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British Asian music is a phenomenon that not only involves the scenes of entertainment, but has opened its doors to the educational panorama too. Due to the crisis this industry is facing, British Asian musician and practitioners met during the BASS ‘Made in Britain’ Festival in Birmingham, to debate the future of this industry within the local and international arenas. Led by the international Reggae star Apache Indian, the activities at the school have produced important reflections on the status of this musical landscape. This paper, via social and cultural analysis, narrates the event, and sets a series of questions on the future evolution of the British Asian music industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manipur, a small state in the North-Eastern corner of India, is traditionally regarded as the home ofgandharvas(the celestial dancers). Manipuri is one of the 11 dance styles recognized by the Ministry of Culture of India that have incorporated various key techniques mentioned in the ancient treatises like the Natya Shastra and Bharatarnava and has been placed under ‘a common heritage’ called Indian classical dance forms (shastriya nritya) – Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, Mohiniyattam, Odissi, Sattriya, Chhau, Gaudiya Nritya, and Thang Ta. In 1951 Louise Lightfoot, the ‘Australian mother of Kathakali’ dance, visited the remote mountain state of Manipur to learn more about Manipuri dance. Soon she was successful in persuading and bringing eminent exponents of Manipuri dancing style Jagoi, Rajkumar Priyagopal Singh and Lakshman Singh, to tour Australia. Priyagopal, with the help of Lightfoot and their international tours, to some extent, de-provincialized and also popularized the Manipuri dance and paved the way for other dancers from North-eastern region of India in the International art world. Through this paper I attempt to highlight the contribution of Lightfoot in the promotion of Manipuri dance and in Australia. I here also engage explicitly with Priyagopal and Lightfoot's unusual dance collaboration and trace the historical journey and reception of a Manipuri dance in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through an ethnographic investigation of an Asian American-only basketball league in Atlanta known as Asian Ballers League, this paper illustrates the messy, contested, and complex terrain of identity formation for South Asian American men who participate in an Asian American league. South Asian American-ness and Asian American-ness do not exist in a vacuum but in relation to both racialized masculinities and power. South Asian American masculinity is performed in relation to Asian Americans, African Americans, whites, and in relation to racializing discourses. As basketball practices allow these young men to insert themselves into Asian America, they simultaneously perform their versions of South Asian American-ness and structure their own set of exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslim women's personal relationship with the body beneath and beyond the veil has received little attention, especially in the sporting literature. Instead, talk of sporting Muslim women has been more frequently animated around a monolithic Orientalist narrative that sensationalises the veil, and asserts the oppression of Islamic thinking on gender equality and female sexuality. Similarly, discussions of South Asian Muslim women's participation in sport have been more routinely informed by ethnocentric stereotypes about the ‘passive Asian woman’. In this paper I engage postcolonial feminist thinking to movebeyonduncritical dichotomous re/presentations that have systematically denied diverse sporting Muslim women an identity or bodily presence outside of the discursive identity of the veil. I focus on British Muslim Pakistani women who play basketball, and explore the multifarious, dynamic ways in which these women negotiate and perform various discourses pertaining to idealised yet dramaturgical notions of ‘hetero-sexy’ femininity on and off the court. By drawing the fe/male ocular away from the visual aesthetics of the veil and Islamic theocracy in shaping their engagement in sport, I seek to unveil something morepersonalabout the relationship these sporting Muslim women have with the body that theyownand an identity which they are actively carving out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the multimodal representations of beauty inAsiana, a contemporary magazine aimed at British Asian women. Through a methodological integration of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis, it argues that the magazine promulgates a universal aesthetic of female beauty which is persistently white, western and wealthy; a standard imbued with corresponding ideals regarding femininity and female sexuality. The analysis will focus on the constitution of the consuming subject through the beauty/lifestyle features and skin care/fashion advertisements to illustrate the ways in which whiteness is promoted as a commodity in the global marketplace. Underlying tensions are inherent in the juxtaposition of Western and traditional images and values which offer this ‘new’ community a commodified and hybridized subject position. As a useful complement to the substantive analysis, a small-scale focus group discussion was carried out to ascertain the subject positions taken up by the target audience. Despite a discursive, nationalistic discourse which promotes Asian cultural superiority, the article concludes that the association of pale skin with success and the alignment of material commodities with progress results in Western forms of expression having an advantage over indigenous ones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Hindi film song ‘Thoda resham lagta hai’ [It takes a little silk] written by the music director Bappi Lahiri for the film Jyoti (1981) was a long forgotten tune before being rediscovered in 2002 by American music producer DJ Quik. Based around an unauthorized 35-second sample of the recording, the Truth Hurts song ‘Addictive’ famously inspired Bappi Lahiri to sue Quik's associate Dr Dre (executive producer of the song), Aftermath Records, and Universal Music (Aftermath's parent company and distributor) for $500 million. Beyond Lahiri's claims of cultural imperialism, obscenity, and outright theft, DJ Quik's rearrangement of the song was, in turn, adopted by music producers, including Lahiri himself, in a wide variety of international genres. This paper tracks the use and reuse of the melody in Indian, American, and Jamaican contexts, focusing on the song's remediation for new audiences. Yet even as this well-traveled tune evokes different historical and local meanings, it evokes an eroticized Other in each context, including its original context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in Sri Lanka, filmmakers have increasingly come under the threat of violence for putatively-partisan depictions of the recently concluded armed conflict in Sri Lanka. In this paper, I suggest that Sri Lankan cinema has become a discursive battleground between nationalist elements both in India and in Sri Lanka. I will discuss how Vimukthi Jayasundara's The Forsaken Land (2005) makes a crucial intervention in the competing nationalist discourses, between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, circulating around the Sri Lankan civil war. Rather than interpret the film simply as an attack on Sri Lankan state institutions, as perceived by Sinhala nationalists, I demonstrate how the film provides a critique of authoritarian, military rule on both sides of the conflict – the Government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil militants. Both entities see themselves as preserving a distinct national culture, against attacks from the other side, achieved through the policing of gender and sexuality, the same cultural ideals that come under scrutiny in Jayasundara's controversial film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way significant Tamil films of the 1970s were distinct from most of the films made by and largely in the major Madras studios – Modern Theaters, AVM, Gemini, and Vijaya-Vauhini – during the earlier decades. It interrogates the seminal moment in the history of Tamil cinema when films such as Aval Appadiththan (1978), Agraharathil Kazhuthai (1978), 16 Vayathiniley (1977) and Uthirippookkal (1979), marked by ambiguous and dark protagonists, avoidance of clichéd and cathartic closures, experiments in cinematography and editing, and shooting on locations and new subjectivity, signaled the transition of Tamil cinema from the classical period of the studio system to the post-classical. All these films epitomize a unique period punctuated by the changing power of studios and stars and dramatic changes in technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centrality of South Indian cinemas in ‘New Indian Cinema’, one of the many cultural constellations of the turbulent and vibrant 1970s, has been widely acknowledged. Focusing on the aesthetic structuring of select moments from Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Swayamvaram, K.P. Kumaran's Athithi and P.A. Backer's Kabaneenadhi Chuvannappol, this paper investigates the contestations central to the emergence of a realist aesthetic in Malayalam cinema. It unpacks the movement towards the consolidation of realism as a mode of address that generates certain spectatorial responses, as opposed to understanding this turn in Malayalam cinema as foregrounding a new version of the social. The status of popular cinema and cinephilia are at the center of these contestations, as these film texts actively intervene in debates around aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant counterpoint to the subaltern impatience and revolt that characterized popular Hindi cinema of the 1970s was the staging of middle-class civility and desire, away from the generic conventions of the ‘masala-Social.’ This paper argues that this new desire for modernity was supplemented with a determination to secure it, and necessarily involved fresh forms of engagement and disengagement with the Symbolic pact that had instituted modernity in India during the Nehruvian conjuncture. I trace the emergence of a new cycle of middle-class cinema by focusing on the contrapuntal star personas of the ‘angry’ and the ‘affable’ young men (Amitabh Bachchan and Amol Palekar) during this decade. The focus is on selected films by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee which put into play a newer narrative contract, and consolidated the rise of the desiring/consuming screen subjects of the post-liberalization Hindi film narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I pursue a method of ethnographic media research that foregrounds the relation of embodied experience to what Gilles Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism.’ For Deleuze the critique of Kant's theory of a transcendental subject grounding space-time moves thought toward an intuition of the time of becoming, the being of time itself: it is not we who constitute time, but time constitutes and reconstitutes subjectivity. The aim of such a method is to understand the organization of sensory-motor circuits that stabilizes the movement of becoming as clichés entrenched in habit. I argue that Deleuze's transcendental empiricism is a robust method to diagram South Asian media's empirical field in terms of its various circuits between the virtual and the actual. This method allows us to pragmatically diagram the doubleness of the mobile – as intensive potentializer and biopolitical control grid – in which media form dynamic feedbacked assemblages with the body's sensorimotor processes. Mobile connectivity is unmediated and direct, which is why it is both virtual and actual at once. Thus, it has a definite history while also being part of the body as a center of indetermination (virtuality). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a cultural, educational and religious experience of Western tourists to Dharamsala in Northern India. It supplies information on the growing phenomenon of Western people visiting the East for self-fulfilment, study and belief. The article aims to deal with tourism in its popular cultural format, as this aspect of the phenomenon is under-theorized. A structured questionnaire was administered to 127 visitors at seven different sites in Dharamsala. In addition, 20 in-depth interviews were held with participants. Participant observation was chosen as another research method, as one of the researchers had lived in Dharamsala from 2004 to 2005. The study examines and analyses the characteristics of visitors to Dharamsala in terms of their cultural, educational, religious, and tourist experience and positions the visitors on a scale of motivations from education to tourism, and from pilgrimage to tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concern over 'forced' conversions believed to be initiated by 'predatory' Muslim males, who 'groom' Sikh 'girls' into converting to Islam against their will, continues to resurface within the British public eye. This narrative first emerged in late 1980s and early 1990s and has been reproduced to establish the threat of the Muslim 'Other'. Such a discourse remains fixed within the Sikh social fabric as the tale continues to circulate within the collective despite a lack of evidence to support such claims. By examining the construction and manifestation of this narrative, this paper will explore the question of Islamophobia to explain why such a sensational account composed of 'villains and victims' or 'friends and enemies' has remained so prominent within the Sikh diasporic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This photo-essay chronicles the relationship between the artist, Karachi as a postcolonial urban environment, and the small offshore island of Manora. The artist's visits to Manora become a mode of memorializing the hidden histories of decay and oblivion that pertain to this island, as well as its historical role as an escape from the urban chaos of Karachi. Memorialisation in turn becomes the catalyst for creativity and for the artist's role as conservator of memories and histories. My desire to leave the city... just like all the other passengers on the public boat who want to get some distance from the density of space and of life in this city. Manora must always have been this restful anchor to the turbulence of Karachi, something so needed now, a sheltered space that is fast losing ground. Naiza Khan, Journal, 2 April 2009 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore how Internet media is shaping transnationally-mediated South Asian music subcultures. Rather than serve as a literature review of new media and South Asian popular culture, this paper is especially interested in how particular music websites, discussion forums, social networking sites, and IP-based technologies in general are facilitating the creation of progressive South Asian virtual spaces. One particular South Asian musical scene, 'Taqwacore', a transnational Muslim punk music scene, is used as a case study. Reference is made to other non-Muslim diasporic South Asian musical scenes including Asian electronic music and Bhangra as well to contextualize Taqwacore. Ethnographic research (participant observation and interviewing) was conducted both online and offline using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, discussion groups, and face-to-face meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dramas that triggered the British imposed 1876 Dramatic Performance Act in India reveal a playful indictment of the British colonial character in portrayals that range from benevolent missionaries, swindlers, rapists, lusty princes, and monkeys, to pigs and sheep. This paper examines the relationship between dramatic representations of the white sahib (colonial ruler) and the construction of theatre censorship, through the plays performed by The Great National Theatre, Calcutta: Dinabandhu Mitra's Indigo Mirror (Nil Darpan, 1860), Dakshina Charan Chattopadhyay's Tea Planters' Mirror (Chakar Darpan, 1875), Upendra Nath Das's Surendra-Binodini (1875), Gajadananda and the Prince (1876), and Police of Pig and Sheep (1876). In this discussion I hope to illustrate how the British perpetuated colonial hegemony in alliance with a Brahman and Indian elite and in so doing deflected the native gaze away from its own representations, whereby what was political was branded 'obscene' and resistance to the colonial 'other' was forced into self-abnegation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teesri Duniya Theatre produces politically relevant theatre about a number of uncommon and contentious issues. Its plays rely on everyday cultural experiences acquired within the local cultural milieu. This approach involves a deliberate distancing from the culture of origin and, at the same time, a resistance to cultural homogenization. A dialogic exchange ensues that includes an examination of critical social issues and relationships with the dominant culture(s), as well as a questioning of cultural orthodoxy from within diverse cultural communities. This paper discusses the material conditions (funding and company structure) that affect Teesri Duniya's work. It also addresses the relationship between art and society through a discussion of selected images and texts from Teesri Duniya productions. Teesri Duniya Theatre has demonstrated that a politically engaged theatre that examines critical and contentious issues, and builds solidarity among cultures, can represent the cultural identities of visible minorities as well as express the relationships between cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors give a personal account of a one week Theatre for Development Workshop held in Manmathapur in Northern Bangladesh, sponsored by the British Council. The practice of short, workshops facilitated by urban 'experts' in impoverished rural areas is heavily critiqued. This opens into a broader critique of the manipulative and paternalistic attitudes which often undermine the effectiveness of post-colonial development communications, due to global power imbalances. Modesty is urged for the strategizing and practice of such workshops through a return to the participatory principles of Paulo Freire. The paper describes the advantages of 'Barter Theatre' as a methodology which attempts to ensure equality in the exchange of skills and ideas between marginalized, host communities and visiting facilitators. The potential of such intercultural 'bartering' is linked both to the injustices caused by, and potential resistance to, globalized communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Washingtonil Tiruma[image omitted] am (Marriage in Washington), C[image omitted] vi's early-1960s Tamil-language novel about wealthy American Mrs. Rockefeller conducting an elaborate Tamil Brahmin marriage in Washington, DC, has been adapted for radio, stage, and television. In this paper, I compare the Washingtonil Tiruma[image omitted] am play to the novel and television serial to argue that the story facilitates the re-constitution and re-negotiation of Tamil Brahmin identity. It appeared during the anti-Brahmin movement in Tamilnadu and reflects conflicts within a community trying to define itself as both traditional and modern and suffering from the dual impulses of cultural narcissism and cultural anxiety. Washingtonil Tiruma[image omitted] am is a performance of tradition, the measure by which Tamil Brahmins tend to evaluate their culture. The American characters revalue everyday things and practices in the eyes of contemporary Tamil readers. The narrative displaces tradition onto the past or onto ideal selves, allowing contemporary Tamils to associate themselves with modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asian diasporic subjects have dealt with experiences of 'home' in various ways: ranging from the ostensibly failed assimilations of racialized subjects in their new homes to the nostalgia and trauma of exile felt in relation to former homelands. Most conceptualizations of home, in their privileging of racial formations that underpin Western racism, have elided questions of (homo)sexuality. This reading of My Beautiful Laundrette evinces the ways in which queer South Asian Diasporas resist the interpellative praises of the British nation-state during the years of Margaret Thatcher. I argue that the film depicts, on the one hand, hegemonic homes that expound classist and heteronormative ideals supported by neoliberal capitalism. On the other hand, the characters Omar and Tania act as queer agents whose non-heteronormative sexual practices trouble such exclusive homes, and thus create new 'home' spaces for belonging. This paper contributes to queer post-colonial studies, 'third' world feminism, and diasporic cultural studies by examining, for a historical perspective, how Kureishi's queer characters resist the interpellative demands of the nation-state, capitalism, and the materialist family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bollywood has been extensively studied for its nationalist themes, its widespread popularity, and its emphasis on tradition and ritual. For the most part, these traditions and rituals tend to be derived from Hindu mythology and symbolism, presenting an interesting paradox given that its audience is not composed exclusively of Hindu viewers. This contradiction is deepened by the fact that Bollywood's production and content are touched by the influences of other cultures and religions, including Islam. This paper focuses specifically on the role of Islam in Bollywood films, analysing central themes and production practices and assessing whether these have changed substantially over time. Given India's complicated political, cultural, and religious history and the more global concern with Islam's meaning and significance, Islam inevitably plays a significant - and somewhat transformed - role in popular Indian cinema. However, in the films discussed here, it also carries familiar associations with terrorism, violence, and intercultural misunderstanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of three notable people related to the popular culture regarding the 3rd South Asian Popular Culture conference. Doctoral degree candidate Subrhi Malik in the Department of English at University of Illinois in Chicago explained that refusal to organise panels on basis of similarity of analysed media has led to necessary juxtapositions. Ethnology professor Bernhard Fuchs and University of Exerter doctoral candidate Chandrika Partel were the other two individuals who gave their views.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Bradley Shope about the African American jazz musicians in India and another by Ratnakar Tripathy on a sociological analysis of Bhojpuri cinema.

In the autumn of 2017 we entered the second year of our PhDs under the supervision of Professor Rajinder Dudrah and were tasked with organising a conference which sought to bring together the next generation of Bollywood scholars. It was a natural choice and fit for our research topics - Dalit representation in Bollywood is Vishal's area of enquiry and white femininity in Bollywood is Alexandra's. We were delighted that Professor Rachel Dwyer, who has been a significant an influence on our work as our supervisor Professor Dudrah, accepted and attended to give the keynote speech on ageing masculinity in Bollywood, examining the case of Salman Khan specifically. [Extracted from the article]

This paper deconstructs the representation of state-of-the-art colour television sets in India through close textual analysis of print advertisements that appeared in leading national news magazines such as India Today from 1991 to 2001. It argues that the advertisements are indicative of the innovative strategies - such as the home theatre -- that are being used by leading manufacturers in the Indian electronics industry to promote television as a technology capable of bringing the outside world inside the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the autumn of 2017 we entered the second year of our PhDs under the supervision of Professor Rajinder Dudrah and were tasked with organising a conference which sought to bring together the next generation of Bollywood scholars. It was a natural choice and fit for our research topics - Dalit representation in Bollywood is Vishal's area of enquiry and white femininity in Bollywood is Alexandra's. We were delighted that Professor Rachel Dwyer, who has been a significant an influence on our work as our supervisor Professor Dudrah, accepted and attended to give the keynote speech on ageing masculinity in Bollywood, examining the case of Salman Khan specifically. [Extracted from the article]

The article attempts to explore the specific performative and digital practice of users sharing digital self-images and videos on social media platforms in which they cry, with or without a 'tear filter'. In this article, the author employs Netnography (Kozinets, 2010) to look at social media accounts and online archives to track the origins of the trend of 'crying videos on TikTok' and through comments, reactions, and user interactions, attempts to understand how grief is performed on Instagram and TikTok. The article offers a diversion from the ossification of the current scholarship on self-images and identity construction on social media by looking at the marketability and entanglements in ecologies of commerce and sociality that the crying videos lead to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the reasons and the effects of the rise of digital platforms in India, specifically focusing on SVOD platforms. The proliferation of various digital video platforms of different types has been tremendous both in India and the world since early years of 21st century. Taking into consideration the fact that digitality in India is a recent phenomenon, the article, by drawing upon some of the most significant theories in new media studies analyzes the questions of remediation and mediatization in the context of streaming culture in India by taking an example of an emergent media form - web series. The article also takes into consideration the impact of infrastructural development of streaming culture in India, and looks at several examples illustrating digital revolution in India - the remediation of television and the regulation of SVOD content as an example of entanglement of media and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These notes are based on an ongoing project for building an archive of a premier women's college, Miranda House (established 1948), University of Delhi. We begin with a brief overview of the processes and methodologies involved in identifying materials to shape our collection, discuss processes of cataloguing, digitization, planning digital collections and a website. Our collection lies at the cusp of being an institutional archive, women's archive, archive of college women as well as an archive for doing public history. Despite the challenges of infrastructure, trained staff, technological expertise, digital humanities offer us immensely exciting possibilities. We use social media to reach out to alumni to build our collections, social media presence to showcase our materials, digital tools to widen access, share skills and create awareness regarding the significance of archiving the history of college women. Our attempts at DH have been quite successful. However, as DH opens up a plethora of opportunities, doing digital history also has its methodological challenges as well as conceptual and financial concerns for feminist projects like ours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This working note examines the social media presence of Hijra and trans communities in Bangladesh. Visibility filters and representation has created new forms of community making and empowerment. Whilst some of this is created through self representation, this note also argues the role played by international bodies and neoliberal agendas in this creation of online identities. Through an exploration of digital identities, these working notes seek to enrich our understanding of queer, trans and hijra lives in Bangladesh and also help in envisioning radical possibilities of connection and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a particular focus on zines produced in Bombay from the 1990s to 2000s, this essay draws on and thinks with the masala that flavored the pages of three prominent Bombay queer zines: Bombay Dost, Scripts and Gaysi Zine. Through close readings of specific volumes, I demonstrate that zines constitute not only an overlooked archive of queer and trans cultures in India but have also been crucial to facilitating 'queer sociality' (Rodríguez 2011) between the sheets of the zine's pages and in the worlds through which its copies might travel. I develop the concept of masala-with a queer accent (Khubchandani 2020)-to reflect its usage and meaning in queer spaces to reference sex, messiness, gossip and at times unruliness and nonresectable behavior. Extending its potential, I suggest that masala names not only a genre of content that is erotically charged or gossip-laden but is perhaps itself an analytic or technique by which queer subjects make political claims and forge community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Indian superhero films, the superheroes migrate to cities. Indian cinema has always tried to emulate the stylish superheroes of the west like Spiderman, Batman, and various characters of marvel comics which take the audiences to space, time travel, glossy VFX, and unbelievable stunts. [Extracted from the article]

This article studies the Tamil film director Pa. Ranjith as a phenomenon and evaluates the sensorial signification of his experiments with performance and music (Aadalum-Paadalum) in the filmic medium. Foregrounding the music band that Ranjith initiated, 'The Casteless Collective' – inspired by the 20th century anti-caste Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass – which features Gaana (Tamil music form mainly performed by Dalits in urban slums), hip-hop, and fusions of world music; I discuss the debates on music and caste as well as analyze the song-performances in his films Attakathi (Cardboard Knife), Madras, Kabali, Kaala, and Sarpatta Parambarai (The Sarpatta Clan), which I suggest, re-script anti-caste sensibilities in popular culture. This article demonstrates that Ranjith's interventions not only expose inscriptions of caste but also creatively stage acts of a collective against caste, which is a casteless becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chetan Bhagat's blockbuster, was the first popular novel about business process outsourcing work – but not the last. Since 2007, several new authors, including Vikrant Shukla, Shruti Saxena, Anish Trivedi, Brinda Narayan and Makhudar Yadav have all launched careers in fiction writing by employing call centre narratives, and drawing specifically on their corporate work experience. Much like popular compilations of 'true' stories by Sudhindra Mokhasi, these ostensibly fictional texts perform a variety of functions: instructing prospective call centre employees on the industry, breaking down negative perceptions of call centre work and entertaining the reader with tales of youthful hijinks. Perhaps most importantly, however, popular texts interpolate a growing Indian middle class who wishes to consume the products of the west without either leaving South Asia or conceding any cultural loss, absence or inferiority. In so doing, popular call centre texts reconfigure narratives of globalization for domestic use, which may be why these novels and anthologies have gained far more popularity than the prevalence of business process outsourcing work alone would suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the stardom of Ranveer Singh in the light of Queer Theory. In the last decade, Ranveer Singh has established himself as the superstar of the Bombay film industry. Not only has he acted in a range of challenging films, thereby proving his versatility as an actor, his quirky sense of clothing and style, as well as his eccentric personality and over the top public gestures, have been subject to endless public conversations and debates. In this essay, I argue, that Ranveer Singh's aesthetics – both, on-screen and off-screen – mirror an aesthetics of queerness that militate against the normative expectations of a male star in the Bombay film industry. The characters that he plays on screen, his fashion, as well as his public conduct, together, are responsible for the construction of such an aesthetic. Rather than using 'queer theory' to examine the stardom of Ranveer Singh, this essay will look for ways in which Singh's aesthetics allow the spectators to read queerness in non-identitarian ways. Singh's body of works and his body-as-text repeatedly sabotage normative heterosexual tendencies, thereby, revealing that queerness need not always flow out of LGBTQ marked bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the process of economic liberalization began in India in the 1990s, globalization opened channels for the circulation of Western popular literature and culture in India, which led to their localized adaptation. An illustrative example of this phenomenon is Indian chick lit, which features plots that have a lot in common with Western chick lit but are adapted to reflect urban Indian popular culture, complete with popular Indian stereotypes like the arranged marriage to make it more relatable to the target Indian audience. Through an analysis of Swati Kaushal's Piece of Cake (2004) and Advaita Kala's Almost Single (2009), this essay will illustrate how Indian chick lit represents a newer version of Rupal Oza's post-liberalization 'new liberal Indian woman' and glocalizes the influences of Western culture. I also suggest that Indian chick lit requires a broadening of the understanding of agency to include the choices that privileged subjects make even if they do not dismantle hegemonic power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces several articles published in the special issue of the journal on 'Beyond and Beneath the Habitual.' The authors present a critique of popular culture and everyday life in South Asia with a view to reframe the visual. Included are articles by Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam, Iftikhar Dadi, Vivek Bald and Anupama Arora.

Departing from the extensive internet shutdown (2019–2021) that the Indian government imposed on the annexed state of Jammu and Kashmir, this essay traces a historical trajectory of Kashmir's invisibilisation in India's popular imagination. Focusing film and television serial productions from the 1960s onwards, my argument proceeds from the forming of the cinematic master narrative on Kashmir towards the forcefully aborted TV serial Kashmeer (2003). I contend that in order to understand the large public acceptance both of Kashmir's annexation and its digital closure, we need to engage a more capacious conceptualisation of censorship that captures the variety of its political influences in everyday entertainment and its formative role for audiences. Moving beyond the official interference with imagery and story lines (through the Central Board of Film Certification, CBFB) I examine on the one hand, how the visual framing of Kashmir, and its absence, has been dependent on a structurally, ideologically and economically shifting televisual field that bore interlinked modes of vertical/state and horizontal/populist censorship as well as manipulative corporate intervention. On the other hand, in conjuncture with these conditions, I argue for a stronger consideration of the functional significance, at specific historical moments, of different formats and genres in fictitious storytelling, whose respective logics of production and consumption are themselves carriers of emancipative opening and closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Introduces a series of papers which appeared in the April 2003 issue of the journal of "South Asian Popular Culture." Analysis of select Asian diasporic films in the U.S.; Fusion of British and South Asian cultural practices in the domain of theater in Britain; Photography exhibition in the U.S. that re-affirmed colonial and orientalist representations of India.

Mainstream Hindi cinema, or Bollywood, has often clustered female characters into a finite number of gendered tropes, from damsels in distress, Hindu goddesses, virtuous wives and mothers, to vamps, molls, vindictive mothers-in-law, and justice-seeking avengers. Recently, women-centric cinema has attempted to depart from such stereotypical portrayals, with movies such as Queen, Pink, and Tumhari Sulu. The present study investigates the nature of female rebellion in women-centric Bollywood movies from 2007 to 2017, delineated by a major act of rebellion undertaken by the female protagonist(s), the antecedents to the major act, the immediate reactions to, and the cinematic consequences of this act. Based on these criteria, four coders independently assessed 13 movies depicting rebellion in women-centric Bollywood movies. Quantitative analyses revealed a consistent story arc of rebellious depictions across movies. Qualitative analyses showed that major acts of rebellion occurred subsequent to negative antecedents such as disrespect, lack of freedom, abandonment, and inequality. Overall, the study contributes to understanding the contemporary portrayal of female rebellion in Bollywood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]