Contents: List of contributors. 1. Introduction: understanding popular culture/Kausik Bandyopadhyay. 2. The poet's Swadeshi Movement--nationalism as popular culture: a study of the poetry of the Swadeshi Movement/Anuradha Roy. 3. Commercializing tradition: women, Ayurveda and healing in colonial North India/Charu Gupta. 4. All India Radio: politics and culture/Nabanita Mitra. 5. Negotiating 24-Hour News: satellite television, democratic politics and globalization in contemporary India/Nalin Mehta. 6. New culture at the Periphery: the story of 'Musical North-East'/Rakhee Bhattacharya. 7. Nationalism and entertainment: a study of colonial Bengali and Gujarati Theatres/Sunetra Mitra. 8. Changing contexts, new texts: analysing the transforming text of Post-1980 Bengali Cinema/Sharmishtha Gooptu. 9. Partition memory and refugee experience: a study of literature and cinema in Post-Colonial Bengal/Monika Mandal. 10. Retelling the holocaust in Film and Literature/Priya Singh. 11. Representation of the Armenian Genocide in popular culture/Susmita Bhattacharya. 12. The construction of martial race culture in British India and its legacies in post-colonial South Asia/Kaushik Roy. 13. Women and sports in colonial Bengal: a process of emotional and cultural integration?/Suparna Ghosh (Bhattacharya). 14. Cricket beats soaps, serials and politics: cricket and television in contemporary India/Boria Majumdar. 15. Science for whom? Popular perception of science and the politics of Science Movement in Bengal/Sabyasachi Chatterjee. 16. Constituent Assembly Election in Nepal: from monarchy to a republic--a political cultural transition/Amiya K. Chaudhuri. Review Article: 17. Bollywood, popular culture and cultural diffusion/Sreemati Ganguli. Research notes: 18. My journey through Myanmar: culture, people and history/Swapna Bhattacharya (Chakraborti). 19. Media reconstruction and the popular 'Hindi Serial' culture in contemporary Afghanistan/Arpita Basu Roy. 20. Encounters: reflections on culture and identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan/Anita Sengupta. 21. Orbiting the steppe/Suchandana Chatterjee. Book reviews. [1 Article in Hindi].

"Popular culture has long been a site which articulates the complexities and diversities of the everyday life of the nation. People, society, nation--all confront, negotiate and internalize or exclude the variegated and nuanced forms of popular culture in their own ways from time to time. Popular culture thus represents people, redefines society, and, to be bold, reconditions humanity. Asia Annual 2008: Understanding Popular Culture attempts to reveal at least part, if not the whole, of the processes of how significant variegated aspects of popular culture was/has become for parts of Asia and particularly for India--politically, socially, economically, culturally and emotionally.

The volume is an interdisciplinary effort designed to respond to the growing interest in popular culture throughout Asia. It intends to address the changing intellectual ways of constructing, reconstructing or deconstructing texts and activities as popular culture. Popular culture, in such context, is a broad canvas to incorporate lived and textual cultures, the mass media, ways of life, and discursive modes of representation. Central to the formation of these popular cultures are articulations of the economic, social and political spheres, and the volume offers contributions that highlight these issues. Asian popular culture is of interest to cultural, media, film and sport studies, as well as social geography, history, business management, international relations, area and diaspora studies, post-modern and post-colonial theoretical formulations.

The volume therefore intends to bring together scholars who offer critical appreciation on various forms of popular culture within Asia and across its borders. It thus attempts innovative discussions and debates on the emergence and vibrancy of new forms of social, cultural and political strategies and representations of popular culture in literature, film, music, theatre, sport, media, advertisement, science, politics and visual cultures." (jacket)