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It becomes apparent that Preeti's only connection to her Indian roots is the convenient fact she speaks Hindi (a production necessity perhaps, given the film's national audience) and demonstrates complete ignorance towards any of the spiritual, historical or scriptural learning Bharat is keen to instil. Recalling Preeti's ability to speak Hindi as perhaps a production strategy to make her intelligible to the audience, actress Amy Jackson is unable to speak Hindi. The similarities between the two films are striking with regards their movement from the dangerous West to the serene Punjab (remembering that Preeti narrowly escaped a rape attempt in London and Sara has been threatened with kidnap in Romania). As Indian actresses assert themselves in non-Indian film industries and exploit their racial fluidity and universal beauty aesthetic, white actresses are establishing themselves in roles beyond those previously afforded them in popular Hindi film. [Extracted from the article]

Globalization and transnationalism have expanded the physical territory of television and are responsible for global reshaping of media industries and cultures. In the contemporary mediascape, Indian television industry is an interesting site for excavating new transnational patterns wherein the circulation of Indian TV content extends beyond the diaspora and caters to non-diasporic audiences, especially, in South Asia and South-east Asia. The popularity of Hindi language TV soaps in Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, etc., have aided in mapping a new 'tele'-visual geography of popular culture that deems Western media influence as almost insignificant, if not absent. Chronicling the success of two Indian TV programmes – the story of a 'child-bride' Balika Vadhu (2008–16) in Vietnam and a Hindu mythological Mahabharat (2013–14) in a Muslim-populated Indonesia; this paper traces the transnational circulation of Indian TV content amongst non-diasporic markets in South-east Asia. Drawing from Daya Kishan Thussu's notion of 'contra-flows' and Brian Larkin's conception of 'parallel modernities', the paper argues that the success of Indian television programmes in non-West media markets diverts our attention towards new kinds of transnational media flows which I have termed 'neo-global' flows that operate amongst emerging centres of media production and need not be mapped against dominant Western flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Udalaazham (Body Deep), the 2018 Malayalam film directed by Unnikrishnan Avala, intrigues into the precarious dimensions of gender liminality in unprecedented ways by being the first film to discuss the life of a gender-liminal belonging to a tribal (Paniya) community in Kerala. The paper engages in a close reading and analysis of the film-text Udalaazham by placing it in juxtaposition to figurations of transgender subjectivities in contemporary Malayalam films, with an aim to contest the acclaimed progressive disposition of these mainstream representations. It employs the framework of intersectionality to focus on the protagonist Gulikan's lived experiences enmeshed within the structures of tribal caste, ethnicity and gender characterized by multiple interlocking dimensions of precarity. His body, identity and desires are open to threat, violence, mutilations and perpetual questioning due to lack of socio-cultural capital and support network. The relevance of this film is in opening up the discussions on caste and liminal gender identity and thereby urging the dire need to re-write the formula of identity politics in the region and its popular culture. Reading Udalaazham in this context provides a more liberating yet disturbing space to discuss the regressive operations of identity categories and their limitations in conceptualizing regional queer identities in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the Common Man political caricatures by R.K. Laxman, a staff cartoonist at the Times of India, to understand dominant political discourses in postcolonial India. It argues that constructs like the 'common man' and 'vote bank' through popular cultural discourse like caricatures have a critical impact on the political landscape of the country. While the former is associated with an urban English-educated middle class, the latter is used to denote the socially marginalised sections of the electorate voting en masse as a form of political assertion. The latter is perceived as an aberration in the modern secular democracy and its political voice is often delegitimised. Further, the former is associated with economic liberalisation, development and anti-corruption. The paper demonstrates how Laxman's Common Man is a proponent and mascot of these in the popular imagination. Thereby indicating that the popular cultural archive has indeed had a visible impact on the political, economic and sociological cartography of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The developmental projects like dams and other capitalist structures in India, allocate the natural water reserves to elite industrialists and state apparatuses, leaving the local ecosystems impoverished and in the hands of capitalism driven policies, which milk the indigenous population to mollify the materialistic needs of the affluent. This predicament is vividly illustrated in Subhash Vyam's graphic narrative Water that employs the traditional Gond Art to anchor the consequences of the 'Slow Violence' rendered to the local ecosystems owing to the development policies. As the revered natural sources of water in Vyam's village are regulated through a dam, the rural Indigenous community is deprived of its basic rights to survive, vandalising the pious 'human-water' relationship, resulting in 'a serious ecological crisis'. Drawing theoretical insights from Rob Nixon, Ramachandra Guha and Vandana Shiva, the proposed paper attempts to emphasize that the graphic narrative Water, through its remarkable graphic visuals, conjoined with local customs and folklores, is a reflection of the agony of the indigenous communities. Further, the paper analyses the grim reality that privatisation not only leads to exploitation and consequent depletion of the natural resources, but also robs the local communities of their ways of survival and resource sharing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines two films, Haanduk (2016) and Jwlwi: The Seed (2019), which explore the issues of identity and insurgency in Assam. Insurgency began in Assam during the 1980s when the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), an organisation that emerged along with the Assam Movement (1979–1985), started an armed uprising for an independent Assam. Meanwhile, the Bodos also engaged in violent insurrection, seeking to establish an independent state. As a response to these uprisings, the Union Government implemented several measures, such as the enactment of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (AFSPA), that transformed Assam and the Northeast region into a heavily militarized area. The military executed multiple counter-insurgency operations to quell the armed rebellions. However, in the middle of these occurrences, accounts of violence promoted by the state, violations of human rights, and instances of torture emerged in both local and international media outlets. This engendered a feeling of apprehension and psychological distress among numerous people throughout Assam. The paper aims to critically examine the ideological dimensions of how the concerns related to insurgency are depicted in the select films. Additionally, it will also examine the portrayal of trauma and breaches of human rights in the select films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-millennial Tamil cinema has seen a marked increase in casting women as protagonists or in pivotal roles. In a historically patriarchal industry that rests on an almost sycophantic male star system, this proliferation of women characters has proven significant in expanding the possibilities of female stardom. In turn, the potential of women stars and women's narratives participates in and showcases the broader globalising impulses of Tamil cinema in the twenty-first century. This paper focusses on two actors – Jyothika and Nayanthara – who have been instrumental in bringing to the fore a new figure in Tamil cinema, i.e. the 'lady (super)star'. This paper theorises their rise to stardom as a set of complex negotiations between their personal and professional lives while navigating and resetting the boundaries of the 'good Tamil woman'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the symbiotic relationship between international film festivals and contemporary Hindi cinema. The years post 2010 have witnessed an increase in showcasing of Hindi cinema at international film festivals. Unlike earlier Indian cinema that has been celebrated at global platforms, the Hindi cinema under discussion situates itself at a juncture between the commercial and the art. In fact, a number of mainstream filmmakers who attempt unconventional themes, are exploring international film festivals as suitable avenues to reach a larger audience and to forge newer alliances. The primary theoretical framework of this research will draw upon Marijke's proposition that film festivals are 'sites of cultural legitimisation' (77); along with, as an entry point, Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of the festival space as an active site for the generation of economic and cultural capital. In addition, the study also investigates how Hindi filmmakers use this platform to market cinema and reach an international audience. This paper attempts to evaluate the above dynamics through the prism of three representative cinematic texts: Masaan (Dir. Ghaywan), Newton (Dir. Masurkar) and Gully Boy (Dir. Akhtar). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a comparative reading of the female protagonists in two Sri Lankan films, focusing on how the female body becomes a contentious site of gendered violence, subject to state and male surveillance and containment. Through a close analysis of Prasanna Jayakody's 28 (2014) and Asoka Handagama's Asandhimitta (2019), this paper attempts to reveal how Sri Lankan cinema violently reconfigures the female body as a site of negotiation for articulation of victimhood and desire and becomes a potential space for the inscription of feminist issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2013 recriminalization of homosexuality in India after the Delhi High Court had read down the anti-sodomy law in 2009. The verdict cannot be simplistically seen as a backward move. To say that it moves the country backwards or that the country is going back in time because of the said step is to fall into the trap of heteronormative prioritization. The recriminalization of homosexuality has to be seen as a violent erasure and disabling of queer narrativization of time in India. This paper presents an analysis of Sudhanshu Saria's film, Loev (2015) to examine how queer citizen-subjects navigate the politics of invisibilization and hyper-visibilization in post-2013 India. The paper proposes the lens of Probability to examine the queer experience of how 'now' is occupied differently by way of structures of ambiguity. Probability can be said to be the space of slippages where heteronormative performances are used to temporarily and repeatedly hoodwink society to make possible a queer 'now'. The paper explores the concept of Probability in relation to temporality and visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 studies the sense of increasing isolation within the protagonists of the story, Miloni and Rafi, and relates the same in the sociological context of the urban hub of Mumbai city. The identities of the characters are further analysed with respect to their socio-economic privilege in the society and the paper argues that the social conditioning of, and expectations from, the characters play an instrumental role in creating two different approaches to their aforementioned need for escapism. The longing for human connection, as represented in the setting and use of the meta-narrative technique in turning to old Bollywood films and music, is one of the prominent approaches seen within the characters and the film in coping with the modern escapism from their private and public selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bovine has been the cause of conflict in the Indian sub-continent for the past few centuries owing to religious and cultural sentiments associated with it. This apparent irreconcilable conflict is localised in the binary of religious mannerism espoused by the religious groups in northern India, which is known as India's cow belt. Such contradictions have caused bitter riots and conflicts resulting in social unrest in mainland India with spiralling effects spilling over to other regions. Although this issue has become a determiner in controlling electoral politics in some Indian states that affected the rise in Hindutva politics, in the case of Assam both cow-politics and Hindutva sentiments have had little effect. This paper proposes to examine this hypothesis by analysing Himanshu Prasad Das' Assamese feature film Goru (2021) through the lens of cultural nationalism. A study of the film within the framework of Assamese popular culture shall help us understand the implication behind the rejection of Hindutva ideology in this peripheral region. The primary focus of this paper is to read how cow politics and Hindutva have failed to make inroads in Assam's composite culture despite Bharatiya Janata Party's thumping victory in Assembly polls in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile theatre being the one and only regional fully commercial cultural industry in Assam (India) has significant representation of the Assamese culture. The theatre medium started as a socially responsible cultural forum later translated itself into a commercial enterprise. The 1990s repertoire of Mobile theatre can be seen as popular and it often resonates the regional-political events, while by the 20th century, it took an entirely commercial shift and created a 'populist model'. This paper aims to understand this shift between these popular (political) and populist, through some of the classic theatre productions like Soraguri Sapori (1983) and Titanic (1996). While the first case study attempts to read the performance against the backdrop of Assam Movement and its subsequent emergence of insurgency in the state. Then, the other tries to develop an understanding on the populist shift against the socio-political and neo-economic changes in 20th century. The paper takes performance analysis approach while studying the productions and also trying address the debates around the idea of 'Popular'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular singer-songwriter-composer Bhupen Hazarika has exerted enormous influence in shaping the aesthetics of contemporary Assamese popular music. As an artist and public intellectual who often engaged with contemporary political questions, his songs have come to be regarded as a distilled expression of Assamese linguistic-national identity in postcolonial India. This paper deals with his entry into the Hindi music market in the mid-1990s, with songs for films and two music albums. Specifically, it maps the transformation of the Bhupen persona through this period as a conjuncture overdetermined by two relatively autonomous logics – first, the emerging cassette culture of the 1980s and its effects on the market for popular music; and second, the articulation of linguistic national identity in the wake of the Assam Movement (1979–85). The paper begins by showing how Bhupen's foray into Hindi music tied together the economics of bringing a regional star into the Hindi market with the ongoing reconstitution of linguistic-national identity in the post-liberalisation Indian ideology. Then, through a reading of his live performances and the Bhupen-related fan literature appearing at the time, it looks at how these ventures came to be seen by his Assamese fans, to argue that the Bhupen persona here becomes an ambivalent figure through which the internal schisms within Assamese national identity came to be articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anxieties of consolidation and concentration have been central to the study of the media business across the world. Debates on media ownership have either pointed at business models and regulatory conditions leading to market concentration or the increasing accumulation of interests by political actors in the media business. This paper delves into the simultaneity of such dynamics in India, as refracted in the business of TV distribution. Once merely a downstream segment of the visible and highly researched broadcasting segment, cable distribution has emerged as the prime commercial locus, technological driver, and regulatory site in India's TV business. Our paper unearths the modes of expansion of leading cable distribution companies across various regions of India. We find the expansion of cable companies rested on a dual engagement with regional ecologies of distribution: first, pursuing commercial growth by capturing, rather than developing, pre-existing regional markets, and second, flexibly engaging with, rather than uniformly steamrolling, incumbent regional actors. To manage these interests, a complex network of subsidiaries, interlocking directorships, and web of employees were created. Such a business-model not only propelled the expansion of what have today become gigantic, cross-regional cable companies but also spawned their peculiar ownership structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper grows from the research conducted on the video industry located in Purulia District, West Bengal, India, namely 'Manbhum videos'. 'Manbhum' signifies both place and idiom, and the videos are imagined and produced in relation as well as in opposition to its big Other(s), which include Bollywood, and reputable Bengali language cinema. Manbhum feature-lenghth videos, comprise discreet episodes, which are intercepted by songs and dances; working within popular narrative strategies and modes of address, some of these videos use unique voices, of both singers and dubbing artists, to tell the story. Such application of music and voice do not only re-present specific conditions of production, but also inform us about the ways in which the actor's 'body' and 'voice' may be used within parallel industrial practices. Therefore, besides addressing the industrial contexts and proliferation of video industries across Global South in the era of the digital, this paper considers subjects of language, community, culture, geography, politics and the problem of Jhumur (songs) transfiguring into a so-called 'vulgar' form, and thereby, examines particular videos to study the characteristics of production, and the question of narration and recounting, in such intermittent videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 crime thriller web series Paatal Lok featured a Nepali trans woman by the name of Mary Lyngdoh who is referred to as 'Cheeni' (a racial epithet for persons from India's Northeast region and East Asia). The series has been lauded for its inclusive representation of a transgender actor, Henthoi Mairembam from Manipur, yet the choice of a Khasi name, 'Mary Lyngdoh', for a Nepali character as well as the use of 'Cheeni' as an alias raise multiple questions about racialization and queer politics in India. This arbitrary racialized characterization in Paatal Lok and its queer Northeast representation can serve as critical points of departure to examine the emerging LGBTQ politics in Northeast India. This paper attempts to highlight the convergences and incommensurability of LGBTQ politics in the region, particularly in Manipur, with that of mainland India. Against the backdrop of the history of militarization and conflict in Northeast India, LGBTQ individuals migrants from the region are further racialized in India's metropolitan centers. This geopolitical alienation is felt by LGBTQ persons from the Northeast at the scale of the body. LGBTQ politics in Manipur represents a new form of resistance that introduces 'Indigeneity' as an identity and an epistemic category to counter the assimilationist projects of Hindutva's authoritarian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This working note is centred on snippets of the journey of two Sri Lankan queer couples as they negotiate the normative authoritarian regime of Sri Lankan state and society. Through the authors' reflections, based on their involvement as activists in these couples' lives, the paper points out to the distance between dominant discourses in state, society and even among elite queer spaces in the country and the needs of ordinary queer folks in dire situations. It suggests possible paths from which to imagine taking forward the struggle towards decriminalization, freedom, dignity and respect for the LGBTQIA+ community. It shows that these paths have a lot to learn from as well as contribute to, moments and the future impact of the mass mobilization for change in Sri Lanka in 2022 and the repression of the same that the people of Sri Lanka are currently living through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the representation of queer men's unequal sexual citizenship in Sri Lanka in a Sri Lankan Anglophone play, focusing on its problematisation of an ambiguous 'sodomy' prohibition. I examine The One Who Loves You So (2019), a text in which the illegality of queer men's offline and online intimacies is paradoxically depicted as both affirmed and open to interpretation. The textual analysis is contextualised by the Sri Lankan state's consistent history of equivocating on who or what the country's 'sodomy laws' criminalise, particularly when facing international human rights pressure. The state's equivocation is surprisingly overlooked or dismissed as strategy in most current scholarship and activism: the trend is to think in terms of a hard state stance and a categorical criminalisation. The play lays the ground to grapple with the work done by equivocation, for instance in insidiously regulating same-sex intimacy and marking the conditional status of queer sexual citizenship in Sri Lanka. I plead for attention to the play's intersectional approach, in particular how queer privilege/disprivilege mediates gradations of empowerment and disempowerment in an uncertain legal situation. The essay argues for moving beyond the idea of strategic evasiveness to recognising a state politics of equivocation on decriminalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 29 April 2022, a new mural called 'Home is Where We Make It', designed and installed by Amrisa Niranjan, an Indo-Guyanese artist was vandalized, just three days after completion. Black spray paint attempted to cover the artist's name, and the letters 'USA' were printed over the portrait of a hijabi woman. Other signs saying 'USA' were taped to the mural and removed by police. By that same evening, the Star of David had been added across the woman's face in an attempted erasure of her presence. Drawing on an interview with Amrisa Niranjan, I discuss the implications of being Indo-Caribbean migrants at the nexus of Islamophobic, xenophobic, and sexist rhetoric that mark us as 'unbelonging'. In this paper, I address this event as part of a continuum of white supremacist racist, sexist and xenophobic violence that gets played out at the national, institutional, and interpersonal levels. This incident highlights how border policing occurs in everyday spaces, from microaggressions to overt acts of violence and erasure, in communities, universities, and even in supposed sanctuary spaces, where hatred is hidden under banners of diversity and inclusion but resurfaces in these moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Transgressive Behaviour (STB). A sample of nine films released between 2000 and 2016 was analysed against a set criterion that includes: off-screen gender demographics, three tests to analyse the scope of the female character, incidents of Sexually Transgressive Behaviour (STB) and the male gaze. The results demonstrate that Bollywood continues to be a male-dominated industry and that female narratives are largely neglected. The majority of films analysed (six films) demonstrate a blatant objectification of women and seven of these demonstrated clear manifestations of STB. Only two of the nine films pass the Bechdel-Wallace test (a test which indicates the number of female characters, their interactions, and nature thereof), only three films show an independent female character arc and five films have replaceable female characters. This paper concludes that Bollywood films show the potential of being criminogenic (tending to produce crime) and the overall results are indicative that there is ample scope for further academic studies of Bollywood through a cultural criminological lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Pakistani cinema or Lollywood, the Pashtun subject is pejoratively represented as either the noble savage, the violent Islamist, the vengeful patriarch, the paedophile, or the simple-minded buffoon. Such representations are grounded in colonial discourse and in post-9/11 national and transnational political discourse, which is then inflected by historical legacies of Punjabi majoritarianism. Cinematic renditions play a critical role in depicting Pashtun subjectivities as excluded from the imagined community of the nation and the national body politic and re-affirm the hegemony of certain identities at the expense of other minoritarian identities. In this paper, I will focus on three popular contemporary Pakistani films – Khuda kay Liye (2007), Jawani Phir Nahi Aani (2015), and Karachi Se Lahore (2015) – in order to argue for the co-option of the national cinematic apparatus to construct a Pashtun/Punjabi binary where Punjabi identity functions as a placeholder for Pakistani national identity and the Pashtun is strategically expunged from the national imaginary as a balm to the nation's extant anxieties relating to the presence of local and global terrorism in the region, the centre's inability to consolidate a collective cultural and national identity and the persistence of ethnic inequality in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fandry (2013) is the first feature film written and directed by Nagraj Manjule. The film received a national award for the best debut director and several accolades in national and international film festivals. This paper offers introductory remarks on the representation of the de-notified tribe- Kaikadi in the film Fandry (2013). It starts with the observation about the social location of de-notified tribes and stigmatization around these communities and how Fandry as a film becomes a vehicle of resistance and formation of defiant identity. I also offer a critical reading of contemporary scholarship on Fandry, which overlooks the de-notified tribe identity and appropriates the struggle in the film with the larger Dalit struggle and caste issues. While the Dalit framework forms the background of the film, I argue that Manjule, through his film Fandry, is asserting personhood by bringing in lived experiences in his cinematic narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punjab, when viewed through the lens of culture, presents a multifaceted and multi-dimensional cohesion. Within the frame of a cultural phenomenon, Punjab appears to be many Punjabs at once, a geographical, a political, an online, a feudal, and a diasporic Punjab. All of these many phizogs appear to be in continuous dialogue, negotiating for the supremacy of one structure. The paper aims to examine these kaleidoscopic patterns of a changing Punjab through the negotiations occurring within the cultural phenomenon of Sidhu Moose Wala as a singer, painting a picture of an evolving Punjab that persists along spatial, temporal, and cultural axes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anderson argued that it was not just the 'innovation' of nations as an entity that is important but also the material conditions. The extent of nationalism and patriotism used as a tool in mass media (printed texts and popular culture) in India and Pakistan is evidence of the persisting enmity between neighboring states, which popular culture not only depicts but also ends up reinforcing with its construction of 'the other' and 'the enemy'. The paper analyzes two films, Pakistan's Ghazi Shaheed (1998) and India's The Ghazi Attack (2017), which are war-at-sea and submarine films, respectively, To answer the research questions: How do these movies depict 'imagined' community and 'blind' nationalism? How is this depiction of 'imagined' community and 'blind' nationalism, similar or different in the two movies made on the same theme, given the backdrop of war and its outcome? In my analysis of the two films, I explore two facets of the concept of blindness: first, referencing Anderson's definition of being unable to see the community members or enemies, and the blindness one experiences while underwater in a submarine. The paper argues that these 'imagined' communities find their stronghold in religion, culture, language, and ways of being in order to justify the existence of separate nations despite being part of the same landmass and empire for centuries. The 'submarine' is both an abode for men at sea and a weapon run for the enemy. The submarine, as a patriotically charged body at sea, serving the idea of nationhood, is an extension of the nation's body in water, unable to see but functioning on the perception and identity gained from the 'motherland'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (dir. Shelly Chopra Dhar, 2019) is touted as the mainstream commercial venture that cemented Bollywood's journey from creating queer homosocial and homoerotic moments on screen to representing a queer relationship between two women for the first time. This paper tries to understand how the film's liberal messaging about queer acceptance and anti-discrimination, through the coming out narrative of its queer protagonist, is made possible through the embodiment of sanitized class and caste markers, how Indian queer femininity is encoded in the film and what its relationship with the heteronormative biological family reveals about the film's messaging. It also tries to explore the figuration of Sweety, an upper-class feminine queer woman in small town Moga (in the North Indian state of Punjab), who is portrayed as the quintessentially 'good' queer woman. Even though Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga offers a queer visual and imaginative landscape, it limits itself by constructing discursive, narrative, and visual terrains where Sweety's dissidence is deemed acceptable on grounds of her class privilege, her reverence for her family, her respectable femininity, and the embeddedness of her queer subjectivity in the family and culture. This paper interrogates the nature of queer representation in the film, how it tackles anxieties around acculturation, queer opposition to the nation-state and the visual and narrative means by which it domesticates queerness by sanitizing and inviting it into culture, family, nationalism and the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity in relation to 'settlement' as a migrant generates challenges in redefining the old self into what one is and/or ought to become. The process of 'becoming' and redefinition of the 'self' leads to an ongoing struggle alongside the context, practices and culture of the host country thus creating multiple challenges while discarding or modifying popular notions of self and culture. Identities are fluid and subject to varying degrees of change brought about by one's experiences and culture. As two ethnic migrant women in Australia, living in the context of social cleavages encompassing race, gender, culture, class, education and memories, we acknowledge our hybrid identities based on our past selves and the borrowed/adapted ways of doing and being in Australia. Tied in with these issues of identity is the concept of 'settlement' in Australia. While remaining mindful that dislocation of nation is not always dislocation of gender and social class, our autoethnographic accounts reveal our negotiations of 'settlement' within this alien yet now familiar space. In the process, this paper highlights the need for a niche discussion space for unpacking the experiences of transnational women of colour such as us who occupy a zone of what we term as 'privileged marginalisation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present essay discusses the visual representation of masculinity in Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Kabir Singh (2019). Kabir Singh is a machomelodrama and a romantic account of the eponymous character, Kabir Singh, and his spiralling into self-destruction following his separation from his love interest, Preeti Sikka. Through the strategic exploitation of masculine tropes and symbols in the cinematic narrative, Vanga aims to construct the male protagonist, Kabir, as the public face of the hegemonic masculine ideology. The film, which offers to its audience a heteronormative heterotopia, also reinforces the patriarchal agenda through the portrayal of a sentimental, submissive woman with negligible autonomy. The article aims to develop its argument of masculinity and its association with pervasive power in the film through the reading of specific scenes through the intellectual and theoretical apparatuses of R.W. Connell, Michael Kimmell, and Michael Kaufman. It looks at the construction of masculinities as a homosocial enactment and also reads the protagonist's borderline toxic behaviour through the theories of machoism and overcompensation of masculine identities. The paper concludes with situating Kabir Singh in Bollywood's continuum of toxic masculinity. Through the deployment of masculinities and its nexus with sexism, this research paper also aims to query how machoistic scripts of masculinity implicate heterosexual romantic relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 contributes to understanding this peculiar connection by focusing on the cultural impacts of Indian Tamil films on Eelam Tamil refugees resettled in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on the existing scholarship on pan-Tamil identity, memory, and film, the paper asks: how did consuming Tamil films affect Eelam Tamils' cultural identities in their refugee resettlement? Transcultural memory is used as a framework to examine this interaction and the multi-focal identities and orientations among Eelam Tamils towards pan-Tamilness. Tamil refugees used film in a novel way to recall difficult memories of the pressures felt by a young war generation to sustain their cultural heritage while adjusting to the cultural norms of Australia. Consuming films become formative to reconstructing their cultural identities and enables the possibilities for exploring the cultural linkages and disconnections that constitute the heterogeneity of pan-Tamil subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many recent studies, academic and non-academic alike, have argued that the use of Urdu in Bollywood has started to decline. These studies, important as they are, however, suffer from some limitations. They are either impressionistic or based on non-representative data. Furthermore, they do not specify the object of the study or the site of the assumed decline of Urdu. Therefore, it remains vague which element of Urdu, for example sounds, words, syntax or script is under investigation. Similarly, it is not clear which component of film for example titles, dialogues or songs are experiencing the decline. Fulfilling this research gap this paper makes two contributions. Analyzing songs from 1959 to 2010’s, it empirically demonstrates the decline by documenting the shift in the pronunciation of the sounds /kh̲/, /gh̲/, and /q/ from the Urdu to Hindi phonetic norms. Singers from the 1990’s, unlike those from the previous generations, merge them with the sounds /kh/, /gh/, and /q/. The paper also makes a methodological contribution in that it shows how language in cinema can be studied empirically using a corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Psychologist Michael defines banal nationalism as ordinary iconographies communicating a sense of nation and permeating daily existence (8). Postage stamps are vehicles of banal nationalism, as they are ephemeral and small government-issued items that seem innocuous. However, the images chosen to be on postage stamps are carefully considered and chosen, and commonly reflect the ideologies of the dominant political party at the time of production. Yet many citizens do not take the time to contemplate why a certain image has been produced on this medium of government authority. In my paper I will unpack the Bharatiya Janata Party's philosophy and rise to power in 2014 and then discuss how postage stamps issued in 2017, specifically the series on Indian food, reflects the party's implied ideologies. The government chose to depict twenty-four different foods and broke them up into four categories, two of which are tied to religious, predominantly Hindu, occasions. To print these foods on postage stamps allows the subconscious spread of BJP philosophies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatiality and the spatial turn in cultural studies and media theory have critically influenced academic dialogues and the analysis of texts in contemporary discourses. In this context, the paper attempts to apply the discourse of spatiality to read into the family spaces in the New Generation Malayalam film narratives, holding the view that diegetic spaces in these films, directly and indirectly, attempt at foregrounding and subverting the normalisation of reproductive heteronormativity which had resulted in the gendered storytelling practices. To engage critically with the category of diegetic spatiality, two representational New Generation Malayalam films, Bangalore Days(2014) and Kumbalangi Nights(2019) are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food is an important means of signification in cinema and forms a vital part of its semiotics. The article attempts to analyse food symbolism in the Assamese movie, Aamis (2019), directed by Bhaskar Hazarika. In the film, Bhaskar Hazarika parallels the taboo associated with certain meat-eating traditions in Northeast India and the forbidden relationship between a married woman and a young man to create a unique aesthetic rich in food symbolism. In this way, the film tries to destabilise the age-old societal conventions and moral codes. The paper attempts to problematize the cultural imaginary of Aamis (2019) rooted in the vegetarian/non-vegetarian binary. It scrutinises how Bhaskar Hazarika's attempt to create a subversive critique of societal norms and morality ends up in reiterating and appropriating the binary oppositions and cultural associations rooted in hegemonic discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that while fusion music in Shoaib Mansoor's film Khuda Kay Liye (KKL) (2007) serves to reclaim Pakistan's South Asian heritage, there are moments in KKL when non-Muslim South Asians are othered. I examine these contradictory elements in the film with respect to two songs. I first look at 'Bulleh Nu', an anti-casteist 'kafi' attributed to the seventeenth/eighteenth century Sufi poet Baba Bulleh Shah, born in present-day Pakistani Punjab. I then contrast 'Bulleh Nu' with the film's problematic representation of the Sikh as a 'villainous' other. Subsequently I analyze 'Neer Bharan', a 'bandis ki thumri' associated with the cosmopolitan ethos of the nineteenth century kingdom of Awadh, now located in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Alongside my analysis of 'Neer Bharan', I write about how KKL only partially distances itself from the conflation of religious and national identities in Pakistan. The minoritization of non-Muslims from the subcontinent in the film is consistent with how they are represented in certain Pakistani educational and cultural texts. Therefore the desire to embrace Pakistan's pluralistic traditions in Khuda Kay Liye is juxtaposed with a relatively uncritical stance towards non-inclusive notions of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irom Sharmila, also known as the 'iron lady' of Manipur (India), has fasted for 16 long years, sustained through forced nasal feeding, making it one of the longest political fasts in the world. She struggled against the rule of emergency law in her land through the mechanism of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. In an attempt to explore the power of an image, the paper traverses the aspects of iconization of Irom Sharmila. The image of a woman, frail in structure and a tube attached to her nose triggers bodily pain in the spectator which comes from the innate violence in her image. The paper examines how the body of Sharmila has been actively transformed into a site of resistance and a ground on which politics is played out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 years, there has been a proliferation of Kashmiri usage of social media. Analysis of this usage offers an insight into the ways in which Kashmiris and their allies have been able to offer counter-narratives to Indian state and media narratives which have historically underreported, even silenced, dissenting Kashmiri perspectives. A media ecology framework also conveys a sense of the affective publics as Papacharissi notes, involved in deeply polarized debates regarding the relationship between the Indian nation-state and the region of Kashmir (5). Building on an earlier cultural representation framework, this paper argues for a media ecology framework as a way of understanding evolving polarized discourses in the context of Kashmir as an occupied zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakistani popular music has a long trajectory of protest which has denounced the oppressive tendencies of democratic governments as well as military dictatorships. Exploring the idea of popular music as a viable discourse for sociopolitical reform, this paper analyzes the music of three Pakistani bands: Junoon, Beygairat brigade and Ali Gul Pir. Building upon Habermas's idea of public sphere and its transformative potential, this paper posits that Junoon, Beygairat brigade and Ali Gul Pir use self-fashioning, visual dialectics and media presence to promote consciousness raising. In doing so, these Pakistani bands are recreating the public sphere by propagating an 'expressive culture', which allows common people to judge what they have heard, and to participate in the process of making meaning. This paper then establishes the critical significance of Pakistani popular music in creating an 'expressive culture' and advocating sociopolitical justice, economic equity and gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 ordinary lives of urban middle-class subjects of 1970s to present a more nuanced understating of their political and ideological position. I do acknowledge this general sense of ordinary passivity in these films; however, I argue that these films need to be interpreted in the context of the biopolitcal excesses enforced by the Indira Gandhi government. Instead of producing just stabilized, passive male subjectivity, these films actually encourage them to become miniaturized version of State's totalitarian sovereignty. This paper specifically looks at a number of films directed by Basu Chatterjee, the most prominent and prolific filmmakers whose works belong to this genre, to argue that a number of these films are cultural reinforcement of State's biopolitical strategies. The repetitive depiction of everyday spatio-temporality of "normal" citizens is not a mere apolitical representation of their lives; rather, they are staging of the male hero's process of undergoing subjectivation and self-governance to adjust within the presence of pervasive presence of governmental dispositif. The paper further argues that one of the significant aesthetic strategies deployed by these films to underline its reality-status is to distance itself from big-budget popular cinema. Middle cinema performs an ideological interpellation of the (male) civil subject by recognizing and referring to popular cinema's role as a fantasy apparatus in corroborating such stabilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the circulation of music in new spaces produced by technologies of recording, amplification, and transmission. It argues for the making of new categories that go beyond 'classical' and 'popular' especially in the context of southern India and the tradition that is identified as Carnatic music. It looks at Radio and televisual broadcasting to capture new listening communities and their acoustic aspirations. It argues for new radio geographies that reinforced identity of regions and their practices and gave them greater leverage in relation to the nation and national pool of resources. In contrast the television as a medium of spectacle and entertainment impacted listening experiences quite differently even as it expanded the viewership beyond the confines of the nation space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 conducted in one of South Delhi's most successful mega malls: Select City Walk, along with extensive interviews across several departments (design and interiors, security, business development, marketing, staff recruitment and training, food and beverage etc.) of India's foremost multiplex chain, PVR Cinemas, this paper shows how gendered 'safe' space is industrially constructed, maintained and circulated in the public imagination. The 'safety' of the middle-class consuming woman is crucial to the industrial design of the mall and the multiplex, and its architecture is meant to regulate a specific kind of gendered behavior/code of conduct. Through an unpacking of the various elements of the industrial design of this mall and the multiplex, I argue that the space is entirely predicated upon the two age-old pillars of classed, caste-based, and gendered national anxiety in India: 'security' and 'hygiene.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 gender barrier and fashion a shared sensibility and subjectivity that reaches its peak in the neoliberal moment, thus signifying a new metrosexual, even androgynous, subject who is able to speak for the aspiring global citizens of the region. Rahman signifies a break in the traditional, hegemonic imagination of South Indian masculinity that is rooted in the region, and instead stands for the new configuration of cosmopolitan youth that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the migration to the Persian Gulf and the inflow of money and consumer goods from there – a category of youth whose self-fashioning was inflected in a significant way by their consumption practices. Certain representational techniques also resulted in a queering or androgyny of the youthful figure that he personified, suggesting the liminality of gendered identity in youth. Apart from textual analyses of a selection of his films, I also draw on popular reportage around his stardom in the form of news reports and gossip columns published in the leading Malayalam film weekly, Naana, in the 1980s. While the former helps to outline the representational function of Rahman's body in film narratives, the latter supplements this with data on how the ways in which his figure was imagined and received, both within the industry and among fans, contributes to fashioning a new youth subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foundation of the post-colonial development model was based on the concept of modernization of the socio-economic and political growth of third world countries. This development model also led to advanced communication technology in media such as print, radio, television, and cinema; also known as development communication. Cinema acts as a catalyst for the promotion of the concept of nation-building in third world countries. Since the development model ignored the voices of marginalized sections of the underdeveloped nations, cinema helped to portray the unheard voices. In the Indian context, the Hindi film Naya Daur (1957) as a voice of resistance posited a strong critic of the top-down approach of the development model. A critical reading of Naya Daur (1957) attempts to examine the narratives of development and the portrayal of development through industrialization and westernization as a part of nation-building. Since the film raises the question of development politics in the post-colonial Nehruvian era, the paper tries to examine the junctures of resistance against the development process and the nationalist narratives construed in the film. It attempts to analyze the characterization of resistance and struggles of the local villagers against mechanization. Thereby, it attempts to encapsulate the contesting ideas of development and nation-building and the role of cinema in development communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several decades now, the incidental category of 'woman' has been systematically analysed through a pluralistic lens where race, class, and sexuality have cohesively positioned women as discursive subjects. Yet, age persists to be one such integral variable, which women across all cultures strive to cope with as it emerges as a potent threat to the Other's subjective identity, her embodied experience and feminine desirability. In the Indian context, the body of an aging woman is usually situated within a contested and complex nexus, where senescence is a multi-layered experience often getting shaped by the dynamics of power. The old female selves find themselves reduced to a sheer condition of abjection and are often displaced from their former state of belonging and engulfed by the socially scripted embrace of denial. Indian cinematic discourses often represent the aged woman as a pathologised body surfacing as familial/societal burden, forcing us to address the double marginalization associated with gender and age. This paper analyses how in two Bengali films- Pather Panchali (1955) and Sonar Pahar (2018), the directors focus on the social predicament of sexageism and subvert the dominant narratives treating feminine age as a 'crisis'. The select films attempt to deconstruct the aged 'problem body' through an alternative lens and refigure it as an agentic identity with an embodied presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 transcultural references in the Caribbean context. Mashup serves as a conceptual framework to capture the manifold practices of recombining and re-contextualising media content in memes, related meaning making processes as well as interactions on social networking sites. By sharing, tagging and liking memes, young women in Trinidad negotiate their own positioning in relation to imagined as well as familiar audience groups. Embedded in experiences of a multi-ethnic and media-saturated society, these digital practices thus serve to navigate multiple belongings and identity choices. Moving beyond diasporic identity formations, Bollywood is an integral part of transcultural meaning making in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadcasting commentary has developed a unique relationship with cricket wherein it performatively mediates the changing discourse that surrounds the game. Although, the social history of cricket in India has gained a considerable academic space, the cultural history of cricket commentary in India remains a fairly uncharted territory. The paper by placing it within the cultural studies framework attempts to trace cricket's auratic presence in the popular imagination. Cricket's acculturation in India is unique to its radio sonic mapping, televisual spectacle and its experience with modernity. It argues how the cultural economy of cricket through radio and television commentary, covering cricket's varied format over the years constantly informed and negotiated its linguistic, cultural and economic registers. The attempt is to foreground the ways in which its distinct structures of listening experience uniquely fostered decolonisation and indigenous appropriation of the game. Above all, interpreting the materialistic aesthetics of the broadcast medium, the shifting trajectory of cricket broadcast delineates how IPL's subcultural sporting codes challenges the discursive 'Englishness' of cricket. What anchors in IPL through the playful transaction of the contemporary cricket culture, especially, through commentary, is the tension between global cultural reproduction and the forces of indigenisation at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]