Post-millennial Marathi cinema is a dynamic and expanding practice that is celebrated as a “new-wave” but has not received much critical engagement. This book presents the first comprehensive inquiry of contemporary films and examines their textual, industrial, and cultural intersections to understand what constitutes the “new-ness” of Marathi cinema. Establishing the vernacular particularity of Marathi cinema, the book argues that newage films are actively engaged in a reflexive intellectual and social critique as a mark of new filmmaking in India. In the diversity of genres and topics handled by Marathi filmmakers since 2004 this study identifies four broad affective topographies for analysis – an imagery of nostalgia underpinning the narrative strategies of Marathi films, the articulation of social aspiration as a theme as well as a societal dialectic, an experiential reflexivity in the representation of Dalit and marginal narratives, and a mediatic network of border-crossings through transnational influences on films. Contemporary Marathi Cinema: Space, Marginality, and Aspiration offers a critical dialogue on broad issues of film policy, multiplex economics, genre forms, queer politics, and neoliberal contexts. It will be indispensable to students and researchers of Indian cinemas, regional filmmaking, media, cultural studies, popular culture and performance, literature, and South Asian studies, and will also be of interest to filmmakers and cinephiles.

This book is a critical history of Marathi cinema, from its formative years in the 1920s till the end of 1990s. It is the first work to explore the industrial and aesthetic dynamics of Marathi cinema, and elaborate on the idea of region as performance using the framework of critical socio-spatial analysis. Against the dominance of Hindi cinema, the Marathi film industry, as a regional film practice in India, has developed within a cultural and spatial liminality. This historical situation of the Marathi film industry is formulated here as the shaping and dispersal of a vernacular cultural space; and is traced over a period of seven decades, across genres like the saint-film, social melodramas, and the tamasha film, as well as in urban and mofussil sites of film circulation. The book aims to be a useful resource for students, researchers, and general readers, while attending to a lack of scholarly inquiries on this important regional film culture.

This volume offers a novel approach to the world of adaptations through an intense cross-cultural study. The concept of ‘adaptation’ is extensively discussed here, exploring its meaning and relevance, as well as the various forms it takes. The book investigates what happens when three 20th century European plays, considered as landmark works of the age, are adapted to the Indian context in three different languages; discussing the dynamics and the results of this. It takes us into the minds of the creators – playwrights, adapters, directors, actors, and producers, and ‘others’. The interviews with directors who suffused the western plays with Indian flavor and served them to the local audience also provide valuable insights about theatrical, cultural, and ideological concerns. It also represents an interesting collection of examples and analogies hand-picked from the wide space of literature, theatre, and cinema. It offers a comprehensive base for a thorough understanding of adaptations and the allied multi-disciplinary issues.

The over-the-top musicals of Bollywood may be the most familiar aspect of Indian popular culture, but there are many more, all explored in this fascinating volume. Pop Culture India! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle follows the rise of modern India's pop culture world, especially since the 1980s, when relaxed censorship and economic liberalization led to an explosion in movies, music, mass media, consumerism, spiritual practices, and more. It is a captivating introduction to a diverse nation whose appetite for entertainment has led to some surprising twists and turns in recent history. How did a popular Indian television series spark a change in government and the rise of Hindu nationalism? Are some Bollywood film companies laundering money for organized crime, or even al Qaeda? What accounts for the overwhelming popularity of that quaint vestige of colonialism, cricket? The answers, and many more intriguing insights, await the reader in Pop Culture India!

This book investigates theories and practices shaped by a performance’s relationship to the archive. The contributions in the volume examine how the changing nature of performance practices has made it imperative to understand how the archive and archival practices could add to the performance work. They explore a variety of themes, including artistic engagement with the archive in both conceptual and material terms; physical, virtual and digital forms; publicly and privately collected; oral, written and digital ways; or organized and unorganized collections. Finally, the volume examines how archives are modelled on existing structure and the ways in which they can be brought into discourses and practices of performance making through engagement and contestation. A novel approach to performance theory, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of performance studies, media and culture studies, studies of technology and art as also literature and literary criticism.

The largest film industry in the world after Hollywood is celebrated in this updated and expanded edition of a now classic work of reference. Covering the full range of Indian film, this new revised edition of the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema includes vastly expanded coverage of mainstream productions from the 1970s to the 1990s and, for the first time, a comprehensive name index. Illustrated throughout, there is no comparable guide to the incredible vitality and diversity of historical and contemporary Indian film.

This book offers a concise and cutting-edge repository of essential information on new independent Indian films, which have orchestrated a recent renaissance in the Bollywood-dominated Indian cinema sphere. Spotlighting a specific timeline, from the Indies’ consolidated emergence in 2010 across a decade of their development, the book takes note of recent transformations in the Indian political, economic, cultural and social matrix and the concurrent release of unflinchingly interrogative and radically evocative films that traverse LGBTQ+ issues, female empowerment, caste discrimination, populist politics and religious violence. A combination of essential Indie-specific information and concise case studies makes this a must-have quick guide to the future torchbearers of Indian cinema for scholars, students, early career researchers and a global audience interested in intersecting aspects of cinema, culture, politics and society in contemporary India.

A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema's widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film. Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India's moving image cultures.