This is a study of popular Indian cinema in the age of globalisation, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism, focusing on the period between 1991 and 2004.

Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation. In Untimely Bollywood, Amit S. Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are emblematic of the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. Through analyses of contemporary media practices, Rai shifts the emphasis from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of audiovisual media to the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage as a model for understanding the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media practices. Exploring the ramifications of globalized media, he sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy. Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.

How do Indians look at themselves and their nation through cinematic representations of war? War is part of the story of the Indian nation; its presence in India's past continues to shape the Indian present and future. The 1962 China war, the 1971 Bangladesh war and the 1999 Kargil conflict all play outsized roles in the Indian popular imagination. The Indian film industry's war movies play an acute role in representing this aspect of Indian history; Samir Chopra's fascinating book takes a closer look at these movies' emotionally charged depictions of Indian military history. It examines classics of the war movie genre -- from Haqeeqat, Border and Hindustan Ki Kasam to Vijeta, LOC Kargil, Lakshya and The Ghazi Attack to see what they reveal and illuminate about the relationship of the Indian nation to war. Chopra thus enquires into how these movies establish popular Indian understandings of patriotism, militarism and nationalism and reinforce supposed 'Indian' values through their cinematic representations of war. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship of Indian films to Indian culture and history.

Four Sizzling Sexy Romances from Mills & Boon!

Once Upon a Time in Bollywood presents an extravaganza of essays on globalization and contemporary Hindi cinema ("Bollywood"). The wide-ranging analytic strategies in the collection--including ethnographic self-reflection, literary comparison, economic contextualization, and biographic study--bear witness to Hindi cinema's aesthetically elaborate and politically entangled treatment of postcolonial concerns. Together, these essays invite fresh, critically informed engagements with many of the key issues and creative tensions that continue to shape the world's most prolific film industry. For connoisseurs and critics of Hindi cinema alike, Once Upon a Time in Bollywood presents stirring insights into popular culture. With contributions by: Usamah Ansari, Sonia Benjamin, Nitin Deckha, Radhika Desai, Susan Dewey, Ravinder Kaur, Monika Mehta, Ahmad Saidullah, Jenny Sharpe, Florian Stadtler, and Jennifer Thomas.

Media Studies examines the new and rapidly developing field of media studies to discover what insights it has to offer students and general readers as they negotiate their way through the new - and thoroughly saturated - media environment. Explores how recent changes in our media affect the way we watch older media like television, movies, and radio, and offer up rich new interactive media, like video games and the internet The perfect introduction to the field of media studies Chronicles the recent dramatic changes in communication technologies, arguing that most of life itself is now experienced as 'mediated' Discusses the development of cable and satellite television, VCRs, DVDs, the internet and personal computers Emphasizes the broader political, social, and economic context within which these important new technologies have developed