Popular Culture in South Asian Context

The volume examines popular sensibilities via textual, visual, performative, spatial, digital frames of inquiry and critical social-political issues in South Asia. It highlights the interface between cultural studies and its popular-political standpoints and interrogates the kaleidoscope of popular imaginary as well as its conceptual problematics through distinct case studies from the region. It leads learners towards the unfounded territories of popular culture studies in South Asia. With chapters by major scholars in the field, the book uses theoretically comprehensive and empirically varied case studies to re-evaluate the central questions of epistemology, methodology, and approaches to popular culture studies from non-Western cultures' perspectives. Lucid, accessible, and nuanced, the chapters in the volume will be an invaluable reference source for scholars, researchers, and students in the humanities, liberal arts, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.

Akshaya Kumar is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Raj Thakur is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Central University of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India.

Introduction Part I: Performance, Ritual and Folk 1. Secular "bhavs" of Remixed Dances: Dance Reality Shows as Soft Resistance 2. The 'High Seriousness' of Comedy: Stand-up Comedy and the Tradition of Dissent 3. From Behind the Mask: The Jabulo of the Khasis 4. The Axiology of the Lakhe and Navdurga Masked Ritual Dances of Nepal 5. Asura, Danava, Rakshasa: Interpreting Popular Indian Myths from Dalit Perspectives 6. Tales of Love, Passion, Murder, and History: Poet's Songs from Barak Valley 7. Sanjhi: A Multihued Folk Festive Presence within an Over-arching Feminine Divinity 8. Can Nauntanki be digital?: A Study of Nautanki Performances in the Post-Covid Era 9. C¯avi--unatakam and Latin Christians: Becoming and Reviving Identity 10. Musical Culture of Mourning Rituals: Liminality of the Orthodox and the Popular 11. Only a Joke: Stand-up Comedy and Disability in the Indian Context Part II: New Media Frames 12. Breaking Stereotypes or Making Stereotypes: Hiphop Dance in India 13. Mourning, Cult, Fandom and its Tentative Figurations: A Case Study of Pop-star-turned- cleric Junaid Jamshed's Death and Mourning on the Internet 14. Cringe is the New binge: Matrimony, Desire and the Female Body in Netflix's Indian Matchmaking and Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives 15. From Streets to You Tube: Ladisha as an Alternate (Hi)story-Teller 16. Exploring the 'Manosphere': Analyzing Masculinities and the Politics of Red Pill in India across Social Media Platforms Part III: Cinema and Identity 17. Cultural Studies, Popular Hindi Cinema and the Question of Aesthetics 18. Zindagi Tamasha to Kamli: Squeezing Space of Emergent Cinema of Pakistan 19. Framing the Ecology of Fear 20. Subverting the Popular Gaze in Stree (2018) and Bulbbul (2021) 21. Dalit Sporting Imaginary and Jhund 22. "My Son Won't Play Cricket for England": Cricket, Patriarchy, and Diasporic Subjectivity in Patiala House 23. Screening Sainthood: Shifting Paradigms in the films on Vivekananda 24. Surrogate Inc.: The Commercialization of Bollywood's Surrogacy Narrative in the Neoliberal Age 25. An Excavation of Identities through Indiana Jones Part IV: Visual Figurations 26. The Home and the World of Hindi Television Serials 27. Troubling the Waters: Graphic Advocacy and the Indo-Sri Lankan Fisher Folk's Tale 28. Post-1971: Photographic Ambivalence, Archives, and the Construction of National Identity of Bangladesh 29. Talking Walls- Muted Femininity 30. Popular Culture of Cynicism and its Satirical Expressions in Art: Notes from Contemporary Pakistan 31. Re-viewing the Mythoepic in Indian Popular Imagination Part V: Spatial Becomings 32. Willkommen ("Welcome") Bishan Singh to the Kit Kat Klub 33. Unpacking Popular Culture from the Lens of Public Philosophy 34. Popular Culture in Early Nationalist Imagination 35. The World Ends in South Asia: Dilli Dystopias and the (Post-)Apocalypse 36. "Oppositely Parallels": A Visual Inquiry on Squeezing Female Spaces