"We live today surrounded by images - on billboards, calendars, posters, and religious paraphernalia, in print-media and television, in restaurants and shops, on the roadside, in autorickshaws, taxis, trucks, and buses, in bazaars and around temples. This explosion of the visual emanates from the forces of urbanization of India's culture in terms of technologies of image production and ways of thinking and looking. Colonial ideals of perspective and realism in pictorial representation endowed the idealized, traditional imagery with a more tangible and sensual presence. Mass production and circulation of this imagery became a potent instrument in negotiating interstices between the sacred, the erotic, the political, and the modern." "This book largely focuses on the current contexts of popular visual culture. Both "popular" and "visual" as specific forms of modern culture have only recently received serious academic attention in India. Some of the factors which have supplied new frames to these cultural categories are the emergence of modern communication technologies - digital media, TV, and film - as well as emergent new disciplines such as cultural studies, visual studies, film, and media studies."--Jacket.