KP Jayasankar
Dr. K.P. Jayasankar is Reired Professor, Centre for Critical Media Praxis, School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He has an M.A. in German studies and a Ph.D. in Humanities and Social Sciences, from IIT Mumbai and is involved in media production, teaching and research.
His films, jointly directed with Dr. Anjali Monteiro, have won thirty-three national and international awards. Their documentary films. A presiding thematic of much of their work has been a problematising of notions of self and the other, of normality and deviance, of the local and the global, through the exploration of diverse narratives and rituals. These range from the stories and paintings of indigenous peoples to the poetry of prison inmates. Their most recent awards for their Kachchh Trilogy are the Basil Wright Prize 2013 for So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There) and Jury's commendation in the Intangible Culture category 2019 for A Delicate Weave at the Royal Anthropological Institute Festival, UK. Retrospectives include Vibgyor Film Festival, Kerala, 2006; Bangalore Film Society, 2010; Madurai International Film Festival, 2012 Parramasala Sydney, 2013, Chennai 2017, Trichur International Film Festival 2018 and India International Centre, New Delhi 2018. An adaptation of their film Saacha (The Loom) was a part of the art exhibition ‘Project Space: Word. Sound. Power.’ at the Tate Modern, London, in 2013, and at Walking Through the Soul City — Sudhir Patwardhan: A Retrospective, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, between Nov. 30, 2019 and Feb. 12, 2020. Monteiro and Jayasankar were invited artists at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, where Saacha (The Loom) was showcased as an installation, between Dec 12, 2018 and March 29, 2019. They have served as jury and as festival consultants and directors to several film festivals in India. They have mentored many student and fellowship documentary film projects as commissioning editors.
Dr. Jayasankar is an award winning cameraperson and editor and enjoys web and graphic design. He was a a DAAD visiting scholar at the University of Heidelberg in 1984, a Howard Thomas Memorial Fellow in Media Studies, at Goldsmith’s College, London, in 1996, an Erasmus Mundus fellow at Lund University, Sweden and a Key Technology Partner Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney in 2013. He has also been visiting faculty to several Universities and institutions in India and abroad and a media consultant to IFAD, NDDB and UNDP. He has also served as jury to film festivals. He is actively involved in ‘Vikalp', a collective of documentary filmmakers campaigning for freedom of expression. Dr. Jayasankar also has several papers in the area of media and cultural studies and has contributed to journals such as Cultural Studies. His most recent publication is a book: Jayasankar, KP and A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry — Independent Documentary Film in India, Sage, 2015. His areas of research interest include critical theory, documentary film and censorship.
Personal Website: http://www.monteiro-jayasankar.com/
His publications include:
Anjali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar, Amit S. Rai (Eds.) , DigiNaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India
2020, Orient Black Swan
Jayasankar, KP and A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry — Independent Documentary Film in India, Sage, 2015
Phone: +91 22 2552 5660 (Work)
Address: School of Media and Cultural Studies
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Deonar, Bombay 400 088, India
His films, jointly directed with Dr. Anjali Monteiro, have won thirty-three national and international awards. Their documentary films. A presiding thematic of much of their work has been a problematising of notions of self and the other, of normality and deviance, of the local and the global, through the exploration of diverse narratives and rituals. These range from the stories and paintings of indigenous peoples to the poetry of prison inmates. Their most recent awards for their Kachchh Trilogy are the Basil Wright Prize 2013 for So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There) and Jury's commendation in the Intangible Culture category 2019 for A Delicate Weave at the Royal Anthropological Institute Festival, UK. Retrospectives include Vibgyor Film Festival, Kerala, 2006; Bangalore Film Society, 2010; Madurai International Film Festival, 2012 Parramasala Sydney, 2013, Chennai 2017, Trichur International Film Festival 2018 and India International Centre, New Delhi 2018. An adaptation of their film Saacha (The Loom) was a part of the art exhibition ‘Project Space: Word. Sound. Power.’ at the Tate Modern, London, in 2013, and at Walking Through the Soul City — Sudhir Patwardhan: A Retrospective, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, between Nov. 30, 2019 and Feb. 12, 2020. Monteiro and Jayasankar were invited artists at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, where Saacha (The Loom) was showcased as an installation, between Dec 12, 2018 and March 29, 2019. They have served as jury and as festival consultants and directors to several film festivals in India. They have mentored many student and fellowship documentary film projects as commissioning editors.
Dr. Jayasankar is an award winning cameraperson and editor and enjoys web and graphic design. He was a a DAAD visiting scholar at the University of Heidelberg in 1984, a Howard Thomas Memorial Fellow in Media Studies, at Goldsmith’s College, London, in 1996, an Erasmus Mundus fellow at Lund University, Sweden and a Key Technology Partner Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney in 2013. He has also been visiting faculty to several Universities and institutions in India and abroad and a media consultant to IFAD, NDDB and UNDP. He has also served as jury to film festivals. He is actively involved in ‘Vikalp', a collective of documentary filmmakers campaigning for freedom of expression. Dr. Jayasankar also has several papers in the area of media and cultural studies and has contributed to journals such as Cultural Studies. His most recent publication is a book: Jayasankar, KP and A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry — Independent Documentary Film in India, Sage, 2015. His areas of research interest include critical theory, documentary film and censorship.
Personal Website: http://www.monteiro-jayasankar.com/
His publications include:
Anjali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar, Amit S. Rai (Eds.) , DigiNaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India
2020, Orient Black Swan
Jayasankar, KP and A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry — Independent Documentary Film in India, Sage, 2015
Phone: +91 22 2552 5660 (Work)
Address: School of Media and Cultural Studies
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Deonar, Bombay 400 088, India
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An excerpt from Prof. Arjun Appadurai's Foreword to the book:
"This is an extraordinary book. It will set new standards for bringing together place, form and context in cinema studies. It accomplishes what few studies of a modern visual genre even attempt, much less achieve. It reflects the love of the form of the documentary that only those, like the authors, who have made many documentary films, can have. It is also a work of scholarship that tells the story of this form in one place, in this case India, with impeccable attention to history and detail. Finally, it achieves a beautiful balance between historical detail and theoretical currency."
Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication, New York University.
The great textile strike in 1982 marked the process of mill closure, as mill owners used this to shut down the industry and shift to more profitable ventures. Over 150,000 workers and many others dependent on them lost their livelihoods and the mill lands were redeveloped primarily into malls, gated housing and corporate spaces.
This web archive of audio-visual and text resources pertaining to the mill lands of Mumbai, its people and their struggles, features:
Films from TISS
Films from other sources
Interviews
Reports
Photographs
Poems/Songs
More than 3 decades after the closure of the mills, ‘GiranMumbai’ is an attempt to serve as a repository of material that not only details the various contestations around the mill lands of Mumbai, but also explores how people have coped with these traumatic changes, and how the cultural spaces of Mill Mumbai have transformed and continue to survive.
From Neighbourhood To Nation: The Rise And Fall Of The Left In Bombay’s Girangaon In The Twentieth Century
by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
(excerpted from Adarkar, N., & Menon, M. (2004). One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History. Seagull Books Pvt Ltd.)
If you stand at night on the roof of one of the recent, still under-occupied high-rise buildings erected on the property of a defunct mill in central Bombay and often named with a surreal flourish like Kalpataru Heights, or the Phoenix Towers that sprang from the ashes of a spinning mill, you will be treated to an instructive, indeed, allegorical, view of the city. Immediately at the base of the Heights upon which you stand will be a discernible circle of gloom. Further afield, a mile or two away, whether towards the bustling suburbs to the north or the old town and the business districts to the south, the city will be awash with electric light. As the city’s textile mills have closed down, so the residents of Girangaon are enveloped in darkness in the geographical centre of one of the world’s largest cities.
Two events in recent times have marked the ways in which Bombay’s residents view their city, its culture and character, its position in the wider world and the social and political relations by which it is constituted — the decline and in large measure the closure of the textile industry since the late 1980s and the brutal pogrom against Muslims in December 1992 and January 1993 that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. Bombay’s prodigious growth in the late nineteenth century and its claim to be a major metropolitan centre has, until recently, been inextricably tied to the rise and growth of the cotton textile industry. The apparently precipitous decline of the industry has not only proved calamitous for some of its residents but has unsettled the city’s sense of its own identity
Cover
Like here, like there October 2011
By K P Jayasankar & Anjali Monteiro
Nomadic lives were destroyed as Sindh and Kachchh are separated by a border. "
An excerpt from Prof. Arjun Appadurai's Foreword to the book:
"This is an extraordinary book. It will set new standards for bringing together place, form and context in cinema studies. It accomplishes what few studies of a modern visual genre even attempt, much less achieve. It reflects the love of the form of the documentary that only those, like the authors, who have made many documentary films, can have. It is also a work of scholarship that tells the story of this form in one place, in this case India, with impeccable attention to history and detail. Finally, it achieves a beautiful balance between historical detail and theoretical currency."
Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication, New York University.
The great textile strike in 1982 marked the process of mill closure, as mill owners used this to shut down the industry and shift to more profitable ventures. Over 150,000 workers and many others dependent on them lost their livelihoods and the mill lands were redeveloped primarily into malls, gated housing and corporate spaces.
This web archive of audio-visual and text resources pertaining to the mill lands of Mumbai, its people and their struggles, features:
Films from TISS
Films from other sources
Interviews
Reports
Photographs
Poems/Songs
More than 3 decades after the closure of the mills, ‘GiranMumbai’ is an attempt to serve as a repository of material that not only details the various contestations around the mill lands of Mumbai, but also explores how people have coped with these traumatic changes, and how the cultural spaces of Mill Mumbai have transformed and continue to survive.
From Neighbourhood To Nation: The Rise And Fall Of The Left In Bombay’s Girangaon In The Twentieth Century
by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
(excerpted from Adarkar, N., & Menon, M. (2004). One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History. Seagull Books Pvt Ltd.)
If you stand at night on the roof of one of the recent, still under-occupied high-rise buildings erected on the property of a defunct mill in central Bombay and often named with a surreal flourish like Kalpataru Heights, or the Phoenix Towers that sprang from the ashes of a spinning mill, you will be treated to an instructive, indeed, allegorical, view of the city. Immediately at the base of the Heights upon which you stand will be a discernible circle of gloom. Further afield, a mile or two away, whether towards the bustling suburbs to the north or the old town and the business districts to the south, the city will be awash with electric light. As the city’s textile mills have closed down, so the residents of Girangaon are enveloped in darkness in the geographical centre of one of the world’s largest cities.
Two events in recent times have marked the ways in which Bombay’s residents view their city, its culture and character, its position in the wider world and the social and political relations by which it is constituted — the decline and in large measure the closure of the textile industry since the late 1980s and the brutal pogrom against Muslims in December 1992 and January 1993 that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. Bombay’s prodigious growth in the late nineteenth century and its claim to be a major metropolitan centre has, until recently, been inextricably tied to the rise and growth of the cotton textile industry. The apparently precipitous decline of the industry has not only proved calamitous for some of its residents but has unsettled the city’s sense of its own identity
Cover
Like here, like there October 2011
By K P Jayasankar & Anjali Monteiro
Nomadic lives were destroyed as Sindh and Kachchh are separated by a border. "
Chair: Devleena Ghosh
Discussant: Anne Rutherford
Date: November 1, 2016
Time: 6 pm
Venue: Building 10, Level 4, Room CB10.04.460
University of Technology Sydney
Broadway 2007
This presentation, illustrated with film clips, is based on the recently published book A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India. Based on close readings of selected films and interviews with documentary filmmakers, the book provides a practitioner’s understanding of the documentary ‘fly in the curry’ in India.
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are Professors at the School of Media and Cultural Studies (www. smcs.tiss.edu), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Their documentary films, which have been screened across the world, have won 32 national and international awards.
Devleena Ghosh is an Associate Professor in the Social Inquiry program at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research deals with colonial and postcolonial environmental and political studies with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean region.
Anne Rutherford is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Western Sydney University, whose research includes studies of affect, aesthetics and politics in Indian documentary.
The multi-award-winning Indian documentary filmmakers, Anjali Monteiro* and KP Jayasankar have made over 40 documentaries and have jointly won 32 national and international awards. Their films draw on the richness of performance and artistic traditions in India to stretch and reinvent the limits of the documentary form and to dislodge the flows of power in the relationship between documentary filmmaker and subject. Their recent book, A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India (Sage, 2016), is a long-overdue account of documentary in India as a site of resistance.
The filmmakers will speak about their trilogy of films made in Kachchh and the political and aesthetic challenges of independent documentary in India, with Anne Rutherford, Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Western Sydney University. The discussion will be followed by a screening of So Heddan So Hoddan (52 min) and a Q & A with the filmmakers. https://likeherelikethere.wordpress.com/
Monteiro and Jayasankar are media teachers, researchers and activists in the School of Cultural and Media Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. http://smcs.tiss.edu/
https://www.academia.edu/8116567/Filming_Transience_Affirming_Resilience_Profile_of_Anjali_Monteiro_and_KP_Jayasankar
* Anjali Monteiro's visit is supported by a fellowship from the University of Technology Sydney.
When: Wednesday October 26, 6pm for 6.30
Where: AFTRS, Entertainment Quarter, 130 Bent Street, Moore Park
(parking discounted after 6pm)
Map : http://www.aftrs.edu.au/about/contact-us/sydney.aspx
Entry: Donation $7
RSVP not required, but be early to ensure your seat. Please invite your friends too! This event is open to the public.
Kutchi and Hindi with English subtitles, 62 Mins, 2017
School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India
A Delicate Weave, set in Kachchh, Gujarat, India, traces four different musical journeys, all converging in the ways they affirm religious diversity, syncretism and love of the other. Drawing on the poetic and musical traditions of Kabir and Shah Bhitai, as well as the folk traditions of the region, these remarkable musicians and singers bear testimony to how these oral traditions of compassion are being passed down from one generation to the next.
Whether it is the group of young men in Bhujodi who meet every night to sing the bhajans of Kabir, or the feisty women from Lakhpat, who quietly subvert gender roles through their music performances, or Noor Mohammad Sodha, who plays and teaches exquisite flute music, or Jiant Khan and his disciples, whose love for the Sufi poet Bhitai is expressed through the ethereal form of Waee singing—all these passionate musicians keep alive this delicate weave, committed to the project of what Naranbhai, a carpet weaver and community archivist from Bhujodi calls “breaking down the walls”; walls that have been built up through the politics of hate and intolerance that marks our times.
This is the latest in the Kachchh Trilogy— the earlier ones are A Two Day Fair , 2009 (Do Din Ka Mela) and Like Here Like There , 2011 (So Heddan So Hoddan)
How the city perceives waste affects its waste managers. The numerous collectors, managers and cleaners of waste constitute a population whose work and poor working conditions are often neglected.
WasteLines Mumbai is a multimedia web archive (Please follow this link: http://wastemumbai.tiss.edu) that showcases content about the perceptions, politics and management of waste in a city along with arguments on the need to recognise, regulate and dignify the work of waste managers, whose work contributes to the economy and better environment. With special focus on Mumbai, the archive features textual, audio and visual content created by waste managers, communities, researchers and activists.
The different sections of the archive are:
Films from TISS
Films from other sources
Interviews
Videos
Writings
Photographs
Links
WasteLines Blog
Please follow this link: http://wastemumbai.tiss.edu
Diginaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India explores this complex space of the digital from multiple perspectives and locations.
This book explores various aspects of the digital in India, from documentaries, digital video activism in Mumbai, free WiFi and digital populism, to more intimate representations of the digital through circuits of affect, care and motherhood. The chapters focus on crucial areas of study such as the city, documentary and cinematic texts, gender and sexuality, labour, censorship and digital archives.
Ultimately, the volume seeks to diagram various entry points into post-capitalist media ecologies as channels connecting the local and the digital in India.