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Information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, etc. of entities across the world; government site maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States
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Indian Media
The Indian motion-picture industry, which now ranks as the most popular form of mass entertainment. In some years India—whose film industry is centred in Mumbai (Bombay), thus earning the entire movie-making industry the sobriquet “Bollywood” in honour of Hollywood, its U.S. counterpart—makes more feature-length films than any other country in the world. The lives of film heroes and heroines, as portrayed in film magazines and other media, are subjects of great popular interest. While most films are formulaic escapist pastiches of drama, comedy, music, and dance, some of India’s best cinematographers, such as Satyajit Ray, are internationally acclaimed. Others, such as filmmakers Ismail Merchant, M. Night Shyamalan (Manoj Shyamalan), and Mira Nair, gained their greatest success making films abroad. Indian actor, model, and singer Priyanka Chopra Jonas, married to pop star Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, rose to international stardom after she was crowned Miss World in 2000; she is one of India’s highest-paid actresses. Radio, television, and Internet broadcasts, as well as digital recordings, are popular among those affluent enough to afford them.
The corpus of Indian literature is vast, especially in religion and philosophy. The roots of Indian literary tradition are found in the Vedas, a collection of religious hymns probably dating from the mid-2nd millennium bce but not written down until many centuries later. Many of the ancient texts still provide core elements of Hindu rituals and, despite their great length, are memorized in their entirety by Brahman priests and scholars.
Literature languished during much of the period of British rule, but it experienced a new awakening with the so-called Hindu Renaissance, centred in Bengal and beginning in the mid-19th century. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee established the novel, previously unknown in India, as a literary genre. Chatterjee wrote in Bengali, and most of his literary successors, including the popular Hindi novelist Prem Chand (pseudonym of Dhanpat Rai Srivastava), also preferred to write in Indian languages; however, many others, including Tagore, were no less comfortable writing in English. The works of some Indian authors—such as the contemporary novelists Mulk Raj Anand, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and R.K. Narayan; the essayist Nirad C. Chaudhuri; the poet and novelist Vikram Seth; Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie (1981), Arundhati Roy (1997), and Kiran Desai (2006); as well as the novelist Vikram Chandra and the poets Meena Alexander and Kamala Das—are exclusively or almost exclusively in English.
