South Asian Popular Culture

This paper is written under the guidance of Prof. Tutun Mukherjee, the University of Hyderabad (as Principal Investigator) for Comparative Literature: Drama in India | UGC MHRD e Pathshala.

This article explicates the Bhasha or the Vernacular Theatre tradition of India, the emergence of great Bhasha traditions. It attempts to locate the Bhasha Roots in Classical/Sanskrit Drama and in the period of its subsequent decline. The article also defines the characteristics of the Bhasha theatrical performances. The article further expands on the evolution of Parsi theatre, Marathi theatre and Bengali theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). It further explains the Post-Independence scenario and creation of Akademis and various other organisations, which promotes and support Bhasha theatre and performances.

ABSTRACT Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is a recently released Indian historical biopic of Rani Lakshmi Bai. Through historical re-imagining, the film renders several potential social and political issues, which are topical and timely in contemporary India. The present article attempts to examine the topicality of the film. First, it discusses how it rekindles the female heroic tradition of India, which has been overshadowed due to the patriarchal mindset and historiography. Secondly, it explores how, through cinematic liberties, issues like gauraksha, Hindutva, and patriotism have been propagated. Thirdly, it argues how by foregrounding Dalits and Muslims, the film attempts to neutralise extremist Hindu prejudices, dominant in the hyper-nationalist climate of India. The article concludes that by recreating a crucial historical epoch and a legend, the film attempts to reinstate a secular heritage of India’s heroic tradition to rekindle nationalistic and patriotic sensibility among the contemporary masses.

ABSTRACT Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is a recently released Indian historical biopic of Rani Lakshmi Bai. Through historical re-imagining, the film renders several potential social and political issues, which are topical and timely in contemporary India. The present article attempts to examine the topicality of the film. First, it discusses how it rekindles the female heroic tradition of India, which has been overshadowed due to the patriarchal mindset and historiography. Secondly, it explores how, through cinematic liberties, issues like gauraksha, Hindutva, and patriotism have been propagated. Thirdly, it argues how by foregrounding Dalits and Muslims, the film attempts to neutralise extremist Hindu prejudices, dominant in the hyper-nationalist climate of India. The article concludes that by recreating a crucial historical epoch and a legend, the film attempts to reinstate a secular heritage of India’s heroic tradition to rekindle nationalistic and patriotic sensibility among the contemporary masses.

In the years since the London tube bombings, popular depictions of British Asians have been increasingly `othered' at best, and stereotyped as dangerous terrorists at worst. Asian self-representation continues to be a critically-needed intervention. East London's Asian electronic music scene serves as a means to represent the voices of young urban British Asians, attempting to bring them from peripheral alterity and render them visible in mainstream British popular culture. The music, which blends synthesized electronic music with South Asian musical stylings, has brought musicians from both the South Asian diaspora and the subcontinent to perform in `Banglatown', East London. These regular globalized performances of the scene, an aspect rarely investigated, have challenged locally bounded British Asian identities.

This paper analyzes the debates around the regional language film Avalude Ravukal (Her Nights, d. I.V. Sasi, 1978), a controversial film produced by the Kerala film industry credited as being responsible for launching soft-porn cinema as a genre in India. This paper tracks the shifting circuits of Avalude Ravukal and its fractured aesthetic codes to analyze the role of cultural production in configuring the regional public sphere. The intertextual network of Avalude Ravukal and its reception, functions as a live archive of popular memory through which I can track the mutually constitutive relationship between the ‘excesses’ of cinema and moral anxieties within regional publics, especially around the figure of the prostitute. The paper demonstrates that in order to map the non-linear histories of Indian cinema, it is necessary to examine how this medium is enmeshed in vernacular socialities within the heterogeneous space of the nation.

Why do we accept unfair practices because they've been around forever? How do they become a normalized part of our Everyday,  passed down from generation to generation?  Patrilocal marriage, where  a wife relocates to her husband’s house,  is  routine in more than two-thirds of all marriages worldwide. Absurd, isn't it?  It happens without any consultation or discussion with the one about to be relocated. The rawness, the loneliness, the quiet violence of my friend's  departure made these giant questions explode.

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

Taking 2019 Bollywood blockbuster Kesari as a case study, this paper argues that contemporary film trailers are not just promotional para-texts: they can be powerful ideological texts too, as they become accessible, reiterative, and interactive through social media. The paper performs a discourse and visual analysis of trailer and trailer-users interactions to demonstrate that the trailer formulates and disseminates an Islamophobic, anti-secular, Hindu nationalistic discourse with coherence and complexity. It also blurs difficult questions regarding Indians' participation in the British Indian Army, and reclaims Sikhs as part of the Hindu nation in line with Hindutva ideology.

This article contextualizes the historic lack of representation of actors from ethnic minorities in the arts and details two actor-training methodologies that take into account the ethnicity of the actor. The first methodology was developed by Jatinder Verma, artistic director of Tara Arts, as part of his unique ‘Binglish’ theatre form that draws on both Eastern and Western theatre traditions. A close examination of the rehearsal process of Miti Ki Gadi [The Little Clay Cart] (1984), the first ‘Binglish’ production, exemplifies the way in which the ethnicity of the actor is recognized in relation to form as well as content. The second case study focuses on the work of Kristine Landon-Smith, Co-Artistic Director of Tamasha Theatre Company, and her insistence that actor training practically addresses the ‘cultural context’ of the actor. At the centre of her methodology is the innovative application of ‘hot seating’ that was used to develop the text of Lyrical MC (2008).

... The actors in Lyrical MC were: Emmanuel Abubakar; Busola Aderemi; Sarah Akinsanmi; Andre Bromfield; Roxanne Brown; Stefon Fenelon; Joshua Hayles; Amari Shakir Hassan; Ali Khawari; Shuang Liu; Aldo Maffei; Katrina Naumova; Nana Owusu-Agyare; and Funmi Taiwo. ...

This article examines the major ‘Kashmir films’ of 1960s Bollywood: Junglee (1961), Kashmir Ki Kali (1964), Jaanwar (1965), Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965), Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon (1963), and Aarzoo (1965). These films made the Kashmir Valley the space for the expression of a new youthful modernity for urban Indians, especially through the technology of colour. Through a symptomatic and materialist analysis attentive to both cinematic strategies and contemporary political context, this article links the pleasures of these films with the formation of a modern Indian subjectivity, contrasts these pleasures with the mounting political tensions within Jammu and Kashmir, and based on fieldwork in Jammu and Srinagar, examines how they are remembered by Kashmiris today. The historicization it offers of Bollywood's long Kashmir obsession is thus equally an exploration of how this obsession fits into the contested political relationship between Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian Union.

ABSTRACT Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is a recently released Indian historical biopic of Rani Lakshmi Bai. Through historical re-imagining, the film renders several potential social and political issues, which are topical and timely in contemporary India. The present article attempts to examine the topicality of the film. First, it discusses how it rekindles the female heroic tradition of India, which has been overshadowed due to the patriarchal mindset and historiography. Secondly, it explores how, through cinematic liberties, issues like gauraksha, Hindutva, and patriotism have been propagated. Thirdly, it argues how by foregrounding Dalits and Muslims, the film attempts to neutralise extremist Hindu prejudices, dominant in the hyper-nationalist climate of India. The article concludes that by recreating a crucial historical epoch and a legend, the film attempts to reinstate a secular heritage of India’s heroic tradition to rekindle nationalistic and patriotic sensibility among the contemporary masses.

Digital memes have become a widespread form of engagement with media texts in popular cultures. This paper focuses on image macros that incorporate Bollywood film content and establish transcultural references in the Caribbean context. Mashup serves as a conceptual framework to capture the manifold practices of recombining and re-contextualising media content in memes, related meaning making processes as well as interactions on social networking sites. By sharing, tagging and liking memes, young women in Trinidad negotiate their own positioning in relation to imagined as well as familiar audience groups. Embedded in experiences of a multi-ethnic and media-saturated society, these digital practices thus serve to navigate multiple belongings and identity choices. Moving beyond diasporic identity formations, Bollywood is an integral part of transcultural meaning making in this context.

ABSTRACT For popular Hindi cinema’s aficionados, the cinematic idiom’s male protagonist, the Hindi film hero, is perceived as emblematic of the nation’s travails and aspirations. Subsequently, this magnifies the role of the Bollywood male star who with his hyper-virile masculinity, is often employed to the task of articulating questions of national and cultural identity. As the seventies’ iconic ‘Angry Young Man,’ Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan echoed the frustration of a nation battling political ineptitude, corruption and the demise of Nehruvian socialism. However, with the recent reinvention of his star persona, from the erstwhile ‘Angry Young Man’ to what I term as the ‘Benevolent Patriarch,’ Bachchan signifies millennial India’s avowed espousal of neo-liberalism. Employing a detailed analysis of Amitabh Bachchan’s star text, not only as a cinematic icon, but also, his recent avatar as a television host, consummate brand endorser and social media personality, I examine how the shift in his star discourse underlines issues of gender, class and national identity, particularly in the context of the shift from socialist ideals to consumerist aspirations. In doing so, I also contextualize the changing dynamics of contemporary Indian mediascape, with increasing synergy between film, television and digital media, thus engendering in the process, the transformation of the Bollywood star from a movie idol to a transmedia celebrity.

Abstract In this paper, we study some of the politics involved in representing neighbouring country Pakistan with reference to the launching of a new television channel in India, Zindagi/Life. Zindagi was launched on 23 June 2014 and owned by the Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. which airs syndicated television shows from Pakistan. Zindagi became the first ever general entertainment channel (GEC) in India to air syndicated content from Pakistan. Our paper aims to explore how in the popular teleserials of Zindagi the representation of the ‘other’ (here Pakistan and its people) has become part of the viewing practices for Indian audiences. The present context of the Indian political and media scenario (after BJP came to power in the last Lok Sabha election in 2014) with national GECs’ increasing involvement in telecasting Hindu mythological and historical serials makes the airing of Zindagi more interesting (In the last Lok Sabha elections (2014), Bharatiya Janata Party (which formed the government with maximum majority) campaigned extensively through state-run and private-owned satellite television networks. Following this, it is imperative to note how in the recent years National General Entertainment channels actively engaged in telecasting Hindu mythological and historical serials like Devo Ka Dev Mahadev (Life OK, December 2011–2014), Mahabharat (Star Plus, September 2013–August 2014), Siya Ke Ram (Star Plus, 2015–2016), Sankat Mochan Mahabali Hanuman (SONY, 2015), Bharat Ke Veer Putra Maharana Pratap (SONY, May 2013–December 2015), Chandragupta Maurya (Imagine/Dangal TV, March 2011–April 2012/December 2014), Dharti Ke Veer Yodha Prithvi Raj Chauhan (Star Plus, 2006–2009), Veer Shivaji (Colors, September 2011–May 2012) and Chakravartin Ashoka Samrat (Colors, 2015–2016).). Amidst such a context of politics and television programming that fiercely focused around a monolithic construct of Hindu culture, identity and history, Zindagi enters the Indian satellite market by telecasting Pakistani social lives and raising questions on representing the ‘other’ for the Indian viewers. The channel has been well received by the Indian print and electronic media (For instance, one can see articles like ‘5 reasons that make Zee’s new channel “Zindagi” a must-watch’ (dnaindia, 20 June 2014) ‘Bye-bye unending television dramas, welcome Zindagi’ (Times of India, 1 July 2014), ‘Zindagi Gulzar Hai: cross-border love on screen’ ( Hindustan Times, 7 June 2014), etc.). Reports of rising TRPs of teleserials like Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar Hai (on Zindagi) were published in the popular press, which along with social networking sites generated stardom discourses around actors like Fawad Khan. With reference to the politics of representing a neighbouring country and Muslim identity on Indian television, our paper explores questions including couple space and conjugality in the teleserial narratives of Zindagi. Our article discusses two teleserials, Zindagi Gulzar Hain and Humsafar, focusing on how the portrayal of Muslim men and women on Zindagi marks a departure from the stereotypical representation of Muslim characters in Indian cinema and television.

In this week’s episode, guest Ronak Kapadia discusses his article “Sonic Contagions: Bird Flu, Bandung, and the Queer Cartographies of MIA” which analyzes the work of Sri Lankan diasporic musician, producer, and designer Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam (a.k.a. MIA). MIA’s music offers an opportunity to explore the unlikely intimacies between the diverse histories and political agendas of social movements and radical uprisings across the globe. Kapadia argues that prioritizing the sonic realm in MIA’s work makes available alternative utopian possibilities, offering other ways of hearing and conceptualizing queer collectivity, belonging, and pleasure in the midst of the devastation wrought by security panics and constant warfare.

“We can’t just let contagion be the domain of the specter of things that we fear, which is precisely how we are being forced to think about contagion now. Contagion is also the forms of fellow feeling that have produced the kinds of protests that we’re seeing all across North America today. So I want to hold on to the utopian, radical, and de-colonial visions of contagion, even as we very much deal with and address the material violences that the devastation of natural worlds have produced as well.” - Ronak Kapadia

Cinema exhibition houses provide the necessary settings for Indian audience to engage with cinema. Theatre and its overall practices ranging from film publicity to screening cinema helps the cinemagoers to construct the physical and spatial sense of film viewing. In India, post-release film publicity is done by exhibitors in their respective areas. The exhibitor use film posters/notices/advertisements to attract audiences to their cinema theatre. Apart from the conventional publicity mediums, at present exhibitors are using digital platforms like mobile phones and social media to reach the cinemagoers. This study explores one such attempt by a rural single screen theatre in Kannur district of Kerala to reach its audience. At a point of time when majority of nearby single screen theatres closed down due to declining audience attendance ‘Rani Talkies Vengad’ survived by adapting new ways of reaching the audience. While retaining the conventional publicity spaces and methods, this C class theatre is active on social media sites with its regular updates about the film change and show timings. This paper looks at cinema as a holistic experience and attempts to write the local film history of Vengad Rani by looking into the thick terrain of cinema that lies outside the cinematic text.

... here called 'Brahmani' or 'Mrs Brahma'), egged on by the mischievous and meddlesome sage Narada (played by the comic actor Jeevan), attempt to ... and Sita in the Ramayana story.5 5. Thus Satyavati's pious, widowed father (played by former male star Bharat Bhushan in a ...