Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial de... more Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess - simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing - to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's'underdevelopment'. Bhojpuri media therefore demands that it is assessed not merely for its internal content but within the comparative media crucible, marked by interpenetrating forms and histories as diverse as those of ecological distress, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate, urban resettlements, and highway modernities. Foregrounding the libidinal excess, language politics, and curatorial informalities, Provincializing Bollywood synthesizes Bhojpuri media's spectacular public insubordination and its invocation of a shared debt, which is by no means regional in its provenance.
This essay examines how the unruly expressions of grief, rage, and transgressions of two distinct... more This essay examines how the unruly expressions of grief, rage, and transgressions of two distinct mourning publics in contemporary Malayalam cinema surface as potential sites for negotiating justice, while contesting the structural and symbolic violence entrenched in a public sphere.
The 'great integration' of disparate economic sectors by 'Big Tech' has been fuelled by the massi... more The 'great integration' of disparate economic sectors by 'Big Tech' has been fuelled by the massive expansion of mobile infrastructure, especially in developing countries, and the systemic enclosure of users within multi-sided marketplaces operating under the euphemism of 'platform ecosystems'. Taking the case study of India's 'national champion' Reliance Jio, this article considers the ways in which India's leading 'corporate' has deployed the 'ecosystem' blueprint and adopted the strategic role of the oligopolistic megacorp in India's digital economy. It has done so, seemingly, without adopting the institutional form upon which Eichner's founding proposition rests. Consequently, we argue that the separation of ownership and management as per the North American corporate form is not fundamental to the status, function or strategy of a conglomerate oligopoly. Rather, we propose that the megacorps of the digital age have an arisen as an inevitable consequence of market hierarchies in the digital economy, and that the key institutional factor in the consolidation of their market power is the licence of the state.
Adding nuance to the accusation of sustained caste blindness against Indian cinema, this article ... more Adding nuance to the accusation of sustained caste blindness against Indian cinema, this article situates Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi blockbuster Sairat (2016) within the trajectories of Marathi cinema, and vis-à-vis the historical traffic between the Hindi film industry and its southern counterparts. The article grapples with sociological and formal valences of realism and melodrama, which co-constitute Sairat, so as to argue that the re-visioning must address the “invisible” embeddedness of caste in universalized abstractions; or more appropriately, in its (mis)translations away from the “limiting” particularity of caste politics to be subsumed under more universally legible aesthetic of social justice.
This essay makes sense of the trauma of cinematic un-belonging, whether sedimented over a landsca... more This essay makes sense of the trauma of cinematic un-belonging, whether sedimented over a landscape situated in the crevices of caste-revenge and justice, or extracted from nonplussed strangers trapped in the photographic meanwhile of Hindi cinema's ground-zero, via two landmark films situated orthogonal to popular cinema's straightforward certitudes.
In the sales pitch for the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, the gender question was heavily foregrou... more In the sales pitch for the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, the gender question was heavily foregrounded to hail the sports biopic of a commonwealth gold medallist from rural Haryana. However, the film was also criticized for the patriarchal control of the desires of the wrestler-daughters, who gradually take cognizance of their potential. This article argues that we need to address a different trajectory to make full sense of the film, in spite of its marketing strategy. Taking its cues from sports biopics, figurations of obstinate provincial masculinity and neoliberal childhood, Dangal revisits much-maligned parental authority to foreground the question of moral resourcefulness. The state and nation in Dangal, I would argue, are decoupled from a provincial vantage point. Standing apart from generic biop-ics, Dangal's heroes are in a standoff with the state's essentially colonial character and its metropolitan kernel. Their public insubordination deserves a robust analysis of the antecedents from within film history, to reassemble Dangal's urgent critique.
This article describes how the monopolistic capitalism of platform economies gets appropriated by... more This article describes how the monopolistic capitalism of platform economies gets appropriated by political campaigners by highlighting the critical role of derivative valuations in the market without any ‘fundamentals’. I argue that platform economies help generate both the rhetorical flourish and dubious metadata, which provides an unreliable yet vital anchorage towards political campaigns. In this cross-promotional bidding for statistics, the value of these campaigns is staked upon bold claims, affective fluctuations and popularity metrics. This article argues that we must therefore pay attention to the advertorial overlap of interests which makes a particular state form strategically reliant upon the derivative impulse of monopoly capital. It is via the public transcripts of such overlapping tendencies – which make it difficult to distinguish between the product and the advertisement – that derivative valuations emerge, converting intangible assets into tangible gains.
Reflecting on the aesthetic trajectory of the idea of social mobility in Hindi cinema and situati... more Reflecting on the aesthetic trajectory of the idea of social mobility in Hindi cinema and situating such film texts within the long history of the optical relation between cinema and the city, this article argues that the film Gully Boy’s (2019) quest is anchored within neo-liberal freedoms, albeit topped with a laudable linguistic experiment. In comparison with the social mobility films of the last three decades, the film is marked by certain key departures and new blind spots, which occasion a rethinking of popular culture, particularly due to its increasing over-reliance on the attention economy of social media.
In this article, I argue that formalization, not as a simple economic fact ascertained by license... more In this article, I argue that formalization, not as a simple economic fact ascertained by licensed product sale but as a force determining the performative temperament, stands at odds with the "vernacular" media in general, and Bhojpuri media in particular. That is why, even as online views multiply and offline data kiosks continue to thrive, the performative informality of the live concert continues to mobilize millions across remote villages, small towns, and big cities. What can be rendered in terms of new technologies and platforms enabling specific sort of publics must not overwrite another adjacent trajectory-that of informality, as a performative excess, as a cultural cache of communitarian solidarity particularly built around language affinities, as a visceral aspect of music economy, seeking its life outside the formal straitjacket. The live concerts then stand not in opposition to, but adjacent to the platformization and formalization of the media economy.
Taking the historical example of the emporium, this paper attempts to situate India's emerging pl... more Taking the historical example of the emporium, this paper attempts to situate India's emerging platform economy within the historical evolution of market exchange in the subcontinent. I argue that the market systems constituted by media platforms are, like all markets within a true economy, significantly dependent upon their interaction with other markets. In India, this includes the aggregation of erstwhile media industries along with informal markets for ‘services’, increasingly under the aegis of finance capital and the operators of mobile digital infrastructure. From this wider perspective, we can trace the expansion of a ‘mediated economy’ through which an increasing number of exchanges are being aggregated within portals designed to value capture from social economies. Rather than framing this process as disruptive, this paper seeks to illustrate how India's platform economy has been shaped by pathways established within the distinctive economics of media systems.
Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this ess... more Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this essay draws upon media history in South Asia to tease out the repackaging of stardom in a changing media ecosystem, which commands the celebrity function to be more flexible and more willing to mount increasing debt upon its diversifying palette. The rise of calculable creditworthiness and sophisticated systems of prediction thus securitize media portfolios, while de-risking the business at the production end and distributing risk further downstream. The essay shows how targeted advertising comes to reign over this digital network as its preeminent language and what its consequences might be for consumer attention.
In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north In... more In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi film. Arguing that the vibrant debate that took place on the fundamental distinctions of Deswa is animated by Chandra’s persistent desire to narrate Bihar’s lost glory and utmost disrepair, I assess in this paper the industrial constraints that shaped the journey of Deswa. Drawing contrasts and parallels with the Hindi film industry, and drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical modeling of the field of cultural production, I locate the Deswa debate as a key moment in the contestations over subject positions, industry infrastructure, and linguistic affinities.
Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated
in color and light appeared on the... more Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated
in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between
visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while
retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investible capital. This
article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom
possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that
revolved around major stars featuring in action melodramas. The animated
visuality—a result of cinematographic and editorial intensifications—
was then devised to regulate minor stars’ appeal within emerging genre
films. Engaging with the resultant configurations of form, style, sovereign
representation, and masculinity, this article maps the analytical trajec-
tory of mise-en-scène, performativity, and stardom in Hindi cinema.
In the end, it highlights the agitated restlessness of contemporary Hindi
film form as a symptom of its inability to find a stable formal dwelling.
Instead of doing formal analysis alone, this article then aspires to bring
the formal, technological, economic, and political imperatives together in
the analytics of the Hindi cinema.
The soaring emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in 2004 took over the B/C segments of Hindi film distrib... more The soaring emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in 2004 took over the B/C segments of Hindi film distribution in most of north India. The success of the film industry had followed from a vibrant music industry; in a few subsequent years, however, the success of the Bhojpuri film industry turned against itself, on account of the shifting balance between production and exhibition sectors. This paper explores how the Bhojpuri industry negotiated this challenge, particularly with the reconsolidation of the Hindi film industry. I argue that the Bhojpuri stars benefitted most from the enforced reconfigurations as the film-texts became further subservient to stardom and the new aesthetic grammar was organized around the figure of the action-star. Through Jaan Tere Naam (Prasad, 2013)—one among a series of successful films featuring Khesari Lal Yadav—I assess Yadav’s popularity, earned via his performances as a launda (female impersonator). Bhojpuri cinema survives by projecting the male star as its primary text and arranging a plethora of pleasures around his figure, including the bawdy registers that proudly claim the insignia of nativity. The rebellious and native masculinity thus not only anchors the switch between bawdy irreverence and moral exactitude, it also vanquishes the “othered” urban values often resident in the female body.
In 2004, with Sasura Bada Paisawala, a vernacular film industry was re-born in India. While numer... more In 2004, with Sasura Bada Paisawala, a vernacular film industry was re-born in India. While numerous Bhojpuri music videos had been extremely popular among the working class Bhojpuri speakers, it was the visibility Bhojpuri films achieved via theatrical exhibition that infused new energy into film production. This paper investigates the emergence of this third phase of Bhojpuri Cinema. In doing so, it traces the historical trajectory of the segment of film exhibition within which Bhojpuri film industry emerged – the decrepit theatres, marked by the absence of any female audience. Therefore, this paper observes the resonance across two simultaneities: i) the reconfiguration of the sites of public leisure around the middle class woman, and ii) the reconfiguration of the film genres around the absence of female audience. Therefore, gender and space come to regulate each other around the key public sites within the cities, of which cinema has long been a vital component. In tracing the history of exhibition-led trade imaginaries within the film economy, then, we can situate fringe and mainstream genres in relation to the specific demography they targeted. The film text, after all, does not exist independent of the overall habitus that stages the encounter between the text and audience. This paper investigates the gendered vocabulary of this habitus, and the key shifts within the production-exhibition dynamics across the history of cinema in north India. By consolidating this analytical strand, I offer the category of the ‘rearguard’ – a site-specific exhibition-led trade sector of cinema. I then go on to situate the multiplex-mall within this history, not as an unprecedented departure, but a complex that amplified already existing tendencies, hierarchies and exclusive social practices. As the pre-eminent site within the data-mapped network, the multiplex led a far more consolidated economy and thus freed up numerous sites of alternative filmgoing practices, of which Bhojpuri Cinema became the most visible component.
The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has esta... more The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has established itself in the meanwhile not merely as a source of information but also of entertainment. Available in all regional languages through several competing channels, and presented elaborately, television news has come to establish a mode of address, which defines one’s sense of time and space, and configures one’s sense of the dramatic situated in others’ stories. This article engages with the implications of “liveness”—as material and as affect—toward convergence of news narratives. Discussing two of the most widely covered recent stories—Aarushi Talwar’s murder and Baby Falak—the article foregrounds the class antagonism and scandalous anxieties of Indian televisual publics, and argues that news television invites us to trade liveness for news. Thus, news media not only liberates itself of the rigor of news production but also entertains us by reaffirming our deepest anxieties and competing with other modes of intertextual entertainment available on rival channels.
Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial de... more Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess - simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing - to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's'underdevelopment'. Bhojpuri media therefore demands that it is assessed not merely for its internal content but within the comparative media crucible, marked by interpenetrating forms and histories as diverse as those of ecological distress, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate, urban resettlements, and highway modernities. Foregrounding the libidinal excess, language politics, and curatorial informalities, Provincializing Bollywood synthesizes Bhojpuri media's spectacular public insubordination and its invocation of a shared debt, which is by no means regional in its provenance.
This essay examines how the unruly expressions of grief, rage, and transgressions of two distinct... more This essay examines how the unruly expressions of grief, rage, and transgressions of two distinct mourning publics in contemporary Malayalam cinema surface as potential sites for negotiating justice, while contesting the structural and symbolic violence entrenched in a public sphere.
The 'great integration' of disparate economic sectors by 'Big Tech' has been fuelled by the massi... more The 'great integration' of disparate economic sectors by 'Big Tech' has been fuelled by the massive expansion of mobile infrastructure, especially in developing countries, and the systemic enclosure of users within multi-sided marketplaces operating under the euphemism of 'platform ecosystems'. Taking the case study of India's 'national champion' Reliance Jio, this article considers the ways in which India's leading 'corporate' has deployed the 'ecosystem' blueprint and adopted the strategic role of the oligopolistic megacorp in India's digital economy. It has done so, seemingly, without adopting the institutional form upon which Eichner's founding proposition rests. Consequently, we argue that the separation of ownership and management as per the North American corporate form is not fundamental to the status, function or strategy of a conglomerate oligopoly. Rather, we propose that the megacorps of the digital age have an arisen as an inevitable consequence of market hierarchies in the digital economy, and that the key institutional factor in the consolidation of their market power is the licence of the state.
Adding nuance to the accusation of sustained caste blindness against Indian cinema, this article ... more Adding nuance to the accusation of sustained caste blindness against Indian cinema, this article situates Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi blockbuster Sairat (2016) within the trajectories of Marathi cinema, and vis-à-vis the historical traffic between the Hindi film industry and its southern counterparts. The article grapples with sociological and formal valences of realism and melodrama, which co-constitute Sairat, so as to argue that the re-visioning must address the “invisible” embeddedness of caste in universalized abstractions; or more appropriately, in its (mis)translations away from the “limiting” particularity of caste politics to be subsumed under more universally legible aesthetic of social justice.
This essay makes sense of the trauma of cinematic un-belonging, whether sedimented over a landsca... more This essay makes sense of the trauma of cinematic un-belonging, whether sedimented over a landscape situated in the crevices of caste-revenge and justice, or extracted from nonplussed strangers trapped in the photographic meanwhile of Hindi cinema's ground-zero, via two landmark films situated orthogonal to popular cinema's straightforward certitudes.
In the sales pitch for the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, the gender question was heavily foregrou... more In the sales pitch for the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, the gender question was heavily foregrounded to hail the sports biopic of a commonwealth gold medallist from rural Haryana. However, the film was also criticized for the patriarchal control of the desires of the wrestler-daughters, who gradually take cognizance of their potential. This article argues that we need to address a different trajectory to make full sense of the film, in spite of its marketing strategy. Taking its cues from sports biopics, figurations of obstinate provincial masculinity and neoliberal childhood, Dangal revisits much-maligned parental authority to foreground the question of moral resourcefulness. The state and nation in Dangal, I would argue, are decoupled from a provincial vantage point. Standing apart from generic biop-ics, Dangal's heroes are in a standoff with the state's essentially colonial character and its metropolitan kernel. Their public insubordination deserves a robust analysis of the antecedents from within film history, to reassemble Dangal's urgent critique.
This article describes how the monopolistic capitalism of platform economies gets appropriated by... more This article describes how the monopolistic capitalism of platform economies gets appropriated by political campaigners by highlighting the critical role of derivative valuations in the market without any ‘fundamentals’. I argue that platform economies help generate both the rhetorical flourish and dubious metadata, which provides an unreliable yet vital anchorage towards political campaigns. In this cross-promotional bidding for statistics, the value of these campaigns is staked upon bold claims, affective fluctuations and popularity metrics. This article argues that we must therefore pay attention to the advertorial overlap of interests which makes a particular state form strategically reliant upon the derivative impulse of monopoly capital. It is via the public transcripts of such overlapping tendencies – which make it difficult to distinguish between the product and the advertisement – that derivative valuations emerge, converting intangible assets into tangible gains.
Reflecting on the aesthetic trajectory of the idea of social mobility in Hindi cinema and situati... more Reflecting on the aesthetic trajectory of the idea of social mobility in Hindi cinema and situating such film texts within the long history of the optical relation between cinema and the city, this article argues that the film Gully Boy’s (2019) quest is anchored within neo-liberal freedoms, albeit topped with a laudable linguistic experiment. In comparison with the social mobility films of the last three decades, the film is marked by certain key departures and new blind spots, which occasion a rethinking of popular culture, particularly due to its increasing over-reliance on the attention economy of social media.
In this article, I argue that formalization, not as a simple economic fact ascertained by license... more In this article, I argue that formalization, not as a simple economic fact ascertained by licensed product sale but as a force determining the performative temperament, stands at odds with the "vernacular" media in general, and Bhojpuri media in particular. That is why, even as online views multiply and offline data kiosks continue to thrive, the performative informality of the live concert continues to mobilize millions across remote villages, small towns, and big cities. What can be rendered in terms of new technologies and platforms enabling specific sort of publics must not overwrite another adjacent trajectory-that of informality, as a performative excess, as a cultural cache of communitarian solidarity particularly built around language affinities, as a visceral aspect of music economy, seeking its life outside the formal straitjacket. The live concerts then stand not in opposition to, but adjacent to the platformization and formalization of the media economy.
Taking the historical example of the emporium, this paper attempts to situate India's emerging pl... more Taking the historical example of the emporium, this paper attempts to situate India's emerging platform economy within the historical evolution of market exchange in the subcontinent. I argue that the market systems constituted by media platforms are, like all markets within a true economy, significantly dependent upon their interaction with other markets. In India, this includes the aggregation of erstwhile media industries along with informal markets for ‘services’, increasingly under the aegis of finance capital and the operators of mobile digital infrastructure. From this wider perspective, we can trace the expansion of a ‘mediated economy’ through which an increasing number of exchanges are being aggregated within portals designed to value capture from social economies. Rather than framing this process as disruptive, this paper seeks to illustrate how India's platform economy has been shaped by pathways established within the distinctive economics of media systems.
Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this ess... more Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this essay draws upon media history in South Asia to tease out the repackaging of stardom in a changing media ecosystem, which commands the celebrity function to be more flexible and more willing to mount increasing debt upon its diversifying palette. The rise of calculable creditworthiness and sophisticated systems of prediction thus securitize media portfolios, while de-risking the business at the production end and distributing risk further downstream. The essay shows how targeted advertising comes to reign over this digital network as its preeminent language and what its consequences might be for consumer attention.
In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north In... more In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi film. Arguing that the vibrant debate that took place on the fundamental distinctions of Deswa is animated by Chandra’s persistent desire to narrate Bihar’s lost glory and utmost disrepair, I assess in this paper the industrial constraints that shaped the journey of Deswa. Drawing contrasts and parallels with the Hindi film industry, and drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical modeling of the field of cultural production, I locate the Deswa debate as a key moment in the contestations over subject positions, industry infrastructure, and linguistic affinities.
Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated
in color and light appeared on the... more Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated
in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between
visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while
retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investible capital. This
article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom
possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that
revolved around major stars featuring in action melodramas. The animated
visuality—a result of cinematographic and editorial intensifications—
was then devised to regulate minor stars’ appeal within emerging genre
films. Engaging with the resultant configurations of form, style, sovereign
representation, and masculinity, this article maps the analytical trajec-
tory of mise-en-scène, performativity, and stardom in Hindi cinema.
In the end, it highlights the agitated restlessness of contemporary Hindi
film form as a symptom of its inability to find a stable formal dwelling.
Instead of doing formal analysis alone, this article then aspires to bring
the formal, technological, economic, and political imperatives together in
the analytics of the Hindi cinema.
The soaring emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in 2004 took over the B/C segments of Hindi film distrib... more The soaring emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in 2004 took over the B/C segments of Hindi film distribution in most of north India. The success of the film industry had followed from a vibrant music industry; in a few subsequent years, however, the success of the Bhojpuri film industry turned against itself, on account of the shifting balance between production and exhibition sectors. This paper explores how the Bhojpuri industry negotiated this challenge, particularly with the reconsolidation of the Hindi film industry. I argue that the Bhojpuri stars benefitted most from the enforced reconfigurations as the film-texts became further subservient to stardom and the new aesthetic grammar was organized around the figure of the action-star. Through Jaan Tere Naam (Prasad, 2013)—one among a series of successful films featuring Khesari Lal Yadav—I assess Yadav’s popularity, earned via his performances as a launda (female impersonator). Bhojpuri cinema survives by projecting the male star as its primary text and arranging a plethora of pleasures around his figure, including the bawdy registers that proudly claim the insignia of nativity. The rebellious and native masculinity thus not only anchors the switch between bawdy irreverence and moral exactitude, it also vanquishes the “othered” urban values often resident in the female body.
In 2004, with Sasura Bada Paisawala, a vernacular film industry was re-born in India. While numer... more In 2004, with Sasura Bada Paisawala, a vernacular film industry was re-born in India. While numerous Bhojpuri music videos had been extremely popular among the working class Bhojpuri speakers, it was the visibility Bhojpuri films achieved via theatrical exhibition that infused new energy into film production. This paper investigates the emergence of this third phase of Bhojpuri Cinema. In doing so, it traces the historical trajectory of the segment of film exhibition within which Bhojpuri film industry emerged – the decrepit theatres, marked by the absence of any female audience. Therefore, this paper observes the resonance across two simultaneities: i) the reconfiguration of the sites of public leisure around the middle class woman, and ii) the reconfiguration of the film genres around the absence of female audience. Therefore, gender and space come to regulate each other around the key public sites within the cities, of which cinema has long been a vital component. In tracing the history of exhibition-led trade imaginaries within the film economy, then, we can situate fringe and mainstream genres in relation to the specific demography they targeted. The film text, after all, does not exist independent of the overall habitus that stages the encounter between the text and audience. This paper investigates the gendered vocabulary of this habitus, and the key shifts within the production-exhibition dynamics across the history of cinema in north India. By consolidating this analytical strand, I offer the category of the ‘rearguard’ – a site-specific exhibition-led trade sector of cinema. I then go on to situate the multiplex-mall within this history, not as an unprecedented departure, but a complex that amplified already existing tendencies, hierarchies and exclusive social practices. As the pre-eminent site within the data-mapped network, the multiplex led a far more consolidated economy and thus freed up numerous sites of alternative filmgoing practices, of which Bhojpuri Cinema became the most visible component.
The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has esta... more The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has established itself in the meanwhile not merely as a source of information but also of entertainment. Available in all regional languages through several competing channels, and presented elaborately, television news has come to establish a mode of address, which defines one’s sense of time and space, and configures one’s sense of the dramatic situated in others’ stories. This article engages with the implications of “liveness”—as material and as affect—toward convergence of news narratives. Discussing two of the most widely covered recent stories—Aarushi Talwar’s murder and Baby Falak—the article foregrounds the class antagonism and scandalous anxieties of Indian televisual publics, and argues that news television invites us to trade liveness for news. Thus, news media not only liberates itself of the rigor of news production but also entertains us by reaffirming our deepest anxieties and competing with other modes of intertextual entertainment available on rival channels.
This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by ... more This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by film star Aamir Khan, in terms of its politics, Khan’s stardom and the attempt to reframe the social on television. Grappling with the broad contours of the cultural economy of justice on national television in India, I suggest that the star descends upon television as an avatar promising empathy to a variety of victims of social injustice. In so doing, Khan converts crime news into emotional truths. The show has not only generated public debate, it also invites the public to return to a performative innocence. As television becomes the site of articulating moral authority, ritual participation and demanding social change, the political is re-assembled through Khan’s stardom. The paper also enquires how and why the show compels narrative ingenuity towards what Aditya Nigam calls the ‘implosion of the political’—the erasure of the public from the street and its re-inscription in the studio. Equally notable here is the role film-stardom plays in rendering moral authority through the trope of
the sacrificial.
This paper looks at the journey of new small-town films and analyses the cultural economy of this ... more 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 this new genre now working in solidarity with various vernacular cinemas in its site-specific idioms, yet thriving in a space beyond. Thus, the paper raises arguments about a new cinema culture that has at its heart, complex migration patterns across India, a performative belonging, and a cinema culture of mourning.
Kumar, Akshaya. (2022) ‘The Insurrectionary Lateral-ness of Bhojpuri Media.’ In Francesca Orsini ... more Kumar, Akshaya. (2022) ‘The Insurrectionary Lateral-ness of Bhojpuri Media.’ In Francesca Orsini and Ravikant (eds) Hinglish Live: Language Mixing across Media. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, pp. 232-257.
Within the last decade, India has witnessed the impact of two significant legislative decisions. ... more Within the last decade, India has witnessed the impact of two significant legislative decisions. The first related to regulatory prohibitions rendering Facebook's euphemistically named Free Basics program illegal in 2016, and the second involved the repeal of the 'revolutionary' Farm Laws in 2021, following year-long protests by farmers. Free Basics was a corporate development program that gave 'free' internet access to mobile phone users in developing countries, but only within the 'walled garden' of Facebook's apps. The Farm Laws were legislation that deregulated agricultural markets in India by allowing farmers to sell directly to food manufacturers and distributors. In each case, national and global corporate interests moved in to set the terms of access to information and the production of food.
Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia
Edited by Markus Schleiter and Erik de Maaker
Series... more Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia Edited by Markus Schleiter and Erik de Maaker Series: Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia
This book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities take on radically new significances. ‘Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia’ shows how in the portrayal of indigenous groups by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ imaginations of indigeneity and nation become increasingly interlinked. Indigenous groups, typically marginal to the nation, are at the same time part of mainstream polities and cultures. Drawing on perspectives from media studies and visual anthropology, this book compares and contrasts the situation in South Asia with indigeneity globally.
This chapter analytically situates the spectacular on the point
of intersection between transnati... more This chapter analytically situates the spectacular on the point of intersection between transnational and transregional mobility of Bollywood. Arguing that the transnational aspirations of the Mumbai-based industry fizzled out soon enough, while paving the way for Hollywood’s significant rise within the Indian market, the chapter foregrounds the industrial transactions between the north and south. It is on this axis that stardom has been the pre-eminent barricading force, which spectacularity is beginning to scale. As a key case study, the chapter turns towards the Baahubali franchise which has made a decisive bid to consolidate the markets leading from the south. The chapter is therefore a study in what characterises crossover cinema, and what such crossovers hide or reveal with respect to industrial territories.
Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational, and Social Exchanges, 2019
Over the last five years, a Youtube channel, The Viral Fever (TVF), has gained enormous popularit... more Over the last five years, a Youtube channel, The Viral Fever (TVF), has gained enormous popularity across urban India. I invite us to think of TVF as a quick and witty rehashing of the disassembled constellations drawn from the promotional frenzy of various media platforms, of which the celebrity form remains a key guiding force. In this new rendering of digital transactions, references are drawn from celebrity events, celebrity news and an increasingly contiguous - however scattered across media platforms - lifeworld of promotional frenzy, including reality television and web series. Some of these web-based platforms are hosted on Youtube as channels, while some have also developed their own platforms while retaining a presence on Youtube. While a lot of it is primarily witty commentary over what I call the 'membrane of the popular', there is an increasing emergence of new fictional content. Most of the web-based content is very specific and single-minded in its demographic focus upon the urban youth, which has made the mobile phone an emerging counterpart to television. Indeed, not only the demographic target but also the historical legacy of television channels is starkly different from the web-based media. This has also led to the emergent discourse that as opposed to television, the web-based content is more 'real' and relatable. It is in this sense that web-based media are fundamentally different from television, and its particular interest in the family demographic. This paper unpacks the web-based media constellations and argues that they are situated on the bridge between advertising and meta-commentary on the informally constituted celebrity universe. These digital media constellations need to be disassembled to be identified for they are - alternative routes to advertorial aggregation of celebrities, commodities and targeted demographic lifeworlds, all mounted upon the axis of humour. The digital economies, in the process, are shaped by the informality and intimacy they offer via portable platforms, but remain firmly situated on the promotional imperative of the advertising industry. The 'reconfigurations' and 'epochal shifts' of the digital transactions, therefore, must be understood for what they actually are: promotional infrastructure built over and around the existing media economies, so as to access the paying consumer via every platform and device possible.
This thesis is an investigation of the explosive growth of Bhojpuri cinema alongside the vernacul... more This thesis is an investigation of the explosive growth of Bhojpuri cinema alongside the vernacularisation of north Indian media in the last decade. As these developments take place under the shadow of Bollywood, the thesis also studies the aesthetic, political, and infrastructural nature of the relationship between vernacular media industries – Bhojpuri in particular – and Bollywood. The thesis then argues that Bhojpuri cinema, even as it provincialises Bollywood, aspires to sit beside it instead of displacing it. The outrightly confrontational readings notwithstanding, the thesis grapples with the ways in which the vernacular departs from its corresponding cosmopolitan form and how it negotiates cultural representation as an industry.
The two chapters in Part I provide a narrative account of the discourses and media-texts that saturate the Bhojpuri public sphere. The prevailing discourses and the dominant texts, the thesis argues, resonate with each other, but also delimit the destiny of Bhojpuri film and media. The tug of war between the cultural and economic valuations of the Bhojpuri commodity, as between enchantment and discontent with its representative prowess, as also between ‘traditional’ values and reformist ‘modernity’, leaves us within an uncomfortable zone. The thesis shows how aspirations to male stardom consolidate this territory and become the logic by which the industry output keeps growing, in spite of a failing media economy.
Each of the three chapters in Part II traces the historical trajectory of language, gendered use of public space, and piracy, respectively. In this part, the thesis establishes the analytical provenance for the emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in particular, and vernacular media in general. While Bhojpuri media allows Bhojpuri to seek its autonomy from state-supported Hindi, it also occupied the fringe economy of rundown theatres as Bollywood sought to move towards the multiplexes. If the advent of audiocassettes led to the emergence of Bhojpuri media sanskar, the availability of the single-screen economy after the arrival of multiplexes cleared the space for the theatrical exhibition of Bhojpuri cinema. The suboptimal transactions of counterfeit media commodities, on the other hand, regulate the legal counterpart and widen the net of distribution beyond the film theatre. I argue that the suboptimal practices are embedded within the unstable meanwhile. As an occupant of this meanwhile temporality, Bhojpuri film and media, whether in rundown theatres or on cheap mobile phones, grow via contingent and strategic coalitions.
This thesis, then, argues that cinema as a form makes it possible for Bhojpuri speaking society to confront, and reconcile with, its own corporeality – the aural and visual footprints, the discursive and ideological blind spots, and the aspiration to break free. On account of the media economy and its power to ratify a new order of hierarchy via celebrity, Bhojpuri media threatens to transform the social order, yet remains open to the possibility of manipulation by which the old order could rechristen itself as new.
Uploads
Books by Akshaya Kumar
Papers by Akshaya Kumar
in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between
visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while
retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investible capital. This
article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom
possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that
revolved around major stars featuring in action melodramas. The animated
visuality—a result of cinematographic and editorial intensifications—
was then devised to regulate minor stars’ appeal within emerging genre
films. Engaging with the resultant configurations of form, style, sovereign
representation, and masculinity, this article maps the analytical trajec-
tory of mise-en-scène, performativity, and stardom in Hindi cinema.
In the end, it highlights the agitated restlessness of contemporary Hindi
film form as a symptom of its inability to find a stable formal dwelling.
Instead of doing formal analysis alone, this article then aspires to bring
the formal, technological, economic, and political imperatives together in
the analytics of the Hindi cinema.
in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between
visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while
retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investible capital. This
article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom
possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that
revolved around major stars featuring in action melodramas. The animated
visuality—a result of cinematographic and editorial intensifications—
was then devised to regulate minor stars’ appeal within emerging genre
films. Engaging with the resultant configurations of form, style, sovereign
representation, and masculinity, this article maps the analytical trajec-
tory of mise-en-scène, performativity, and stardom in Hindi cinema.
In the end, it highlights the agitated restlessness of contemporary Hindi
film form as a symptom of its inability to find a stable formal dwelling.
Instead of doing formal analysis alone, this article then aspires to bring
the formal, technological, economic, and political imperatives together in
the analytics of the Hindi cinema.
the sacrificial.
Holly Arden, Anna Briers and Nicholas Carah (eds) Conflict in my Outlook. Perimeter Editions, Melbourne and UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, 96-100.
(https://perimetereditions.com/CONFLICT-IN-MY-OUTLOOK)
Edited by Markus Schleiter and Erik de Maaker
Series: Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia
This book examines how in South Asia popular music
videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries
about, by and for indigenous communities take on radically
new significances. ‘Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South
Asia’ shows how in the portrayal of indigenous groups by
both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ imaginations of indigeneity
and nation become increasingly interlinked. Indigenous
groups, typically marginal to the nation, are at the same
time part of mainstream polities and cultures. Drawing on
perspectives from media studies and visual anthropology,
this book compares and contrasts the situation in South
Asia with indigeneity globally.
of intersection between transnational and transregional
mobility of Bollywood. Arguing that the transnational
aspirations of the Mumbai-based industry fizzled out soon
enough, while paving the way for Hollywood’s significant rise
within the Indian market, the chapter foregrounds the
industrial transactions between the north and south. It is on
this axis that stardom has been the pre-eminent barricading
force, which spectacularity is beginning to scale. As a key
case study, the chapter turns towards the Baahubali franchise
which has made a decisive bid to consolidate the markets
leading from the south. The chapter is therefore a study in
what characterises crossover cinema, and what such
crossovers hide or reveal with respect to industrial territories.
The two chapters in Part I provide a narrative account of the discourses and media-texts that saturate the Bhojpuri public sphere. The prevailing discourses and the dominant texts, the thesis argues, resonate with each other, but also delimit the destiny of Bhojpuri film and media. The tug of war between the cultural and economic valuations of the Bhojpuri commodity, as between enchantment and discontent with its representative prowess, as also between ‘traditional’ values and reformist ‘modernity’, leaves us within an uncomfortable zone. The thesis shows how aspirations to male stardom consolidate this territory and become the logic by which the industry output keeps growing, in spite of a failing media economy.
Each of the three chapters in Part II traces the historical trajectory of language, gendered use of public space, and piracy, respectively. In this part, the thesis establishes the analytical provenance for the emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in particular, and vernacular media in general. While Bhojpuri media allows Bhojpuri to seek its autonomy from state-supported Hindi, it also occupied the fringe economy of rundown theatres as Bollywood sought to move towards the multiplexes. If the advent of audiocassettes led to the emergence of Bhojpuri media sanskar, the availability of the single-screen economy after the arrival of multiplexes cleared the space for the theatrical exhibition of Bhojpuri cinema. The suboptimal transactions of counterfeit media commodities, on the other hand, regulate the legal counterpart and widen the net of distribution beyond the film theatre. I argue that the suboptimal practices are embedded within the unstable meanwhile. As an occupant of this meanwhile temporality, Bhojpuri film and media, whether in rundown theatres or on cheap mobile phones, grow via contingent and strategic coalitions.
This thesis, then, argues that cinema as a form makes it possible for Bhojpuri speaking society to confront, and reconcile with, its own corporeality – the aural and visual footprints, the discursive and ideological blind spots, and the aspiration to break free. On account of the media economy and its power to ratify a new order of hierarchy via celebrity, Bhojpuri media threatens to transform the social order, yet remains open to the possibility of manipulation by which the old order could rechristen itself as new.