'South Asian Media Cultures' is a collection of essays that pulls together field-based audience and textual research in areas such as the politics of new media, contemporary television and film in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and their audiences. Through a careful analysis of the various media cultures and practices from across South Asia, this collection addresses pertinent issues such as how discourses on gender, nationalism, ethnicity and class are being expressed by mainstream media texts across South Asia, and how different groups within the public discern meanings from such discourses.

Introduction; Talking Back to 'Bollywood': Hindi Commercial Cinema in North-East India; 'Adverts Make Me Want to Break the Television': Indian Children and their Audiovisual Media Environment in Three Contrasting Locations; Urdu for Image: Understanding Bangladeshi Cinema through its Theatres; Musical Media and Cosmopolitanism in Nepal's Popular Music, 1950-2006; Private Satellite Television and the Geo-Politics of Moderation in Pakistan; Forgetting to Remember: The Privatisation of the Public, the Economisation of Hindutva, and the Medialisation of Genocide; Myth - The National Form: Mission Istanbul and Muslim Representation in Hindi Popular Cinema; A Peace of Soap: Representations of Peace and Conflict in Popular Teledramas in Sri Lanka; Destigmatising Star Texts - Honour and Shame among Muslim Women in Pakistani Cinema; Through the Lens of a 'Branded Criminal': The Politics of Marginal Cinema in India; Pakistani Students' Uses of New Media to Construct a Narrative of Dissent; Expanding the Art of the Possible: Leveraging Citizen Journalism and User Generated Content (USG) for Peace in Sri Lanka; Conclusion; List of Contributors