Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
The Horror in Hindi Cinema
Between the Mythic and the Monstrous
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
The book offers a lively and detailed analysis of the ideological subtext of Hindi Horror cinema. It unearths its codes and conventions, its relationship to spectatorship, the genre’s conjunctions and departures from Hollywood, and the unique features of Hindi horror. It posits the Hindi horror genre as a project of / for the ‘nation’ in the making.
Analysing films from Mahal (1948) to Bhediya (2022), this book uncovers narrative strategies, frames unique approaches of investigation, and reviews the transformation taking place within the genre. It argues that Hindi horror cinema lies at the intersection of myths, competing ideologies, dominant socio-religious thoughts revealing three major strands of narrative constructs, each corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in post-colonial India. It establishes a theoretical framework of Hindi horror cinema, and demonstrates for the first time how this genre, with its subsets, provides a means to contemplate the nation.
This volume will be useful to students, researchers and faculty members working in mass communication, journalism, political science, film studies, political sociology, gender / women studies, Culture studies and post-colonial Indian politics. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian popular culture studies.
About the Author:
Meraj Ahmed Mubarki is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mass Communication & Journalism at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad. He has a Master’s Degree and a PhD in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Calcutta. He has taught at Asutosh College and Shri Shikshayatan College, Kolkata.
He has contributed articles to prestigious international peer-reviewed journals like the History and Sociology of South Asia (Sage Publications), Contemporary South Asia (a Routledge Imprint), Visual Anthropology (Routledge Imprint), Indian Journal of Gender Studies (Sage Publications), South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Routledge Imprint), Social Semiotics (Routledge Imprint), Quarterly Review of Film & Video (Routledge Imprint)and Feminist Media Studies (Routledge Imprint).
In 2020, he was awarded a Fellowship by the National Film Archives of India, Pune to study film censorship in Colonial India.
His articles have been included in the Reading Lists of the Sussex University, U.K.; Central University of Gujarat, India; the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Tirupati, India; St Paul’s University, Canada; University of California, Riverside, USA.
Press Reviews:
This is a hugely thoughtful, original and sophisticated book that brings light to an area of Indian film studies that is much neglected — Hindi horror films. With a sharp understanding of the ideological role of narratives and symbolism for spectators, Mubarki’s book outlines the horror genre internationally and historically, drawing attention to both classic moments as well as lesser-known aspects of the history of cinema and of horror in India. All of these will be of tremendous value to sociologists and scholars of cinema history, humanists studying the genre of horror and literature, as well as media and cultural historians excavating the travels of the genre in a new context.
— Professor Shakuntala Banaji, Media Culture and Social Change, Programme Director MSc Media, Communication and Development, Department of Media and Communications. London School of Economics and Political Science
By the 1970s, Hindi cinema had begun registering (and participating in) the crisis of the nation-building project crystallized by the Emergency (1975–77) and Mubarki correctly observes that in this moment, hegemonic Nehruvian rationalist secularism "did not go unchallenged", and in fact "engendered counter-narratives" that were stridently anti-science and anti-secular.
— BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies
The book declares that the popular Hindi film’s ideology is the outcome of the same sociopolitical elements that govern other film texts, resulting into a different hybrid every time they are summoned to generate a guiding principle.
— Economic & Political Weekly
The greatest value of this book is that … in bringing together, for the first time, selected films and directors from the late 1940s to the present, the author tries to systematically produce horror as a coherent genre within Bombay cinema.
— Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Meraj Ahmed Mubarki’s book—the first monograph length study of Bollywood horror cinema—is the most exciting new entrant to genre explorations in Indian cinema since the study of the ‘Muslim Social’ genre in Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema by Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen (2009).
— The Book Review Literary Trust
Mubarki’s book makes an important contribution to the field of Indian cinema studies and will be of interest to anyone interested in non-Western traditions of horror. It will also be useful as a teaching tool in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in colleges and universities.
— Meheli Sen, Associate Professor, Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and the Cinema Studies Program, Rutgers University.
See the publisher website: Routledge
> On a related topic:
Indian Horror Cinema (2019)
(En)gendering the Monstrous
The Screen Chills Companion, 1931–1939 (2025)
Films of the Golden Age of Hollywood Horror
The Screen Chills Companion, 1940–1946 (2025)
Films of the Golden Age of Hollywood Horror
Back
