This essay situates the academic enquiry into the ‘popular’ idea of the nation within the shifting disciplinary contours of English in India. Using the iconic Bharatbala music video ‘Vande Mataram’ (1998) as a case study, it demonstrates how methods of analysis derived from literary studies may be used to engage with the mediated nature of contemporary culture; the classroom experience of ‘reading’ together a popular cultural text reflects as well as instantiates the expansion of ‘English’ at the level of both content and form. The collaborative pedagogic exercise of decoding the ‘signs’ that constitute the audio-visual text through familiar literary terms such as imagery, symbolism, setting and character reveals how the cultural discourse of nationalism – in terms of its historical legacy as well as its current political resonance – can be ‘read’ contextually using disciplinary methods of ‘English’. I argue that the ‘literary’ can no longer be defined only in terms of the nature of the text one brings into the classroom – it is a mode of analysis that can be extended to examining cultural texts in other media formats too, especially if the enterprise of ‘doing’ English in a formal, academic set-up is to be anything more than a reiteration of the value of Anglo-American canonical literature. If the English canon has traditionally been a means of teaching students how to ask fundamental questions about cultural representation, the same aim is now achieved also through the use of texts from other, more familiar and local contexts and media.

中文翻译：

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从这里看——用英语教授“流行”民族主义

这篇文章将学术研究置于印度不断变化的英语学科轮廓中，对民族的“流行”理念进行研究。使用标志性的 Bharatbala 音乐视频“Vande Mataram”（1998 年）作为案例研究，它展示了如何使用源自文学研究的分析方法来参与当代文化的中介性质；一起“阅读”流行文化文本的课堂体验反映并实例化了“英语”在内容和形式层面的扩展。通过熟悉的文学术语（如意象、象征、背景和性格揭示了民族主义的文化话语——就其历史遗产和当前的政治共鸣而言——如何可以使用“英语”的学科方法在上下文中“阅读”。我认为“文学”不能再仅仅根据带入课堂的文本的性质来定义——它是一种分析模式，也可以扩展到检查其他媒体格式的文化文本，特别是如果在正式的学术环境中“做”英语的企业不仅仅是重申英美经典文学的价值。如果传统上英语经典一直是教学生如何提出有关文化表征的基本问题的一种手段，那么现在也可以通过使用其他文本来实现相同的目标，