In 2011, a music video, 'O Tunir maa' (Hey, Tuni's mom), performed by Promit Kumar, produced in Bangladesh, circulated in West Bengal, India, and generated sonic imprints across mediascapes. The audio track and, subsequently, the video, produced in tandem with local music and video industries, accentuated the fluidities of media material across borders. Following many variations, the 'Tunir maa' song resurfaced in 2020 as 'Tumpa, sona' (dear, Tumpa), a digitally 'upgraded' version, made in West Bengal, India. I suggest that such traffic of media content and material underscores the densities of media forms and technologies, and accentuates how popular texts are revitalized in different formats, at different times. For instance, a study of the melody illustrates how 'Tuni-Tumpa' was a recreation of the 1989 Hindi film song 'Hawa, hawa' (Oh wind), which was a Pakistani hit, sung by the ever-popular Hasan Jahangir. There are, however, many versions of 'Hawa-hawa', for instance, the ones aired on (pre-revolution) Iranian TV. Therefore, by invoking the framework of 'media archaeology', I track the history of a song and its contemporary avatars, as well as media forms. I specifically trace the movement of media content across Pakistan, India, Bangladesh - via celluloid films, analog/VHS tapes, audio cassettes/tapes, and by means of TV signals and digital files. I examine how intersecting media maps complicate histories of media, studies of 'national' media and circumscribed analyses of mediums. I, thereby, reflect on how media files make borders porous and periods conjoined and generate a newer understanding of media geographies.
India's rich tapestry of multiculturalism belies the kaleidoscope of marginalised perspectives that are often mis-represented/under-represented owing to notions of Bharatiyata (Indian-ness), the hierarchical structures of class and caste, and the conservative ideologies of heteronormative proclivities. New Delhi, its symbolic power-centre and elitist playground, is also home to the highest number of internal migrants. As an urban simulacrum of the country's diversity and disarray, New Delhi is also the setting of Cla$$, an Indian adaptation of Netflix web-series, Elite. Cla$$ underscores the elite-subaltern clash in Delhi through antipodal polarities - of wealth-poverty, caste-privilege and heteronormativity-queerness - as encountered by Hampton High's graduating batch. In its depiction of New Delhi's elite and as a coming-of-age series in a country with nearly 40% population below 25 years, Cla$$ represents the nation's aspiration of East-meets-West as a technologically advanced developed country rooted in its history and culture. Towards unraveling the series' power dynamics and social constructionism, this article explores Cla$$' diegetic world to deconstruct its representation of prevalent social hierarchies, stereotypes, and concomitant manifestations. Through this critical analysis, the author aims to highlight the importance of intersectional approaches for more meaningful representations of India's mosaic of cultural diversity and mercurial modernity.
This research article examines how Islamic feminism is reshaping the representation of gender in contemporary Pakistani cinema, focussing specifically on the critically acclaimed film Joyland (2022), directed by Saim Sadiq. The film acts as an expose of Pakistan's complex Islamist patriarchal system, shedding light on how its characters navigate through the complexities of the Islamic nation-state. Set within the intricate socio religious and political landscape of Pakistan, where orthodox interpretations of Islam intersect with patriarchal cultural norms that appear to regulate gender and sexualities, Joyland has emerged as a radical cinematic intervention. Through its nuanced portrayal of a transgender character, queer desire and patriarchal contradictions, Joyland engages with intersectional gender relationships within a religious nationalist and patriarchal framework. The film immerses viewers in the complex issue of heteronormativity, gender fluidity and patriarchal repression in Pakistani society. By drawing on Islamic feminist scholarship, this article argues that Joyland not only exposes traditionalist religious and state-imposed moral codes that are affecting gender and identities in Pakistan but also symbolically paves the way for how, through Islamic feminism, Islam can be reclaimed as a source of gender justice and liberation. The film's controversial reception in Pakistan, which is marked by strict censorship and backlash from the conservative sections of the society, especially the Islamist political parties, highlights broader tensions surrounding issues related to gender, religious authority and freedom of expression in Pakistan. Ultimately, this study highlights how Joyland is a pivotal cultural text that could help expand the possibilities for further faith-informed feminist narratives and the reimagining of gender and identity in Pakistani society.
South Asian nations have all been heavily exposed to Hindi cinema for many decades. Within a region where tensions between individual nations make movement of goods and people at best difficult, Hindi cinema made in India has been simultaneously a shared medium and a form of cultural supremacy. Video online distribution (VOD) has begun to destabilise this film industrial configuration, enabling the regional (and global) circulation of films from other South Asian countries that, until recently, were largely confined to their domestic market. These working notes are based on research conducted by a small network of filmmakers, scholars and programmers working in and/or on the cinemas Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Over two years between 2022 and 2024 we meet at regular intervals to compare notes and document how the presence of streaming platforms manifested itself across South Asia. Our objective was to begin to assess how streamers' operation was impacting on the work of independent filmmakers in the region.
Over the past decade, Instagram has emerged as a leading infrastructure of digital sociability and cultural production - powered by an algorithmically curated set of visuals for a diverse mix of virtual publics. While often seen as implicated in popular feminism's tropes of visibility, empowerment and wellness, the platform also facilitates feminist, queer, and anti-capitalist imaginaries. Informed by feminist theories of leisure as a counterpoint to productivity ideals, I look at the Instagram page, Basanti: Women at Leisure, to understand how it curates the everyday occupation of leisure spaces by women, as assertions of presence and agency. I read the ways in which leisure is constructed as a relational, affective site of resistance and solidarity through the page's reworking of representational aesthetics. Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism frames this approach, as I examine the potential inherent in minor digital narratives of leisure to reimagine collective futures and foster feminist solidarities - while still hemmed in by the constraints of platform capitalism.
This co-creative performance project is rooted in South Asian performing arts, particularly Hindi poetry, Kathak, and Rajasthani folk dance. It was initiated and co-founded by poet and vocalist Sarita Rao and dancer and researcher Aaricia Ponnet, and developed in collaboration with guest artists Tristan Visser (sound artist) and Shalan Alhamwy (violinist). The project explores how artistic translation can serve as a methodology to convey culturally specific content in a European context. Rather than translating poetry into another spoken language, the artists translate meaning through embodied and sonic modalities - foregrounding voice, movement, and music. The project's initial phase translated Rao's Hindi poem Kab Tak - through videography, music, and dance, emphasising the performative strength of her voice. In its live performance iteration, the work expands through dialogic exchange between artists from different cultural and artistic lineages. Ponnet interprets the poetry through a contemporary Kathak lens while engaging with soundscapes shaped by Rao, Visser and Alhamwy, whose musical vocabularies draw from Arabic, South Asian, and European traditions. By involving artists new to South Asian art languages, the project invites new forms of intercultural listening while resisting cultural amalgamation. This article reflects on the development of BO-LA from the perspective of an artist-researcher situated in an in-between position - both within and outside the cultural traditions she engages with. It considers how artistic translation can amplify minority languages like Hindi in Europe and how embodied performance can create space for female agency and cross-cultural solidarity in diasporic artistic practice.
A Netflix study reported that the viewing of South Korean dramas on Netflix in India increased more than 370% in 2020 over 2019. The rising popularity of these shows has led Indian streaming platforms such as MX Player and ZEE5 to release their Hindi-dubbed versions. In concert with these trends, Spotify's 2020 data revealed that BTS was the fourth-most streamed boy band in India. How do we make sense of the astounding spread of Hallyu in India? Do concepts such as 'cultural imperialism', 'cultural proximity', or 'contra-flow' explain the consumption of Hallyu in India? Scholarly discussions of Hallyu's success generally and in South Asia specifically have focused on fans, insightfully demonstrating how an engagement with Hallyu enables the formation of resistant subjectivities and pressures Hollywood's hegemony. I turn to map another trajectory of Hallyu, focusing on how it is mobilized to promote neoliberal initiatives in India. I focus on the Delhi based Korean Cultural Centre, tracing how its sponsorship and streaming of the All-India K-pop contest and K-pop Documentary Challenge make possible political and economic ties among the South Korean state, the Indian state and South Korean conglomerates, all the while cultivating neoliberal fan subjectivities.
This paper examines three panels of public wall art on Maharshi Karve Road (Marine Lines), Mumbai, specifically artwork found on the walls of a kabristan (Muslim cemetery). Some of the artwork appeared following the 26/11 Mumbai attacks in 2008 and more latterly, Swachh Bharat Mission images have appeared since the campaign launched in 2014. Drawing on fieldwork from April 2016 and December 2017, the paper examines how ideas of Indianness and (cultural) citizenship are evoked both textually and visually. Since the paper examines wall art produced intermittently, over a number of years, I suggest that the palimpsestic nature of the artwork appearing on the kabristan wall is central to the reading of these images.The ‘reading’ of the 26/11 wall art specifically is shaped by the fact that the fieldwork was conducted ten years on from the terror attack of 2008 and thus takes into consideration the hanging of Ajmal Kasab in 2012 as well as the burial of Yakub Memon, convicted of the 1993 Bombay bombings, in a ‘Marine Lines cemetery’ following his execution in 2015. Through these readings of the larger canvas that constitutes the wall artwork of Maharshi Karve Road, the paper considers how Indianness, notions of communities and citizenship are portrayed in these panels of wall art and moreover, how these are complicated by the physical surroundings, the transient nature of wall art and the passing of time.
This article focuses on two Malayalam films such as Ore Kadal (The Sea Within, 2007) and Artist (2013) directed by Shyamaprasad. The article argues that these films break the shackles of middle-class moralities and heteronormative practices, and challenge 'traditional' Indian values of arranged marriages and hierarchical gender relations. Through a narrative analysis of the two films, the article examines the conception of an alternative image of women, the transformation from silent endurance to sexual equality and the embrace of individualism and liberalism. In both these films, what is at stake is the notion of heteronormative families, where women go against the grain of the ways in which the idea of family is articulated in Indian society. Shyamaprasad's films offer a poignant critique of normative gender ideologies and idealised notions of domesticity.
'Garments' (2016) by Tahmima Anam underlines the hardships in the position of women in contemporary Bangladesh. In this male-dominated society, women lack subjectivity and are constructed as the inferior 'other', an instrument for the fulfilment of male desire. The story approaches the plight of women in a very reticent manner and subtly highlights the patriarchal heterosexual burden on women. The character of Jesmin attracts researchers' attention due to the explicitness of personal and sexual sufferings addressed in her story without commenting on which side the author prefers to be on. This paper attempts to examine Jesmin's character through the lens of a body that suffered (emphasis added), struggling within her ways to survive in an abusive male-dominant society and achieve her sexuality. First, it discusses the condition of women in society, as portrayed in the given Chronotope. Second, it highlights the acceptance of the patriarchal norms by women for survival and the compulsory heterosexuality imposed on them in light of Adrienne Cecile Rich's arguments against the implicit assumption that heterosexuality is the only natural sexual orientation for men and women. Lastly, it explores the sexuality accomplished by Jesmin towards the end of the story from the standpoint of Luce Irigaray's idea of Autoeroticism in opposition to Heteroeroticism, where the complexity of female eroticism is not captured by male-centric sexual pleasure. The article concludes that Jesmin successfully transgresses from a sexual subject to an independent woman, ultimately unearthing her sexuality.
Departing from an endorsement of the idiom of moral superiority that undergirds most Hindi vigilante films, Vasan Bala's 2018 film Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota presents the vigilante figure itself as an archetype, a product of pop cultural utopias. Further, the film displaces the hegemonic position of the cinematic body of the vigilante hero by focusing attention on the 'body' of the cinematic medium and other pre digital media technologies. Bala invests heavily in 'analog nostalgia', accounts for media anachronisms by underlining the 'circulatory flows' of media materialism and even stages what I argue as the vigilante assertion of the analog media. In doing so, the film successfully manages to fragment the spectators' affective alliances/loyalties, which are otherwise expected to lie with the vigilante hero. Through a close reading of the film and mapping the paratextual conversations related to it, this article ultimately argues that the film expands on the existing conceptualisation of the Hindi film vigilante or the phenomenon/practice of cinematic vigilantism by making a case for the affective potential and material agency of the inanimate, non-human vigilante.
In recent years, a paradigm shift from the cosmopolitan city centres to small towns and cities has propelled scholarship on the politics of spatial representation. With the mapping of digital media cultures, the 'region' as an industrial construct has expanded to accommodate video and digital cultures as a new coordinate of Cinema Studies, one that neither fits linguistically demarcated category of big-scale 'regional cinema' nor does it adequately represent the neoliberal-touristic imagination of 'small-town' in mainstream Bombay cinema's post-2000s 'regional turn'. But how do these localized film practices of the 'hinterlands' articulate their regionality? This article draws on the contestations and negotiations of the region in recent film scholarship and argues that the decentering of the urban sprawl of the metropolis for a more diffused spatial imagination of tier-1 and tier-2 cities and towns needs to be studied in conjunction with an alternative parallel visual regime of mobility and travel in local film cultures. By turning to the socio-industrial act of making the 'travel film' Malegaon to Dubai, I analyse how epistemic erasures of 'other regions' reveal overlapping cartographies of 'region' that challenge the spatial-industrial boundaries and reveal how travel and mobility can exceed the touristic representation of small-town India.
In the past two decades, the Tamil and Hindi film industries have taken a greater interest in each other, and as a result, there has been tremendous cross-pollination of stories, technology, capital and labour. Of particular interest is the recurrence of Tamil characters and cultures in recent films starring Shah Rukh Khan, Ra.One and Chennai Express. There is an argument to be made that this is an attempt to cultivate a wider audience for the star by including South Indian characters. However, the representation of Tamil cultures in Hindi cinema is still ripe with stereotypical characters. This paper looks at two films, Chennai Express and the recent Netflix film, Meenakshi Sundareshwar. While these films have significant differences in their production, casting, storylines, genre and especially circulation, they both fall into the practice of caste and fandom-based stereotypes. Through a comparative study of the films, I break down the politics of region, language, caste and technology, and how they play into the representation of the region in Hindi cinema.
This paper focuses on the evolution of the emblems and stereotypes that have represented the milieu of the 'regional' in Hindi films from the 1960s to its post-millennial Bollywood form. Taking two melodramas, Gunga Jumna and Mukkabaaz, ostensibly set in Uttar Pradesh but separated by nearly six decades, this paper attempts to illustrate how (regional) locations get shaped as bearers of cultural features and theatres of action through the social, institutional, industrial, and, ultimately, political processes that Hindi cinema emerges from. As the paper shows, while Gunga Jumna frames its regional setting as an existing milieu belonging to a rural world, Mukkabaaz frames its setting as a new, previously unavailable milieu which must be revealed through the film's staging of a theatre of action(s). Such newness is emergent from the transformed location of (Hindi) cinema itself, placed as it is at the intersection of economic, industrial, state, material, and cultural logics different from those that cut through it in the 1960s. Through the example of these two emblematic films, then, this paper argues that this transformation in the imagination of the regional in the Hindi film is an artefact and index of the changed situation of (Hindi) cinema in India today. The 'ethnolinguistic realism' of the post-millennial Hindi film is, therefore, an artefact and index of an imagination of the regional/provincial as a new milieu - a location that must be birthed and revealed through new stories that we, as audiences, already know.
This article assesses regional depictions in Omkara, Ishqiya, and Masaan to examine the primacy of affectivities in narratives that stem from and reflect vernacular, lived spaces. It identifies a shift from ambiguity to autonomy in portraying regional characters and social intricacies, which also characterizes a recent 'New Wave' within mainstream Hindi cinema (Bollywood). The article engages with two questions. One relates to the spatial disjunction initiated by the regionalist film to consider how these films constitute a politics of spatial difference. The other looks at the expressions of regional particularity to examine the constitutive function of affectivity: in which formal moves do narratives demonstrate the coupling of space and subjectivity? The article posits a relational framework to argue that regionalist films constitute affective connections that symptomize a simultaneous avowal and disavowal of globalization. This inquiry begins by contextualizing relational tendencies with reference to notions of the vernacular as a cultural space, and key terms of affect theory. The second part reads in Omkara and Ishqiya a border-position of sidekick figures to explain that guilt, rage, derangement, and desires embody the features of an intense frontier terrain. In the third part, the pivotal role of aspiration is examined in Masaan to analyse the triggering of shock, humiliation, and a caste habitus, while manifesting spatial transitions that are evoked in the motif of bodies-in-transit. In conclusion, the article ascertains the transgressive potentialities of the vernacular that are transversal and extend through the mainstream form as a network of affects.
It is my larger contention that Hindi cinema's (re)turn to its 'regional roots' and the resurrection of its fortunes in the Hindi heartland in recent times have happened via remake and dubbing of films from other Indian languages into Hindi. In this essay, I take a preliminary step via a case study to show how Hindi cinema's return to the region as locale and setting is mediated and propelled largely by 'regional cinema' (and in this instance, it is also through the remaking of a couple of episodes of a TV series set in a non-Hindi speaking region). Though 'regional cinema' suggests the replication of a hierarchy between national cinema (claimed for Hindi cinema) and regional cinema (which other Indian language cinemas are relegated to), here, by regional cinema I mean films made in an Indian language which is supposed to be coterminous with a region within India - where the territory is supposed to be the signified of the language that functions as its signifier. I take the case of the Hindi film Swades: We the People (Homeland, 2004), and look at how it reprises other returns of the protagonist to the Kannada region and language in its antecedents.
On 5 August 2019, Article 370, which protected the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, was revoked, adding another twist to the narrative of a tortured land that had fed cinema's fantasies. Among the measures taken by the Indian government to bring 'normalcy' to the region was the 'Jammu and Kashmir Film Policy', endorsed by industry A-listers such as Aamir Khan and others. The policy aims to 'provide means to attract tourists, employment to the local population and to disseminate information about art, culture, history, heritage, livelihood and the glorious traditions of Jammu & Kashmir'. This article leverages the policy document to revisit the representation of Kashmir in Indian films, through a framework where 'regional representation' is grounded in an understanding of cultural industries, repressed rights, and fantasies of 'adaptive repurposing' across sites of desire and conflict.
Focusing on Anurag Basu's Barfi (2012) this article attempts to read the changing pattern of portraying Bengali-ness on post millennial Bollywood screen. The article demonstrates how, Barfi widens the Hindi film stereotypes of Bengal and Bengalis in the context of contemporary Bollywood's drive towards localization. The article argues that the idea of Bengali regional identity in Barfi functions as political constructs which is reflective of the dominant political mood of post 2011 West Bengal and carries the influence of Bengali. 'Relationship films'. In the 2000s Bengali cinema experienced the rise of Tollywood as a new media industry replacing the earlier modes of popular Bengali cinema and in this. transformation the construction of gentrified Bengali-ness is central. The article demonstrates, how Barfi reflects some of the newer formations associated with Tollywood and can be seen as a text consciously designed to speak to both Bengali and national audiences in its portrayal of city spaces and characters. With reference to this film, I try to argue that the constructs of regionality in the contemporary Bollywood production needs to be understood in them, specificity rather than as a common pattern of representing regions in Indian media texts.
