Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction: films, literature and culture/Jasbir Jain. 2. Problematising diasporic motivation: Deepa Mehta's films/Uma Parameswaran. 3. Ruler of love's republic: Deepa Mehta Seen from the US Southwest/Jennifer Heath. 4. Packaging India: the fabric of Deepa Mehta's cinematic art/Avinash Jodha. 5. The Diasporic eye and the evolving I: Deepa Mehta's elements trilogy/Jasbir Jain. 6. Women's bodies, women's voices: exploring women's sensuality in Deepa Mehta's trilogy/Madhuri Chatterjee. 7. Marginalised by domesticity: the (Un) Desirable women of Deepa Mehta's trilogy - fire, earth and water/Simran Chadha. 8. Gendered subject(s) in Deepa Mehta's Fire and water/Jayita Sengupta. 9. Female bonding/female desire: Deepa Mehta's Fire/Bandana Chakrabarty. 10. Looking for ways of representation: 'Looking' as a trope in 1947-earth/Sudha Shastri. 11. Re-presenting the partition of India: from Bapsi Sidhwa to Deepa Mehta/Somdatta Mandal. 12. Wounded India in Deepa Mehta's 1947-Earth/Neelam Raisinghani. 13. Readings, misreadings and fundamentalist readings: reflections on the making of Deepa Mehta's water/Uma Mahadevan. 14. Characterisation of space as home in Mehta's water/Shamini Shanker-Jain. 15. Exteriority, space and female iconography in Deepa Mehta's water/Vijaya Singh. 16. The diasporic gaze: Deepa Mehta's and Bapsi Sidhwa's water/Sudha Rai. 17. Deepa Mehta's film water: constructing the dialectical image/Tutun Mukherjee. 18. Meaning through contrast: colour and image in water/Rama Rani Lall. 19. Variations on a theme: water and Banaras/Santosh Gupta.

"Films, Literature and Culture is a collection of nineteen essays that focus on Deepa Mehta's Elements Trilogy in order to explore the interconnections in the three categories and the manner in which they feed into each other. Films and literature are two mediums - one literary, the other performative - which use language and image, in order to capture the lived reality of cultural constructs.

But the processes of producing meaning and interpreting meaning are complex and multilayered. They get caught up in histories, locations and experiences. Neither film nor literature is a self-contained autonomous medium or artifact and even as they use and produce culture, they become its subverters.

The range of the interpretative strategies is amazing: social and political history, gender positions and feminist theory, cinematic frameworks and the theory of the gaze; landscape, space and exteriority; diasporic location and relationship to the culture of origin; religion and patriarchy; the city and its history, and the history of the making and reception of the three films fire, 1947-Earth and water.

The various interpretations provide a base for working out the psychodynamics of the relationship of the viewer with the text and invite the reader to participate in this multi-directional debate between reality and representation." (jacket)