This book focuses on 'urban family soaps' on television and analyses them as an important resource for anthropological insights into contemporary social issues and practices. It studies the 'popular' and 'everyday' while also concentrating on the middle class.

At least one third of India's billion inhabitants regularly watch Indian soap operas, which have displaced popular cinema as the prime entertainment genre. And in the Indian diaspora on every Continent, Indian soap operas are a feature of life -- a source of pleasure, discussion and shared identity. This book characterizes the forms of these soap operas and relates how they have evolved. It explores how they have contributed to shaping the identity of modern India. Initially developed by the national telecast service, Doordoshan, specifically to convey messages about women's role, contraception and other family issues. Doordoshan also engaged viewers with serializations of the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabarata. But with the onset of cable TV, soap operas became primarily entertainment driven and progressively more sensational. The book traces the impact of these different strands of soap operas and considers their impact on India's dominant concerns: the search for national unity, identity, the changing role of women, and the ideology of consumerism.

Ramachandra Guha is one of the world's foremost historians and writers on cricket. Charting the social history of cricket in India he not only sheds light on the way a society works during a time of massive social and political transformation (the small but important social arguments that take place - for example, the staking out of territory in terms of public parks; the changes in position between the ruler and the ruled and within the limits of caste and class) but he also brilliantly traces the links between sport and politics.

This original collection demonstrates the importance of sporting practices, spaces and leisure affiliations to understanding issues around identity, (post-) migration, diaspora and transnationalism for global South Asian populations. The chapters provide a critical (re-) examination of the roles that sport plays within and in relation to South Asian groups in the diaspora, and raises a series of pertinent questions regarding the multifarious relationships between sport and South Asianness. The chapters range across a wide variety of disciplines, regions, sports and identifications. They are in conversation with each other while showing the particularity of each diasporic context and relationship to sport. The book encompasses a number of global contexts from the "homeland" (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan) to the diaspora (Fiji, Norway, the US, the UK), and addresses a broad range of sporting contexts, including basketball, boxing, cricket, cycling, field hockey, soccer and golf. The chapters combine a range of qualitative methods, including ethnography, auto-ethnography, participant observation, memoir, interview and textual analysis (film, television and print media). This collection comprises the latest cutting edge research in the field, and will be essential reading for scholars and students both of sport and South Asian diasporas. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

An in-depth analysis of the intricate relationships among sport, culture, politics, identity and regional cooperation in South Asia. In South Asia, sport has long been a site--albeit ignored by social scientists--which articulates the complexities and diversities of the everyday life of the nations. This book highlights the importance of sport in colonial and postcolonial times in India and South Asia as an essential cultural experience, a political tool, a social instrument and a commercial force. It reveals how sport has become politically, socially, culturally and emotionally significant, particularly, football in India and cricket in South Asia.Sport, Culture and Nation would be useful to historians, political scientists, sociologists and to scholars of South Asian studies as well as culture and leisure studies.

Bhangra is commonly understood as the hybrid music produced in Britain by British Asian music producers through mixing Panjabi folk melodies with western pop and black dance rhythms. This is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. This book looks at Bhangra's global flows from one of its originary sites, the Indian subcontinent, to contribute to the understanding of emerging South Asian cultural practices such as Bhangra or Bollywood in multi-ethnic societies. Gera Roy contrasts the frames of cultural imperialism with those of cultural invasion to show how Indian cultures have constantly reinvented themselves by cross-pollinating with 'invading' cultures such as Hellenic, Persian, Arabic and many others in the past.

This is the first book to tackle the diverse styles and multiple histories of popular musics in India. It brings together fourteen of the world's leading scholars on Indian popular music to contribute chapters on a range of topics from the classic songs of Bollywood to contemporary remixes, summarized by a reflective afterword by popular music scholar Timothy Taylor. The chapters in this volume address the impact of media and technology on contemporary music, the variety of industrial developments and contexts for Indian popular music, and historical trends in popular music development both before and after the Indian Independence in 1947. To illustrate each chapter author's points, and to make available music not easily accessible in North America, the book features an Oxford web musiccompanion website of audio and video tracks.