"According Esha De and Elora Chowdhury, the legacies of industrial and independent cinemas in the subcontinent of South Asia reveal an intertwining of South Asian histories that show geopolitical and social boundaries to be both porous and hybrid. On the one hand, cinematic portrayals encode the effects of the massive geopolitical rifts born in postcolonial south Asia of religious, linguistic, and ethnic conflicts--the primary being the India-Pakistan Partition (1947) and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). Practices and policies of cinema in the nation-states (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) likewise reinforce prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. On the other hand, the combined histories of cinema and sociality in the South Asian region are replete with cross fertilization the effects of which lingered on well past the Partition of India and Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh. The essays in this volume reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners across South Asia and interrogate how filmic politics intersect with discourses around nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language"--

Introduction. Transregional Archives, Cinematic Encounters: Filmscapes across South Asia
Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De
Part I: Nations and Regional Margins
1.) National Identity and Cinematic Representation: Independent Films in Bangladesh
Fahmidul Haq
2.) Female Friendship and Forbidden Desire: Two Films from 1960s Pakistan
Kamran Asdar Ali
3.) Bringing Back Sikhs after the 1984 Pogrom: The Politics of Picturization in Hindi Cinema
Amit Ranjan
4.) Silencing Films from the Chittagong Hill Tracts: Indigenous Cinema's Challenge to the Imagined Cultural Homogeneity of Bangladesh
Glen Hill and Kabita Chakma
5.) Pakistan, History, and Sleep: Hassan Tariq, a Progressive Patriarch, and Neend
Nasreen Rehman
Part II: Transregional Crossings
6.) The Public in the Cities: Detouring through Cinemas of Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore (1920s-1930s)
Madhuja Mukherjee
7.) Cross-Wing Filmmaking: East Pakistani Urdu Films and Their Traces in the Bangladesh Film Archive
Lotte Hoek
8.) Action Heroines and Regional Gifts: Authorship Crossing Pakistan
Esha Niyogi De
9.) Realism and Region in South Indian Cinemas, 1947-1977
Hariprasad Athanickal
10.) "This Is London, Not Pakistan!": Articulations of the Diaspora in Pakistani Punjabi Film
Gwendolyn S. Kirk
11.) The Birth of a Cinema in Post-9/11 Pakistan
Zebunnisa Hamid
Part III: Fractured Geographies, South Connectivities
12.) Zahir Raihan's Stop Genocide (1971): A Dialectical Cinematic Message to the World
Fahmida Akhter
13.) Gender, War, and Resistance: The Case of Kashmir
Alka Kurian
14.) Cinema That Raises a Critical Consciousness: The Films of Alamgir Kabir
Naadir Junaid
15.) Ethical Encounters: Friendship and Healing in Contemporary Films about the Bangladesh Liberation War
Elora Halim Chowdhury
Contributors
Index

Edited by Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De