Bhaskar Sarkar
Film and media studies scholar and author known for work on Indian cinema, including the book Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (2009); faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
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1. Mourning The Nation
Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition
Drawing on film theory, trauma studies, and critiques of nation-formation, this study examines how post-1947 Indian cinema grapples with the grief and dislocations of Partition. It argues that both popular and art films stage an ongoing work of mourning—through melodrama, allegory, and recurring motifs of rupture, exile, and maternal sacrifice—that helps imagine and contest national community. Through close readings of canonical works, it shows how loss is aestheticized and politicized, revealing a melancholic undercurrent that shapes spectatorship and public culture, and reframing cinema as a key arena where historical catastrophe is continually negotiated rather than resolved.
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