Description
This volume attempts to address some of the questions that arise when
considering the complex role that cinema has performed and continues to
perform in the public sphere in India. The essays herein focus on issues related
to the shifting responses of the colonial state, the Indian nationalists and
intellectuals, and the popular press to the emerging medium of cinema and its
creative potential. It also examines the threats as well as the challenges to this
medium; the transitions and the continuities, the filiations and the ruptures
from the colonial to the postcolonial as represented in cinema. The schisms,
fissures, and conflicts of the colonial state, and later of the postcolonial nation
state which is increasingly marked by the economic and cultural processes of
globalization, accompanied paradoxically by bitter local and ethnic conflicts, are
critically analysed in the context of the local, national, and global financial networks within which cinema is
located.