Permanent Black

The two most recent books in Film Studies published by Permanent Black are   Ravi Vasudevan's THE MELODRAMATIC PUBLIC    and Monika Mehta's CENSORSHIP AND SEXUALITY IN BOMBAY CINEMA . Below, the two authors converse with each other about their books and related matters: RAVI VASUDEVAN ASKS MONIKA MEHTA … 1. RV:       Censorship is often considered a negative act, as something which cuts out images and sounds. Could you outline the rather different theoretical premises of your book? I’m particularly interested in the way you pose the relationship between censorship laws and practices, and film-making's own relationship to the acts of cutting, selecting, and classifying. MM: As you mentioned, censorship is most associated with the practice of cutting, and the censors’ are seen as film “cutters” or “hackers,” who distort a “complete” film or a “director’s vision.” My task in the book is to draw attention to other practices o...

Rashmi Sadana English Heart, Hindi Heartland The Political Life of Literature in India English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighbourhoods in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Vikram Seth in the context of debates within India about the politics of language, and alongside regionally recognized writers such as K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. She undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture, probing the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives. In so doing she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and the cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. She i...