Filming the Line of Control: The Indo-Pak Relationship through the Cinematic Lens

Filming the Line of Control charts out the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan as represented in cinema, especially in light of the improved political atmosphere between the two countries. It is geared towards arriving at a better understanding of one of the most crucial political and historical relationships in the continent, a relationship that has a key role to play in world-politics and in the shaping of world-history. Part of this exciting study is the documentation of popular responses to Indian films, from both within the two countries and among the Pakistani and Indian diaspora. The motive of this has been to locate and discuss aspects that link the two sensibilities — either in divergence or in their coming together. This book brings together scholars from across the globe, as also filmmakers and viewers on to a common platform to capture the dynamics of popular imagination. Reverberating with a unique inter-disciplinary alertness to cinematic, historical, cultural and sociological understanding, this study will interest readers throughout the world who have their eye on the burgeoning importance of the sub-continental players in the world-arena. It is a penetrating study of films that carries the thematic brunt of attempting to construct a history of Indo–Pakistan relations as reflected in cinema. This book directs our holistic attention to the unique confluence between history and film studies.

About the Author

Meenakshi Bharat is Reader in English at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She is a translator, reviewer and critic. Her special interests include children’s literature, women’s fiction and English studies — areas which she has extensively researched. She has published three books: The Ultimate Colony (2003), Desert in Bloom: Indian Women Writers of Fiction in English (2004), and the recently published edition of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Currently, she is engaged in translating a volume of Hindi short stories, and is also editing an anthology of Indo-Australian short stories. She has presented a number of lectures on films in several universities in Australia. At present, she is exploring diasporic responses to Indian films in the UK (as Charles Wallace Fellow), and elsewhere. Nirmal Kumar is Reader in History at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. He has worked on gender history of the 18th century and is in the process of editing a book on Muslim identities in Hindi films. Some of his forthcoming books that he has edited are: Essays in Medieval Indian History and Essays in Early Modern History of India. He has been Associate Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla; Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Leeds; and Fellow, Royal Asiatic Society, London. He has presented many papers at national and international conferences.