Key concepts and theories: media, culture, high/low culture, and popular culture mass culture.

Media in the global context: The development of cultural industries (case studies of cross cultural consumption, Mcdonaldisation, exoticization of the third world, United colors of Benneton)

Cultural studies in India: Different perspectives, understanding the folk/popular practices in India.

Print Culture: the emergence of the newspaper, print, capitalism and political identity. Calendar art and mass production of pictures and the middle class aesthetic, photography and film hoardings.

Indian Cinema: The conflict of traditional forms and modern technology, the nation- and the home - persistent themes in Hindi cinema, the post-90s Hindi cinema imagining the family and NRI cultures.

Screening culture and cassette culture; Television in India - issues of modernity and development, discourse of national integration, narrative serials, commercial sponsorship, women oriented narratives, the mythologicals, global and regional networks, politics after television, popular music and technology, devotional music.

Resisting power through the media.

Texts/References

Niranjana, Tejaswini, P.Sudhir and Vivek, Dhareshwar (Eds.) Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India. Calcutta. Seagull Books.1993.

Dwyer, Rachel and Christopher Pinney (eds.). Pleasure and the Nation. New Delhi. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Grossberg, L., C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds.) Cultural Studies. London.  1992

Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick (eds.) Key concepts in Cultural Theory. London. Routledge.1999

Singhal, Arvind and Rogers, Everett (Eds.) India�s Communication Revolution; From Bullock carts to Cyber marts. New Delhi. Sage.2001

Kapur, Geeta, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice, New Delhi: Tulika, 2000.

Prasad  Madhava. Ideology of Hindi Cinema. New Delhi: OUP.1998.

Srivatsan. R. Conditions of Visibility. Calcutta. Stree. 2000.