India's Imperial Formations - by Amrita Ghosh & Rohit K Dasgupta & Bhakti Shringarpure (Hardcover)

About the Book

India's Imperial Formations explores the ways in which empire building occurs and consolidates through the Indian and diasporic cultural landscape where a collusion with whiteness, Hindu fundamentalism, casteism, and religious and racial bigotry are rampant, and denies a democratic space of multiple Indias to coexist together.

Book Synopsis

India's Imperial Formations explores the ways in which empire building occurs and consolidates through the Indian and diasporic cultural landscape, where a collusion with whiteness, Hindu fundamentalism, casteism, and religious and racial bigotry are rampant, and create hegemonic imaginaries of an India that denies a democratic space of multiple Indias to coexist together. India is not only home to the world's largest film industry but also has one of the oldest media ecosystems today with a prolific output in television, radio, print, and digital media. These systems shape hearts and minds in the large nation and also have significant impact in the region as well as in the world due to India's vast diaspora population. This book argues that Indian culture industries are a crucial site to investigate constructions of Islamophobia, casteism, sinophobia, sexism, colorism and anti-Blackness. Within this work, the authors highlight the urgent need to evaluate the complicity of Indian and diasporic cultural production in perpetuating a casual and sometimes even aggressive normalization of bigotry and discrimination towards minoritized communities. This polemical book is written by three scholars of culture, gender and postcolonial studies providing an accessible yet rigorous study of these issues.

Review Quotes

"Incisive and accessible, India's Imperial Formations, delves into the pervasive anti-Blackness embedded within Indian and diasporic media. By conceptualizing Indian media ecologies as imperial formations rather than merely racist ones, Amrita Ghosh, Rohit K. Dasgupta, and Bhakti Shringarpure highlight the role of Indian media as a formidable global soft power in the twenty-first century. With a bold and ambitious agenda, India's Imperial Formations weaves a compelling narrative that links popular Hindi cinema, social media, Mindy Kaling, and Indian American responses to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings." --Jigna Desai, University of California, Santa Barbara

"India's Imperial Formations is an innovative and very topical intervention in the fields of Indian and Indian diaspora cultural studies. This is necessary given that for too long the racism, casteism, and colorism of the commercial Hindi film industry have been overlooked by both fans and scholars." --Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University

About the Author

Amrita Ghosh is assistant professor in South Asian literatures in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida.
Rohit K Dasgupta is associate professor in gender and sexuality at the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Bhakti Shringarpure is author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and recently co-edited the collection Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War.