Reading Contemporary India

Auteur

MK Raghavendra is a scholar-critic of culture, literature and cinema with political discourse as his chosen field of analysis. He won the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997 and received a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000, after which he has published a number of books, both academic and popular from a number of international publishers including Routledge. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish and Polish and two of his books have been translated into Russian. His titles include: Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (2008), Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film (2011), The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation (2014), Locating World Cinema: Interpretations of Film as Culture (2020) Philosophical Issues in Indian Cinema: Approximate Terms and Concepts (2020), The Politics of Modern Indian Language Literature: Implicit and Symptomatic Readings (2024) and The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity, The Writing of the Nation by its Elite: The Politics of Anglophone Indian Literature in the Global Age (2022), 50 Indian Film Classics (2009), Directors Cut: 50 Filmmakers of the Modern Era (2013)

Texte du rabat

This is the first ever effort to bring such a wide range of socio-cultural issues and establish interdisciplinary links between them by studying India's past, ancient and modern. The issues include caste and hierarchy, religious and political conflict linked sharply to diverse others like literary practice and intellectual life.

Contenu

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The past as capital and burden

1. Caste, power and hierarchy

2. Elitism, communities and democratic politics.

3. Religious/political identity and conflict

4. Racial discrimination

5. State authority and justice

6. Poverty and income disparity

7. National language, link language

8. Higher education and global competitiveness

9. The inward look and its effects

10. Local languages and Modern Literature

11. Artistic/literary practice and relevance.

12. Knowledge, method and intellectual life

Afterword: Education, the crisis area

Bibliography

Index