Tupur Chatterjee

How do key players in Bombay's screen industries-producers, directors, writers, and business developers-understand, imagine, and navigate the dizzying new world of streaming platforms in India? Tracking the emergence of symbiotic relationships between new streaming platforms and established media professionals, I discuss how a restructuring of industry dynamics is elemental to the processes of cultural legitimation of new streaming tastes and the reconfigurations of the relationships between texts, industries, and audiences. Through case studies of a few prominent creative professionals associated in various capacities with global and local streaming platforms, I sketch the multiple linkages between contemporary streaming cultures and the structural histories of both film and television in the subcontinent. Ultimately, this article argues that media workers' self-reflexivity and theorizations about the industry-in-digital transit help us not only grasp the heterogeneity of this moment, but also trace notions of value and taste in Bombay's emerging digital media ecologies.

This article charts the pandemic-engendered configurations of moviegoing cultures, leisure, and collective spectatorship in the Indian subcontinent and locates it within the discourses of personal risk, public anxiety, and industrial exclusion that have historically permeated the cinema hall. The pandemic marks a significant moment in the remaking of collective spectatorship and must be contextualized within the two-decades-long transition from single screens to multiplexes already underway in the Indian exhibition landscape. Through an account of the industrial developments in film exhibition in the last year and a half of pandemic time across two catastrophic waves of Covid-19, I offer some preliminary insights into the ways in which these shifts signal towards the cultural production of a new spectatorial body amenable to novel forms of bio-surveillance and datafication of self.

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.’

One of the most pervasive aspects of Delhi’s post-liberalization
psychopathology has been everyday violence against women. The
city’s rape culture was given an exceptionally sharp global focus after
the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Recent
Hindi cinema has begun to engage with some aspects of the capital’s
misogynist urban ethos. In this paper, I look at how the Delhi subgenre
of the “multiplex film” has engaged with rape culture, misogyny, and
urban anxiety through a close textual and discursive analysis of two
recent films—NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) and Pink (Aniruddha Roy
Chowdhury, 2016). Specifically, I identify how the December 16 “trigger
event” and Delhi’s notorious misogyny are finding newer modes of
representation through the interplay of genre and exhibition space. In
what ways do these films position and imagine the “multiplex viewer”?
New engagements with the figure of the consuming middle-class
woman and the public discourses that surround her sexual safety and
navigation of space have taken a central position in understanding
the present urban psychosis of the capital. I suggest that these films
and the forms of spectatorial identification that they privilege are
intricately linked to the gendered spatial politics of the multiplex.

Located at the intersections of international porn studies, celebrity studies, gender, sex and globalization, this article looks at the recent and unusual case of Sunny Leone, an Indo-Canadian bisexual pornographic actress who successfully crossed over to Bollywood. By examining her many lives and avatars – as an international porn star, a reality TV contestant, a Bollywood celebrity and now a show host on MTV India, who maintains an active presence on social and digital media – I suggest that the unprecedented situation Sunny Leone has engendered in India presents us with a form of transnational onscenity: in other words, it brings to the fore the centrality of porn in the economies of global cross-cultural exchange and forces us to rethink previous paradigms of both ‘pornography’ and stardom, two domains that have more or less remained mutually exclusive of each other in the sub-continent. Leone’s case brings to the fore economic, social and cultural exchanges between two mammoth entertainment industries, Bollywood and American pornography, which had not encountered each other in these ways before. The capital gains from these exchanges seem to overshadow concerns about preserving the nation’s ‘moral’ fabric and have concurrently given way to newer spaces for accommodating a celebrity like Leone. Given that her crossover from porn presents an absolute rupture from all previous paradigms of female stardom in the Indian context, I place the discourses surrounding her within the tangible anxieties and fantasies of both desire and control over her ‘Indian but foreign’ and ‘pornographic’ body. Highlighting Leone’s agency through the entire process, which is unique in many regards, this article attempts to further rethink and complicate overarching notions of ‘objectification’ that often dominate the field.

Since the late 90s, multiplexes in India have almost always been located inside malls, rendering it impossible to inhabit one space without also inhabiting the other. Their prevalence coincides with a shift in the spectatorial imagination of India’s mass audience—spaces that, for several preceding decades, had been designed for the subaltern male, but are now built for the consuming, globalized middle-class woman. By catering to the mutable desires and anxieties of a rapidly expanding and heterogeneous middle class, the mall-multiplex has radically altered the politics of theatrical space and moviegoing.

Projecting Desire tells the story of this moment of historic transition as it played out across media industries, architecture and design, popular cinema, and public culture. Tupur Chatterjee highlights how the multiplex established a new link between media and architecture in the subcontinent, not only rewriting the relation between gender and urban space, but also changing the shapes of Indian cities.

Projecting Desire locates the post-globalization transformation of India’s screen and exhibition industries in a longer arc of ideas about urban planning and architecture, long mired in caste- and class-based gendered anxieties. It argues that the architectural mediations of India’s moviegoing cultures are key to imagining, planning, and policing the contemporary media city. Chatterjee integrates industrial and organizational ethnography, in-depth interviews, participant observation, discourse and textual analysis, and archival work with spatial and urban histories. Focusing on these new meccas of leisure and entertainment, Projecting Desire tracks the understudied nexus between new media architectures, cultures of public leisure, and popular cinema in the Global South.