Full Description
Censorship in South Asia offers an expansive and comparative exploration of cultural regulation in contemporary and colonial South Asia. These provocative essays by leading scholars broaden our understanding of what censorship might mean—beyond the simple restriction and silencing of public communication—by considering censorship's productive potential and its intimate relation to its apparent opposite, "publicity." The contributors investigate a wide range of public cultural phenomena, from the cinema to advertising, from street politics to political communication, and from the adjudication of blasphemy to the management of obscenity.
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Between Sedition and Seduction: Thinking Censorship in South Asia
William Mazzarella and Raminder Kaur
2. Iatrogenic Religion and Politics
Christopher Pinney
3. Making Sense of the Cinema in Late Colonial India
William Mazzarella
4. The Limits of Decency and the Decency of Limits: Censorship and the Bombay Film Industry
Tejaswini Ganti
5. Anxiety, Failure, and Censorship in Indian Advertising
Angad Chowdhry
6. Nuclear Revelations
Raminder Kaur
7. Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan's Postcolonial Predicament
Asad Ali Ahmed
8. After the Massacre: Secrecy, Disbelief, and the Public Sphere in Nepal
Genevieve Lakier
List of Contributors
Index
