and addressing new themes such as the capture of state power in India by the forces of religious majoritarianism, economic development in the context of the ‘rise’ of Asia and strategic shifts occasioned by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and China’s increasing role in the region. Providing fresh insights into the structure and ideology of the British raj, the meaning of subaltern resistance, the refashioning of social relations along lines of caste, class, religion and gender, the different strands of anti-colonial nationalism and the dynamics of decolonization, this is an essential resource for all students of the modern history of South Asia in an Indian Ocean and global context.

Intense and sometimes contentious debates about South Asian identity.