John Hutnyk - Global South Asia on Screen

Contents

For this study, I read new and varied work by scholars and friends such as Abhijit Roy, Moinak Biswas, Anjali Gera Roy, Raminder Kaur, Virinder Kalra, Rajinder Dudrah, Amit Rai, Sanjay Sharma, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Amitava Kumar, Biju Mathew, Vijay Prashad, Rosie Thomas and many others. In particular, I focused upon and learnt much from the noted works of four scholars: M. Madhava Prasad, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Tejaswini Niranjana and Arvind Rajagopal. While they are not responsible for what I write, their collective work made the old media studies look obsolete. It was their fresh look at film, television, and screen cultures in general and the political contextualization offered by these scholars in particular that hit me as an imperative. In the afterglow of their different contributions though glossing their ideas cannot make them agree by any means extending beyond the conventions of screen studies to encompass musicology, sociology, political economy and cultural studies made it possible to conclude that the cinematelevision conjunction today is a fully articulated geopolitical medium. The faults and limitations of this assessment are of course mine. Nevertheless, Abhijit Roy has nurtured this book, much more than he knows. Also Klaus-Peter Koepping, Chandrika Parmar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Joel McKim, Aparajita De, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Scott McQuire, Shiv Vishvanathan, Amitava Ganguly, Amites Mukhopadhyay, Ursula Rao, Meeta Jha, Royona Mitra, Prarthana Purkayastha, Peter Phipps, Ulki Goswami, Claire Reddleman, Lara Choksey, Allen Chun, Joanna Figiel, Theresa Mikuriya, Devina Gupta and Camille Barbagallo all made important contributions, as did the incredibly generous Dorothea Schaefter. Babu at Foreign Publishers Agency kept me supplied, as did Seagull. Paramita Brahmachari did the art with care and inspiration. Liza Thompson, Susan Krogulski, Erin Duffy and Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury had faith. The copyediting and layout is by Rohini Krishnan and Shyam Sunder. Finally, although this book is not wholly her fault, Sophie Fuggle is a great writing partner, critic and mother of even greater children, and the light of my life: her involvement is second only to that of the kids, who I go on about too much and who send me to do your work only after bedtime stories about elephants and songs about billabongs.