Content
List of Tables and Figures vii
Introduction viii
Performative Cultures 20
01 Can the Centre Hold? Play and Tensions in Oral
Cultural Narratives of Goa 22
02 When Is a Coconut Not a Coconut? Using Semiotics to
Harness Culture in India 42
03 Television Narratives: Creating a Cultural Complicity -
A Semiotic Analysis of the Balaji Telefilms Discourse 56
04 Literacy in the 'Visual World': Impact of the SLS
Experiment in Rural India 80
05 Ethnoconsumerism and Cultural Branding: Designing 'Nano' Car 94
06 Contemporary Indian Art and the 'Semiotic Eye': Issues And Perspectives 118
Notions of Space and Geography 136
07 The Sabarmati Story: Memory of Water and Notions of Place 138
08 Designed Environments, Mimesis, and Likeness: Exploring Human-Material Ecologies 152
09 Architecture and Design Semiotics in the Light of Transformative Futures 176
10 Discovering the Abandoned and the Living: A Material-Semiotic Reading of Textile Mills in Ahmedabad 202
Digital Futures 216
11 Humanities in the Digital World/Digital in the Humanities? 218
12 Enchanted Object Indian Sari, Negotiating the Online and the Offline Space 238
Discourses of Identity, Modernity, and Nationalism 266
13 Semiotic Challenges in India 268
14 Branding National Issues: India and the Branding Bandwagon 290
15 Insisting Modernity Exploring Objects of Modernity in the Optimism and Practice in Mulk Raj Anand's Life 300
Epilogue 324
Acknowledgements 334
About the Author 339