New political realities and shared histories connect film cultures across bordersIn South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, new national cinemas promoted and reinforced prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. At the same time, industrial and independent cinemas contributed to remarkably porous and hybrid film cultures, reflecting the intertwining of South Asian histories and their reciprocal cultural influences. This cross-fertilization within South Asian cultural production continues today.South Asian Filmscapes excavates these complex politics and poetics of bordered identity and crossings through selected histories of cinema in South Asia. Several essays reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners, while others interrogate how filmic politics intersects with discourses of nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language. Together, they offer a fluid approach to the multiple histories and encounters that conjure “South Asia” as a geographic and political entity in the region and globally through a cinematic imagination.
Elora Halim Chowdhury is professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh. Esha Niyogi De is a lecturer in English at UCLA and author of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought.
Introduction. Transregional Archives, Cinematic Encounters: Filmscapes across South AsiaElora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi DePart I: Nations and Regional Margins1.) National Identity and Cinematic Representation: Independent Films in BangladeshFahmidul Haq2.) Female Friendship and Forbidden Desire: Two Films from 1960s PakistanKamran Asdar Ali3.) Bringing Back Sikhs after the 1984 Pogrom: The Politics of Picturization in Hindi CinemaAmit Ranjan4.) Silencing Films from the Chittagong Hill Tracts: Indigenous Cinema’s Challenge to the Imagined Cultural Homogeneity of BangladeshGlen Hill and Kabita Chakma5.) Pakistan, History, and Sleep: Hassan Tariq, a Progressive Patriarch, and NeendNasreen RehmanPart II: Transregional Crossings6.) The Public in the Cities: Detouring through Cinemas of Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore (1920s–1930s)Madhuja Mukherjee7.) Cross-Wing Filmmaking: East Pakistani Urdu Films and Their Traces in the Bangladesh Film ArchiveLotte Hoek8.) Action Heroines and Regional Gifts: Authorship Crossing PakistanEsha Niyogi De9.) Realism and Region in South Indian Cinemas, 1947–1977Hariprasad Athanickal10.) "This Is London, Not Pakistan!": Articulations of the Diaspora in Pakistani Punjabi FilmGwendolyn S. Kirk11.) The Birth of a Cinema in Post-9/11 PakistanZebunnisa HamidPart III: Fractured Geographies, South Connectivities12.) Zahir Raihan's Stop Genocide (1971): A Dialectical Cinematic Message to the WorldFahmida Akhter13.) Gender, War, and Resistance: The Case of KashmirAlka Kurian14.) Cinema That Raises a Critical Consciousness: The Films of Alamgir KabirNaadir Junaid15.) Ethical Encounters: Friendship and Healing in Contemporary Films about the Bangladesh Liberation WarElora Halim ChowdhuryContributorsIndex