Promotional Information

Traces the intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period, revealing how popular film styles and controversial film regulations in the politically linked territories of Britain and India reconfigured imperial relations

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction 1
1. Film Policy and Film Aesthetics as Cultural Archives 13
Part One. Imperial Governmentality
2. Acts of Transition: The British Cinematographic Films Acts of 1927 and 1938 41
3. Empire and Embarassment: Colonial Forms of Knowledge about Cinema 65
Part Two. Imperial Redemption
4. Realism and Empire 107
5. Romance and Empire 135
6. Modernism and Empire 165
Part Three. Colonial Autonomy
7. Historical Romances and Modernist Myths in Indian Cinema 195
Notes 239
Bibliography 289
Index of Films 309
General Index 313

About the Author

Priya Jaikumar is Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California.

Reviews

"Priya Jaikumar's Cinema at the End of Empire breaks out of the analytic framework of national cinemas that still dominates the disciplinary imagination of film studies, despite recent attempts to dismantle the rubric...The practice of considering the metropole and the colonies in conjunction has, of course, gained a prominent place on the research agenda of a new imperial history influenced by postcolonial theory but is relatively novel in the field of film studies, where scholarship on (post)colonial film cultures still remains segregated from work on European national cinemas; this monograph thus stages a significant critical intervention in that respect as well...her discussion of British and Indian films emphasizes their aesthetic hybridity, as well as the diversity of British responses to decolonization and the internal schisms of the Indian nationalist project...extremely insightful and thought provoking...the montage of tantalizing glimpses that Jaikumar offers into a complex and fascinating but underexplored domain of Indian cinema and the creative and significant connections that she makes (between, as well as within, national film cultures) will no doubt catalyze other important and much-needed work on the film cultures of colonial India and, more generally, in comparative film studies." Manashita Dass, Screen 2007, issue 48