The destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in December 1992 was a watershed in the politics of independent India. It was also an apocalyptic turning-point for community life at Ayodhya, and for the highly interdependent cultural lives of Hindus and Muslims living there. This book narrates how Ayodhya's inhabitants experienced the events that led up to and followed the destruction of the mosque.

This book deals with an important and too-often ignored area of cultural studies. To examine the enormous industry of Indian popular cinema is to study Indian modernity at its very rawest. The questions and perspectives this book presents provoke a thinking of cinema that is political in the widest sense from cinemas importance in ideas of nation and national cultural formation to psycho-social perspectives on identity, class and gender.
The contributors deal with a range of themes from the metaphor of the slum as a defining cultural phenomenon to personal reflections on the political...