Books by Pramod K. Nayar

The volumes focus on select aspects of the British imperial archives: the accounts of "discovery" and exploration - fauna and flora, geography, climate - the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes - including the "Mutiny" of 1857-58 - and the "civilisational mission".This volume documents how the practice of thuggee was viewed by the British before: as if it symbolized everything that was wrong with the social order in India. The texts collected here are accounts of how the British 'discovered' the subcontinent. The narrative of discovery, with the freshness of the 'new', was couched very often in the rhetoric of wonder. But this sense of wonder, even astonishment in some cases at the variety, magnitude and sheer difference of the land and its people, was tempered over time with a narrative of exploration.

The book is a full-length study of Indian celebrity culture, including fandom, celebrity philanthropy and celebrity activism, which are established features of life today and which constitute a major component of pop culture's coverage of sports/film stars.The collection of essays in the book moves from the largest domain of celebrity culture in India - Bollywood - through celebrity life writing and biopics and, finally, to the politics of and by celebrity culture. The book begins with an exploration of films made around women celebrity victims - Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Jessica Lal and Kiranjit Ahluwaliato - and moves on to show how the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bollywood stars' philanthropic and humanitarian work enables their insertion into a global humanitarian project wherein the Bollywood campaigner for women's rights, environmental causes or animal welfare generates a membership in the global citizenship of benevolence and charity. Celebrity charisma and its role in the current era of 'post-truth' are studied to show how Bollywood charisma as a form of mimetic capital generates a sensuous fidelity in the audience, inducing a certain cultural ignorance.The book goes on to show how star memoirs reinforce star-value through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor. The hagiographic biopics around cricket stars M.S. Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar, the criminal Charles Shobhraj and Neerja Bhanot, the air hostess killed by hijackers, make a case for an argument that the family and the nation remain nodal points in the representations of the lives and careers, and how these representations enable the making of certain aspirational models for the country. Reading cancer memoirs by Bollywood stars shows how these celebrity somatographies move outward, from a focus on the star's body to the biosocial network.The final collection of essays are at the intersection of celebritydom and celebrity politics that starts with the examination of the genre of Indian writing in English as a celebrity within the context of literary festivals and the demand for the postcolonial exotic. The River Narmada as a cultural icon and its iconicity generates a whole new grammar of protest, having become a part of India's collective cultural memory. Reading Arundhati Roy as a celebrity makes a case for her 'insurgent celebrityhood' created through her mobility into and across many public domains. The desacralization of the iconic Ambedkar statues, which occurs periodically in parts of India, is a mode of once again rendering the Dalit an 'outcast'. Reading the websites of celebrity Indian authors, Ashok Banker, Devdutt Pattnaik and Amish, demonstrates how a certain self-fashioning by these authors occurs through a careful engagement with a Hindu ancestry and tradition. The self-fashioning is linked to, and manifests as, their literary location within a scriptural-mythological narrative.

The book offers a close examination of the rhetoric and discourses around the Bhopal disaster through a reading of numerous cultural texts-from fiction to protest effigies and posters - and maps the production of an ecological Gothic around the disaster.

Set at the intersection of Human Rights, social justice and Literature, this cutting edge book examines a range of literary texts, fiction, plays and poetry, and through them considers representations of Human Rights and their violations.

This set includes one copy each of An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures and The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology. When used together in a course these two volumes present a complete introduction to the subject.

Explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. This work argues that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape.

This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in ';extreme cultures'. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the body's immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous forces and conditions.The Extreme in Contemporary Culture studies vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease, accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes. Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer, in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the human.