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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]

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 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]

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]

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]

Presents an invitation to submit research papers on the broad topic of Indian cinema, Bollywood, and its audiences for a special issue of "South Asian Popular Culture" journal. Information on Bollywood; Requirements for the papers that will be submitted for publication; Expected content of the papers.

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.