In an attempt to offer a historical understanding of the audio-visual media in India, the book presents an analytical study of the portrayal of concepts and themes involving the nation, secularism, communalism, minorities, caste, gender, war and patriotism by Indian cinema and television. Arguing that these notions are central to Indian identities, it narrates the history of Indian cinema. It explores the relationship between fact and fiction, history and imagination, history and war, and cinema and social identities, pointing out that representations of social realities in the media shape popular mentality in India which has a long-standing and thriving film industry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anirudh Deshpande
Anirudh Deshpande is a former UGC and ICHR Fellow, and is presently Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), researching visual history in modern India. He has co-edited with the late Professor Partha Sarathi Gupta The British Raj and its Indian Armed Forces, 1857-1939 (2002). He has published papers, commentaries, reviews and articles regularly since 1987 in various journals and newspapers. In the year 2000 he wrote a scientific paper on opium production in India and its regulation by the colonial and post-colonial Indian state as a national consultant historian for the United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP). His recent publications include an NMML Monograph The Stigma of Defeat: Indian Military History in Comparative Perspective and a paper titled ‘Interpretative Possibilities of Historical Fiction: A Perspective on Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold’, in Yasmeen Lukmani (ed.), The Shifting Worlds of Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction (2004).
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