Amaal Akhtar is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research explores social histories of Urdu print and popular culture in twentieth century India, tracing in particular the intersections of gender and caste. She is interested in examining the fluidity of Urdu’s “literary” and “popular” cultures and bringing into focus the bazaar/marketplace as both material reality and contentious imaginary in the twentieth century Urdu print world.
Her previous academic training has been in Modern Indian History at the University of Delhi (MA) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (MPhil). She has worked in publishing as an academic editor with Orient BlackSwan and Tulika Books and also contributed as translator to Sair-ul-Manazil, an eighteenth century history of medieval Delhi published by Tulika Books. Her writings on the representational politics of Bombay/Hindi cinema films have appeared in The Hindu and The Indian Express.
Bombay cinema looms large over media and cinema studies in India even though the history of the Bombay film industry is more recent than the history of film culture in the Subcontinent. The Bombay film industry as we know it today consolidated during the 1950s in the wake of the massive political and economic restructuring…
