A Companion to Indian Cinema

A new collection in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, featuring the cinemas of India

In A Companion to Indian Cinema, film scholars Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar along with 25 established and emerging scholars, deliver new research on contemporary and historical questions on Indian cinema. The collection considers Indian cinema’s widespread presence both within and outside the country, and pays particular attention to regional cinemas such as Bhojpuri, Bengali, Malayalam, Manipuri, and Marathi. The volume also reflects on the changing dimensions of technology, aesthetics, and the archival impulse of film. The editors have included scholarship that discusses a range of films and film experiences that include commercial cinema, art cinema, and non-fiction film.

Even as scholarship on earlier decades of Indian cinema is challenged by the absence of documentation and films, the innovative archival and field work in this Companion extends from cinema in early twentieth century India to a historicized engagement with new technologies and contemporary cinematic practices. There is a focus on production cultures and circulation, material cultures, media aesthetics, censorship, stardom, non-fiction practices, new technologies, and the transnational networks relevant to Indian cinema.

Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students of film and media studies, South Asian studies, and history, A Companion to Indian Cinema is also an important new resource for scholars with an interest in the context and theoretical framework for the study of India’s moving image cultures.