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India's official embrace of the soft power concept and the popular equation of Bollywood films with India's international image are discussed here with reference to their contemporary convergence. ...

While earlier cinemas were built in response to growing urban populations during the twentieth century, the first wave of multiplexes in India were built in anticipation of future wealth. In recent years, multiplex developments have been targeting various areas identified for growth in the urban redevelopment plans now being adopted across India, anticipating a larger “consuming class” spreading beyond existing pockets of affluence and occupying suburban and satellite townships in what were until recently brown and greenfield sites. Exclusive leisure facilities such as the multiplex illustrate the growing socio-spatial segregation in Indian cities, and suggest the ways the consuming classes are transforming urban space in their own image. As such, while the significance of the multiplex to cultural perspectives in the “New India” is widely noted, they also illustrate much broader issues of the political economy of India that are almost never discussed in the same breath as cinema, including taxati...

The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature films takes place, from dedicated single-screen large capacity cinema halls to multiplex venues, has progressively transformed cinema exhibition across the world since the 1980s. The rise of the multiplex in India since 1997 has been an integral, and highly visible, component of the general spread of mall culture; with multiplex venues often being housed within shopping mall developments and other new forms of privatized ‘public’ leisure. As such, the multiplex has powerfully altered the nature of cinema as public space and thus, crucially, what it means to be in the cinema hall. While the reconstitution of the cinema crowd within the multiplex might be seen as constitutive of the ‘globalizing’ trends now at work in Indian cities, this article seeks to demonstrate that the particular dynamics of the Indian multiplex at the present time must also be understood within the historical trajectory of the Indian cinema hall an...

Filming the Line of Control charts out the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan as represented in cinema, especially in light of the improved political atmosphere between the two countries. It is geared towards arriving at a better understanding of one of the most crucial political and historical relationships in the continent, a relationship that has a key role to play in world-politics and in the shaping of world-history. Part of this exciting study is the documentation of popular responses to Indian films, from both within the two countries and among the Pakistani and Indian diaspora. The motive of this has been to locate and discuss aspects that link the two sensibilities — either in divergence or in their coming together. This book brings together scholars from across the globe, as also filmmakers and viewers on to a common platform to capture the dynamics of popular imagination. Reverberating with a unique inter-disciplinary alertness to cinematic, historical, cultural and sociological understanding, this study will interest readers throughout the world who have their eye on the burgeoning importance of the sub-continental players in the world-arena. It is a penetrating study of films that carries the thematic brunt of attempting to construct a history of Indo–Pakistan relations as reflected in cinema. This book directs our holistic attention to the unique confluence between history and film studies.

The aim of this article is to introduce the phenomenon of the multiplex theatre as it is being played out within the complex urban geographies of metropolitan India. Since its inception a decade ago, the multiplex cinema in the subcontinent has become an intrinsic component of a new leisure infrastructure configured around the notion of a ‘consuming class’ keen to take its place amongst a ‘global middle class’. The dramatic growth in multiplex cinemas, projected to grow in numbers by 300 per cent over the next three years, has been greatly encouraged by urban planning and taxation policies designed to encourage new commercial and residential developments arising out of urban regeneration programmes and the growth of satellite conurbations. This article makes the case that, while the multiplex is an example of flagship architecture employed in the ‘globalisation ‘of the urban environment, the demand for such facilities is also a logical extension of the long-running contest over public spaces between different segments of the urban population in Indian cities.