Bio
MK Raghavendra (DOB. 24th Dec, 1954), who got a master’s degree in science (MSc.) and worked in the financial sector for over twenty-five years, is a writer on culture, literature and politics, much of his writing focussed on cinema. His chosen approach is textual analysis with an emphasis on political discourse. He received the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997 and was awarded a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000-01. He has authored four volumes of academic film scholarship criticism – Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (Oxford, 2008), Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film (Oxford, 2011), The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation (Oxford, 2014), and Locating World cinema: Interpretations of film as Culture (Bloomsbury, due March 2020). He has also written two books on cinema for the general reader 50 Indian Film Classics (Collins, 2009) and Director’s Cut: 50 Film-makers of the Modern Era (Collins, 2013). His essays on Indian cinema find a place in Indian and international anthologies. He has also published extensively in Indian newspapers, periodicals and journals like The Indian Review of Books, Caravan, Economic and Political Weekly, Frontline, The Book Review and Biblio: A Review of Books. His writing has been translated into French and Polish. He has written extensively on politics and culture for Firstpost in the past three years. He has edited an anthology of writing on South-Indian cinema Beyond Bollywood: The Cinemas of south India published by HarperCollins in 2017. His book The Oxford India Short Introduction to Bollywood was published in 2016. His academic writings have been anthologized in books published by Oxford University Press, Sage, Routledge, BFI (British Film Institute). His book on international cinema Locating world Cinema is due to be published by Bloomsbury in 2020 as is another book Philosophical Issues in Indian Film by Routledge. He is the Founder-Editor of online journal Phalanx, which dedicated to debate: http://phalanx.in/pages/content.html