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This paper critically contextualizes the open secret of Karan Johar’s sexuality as a key marketable commodity in the neoliberal framework of the ‘KJo’ brand. It examines the cultural legibility of the open secret of his sexuality. It argues that the juxtaposition between the ubiquity of his open secret and his maintained silence on identifying his sexuality serves as an incitement that enables a study of his role in incrementally making space for a depoliticized and individualized upper-class male same-sex sexuality. By mapping the textuality of his open secret in the culture industry surrounding the Hindi film industry this paper offers a nuanced critique of the co-option of male same-sex sexuality by Karan Johar and its deployment as a gimmick.

Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popularity in the 1980s, this paper argues that ‘youth’ bears within itself the desire to transcend the gen...

This paper examines the phenomenon of MMS pornography in India. ‘MMS’ or Multimedia Messaging Service refers to a communication technology that allows the sharing of multimedia files over cellphone networks. In India however, the term ‘MMS’ has become attached to pornographic clips that are shared over mobile phone networks or the Internet. Through an examination of two limit cases, ‘The Mysore-Mallige Scandal’ (2001) and the ‘Delhi Metro MMS Scandal’ (2014) this paper argues that the negotiation of space and place is integral to the production, circulation and ultimately the affective impact of such videos. In particular, I seek to extend the definition of the MMS clip by examining the play between place and affect. In doing so, I argue that MMS pornography is a symptom of a larger spatial problem of the digital age – the problem of the ‘leak’.

Digital memes have become a widespread form of engagement with media texts in popular cultures. This paper focuses on image macros that incorporate Bollywood film content and establish transcultura...

The paper evaluates the use of the escape motif in Ritesh Batra’s 2019 film Photograph, with respect to its modernist tendencies of fragmented psyche, nostalgia for the past, and aesthetics. It stu...

This paper documents how the British Bangladeshi diaspora in the UK has been collaborating to contribute to the growth of the creative sector in the UK and in Bangladesh. Through case studies from the creative-start-up of Oitij-jo (February 2013) and subsequently the planning of its second project ‘AKHON: Where is Bengal Now’, this paper charts the collaborations between the culture and creative industries of Bengali heritage (film, photography, theatre, dance, music, art, architecture, textiles and fashion) involved in the project between 2013 and 2016. The authors question widely used policy notions of ‘the creative class’ and ‘creative clustering’ and explore the collaborative economy model for the growth of Bangladeshi cultural and creative industries. Using infographics and netnographic interviews, the paper maps out advantages and disadvantages of collaboration linked to digital and non-digital peer-to-peer skills sharing and entrepreneurship. It concludes with the next steps for Oitij-jo an...

This paper examines the historic growth and development of the design sector in India, and evaluates the potential of the industry to contribute to innovation performance as the country’s manufacturing sector continues its expansion via a comparative analysis of design policies in advanced economies and those in India, and an evaluation of the performance of design promotional initiatives, the paper identifies lessons that might be incorporated sensitively into the future elaboration of Indian design policy. The paper concludes that design inputs can contribute to both social and economic development (and to innovation performance in both traditional craft and hi-tech manufacturing). However, it also argues that policy to support intelligent growth, diffusion and take-up of design must be attuned to both qualitative issues of culture, diversity and tradition, and to ‘harder’ issues of location, infrastructure, skills, investment and demand.

In this paper, we study some of the politics involved in representing neighbouring country Pakistan with reference to the launching of a new television channel in India, Zindagi/Life. Zindagi was launched on 23 June 2014 and owned by the Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. which airs syndicated television shows from Pakistan. Zindagi became the first ever general entertainment channel (GEC) in India to air syndicated content from Pakistan. Our paper aims to explore how in the popular teleserials of Zindagi the representation of the ‘other’ (here Pakistan and its people) has become part of the viewing practices for Indian audiences. The present context of the Indian political and media scenario (after BJP came to power in the last Lok Sabha election in 2014) with national GECs’ increasing involvement in telecasting Hindu mythological and historical serials makes the airing of Zindagi more interesting (In the last Lok Sabha elections (2014), Bharatiya Janata Party (which formed the government with ma...

Eelam Tamils have a growing connection with Indian Tamils through shared language, cultural heritage, history, and cosmology, despite not having a shared geography or homeland. This paper contribut...

The paper looks at Filmindia magazines from 1946 to 1948 on the eve of transition of India from being a colony to an Independent nation. The paper uses the Habermasian public sphere, Kellner’s media culture and Gaonkar’s ideas of alternative modernities to analyse the magazine. Magazines like Filmindia constituted literary public spheres which became a site for deliberation on defining the ideals of masculinity and femininity for the new nation. By virtue of being the most influential magazine of the time, Filmindia’s views also gain significance in constructing gender role models for the new nation. Filmindia, in its construction of the ideal man and woman, promotes societal modernization but opposes cultural modernization. The cultural core was to be protected and cinema with its ability to influence the masses posed a threat to it. Thus censorship becomes a tool to enforce the gender norms defined for the nation.

This paper analyses contemporary, popular Tamil films set in Madurai with respect to space and caste. These films actualize region as a cinematic imaginary through its authenticity markers – caste/ist practices explicitly, which earlier films constructed as a ‘trope’. The paper uses the concept of Heterotopias to analyse the recurrence of spectacle spaces in the construction of Madurai, and the production of caste in contemporary films. In this pursuit, it interrogates the implications of such spatial discourses.

Bollywood’s depiction of its female characters tends to be regressive. Recently, however, movies like Kahaani (2012), Queen (2014) and Gulaab Gang (2014) depict a limited presence of male characters or no male protagonist, thus focusing all attention on the female character and its development. Examining the construction/depiction of the Indian woman free from a validating male presence, this paper discusses the new trend in Bollywood post-2010 and views it as an indirect response to both the increasing role women are playing in the Indian economy and the rising violence directed towards Indian women in the twenty-first century. Introducing six tropes common to Kahaani, Queen and Gulaab Gang to analyze the new trend, the paper argues that these movies offer a nuanced understanding of the Indian woman by implicating the audience and its perception of female characters, and by simultaneously highlighting the inherent multiplicities within the seemingly homogenous category of Indian femininity. Depicted as i...

Using questionnaire and interview findings from 120 young Mauritians, this paper explores the ways in which young Mauritian Muslim women form part of a cross-religious and cross-national intimate public consuming Hindi films. Bollywood romances are among the most significant cultural resources through which young Mauritian Muslim women imagine their female selves and reconnect with their Indo-Muslim heritage, despite overlapping local/global cultural politics that encourage purist versions of Islam and Hinduism, expunged of Indo-Muslim legacies. Bollywood cinema is an intensely private experience that allows informants to harness a form of modernity that is a socially tolerable alternative to Western popular culture. This paper suggests that young Muslim women's relationship to their Indo-Muslim lineage as mediated by Bollywood can be read in terms of melancholia, as their apparent emotional investment into Bollywood romances is anxiously mitigated, marking a lack of consciousness of, and ambivalence towa...

This paper explores a new genre of Bollywood action films spawned by action superstar Salman Khan, focusing specifically on his 2010 hit Dabangg [The Thug]. The paper argues that although touted as an action film, Dabangg plays with the generic conventions of the Bollywood action film, by introducing elements of the carnivalesque into its display of masculinity and violence. In doing so it reinvents the action film as the masti (or fun/playful) film. I begin with a brief history of the Bollywood action film, situating Dabangg both within this larger tradition and also analyzing its departure from it. Next, I argue that Dabangg parodies the fight sequence, a staple of the action film genre, by introducing elements of the carnivalesque – the image of the grotesque body, songs and dances, mimicry of serious rituals and the destabilization of the boundaries between art and life – into the ritualized performance of violence and masculinity, thereby transforming the latter into comedic spectacle. Following this...

This paper explores the formations of masculinity and its links to the perceived vulnerability of young women’s sexualized bodies by focusing on popular Malayalam cinema from Kerala. I will specifi...

This working paper will introduce a comparison of the representation of white femininity pre- and post-economic liberalisation in India. The intention is to understand better how earlier representa...

This paper aims to extend the scope of cultural criminological research through an investigation of gender representation in 21st Century Bollywood films focusing on portrayals of Sexually ...

This paper examines two graphic novels by women based on Hindu mythology: Samhita Arni’s Sita’s Ramayana and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva: The Churning of the Ocean. These texts use a range of storytel...

This paper explores the necessity of understanding contemporary Kashmiri contestations of hegemonic Indian state, media and social media discourses through a media ecology framework. In recent year...

This paper focuses on the changing representation of youth violence in India, where the political culture remains focused on power as a function of seniority and generation, not merit. The state's recent attempt to bring the networked protests of the middle class young within the ambit of sanctions historically reserved for terror, highlights its anxiety over the New Media. The extraordinary powers of communication and publishing which digitisation now makes available to educated youth, through interactivity, cross-referentiality and convergence with audio and video entertainment and mobile telephony, lies at the heart of their concern. Setting aside ageist and ethnocentric explanations for the ‘radicalisation’ of youth, the paper argues for opening up mainstream education itself to a critical academic scrutiny into terror. Fundamentalism, it concludes, cannot be sourced to the madrassa (‘school’ or ‘seminary’ in Arabic) and its specialised teachings; but rather to the techno power routinely invested in t...

As the first British situation comedy about a Muslim family, Citizen Khan received mostly negative reviews from the press. Reviews could be split into two tropes: Citizen Khan was offensive to Muslims, or just offensively bad. It was the comedy's use of crude caricatures, compounded by its foundation in a rather archaic form of humour that seemingly rubbed up both white and Asian critics alike. However, this paper argues that much of this criticism failed to adequately contextualise Citizen Khan within the form of comedy that it is working within. Using Georgina Born's notion of ‘genre-in-progress’, the paper argues that it is only by situating Citizen Khan within its genre of British family sitcom that we can properly ascertain its cultural political value, where we find in fact something much more potentially subversive than the reviews give it credit for.

This paper looks at the journey of new small-town films and analyses the cultural economy of this small-town nostalgia. Looking at the reconfiguration of Indian cities as a key phase, the paper attempts to argue that small-town nostalgia is produced by these reconfigurations as the small-town seeps into the big cities and produces its cinematic variant from within the urban imaginary. The paper conceptualises the small-town as a space marked by performative excess and state of exception in the realm of law and order. It is produced as an imaginary ‘other’ of the big city, a counter-utopia which threatens even as it entertains the residual cultural-self trapped in the confident but ill-conceived Indian urbanism. The multiplex, as a prominent socio-economic site of exhibition, now hosts this new small-town simulacra that disengages itself gradually from its referent and gets a life of its own. This paper, therefore, situates small-town nostalgia within the multiplex-mall probing the boundary conditions of t...

This paper looks at Ashutosh Gowariker's film Swades: We the People (Homeland, 2004), a cinematic narrative dealing with a non-resident Indian's return to his homeland, to argue that this film challenges the paradigm Bollywood films have set for representing the Indian diaspora by questioning the idea of originary bond between the diasporic subject and his homeland. I argue that Mohan's return is not, unlike his Bollywood predecessors, determined by either a metaphysical cultural re-turn to an idealized homeland or an expression of what Aihwa Ong terms as ‘flexible citizenship.’ Rather, the filmmaker locates this narrative of return within the context of the material and the everyday. The paper argues that the filmmaker accomplishes this by destabilizing the discourse of oedipalic and homing desire that has been used by Bollywood cinema to dramatize the diaspora's belonging to the motherland. Deploying the character of a foster-mother and the spatial metaphor of a caravan, Swades brings in the element of ...

This paper presents emerging research on young women's participation in virtual heterosexual mate-seeking in two bustees (urban slum communities) in Kolkata. I begin the paper by reviewing the context of online friendship, dating and romance in India. I show how greater educational and social achievements in the bustees are prompting some young Muslim women to pursue online friendship and mate-seeking. I explore how these young women are using schooling opportunities to learn computer skills, and using the computer to broaden their social worlds. I discuss the opportunities young women have to meet friends and partners online and how they sustain virtual relationships. For many, online friendships and mate-seeking can be a safe method to meet young men, as it reduces corporeal risks. This virtual world of relationships, however, is not entirely risk free. I discuss how the online nature of meeting young men is underpinned by discourses of distrust. Though the research group is small and participants repre...

This paper examines how Zeenat Aman helped inaugurate new forms of sexuality and femininity in 1970s Bollywood. Along with redefining the rules of a screen heroine's identity, Aman also created a range of grey characters such as Sheetal in Manoj Kumar's Roti Kapada aur Makaan (1974) and Sheela in Feroz Khan's Qurbani (1980). These roles became associated with hugely popular songs of the period, lip-synched by Aman, including ‘Aap jaisa koi,’ from Qurbani, and ‘Main naa bhoolunga’, from Roti Kapada aur Makaan. This paper explores how these repeated song sequences reflect Aman's positioning within these narratives even as they allow her to reshape her role in innovative ways. In this way, this paper examines how Zeenat Aman deviated from earlier binary models imposed upon Bollywood heroines, pitting heroine against vamp and, in the process, created new modes of femininity and female agency within these films.

This paper analyzes the debates around the regional language film Avalude Ravukal (Her Nights, d. I.V. Sasi, 1978), a controversial film produced by the Kerala film industry credited as being responsible for launching soft-porn cinema as a genre in India. This paper tracks the shifting circuits of Avalude Ravukal and its fractured aesthetic codes to analyze the role of cultural production in configuring the regional public sphere. The intertextual network of Avalude Ravukal and its reception, functions as a live archive of popular memory through which I can track the mutually constitutive relationship between the ‘excesses’ of cinema and moral anxieties within regional publics, especially around the figure of the prostitute. The paper demonstrates that in order to map the non-linear histories of Indian cinema, it is necessary to examine how this medium is enmeshed in vernacular socialities within the heterogeneous space of the nation.

A globalization-era fairytale, Slumdog Millionaire has exposed millions of viewers to a story of redemption amid grinding poverty and hardship in urban India. The compelling story can serve as a valuable educational tool for youth to recognize the complex processes at play in the production of media such as Slumdog Millionaire, and its delivery and subsequent celebration by Western audiences. This paper places the film within the context of the global expansion of markets for corporate profit and resulting inequity – namely, Western audiences' consumption of a specific narrative from the so-called ‘Global South.’ Additionally, it critiques Slumdog Millionaire's representations of the South Asian working class, particularly the lack of agency for female characters in the film, who serve as little more than symbolic prizes to be won. Finally, the paper provides a popular education-based lesson plan for educators interested in utilizing the film as a point of departure to discuss present-day manifestations o...

This paper is about contemporary art from South Asia, and more importantly about the ways in which women as artists respond to conflict. This paper looks at the idea of ‘space’ in art and how it is employed by the different artists who exhibited their work in the Between Kismet and Karma (BKK) programme, 2010. It also studies the politics of identity within the context of political realities as represented by the various artists. The relationship between the art and the audience is key to this study of BKK, as the paper is written to reflect and respond to the various pieces of art. As a viewer I will pose questions that are endemic to the art and thereby seek to reconcile the art to its context. This paper will also examine the representation of postcolonial memory and political correctness to arrive at a more succinct understanding of the programme's themes and objectives.

The development of South Asian arts in the UK has gone from using typical colonial and ‘high culture’ showcases to using particular but still far more ‘mainstream’ formats, and has been publicly subsidised in a number of ways, including through community projects. In many respects, South Asian arts is not a ‘niche product’ any more due to the (mainly political) tension towards creating a distinctively ‘British Asian’ (or BrAsian) rather than a strictly ‘South Asian’ product. This paper draws upon two case studies of South Asian ‘cultural producers’ (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 223) in Northern England to argue that showcasing South Asian art in Britain is a peculiar endeavour, the existence of which must account for multiple functions, multiple audiences and even international politics. The paper argues that recognising this fact has profound implications for the future of British Asian identities and for the negotiation between popular culture and politics.

This paper argues that the ‘Tamil-ness’ of Tamil cinema was not based on any fixed linguistic identity, but was constructed as a matter of production practice and critical discourse after the introduction of sound film during the 1930s. Using contemporary sources the paper looks at how the Tamil part of Tamil cinema was constructed through changes in film form, production and music at a time when producers and directors were confronted with new and as yet untested linguistic and geographic parameters for imagining their audiences. The Tamil-ness of Tamil film must also be read in relation to an increasing differentiation within the ongoing linguistic division of Indian cinema, the critical discourses of Tamil revival and the cultural politics of caste and class during the 1930s and 1940s. This paper problematizes the Tamil identity of Tamil cinema as a stable, self-contained, linguistically bounded tradition during the 1930s.

Slumdog Millionaire's success in the US invites a broader question: have the film's many Bollywood flourishes and references created a wider appetite for its ‘ancestors’ from Bollywood? In addressing the question of Bombay cinema's penetration into the US mainstream, the paper argues that the germane issue is not the influx of Bombay cinema en masse into America's screens but rather the specific forms from Bombay that have captured the interest of US audiences. This form is such a departure from the internal conventions of Bollywood that it is more properly understood as Bollywood Lite, or Bollylite. Bollylite pillages formal characteristics from Bollywood while shearing much of that cinema's fabled social substance and political edge. Thus lightened, Bollylite travels, though with a remarkably limited commercial and critical half-life. Observing Bollylite's fortunes and the material conditions that produce it, the paper examines Bollylite films that have enjoyed successful distribution in the US market, ...

Based on ethnographic field research in a south Indian city this paper explores some of the practices, habits, and preferences of women movie-goers. I examine how middle class women construct the cinema experience: how they navigate the city, negotiate ticket queues, secure seating of their choice – all of which shape the movie outing and the cinema experience. The paper advances the idea that the sense and significance of cinema for its audiences cannot be gleaned by a focus on the film itself or on filmmakers, stars, and institutions of production. Audiences' embodied practices and habits are consequential for both the collective and individual experience of cinema, yet are some of its most overlooked aspects.

Looking at Asia and the Asian Diaspora as a geopolitical post-colonial space, this paper aims to examine the role of travel and tourism as a sign of modernity and how it influenced and reconstruct the use of existing spatial gender categorization in cultural practices. Through the understanding of tradition as a fluid bodily knowledge in contemporary cultural political economics, this paper questions the intervention and innovation of the female bodies in Asian global tourism and indigenous Diaspora subjects within globalization. Based on the novel Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, to mediate the analysis of the effect on space in cultural modernity, in the construction of otherness, which provokes the understanding of other culture as ‘non-modern’ yet reiterating tourism as one of the possible mechanism to mediate this encounter in bringing the ‘un-modern’ cultural practices to the world of modernity. This paper seeks to discuss the invisibility and visibility of female bodies in tourism space and c...

The coastal belt of the east was hit hard by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and worst affected were the Muslims who faced marginalization in the post-tsunami reconstruction. The women of this community faced more divergent challenges in the immediate aftermath and in the subsequent rehabilitation and reconstruction stages than their counterparts – Tamil and Sinhalese women – due to their cultural, religious and social background. This paper analyses the impact of the tsunami on Muslim women of the east and the role they played in rebuilding their society. It also looks at the rigid and discriminatory systems and social fabric of this society that negatively impacted the space claimed by these women in the immediate aftermath of this disaster. The case studies in this paper narrate these women's success and painful experiences. It specifically points to the fact that only a few women from this community servived the backlash against their post-tsunami activism while recognizing the fact that these women lack ...

Critics and scholars have read films belonging to the genre of Bombay middle cinema as texts marked by consistent political and social ordinariness. This paper re-visits films portraying the ordina...

This paper seeks to discuss the matrix of elements that enable the transnational circulation of Aishwarya Rai, Bollywood actress and former Miss World, in the context of embodied notions of gendered beauty and skin‐colour. Reading beauty contests, advertising campaigns and blog sites, this paper explores how representations of Rai's beauty and skin‐colour appear to resonate with investments in an aesthetics of whiteness, which govern gendered notions of beauty especially in Western locations. This paper addresses the following questions: How is an Indian cosmopolitan femininity as represented by Aishwarya Rai circulated and transfigured in a transnational context? How do racialised ideals of white beauty shift as well as entrench, include and exclude ‘multicultural’ ‘cosmopolitan’ femininities? How do transnational discussions of the privileging of light skin in the Indian context transfigure the politics of race, skin‐colour and whiteness?

This paper analyzes the overlapping and contradictory transnational taste cultures addressed by the 1946 Indian film, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani, which became re‐edited as an American exploitation film, Nightmare in Red China in the 1950s. A biopic featuring an Indian doctor who traveled to China as part of a medical team, the film offers a case study in multiple textual, institutional, and audience formations as we follow its transformation from middlebrow, canonical Indian film to lowbrow US exploitation film via a brief and unsuccessful detour as a highbrow international art film. While suggesting the broader implications of the possibility of other national cinema classics lurking in the bowels of exploitation films, the paper also argues that this film's secret history is one of failed negotiations and translations that centered around incompatible norms of realism, cultural representation, spectacle, and political ideology.

This paper proposes a renewed, interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular Hindi film, which uses the notion of genre to understand the relationship between individual films and social questions in contemporary India at large. We argue that ‘text’, ‘genre’, and ‘society’ are three crucial nodes that allow us to access the many levels at which individual films and groups of texts make meaning. The first half of the paper outlines three reading strategies, which we feel are crucial to understanding popular film as a genre. The second half proceeds to demonstrate the use of these strategies by enacting a dialectic and intertextual reading of three popular youth films of the early 2000s: Dil Chahta Hai, Kyon?, and Yuva, for what they reveal about change and postcolonial desire in contemporary urban India.

The aim of this paper is to explore how ethnic and linguistic identities intersect with national identity in Indian cinema through a ‘diasporic’ reading of the film Nala Damayanti (2003) produced by Kamal Hassan. Tamil cinema or ‘Kollywood’ may share common genre conventions with Bollywood (duration, stylized exaggerations of speech and plot, song and dance sequences). However, unlike Bollywood, which is most often neither ethnicized nor geographically situated, Tamil cinema first promotes Tamil pride (feminized in Tamil culture as Tamil Tazhi, guardian deity of Tamil culture) before national chauvinism. Through a reading of the Tamil screen comedy, Nala Damayanti , this paper will explore how Indianness is produced within the cultural constraints of Tamil cinema. To this end, the paper will first examine two issues, (a) existing paradigms of Tamil identity in India and overseas; and (b) caste and comedy conventions in Tamil cinema, before investigating how Tamilness, Indianness and South Asianness inters...

This paper explores some of the challenges facing researchers and writers working in the field of South Asian cultural studies in the diaspora in the contemporary moment. Taking as its starting point the burgeoning interest in all aspects of South Asian cultures, lives and expressions since the late 1990s', the paper explores some of the dilemmas that accompany this emergence – around the politics of knowledge, the problem of cultural identity and the potentialities of popular culture – and argues for the necessity of a critical and politically re‐engaged cultural analysis.

This paper looks at the gendered architecture and industrial design of the most predominant fused space of urban entertainment in contemporary India: the mallitplex. Drawing upon fieldwork ...

This article engages with the messy streets of post-Partition Delhi. The author engages with a relatively understudied facet of the Partition: its impact on the everyday life of a city. Through physical sites which carried imprints of former inhabitants, to letters that refugees wrote to express their anxieties, the article constructs identities that were forged in the everyday life of Delhi. Questions of ownership, self-making, and governance help answer how the trauma of riots was negotiated in mundane paper trails. The essay is divided into two parts. The first half describes the emotional topography of the city, with an eye on the aspirations of the refugee. It describes the emotional city the refugee encountered. The second half addresses the way the refugee talks back and creates her own emotional landscape. The first master plan of the city enacted in 1962 provides the context for this conversation.

Based on participant observation and ethnographic interviews this paper examines the ways in which the popular film business in India anticipates audiences. I explore filmmakers' perceptions of audiences and their attempts to map the audience in the absence of formal market research of the Hollywood variety. Through an identification of conceptualizations and classifications of audiences made by those within the film business, the paper addresses some of the constraints and challenges faced by filmmakers and the related construction of the audience.

This paper looks at advertisements as a part of popular culture, where popular is defined as mass culture. It attempts to analyse how ads must remain polyphonic in the ideologies they encompass, despite being imposed from the top down, in service of the capitalist industry. This examination is done through a close reading of three Indian television ads released in 2013. The reading places these ads firmly in the context of public discourse at the time, the focus of which was gender-centric, as a result of the Nirbhaya incident in the capital city of Delhi. The kind of popular feminism generated by this incident was intricately linked to the Indian middle class and its sensibilities. This is the target demographic of the ads being examined and these ads encompass various gender ideologies, from traditional to subversive, to appeal to those who fall across the spectrum of this popular feminism. This multiplicity is what makes ads engage in a two-way communication process.

Although the impacts of government funding in digitising the Bangladesh Film Industry is noticeable, the aspiration of growth to be expected has not yet been met. No studies were found to identify the reasons why the digitisation project took over a decade and failed to attain its goal satisfactorily. This paper therefore aims to explore the funding impacts by considering two issues: whether the project has enhanced or lessened the BFI’s productivity and eventually widened or narrowed the market’s business to business relationship within and beyond the stakeholders in the digital era. In-depth interviews of the industry professionals and secondary data sources were used for this study. Empirical results reveal that workforce derelictions in learning the digital technology and overarching business dominance of few stakeholders have a perceived impact on the productivity of the industry. This study therefore suggests that a desegregated and carefully balanced market policy would enable the governmen...

This paper provides a sociological analysis of the increasing popularity of internet-based matchmaking services among the urban Indians and Non-resident Indians. The institution of arranged marriage is subject to numerous pressures, such as declining social networks, high geographical mobility and growing complexity in the choice of a marital partner, and is finding a new lease of life via such services that are increasingly replacing and penetrating other commercial matchmaking media. It is argued that while the extended family and kin are now less inclined to directly participate in the process of matchmaking, the use of internet-mediated services itself becomes a means of undertaking such ‘kin work’. The dominant Indian variant of online matchmaking is shown to be combining elements of varied global trends in online matchmaking insofar as it facilitates conventional marriage preferences under conditions that are less than favorable to perpetuation of such preferences. This analysis shows how the new te...

This paper maps the production history of Malayalee House (2013) a reality television show telecast by Surya TV, one of the many Malayalam satellite channels in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Publicized as a Malayalam edition of Bigg Boss, it soon ran into controversy with the filing of the injunction at the Bombay High Court by Endemol group, the makers of Bigg Boss who alleged copyright infringement. This was followed by protests by women's organizations and an outcry for television censorship. The making and the telecast would leave the participants and the producers at loggerheads about the unsaid norms which govern the so called “appropriate” content to be telecast during the prime time. Using an ethnographic lens, I map out the varied circuits taken by the television program and the “afterlives” of the participants, to explore the social dynamics that shaped the debates in the post-telecast phase. In doing so, I try and see how rather than a mere deployment of “electronic eyes” and voyeuristic...

British Asian music is a phenomenon that not only involves the scenes of entertainment, but has opened its doors to the educational panorama too. Due to the crisis this industry is facing, British Asian musician and practitioners met during the BASS ‘Made in Britain’ Festival in Birmingham, to debate the future of this industry within the local and international arenas. Led by the international Reggae star Apache Indian, the activities at the school have produced important reflections on the status of this musical landscape. This paper, via social and cultural analysis, narrates the event, and sets a series of questions on the future evolution of the British Asian music industry.

In the analysis of the popularity of Hindi cinema during its formative decades in the post-Independence period, the presence of supporting cast played by minor characters has received little attention. Using the Rasa theory of cinematic performance, this paper argues that the characters of Hindi cinema have succeeded in establishing a relationship with the viewers that encourages them to return regularly to movie theatres.

While studies on corporeal beauty – the ‘body beautiful’ – constitute a mini academic industry, everyday practices of ‘beauty work’ are somewhat underresearched. This paper engages with notions and practices of beauty in a context of socio-cultural transformation and global flows in urban India. The ‘beauty parlor’ emerges as a socio-cultural space where urban aspirations are made and realized, mirroring the shifting place of beauty in the daily life of subjects with diverse class locations. A qualitative study of five beauty parlors in Mumbai revealed embodied practices of aesthetics that reflect the interplay of social structure and agency in the everyday life experiences of men and women. Providing tangible benefits in terms of new opportunities, beauty practices are also influenced by a desire for status, and ideas of ‘good health’ within an emergent ethic of self-care. Practices and consumption in the parlor juxtapose modernity and tradition materializing the field of beauty.