{"id":18057,"date":"2018-10-16T06:07:17","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T03:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=18057"},"modified":"2018-10-16T06:07:17","modified_gmt":"2018-10-16T03:07:17","slug":"indian-genre-publications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2018\/10\/16\/indian-genre-publications\/","title":{"rendered":"New books on Indian genre publications"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first such book in English, Saif Eqbal’s Adventure comics and youth cultures in India<\/a><\/em>, offers “a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India” with a strong focus on home-grown superheroes, detectives and some outright space sci-fi heroes (although I hear that hard space sci-fi is not very popular in India, as the mass markets are culturally attuned to fantasy). Routledge has managed to lumber the book with a very offputting cover, which must have taken them all of five minutes to slap together. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But the Contents suggest a useful brisk overview…<\/p>\n

1. Action India
\n2. The Making of Modern Mythologies
\n3. The Golden Age of the Indian Superhero
\n4. Gendering Graphics
\n5. A Haven of Super Creativity
\n6. The Fantastic Familiar
\n7. The State of the Nation
\n8. A Forensics of Evil
\n9. Readers\u2019 Worlds
\n10. In One of my Dreams, I Defeated America
\n11. Future Presents.
\nGlossary of Key Indian Adventure Comic Book Characters.
\nIndex<\/p>\n

For a historical take that stretches back further, there are essays on Indian genre in the first third of the recent summer 2018 collection Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories<\/a><\/em>. Again, it’s billed as as a first, “the first substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages”. Though there was the 2008 article “Indian pulp fiction in English: A preliminary overview from Dutt to D\u00e9” which starts in the 19th century. That article is paywalled but there’s a very long summary here<\/a> with lots of name-checks.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure how well Lovecraft fits into this cultural nexus, and a few minutes of searching for variants on India translations Lovecraft<\/em> had no results. But Routledge’s Genre Fiction of New India: post-millennial receptions of “weird” narratives<\/a><\/em> (2016) covers the scene in the post-2000 period. Apparently ‘the weird’ is quite commercially successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first such book in English, Saif Eqbal’s Adventure comics and youth cultures in India, offers “a history and ethnography …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}