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A highly original study of newspaper cartoons throughout India's history and culture, and their significance for the world today.
This book deals with Punches and Punch-like magazines in 19th and 20th century Asia, covering an area from Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the West via British India up to China and Japan in the East. It traces an alternative and largely unacknowledged side of the history of this popular British periodical, and simultaneously casts a wide-reaching comparative glance on the genesis of satirical journalism in various Asian countries. Demonstrating the spread of both textual and visual satire, it is an apt demonstration of the transcultural trajectory of a format intimately linked to media-bound public spheres evolving in the period concerned.
For over forty years, Shyam Benegal has been one the leading forces in Indian cinema. Informed by a rich political and philosophical sensibility and a mastery of the art and craft of filmmaking, Benegal is both of, and not of, Bollywood. As a philosophical filmmaker Benegal brings to life the existential crisis of the downtrodden Indian, the 'subaltern' if you will-the serf, the peasant, the woman-and imposes a distinctive philosophical vision on his cinematic reworkings of literary products. To understand Benegal's cinema is to understand, through his lens, modern India's continued process of political and social becoming. Focusing on the philosophical depth of Benegal's oueuvre, Samir Chop...
Branding Gandhi renews attention to thinking about our relationship with stuff through Gandhi's politics, his image, his things, and the history of branding Gandhi. Based on archival research this book will provoke thinking about why we remain fascinated with brands. The chapters of this book will appeal to introductory anthropology students and nudge them to wonder what it means for India to claim Gandhi as their national treasure, making him their nation's brand. The book asks a simple question: what do brands mean and why do brands move us? To answer, the book takes students to Gandhi, to the past and the present, to India and the U.S, to ordinary and extraordinary things, and to the place of emotion and belief in our rational lives.
Conducting an analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, this book links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of 'progressive' cognition and child cognitive development.
Using primarily Urdu sources from the nineteenth century, this book allows us to rethink notions of 'the Muslim', in its numerous, complex and often contradictory forms, which emerged in colonial North India after 1857. Allowing the self-representation of Muslimness and its manifestations to emerge, it contrasts how the colonial British 'made Muslims' very differently compared to how the community envisaged themselves. A key argument made here contests the general sense of the narrative of lamentation, decay, decline, and a sense of self-pity and ruination, by proposing a different condition, that of zillat, a condition which gave rise to much self-reflection resulting in action, even if it was in the form of writing and expression. By questioning how and when a Muslim community emerged in colonial India, the book unsettles the teleological explanation of the Partition of India and the making of Pakistan.
Public Hinduisms critically analyses the way in which Hinduism is produced and represented as an established feature of modern public landscapes. It examines the mediation, representation and construction of multiple forms of Hinduism in a variety of social and political contexts, and in the process establishes it as a dynamic and developing modern concept. The essays in this volume are divided into themes that address different aspects of the processes that form modern Hinduism. The book includes discussions on topics such as ecumenical initiatives, the contemporary interpretation of particular sampradaya and guru traditions, modes of community mobilisation and the mediation strategies of different groups. It also provides India and diaspora-focused case studies as well as ′Snapshot′ views elaborating on different themes. Taking a critical approach to the idea of Hinduism and the way it becomes public, the book provides an interesting read on contemporary Hinduism.
Studying firms and entrepreneurs over three centuries, this book unravels the historical roots of the impressive business growth witnessed in contemporary India.
This book presents a feminist mapping of the articulation and suppression of female desire in Hindi films, which comprise one of modern India’s most popular cultural narratives. It explores the lineament of evil and the corresponding closure of chastisement or domesticity that appear as necessary conditions for the representation of subversive female desire. The term ‘bad’ is used heuristically, and not as a moral or essential category, to examine some of the iconic disruptive women of Hindi cinema and to uncover the nexus between patriarchy and other hierarchies, such as class, caste and religion in these representations. The twenty-one essays examine the politics of female desire/s from the 1930s to the present day - both through in-depth analyses of single films and by tracing the typologies in multiple films. The essays are divided into five sections indicating the various gendered desires and rebellions that patriarchal society seeks to police, silence and domesticate.
A Companion to the Anthropology of India offers a broad overview of the rapidly evolving scholarship on Indian society from the earliest area studies to views of India’s globalization in the twenty-first century. Provides readers with an important new introduction to the anthropology of India Explores the larger global issues that have transformed India since the end of colonization, including demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, and religious issues Contributions by leading experts present up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of key topics such as population and life expectancy, civil society, social-moral relationships, caste and communalism, youth and consumerism, the new urban middle class, environment and health, tourism, public and religious cultures, politics and law Represents an authoritative guide for professional social and cultural anthropologists, and South Asian specialists, and an accessible reference work for students engaged in the analysis of India’s modern transformation