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Rashmi Devi Sawhney

New York University, Film and New Media, Faculty Member

Trinity College Dublin, Department of Sociology, Department Member

Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Faculty Member

India Foundation for the Arts, Arts Practice, Programme Head

Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, School of New Humanities and Design, Faculty Member

Christ University, Bangalore, India, Masters in English with Cultural Studies, Faculty Member

Dublin Institute of Technology, The Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Pased Research, Faculty Member

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Associate Arts Professor of Film and New Media at New York University, Abu Dhabi. My areas of research include cultural studies, cinema, visual culture, historiography, representation, curation with a focus on South Asia. I have previously served as Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and as Lecturer in Visual Cultural Studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and have been visiting faculty at Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Bilkent, Ankara. I headed the MA programme in Aesthetics and Visual Culture at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore between 2015-18, and headed the Arts Practice and Curatorship programmes at the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore (2012-14). From 2018-2023, I was programme head for the MA in Cultural Studies at Christ University, Bangalore, and convenor of the Cultural Studies Cell. I am co-founder of VisionMix (www.visionmix.info) and have been experimenting with curatorial and artistic projects, which include Future Orbits (Kochi, Jan 2017), Video Vortex XI (Kochi, Feb 2017, http://networkcultures.org/videovortex/), Set.Reset (Saligao, Goa, Sept 2017), Four Acts (British Council, Bangalore, 9 Dec 2018) and Drift City (two channel video, part of 'Could be Urbanism', KHOJ, Delhi, 5-15 Dec 2018).

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Papers by Rashmi Devi Sawhney

Fatma Begum article Sawhney

Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media, 2021

Like many women pioneers in cinema, Fatma Begum, British India’s first female director and produc... more Like many women pioneers in cinema, Fatma Begum, British India’s first female director and producer who ran a production house in Bombay from 1926–29, has by and large been a spectral presence in film history. This chapter attempts to address this gap by bringing her into representation, trafficking her, so to speak, from a past historical time into a contemporary present. The account presented here is a result of several years of persistent probing, and while I have written about her elsewhere (Sawhney 2013), in this chapter, Fatma Begum functions as a point of departure to raise methodological questions for film historiography.1
Given her absence in film archives, my account necessitates a turn to media and legal archives, indicating that mobility – or agility – is a fundamental requirement within cinema studies as well. The larger question at play that underwrites this work is how fluid and impermanent archives influence postcolonial and feminist historiographical approaches to history and its present

Women at work: The cultural and creative industries

Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2020

Artists’ Moving Image: South Asian Trajectories

The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 2018

Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing “National” Histories

University of Illinois Press, 2017

This chapter investigates the historical imagination of 1980s Indian women filmmakers seeking “co... more This chapter investigates the historical imagination of 1980s Indian women filmmakers seeking “companionship” with generations of women enduring or resisting convention in India's colonial past. Leveraging the emergence in the 1980s of an Indian women's cinema—and reflecting on the cinematic construction of gender debates in colonial India through its films, the chapter highlights the challenges they pose to establishing “national” narratives of gender or film history. Three films about gender and reform in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial India are discussed: Phaniyamma (Prema Karanth, 1983), Rao Saheb (Vijaya Mehta, 1986), and Sati (Aparna Sen, 1989). Together these films present a constellation that supports the development of a feminist historiography of Indian cinema. The chapter also considers how literature on Indian regional cinemas, published in regional languages with little translation, has contributed to the marginalization of such cinemas in ...

An evening on Mars, love on the moon: 1960s science fiction films from Bombay

Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2015

Through the Lens of a ‘Branded Criminal’: The Politics of Marginal Cinema in India

South Asian Media Cultures

Apotheosis or Apparition?: Bombay and the Village in 1990s Women's Cinema

Film Studies, 2007

This article examines the representation of Bombay in Aruna Raje‘s Rihaee (1988) and Sai Paranjpy... more This article examines the representation of Bombay in Aruna Raje‘s Rihaee (1988) and Sai Paranjpyes Disha (1990). It has been argued here that in both films, Bombay functions as a narrative anchor to the fictive village, which is depicted as the locus of Indian modernity. Symbolism of the village-city trope is used to reorganise the syntagm of modernity-location-gender in new relations of power and also to present alternative visions of national development within the socio-economic context of 1990s liberalisation in India. The dialectic between city and village in these films emphasises the role of memory and migration in women‘s cinema, and also serves as a means to probing the relationship between gender and films in the postcolonial context.

Decolonising Cultural Studies

Artha - Journal of Social Sciences

Written as a reflective account emerging from the process of reviewing and revamping an MA in Eng... more Written as a reflective account emerging from the process of reviewing and revamping an MA in English and Cultural Studies at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, in the year 2018-19, this essay takes the form of a tapestry woven out of four separate but related inquiries. Section I reflects upon the experience of having taught introductory courses in Cultural Studies (henceforth CS) in India and Ireland separated by a gap of 15 years, and germane questions of cultural specificity and curricula. Section II provides an overview of the available narratives of CS within India, focusing on the distinctive approach taken in each account. Section III looks at the relationship between CS, Postcolonial Studies (henceforth PS) and Subaltern Studies (henceforth SS), as they developed in play with one another in 1980s England and America. And Section IV comments on some wider institutional and creative practices of relevance, and the implications these hold for possible future directio...

To Catch the Eye Askance: Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy

by Geeta Patel and Rashmi Devi Sawhney

B I B L I O : O C T O B E R -D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8

Review of Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy that stresses creative and artistic form, which redefine... more

To Catch the Eye Askance

Biblio (Oct-Dec 2018)

Shadowing the Image Archive.doc

Artists' Moving Image: South Asian Trajectories

Studies in South Asian Film & Media 6,2 - editorial for the science fiction and fantasy issue

An Evening on Mars, Love on the Moon: 1960s Science Fiction Films from Bombay

Extending Arts Practice: Programme Review Brief

ArtConnect Cinema Issue. Includes Fatma Begum Article.

The Shamanic Scientist

The Scientist and His Double in Indian SF Cinema

Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing national Histories: Women Filmmakers in Kanada, Marathi & Bengali Cinema

The Virtual Reality of Indian Cinema: Spectatorship as Enactment of 'Becoming Modern'

Cinema and the city are products of modernity but are also rites of passage through which modern ... more Cinema and the city are products of modernity but are also rites of passage through which modern individuals become properly constituted, as Walter Benjamin implies, when he suggests that transformations in the perception of time and space are similarly experienced by a person in ‘big-city traffic’ and the spectator of cinema. This essay builds upon the foundations of early twentieth-century scholarship on Euro-American cinema and modernity to foreground ‘difference’ in urban and cinematic cultures and their intertextuality, using the example of Indian cinema. The idea of difference as implied here emphasizes the multiple configurations, locations and textures of modernity even within India and its cinema cultures; in order to explicate this, the discussion focuses on Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's (2009) film Delhi 6, especially in the context of Bombay's symbolism as the city ‘par-modernity’ in Indian cinema. The contours of a specific Indian imaginary as seen particularly in Delhi 6 – but also in a number of other recent Delhi-based films – offer an indicative comment on the positioning of Indian film viewers within the process of becoming active spectators and citizens. The argument developed is that the ‘sharp, short, shocks’ of urban modernity are navigated through narrative tropes in popular Indian films that determine the limits of ‘becoming modern’.

Fatma Begum article Sawhney

Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media, 2021

Like many women pioneers in cinema, Fatma Begum, British India’s first female director and produc... more Like many women pioneers in cinema, Fatma Begum, British India’s first female director and producer who ran a production house in Bombay from 1926–29, has by and large been a spectral presence in film history. This chapter attempts to address this gap by bringing her into representation, trafficking her, so to speak, from a past historical time into a contemporary present. The account presented here is a result of several years of persistent probing, and while I have written about her elsewhere (Sawhney 2013), in this chapter, Fatma Begum functions as a point of departure to raise methodological questions for film historiography.1
Given her absence in film archives, my account necessitates a turn to media and legal archives, indicating that mobility – or agility – is a fundamental requirement within cinema studies as well. The larger question at play that underwrites this work is how fluid and impermanent archives influence postcolonial and feminist historiographical approaches to history and its present

Women at work: The cultural and creative industries

Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2020

Artists’ Moving Image: South Asian Trajectories

The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 2018

Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing “National” Histories

University of Illinois Press, 2017

This chapter investigates the historical imagination of 1980s Indian women filmmakers seeking “co... more This chapter investigates the historical imagination of 1980s Indian women filmmakers seeking “companionship” with generations of women enduring or resisting convention in India's colonial past. Leveraging the emergence in the 1980s of an Indian women's cinema—and reflecting on the cinematic construction of gender debates in colonial India through its films, the chapter highlights the challenges they pose to establishing “national” narratives of gender or film history. Three films about gender and reform in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial India are discussed: Phaniyamma (Prema Karanth, 1983), Rao Saheb (Vijaya Mehta, 1986), and Sati (Aparna Sen, 1989). Together these films present a constellation that supports the development of a feminist historiography of Indian cinema. The chapter also considers how literature on Indian regional cinemas, published in regional languages with little translation, has contributed to the marginalization of such cinemas in ...

An evening on Mars, love on the moon: 1960s science fiction films from Bombay

Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 2015

Through the Lens of a ‘Branded Criminal’: The Politics of Marginal Cinema in India

South Asian Media Cultures

Apotheosis or Apparition?: Bombay and the Village in 1990s Women's Cinema

Film Studies, 2007

This article examines the representation of Bombay in Aruna Raje‘s Rihaee (1988) and Sai Paranjpy... more This article examines the representation of Bombay in Aruna Raje‘s Rihaee (1988) and Sai Paranjpyes Disha (1990). It has been argued here that in both films, Bombay functions as a narrative anchor to the fictive village, which is depicted as the locus of Indian modernity. Symbolism of the village-city trope is used to reorganise the syntagm of modernity-location-gender in new relations of power and also to present alternative visions of national development within the socio-economic context of 1990s liberalisation in India. The dialectic between city and village in these films emphasises the role of memory and migration in women‘s cinema, and also serves as a means to probing the relationship between gender and films in the postcolonial context.

Decolonising Cultural Studies

Artha - Journal of Social Sciences

Written as a reflective account emerging from the process of reviewing and revamping an MA in Eng... more Written as a reflective account emerging from the process of reviewing and revamping an MA in English and Cultural Studies at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, in the year 2018-19, this essay takes the form of a tapestry woven out of four separate but related inquiries. Section I reflects upon the experience of having taught introductory courses in Cultural Studies (henceforth CS) in India and Ireland separated by a gap of 15 years, and germane questions of cultural specificity and curricula. Section II provides an overview of the available narratives of CS within India, focusing on the distinctive approach taken in each account. Section III looks at the relationship between CS, Postcolonial Studies (henceforth PS) and Subaltern Studies (henceforth SS), as they developed in play with one another in 1980s England and America. And Section IV comments on some wider institutional and creative practices of relevance, and the implications these hold for possible future directio...

To Catch the Eye Askance: Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy

by Geeta Patel and Rashmi Devi Sawhney

B I B L I O : O C T O B E R -D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8

Review of Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy that stresses creative and artistic form, which redefine... more

To Catch the Eye Askance

Biblio (Oct-Dec 2018)

Shadowing the Image Archive.doc

Artists' Moving Image: South Asian Trajectories

Studies in South Asian Film & Media 6,2 - editorial for the science fiction and fantasy issue

An Evening on Mars, Love on the Moon: 1960s Science Fiction Films from Bombay

Extending Arts Practice: Programme Review Brief

ArtConnect Cinema Issue. Includes Fatma Begum Article.

The Shamanic Scientist

The Scientist and His Double in Indian SF Cinema

Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing national Histories: Women Filmmakers in Kanada, Marathi & Bengali Cinema

The Virtual Reality of Indian Cinema: Spectatorship as Enactment of 'Becoming Modern'

Cinema and the city are products of modernity but are also rites of passage through which modern ... more Cinema and the city are products of modernity but are also rites of passage through which modern individuals become properly constituted, as Walter Benjamin implies, when he suggests that transformations in the perception of time and space are similarly experienced by a person in ‘big-city traffic’ and the spectator of cinema. This essay builds upon the foundations of early twentieth-century scholarship on Euro-American cinema and modernity to foreground ‘difference’ in urban and cinematic cultures and their intertextuality, using the example of Indian cinema. The idea of difference as implied here emphasizes the multiple configurations, locations and textures of modernity even within India and its cinema cultures; in order to explicate this, the discussion focuses on Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's (2009) film Delhi 6, especially in the context of Bombay's symbolism as the city ‘par-modernity’ in Indian cinema. The contours of a specific Indian imaginary as seen particularly in Delhi 6 – but also in a number of other recent Delhi-based films – offer an indicative comment on the positioning of Indian film viewers within the process of becoming active spectators and citizens. The argument developed is that the ‘sharp, short, shocks’ of urban modernity are navigated through narrative tropes in popular Indian films that determine the limits of ‘becoming modern’.

Film Industry as Idea and Image

'Beyond Reverse Ethnography and Self-Representation: Transforming Social Perceptions Through Cinema

Outside the West: Articulating a Different Modernity in Popular Indian Cinema

Melodrama, Violence and the Female Body in Hindi Cinema

No longer "not-yet"? New Indian Cinema, now and then

Cinematic Cities: Indian Cinema

'Women Undoing "National" Histories Through Regional Cinema: A 1980s Perspective on Gender and Reform in Colonial India'

Museum Fellowship in collaboration with CSMVS (Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay)

Curatorship programme at India Foundation for the Arts

Filmic Afterlives: Considerations on the Uncanny

by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Rashmi Devi Sawhney

The Vanishing Point cover

The Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video, 2022

he Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video (volume 3 in the India Since the 90s series) tracks... more he Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video (volume 3 in the India Since the 90s series) tracks the fugitive afterlife of the moving image ever since the proclaimed death of celluloid film. At once everywhere and nowhere, rapidly circulating moving images have become archives of public memory, degraded repositories of what was cinema, surveillance tools and instruments of governance. In this book, filmmakers, moving image artists and theorists are assembled to reconstruct one of the most elusive, and significant, transformations of the millennial turn.

India Since the 90s (general editor: Ashish Rajadhyaksha) is a series of six titles exploring recent history from the standpoint of the present moment. As we face new and unprecedented phenomena in the twenty-first century, along with the new, there is also a ghostly re-evocation of things we have seen and done that relentlessly suggest that we may have been here before. Familiar forms and arguments become curiously prescient revealing new relevance. This series includes texts and images from diverse academic disciplines, curated and assembled by practitioners looking back to reconsider our past.