Local-to-local dynamics of regional Popular Culture (Re)Imagination of South Asia
Local-to-local dynamics of regional Popular Culture (Re)Imagination of South Asia

Summary/Abstract: We are too besotted with the category of global, as though it were a spectacle of the milieu, to make sense of the dynamics of local. However we do make efforts to fathom the local. On one level it is an atomized microscopic local; on the other it is globally mediated local. At microscopic level, an atomized version of local, pertaining to a particular cultural thread in isolation, subscribes to the logic of cultural relativism. On the other hand, globally mediated local, subscribes to the idea of hybridity of cultural forms, and obscures the idea of any cultural specificity whatsoever. In varied manner, the duality of sense, vis-à-vis either atomized microscopic local or globally mediated local, has been fathomed in terms of provincial globalization. But then, the dynamics of local, with its transnational circulation of cultural forms, unfolds an opportunity to transcend the theoretical limitations of globalization and glocalization (or even grobalization). In the backdrop of deliberation on art and cinema, this is imperative to ask as to what sense of local stems from the phenomenon of popular culture and thereof content in the region of South Asia. To make it more precise, what sense of local can be obtained from the circulation of Hindi cinema and thereof content? What notion of local emerges from the dynamics of local art and popular cinema in the region?

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