Reading Contemporary India: An Interdisciplinary Enquiry Into Sociocultural Issues

The book is the first ever attempt to examine various sociocultural aspects of contemporary India, ranging from caste and hierarchy and the religious or political conflict resulting from it to literary practice and intellectual life in the public space and making interdisciplinary associations. It does this by going back to various aspects of India’s past, stretching back several millennia to those owing to public policy after independence. Many of the issues today, such as those named above, can be traced to racial mixing through centuries, which has created a multitude of conflicts that need solutions today. The book is divided into separate chapters corresponding to the issues needing addressing, and a brief note at the conclusion of each chapter makes connections with issues dealt in other chapters. The book has an introduction tracing a significant portion of India’s past and an afterword identifying crisis areas in the present.

MK Raghavendra is a scholar-critic of culture, literature and cinema with political discourse as his chosen field of analysis. He won the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997 and received a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000, after which he has published a number of books, both academic and popular from a number of international publishers including Routledge. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish and Polish and two of his books have been translated into Russian. His titles include: Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (2008), Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film (2011), The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and theAnglophone Indian Nation (2014), Locating World Cinema: Interpretations of Film as Culture (2020) Philosophical Issues in Indian Cinema: Approximate Terms and Concepts (2020), The Politics of Modern Indian Language Literature: Implicit and Symptomatic Readings (2024) and The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity, The Writing of the Nation by its Elite: The Politics of Anglophone Indian Literature in the Global Age (2022), 50 Indian Film Classics (2009), Directors Cut: 50 Filmmakers of the Modern Era (2013)