Reading Contemporary India

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), The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity (2021), The Writing of the Nation by Its Elite: The Politics of Anglophone Indian Literature in the Global Age (2022), 50 Indian Film Classics (2009) and Director’s Cut: 50 Filmmakers of the Modern Era (2013).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The past as capital and burden1. Caste, power and hierarchy2. Elitism, communities and democratic politics.3. Religious/political identity and conflict4. Racial discrimination5. State authority and justice6. Poverty and income disparity7. National language, link language8. Higher education and global competitiveness9. The inward look and its effects10. Local languages and Modern Literature11. Artistic/literary practice and relevance.12. Knowledge, method and intellectual lifeAfterword: Education, the crisis areaBibliographyIndex