Through the lens of political economy of communication and sports, this article examines the role of Bollywood’s sports movies in promoting patriotism and constructing an Indian national identity. ...

Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation

Promoting patriotism through mediated sports: Political economy of Bollywood sports movies

Abstract:Hijras, India's \"third gender\" now often translated as trans figures, have long been defined by their castrated status in colonial and postcolonial discourse, which has aimed at conflating their social and moral positions with their corporeal modification. This article juxtaposes various sets of narrative accounts to explain the theological underpinnings of liberal explanations for accommodating queer sexuality in India. First, the article looks at contemporary Bollywood films in which hijras are often inserted into the plot to bring the villains to justice, sometimes by castrating them. This seeming contradiction, in which queer personhood is made life-affirming, reveals the complex ways in which hijras have been redefined as legitimizing forms of historical queerness in South Asia. Their role, it is argued, is better understood not through an ontological notion of generosity but through the particular dramaturgical position of the sutradhar that the Hindu-Muslim theology of South Asia makes available. The sutradhar is the one who holds (dhar) the strings (sutra) of the dramatic plot. The voicing and enacting of the moral position with which queer ethics have been associated, both in film and in life, are drawn from this character. Given that the long documented history of hijras has made them quite intelligible to South Asian people without the need for translation, this article argues that debates of queer sexuality must go beyond the civilizational terms of \"West and the rest\" and explore the theological material available for the crafting of queer personhood and ethics.

The Queer NarratorViolence, Ethics, and Sexuality

This chapter focuses on how the Indian film industry has helped market “India Inc.” to the outside world since the Government of India accorded ‘industry’ status to the business of film-making in 1998. Specifically, this article focuses on how the biggest film industry in the world went through decades of chaotic and unprofessional managerial regimes to acquire the status of one of the most sought-after marketing platforms by different entities—both Indian and international. The chapter also discusses how the ‘marriage of convenience’ between Indian film world and the game of cricket added fuel to the marketization of the Indian film industry. Overall, this chapter leaves the reader with several interesting and groundbreaking ideas for future research.

The Impact of Indian Movie Industry on Marketization of India, Inc.

“Queen of Misery” Nirupa Roy: Re-reading the Filmic Mother of 1980s Through Alternate Care Dynamics

Critical toponymies, instead of viewing place names as transparent signifiers that designate places as ‘objects’ or ‘artifacts’, have foregrounded the necessity for understanding place naming as ‘a contested spatial practice’ and attempted ‘a critical interrogation of the politics of place naming’. In view of the frequency of colonial erasures and appropriations of the spaces of the colonised, post-colonial reclamations of place resort to technologies of toponymic cleansing, founding and restoration as acts of resistance. Toponymic resistance can occur on both the creation and deployment of alternative names and the use of alternative pronunciations for established names. Viewing ‘pronunciation to be an important element of the cultural politics of place naming within post-colonial societies’, Kearns and Berg argue ‘that even when widespread agreement on the name of a place prevails, the way the name is pronounced reflects, and contributes to, the constitution of imagined communities’. Arguing that plural pronunciations of the city’s names – Bombay, Bambai and Mumbai – evoke multiversal cosmopolitan urban imaginaries that are sometimes disjunctive, this article shows that Hindi cinema employs ‘multiplicity of means’, amalgamating the linguistic tools of toponymy with paralinguistic and extralinguistic codes, to produce the myth of the cosmopolitan city or ‘the Bombay Dream’.

Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation

Citations

Promoting patriotism through mediated sports: Political economy of Bollywood sports movies

The Queer NarratorViolence, Ethics, and Sexuality

The Impact of Indian Movie Industry on Marketization of India, Inc.

“Queen of Misery” Nirupa Roy: Re-reading the Filmic Mother of 1980s Through Alternate Care Dynamics

Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan: Requiem for a Cosmopolitan City

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