Heroes and Heritage: The Protagonist in Indian Literature and Film. An analysis of the role of the protagonist is central to text interpretation. Providing examples of such analyses, the fourteen articles in this volume deal with the protagonist in mainly 20th-century North Indian films and literary texts. Besides a historical survey of protagonists in 20th- century Hindi literature, this volume offers detailed discussions of a wide variety of 'heroes' - among them children, aged men, courtesans, women fighting for independence, and Urdu poets. The literary texts analysed here belong to various genres (novel, short story, drama, poetry) and the papers demonstrate several analytical methods, such as narratology, film analysis, feminist literary analysis and postcolonial studies.