South Asian Popular Culture

‘Bollywood’ film costume has inspired clothing trends for many years. Female consumers have managed their relation to film costume through negotiations with their tailor as to how film outfits can be modified. These efforts have coincided with, and reinforced, a semiotic of female film costume where eroticized Indian clothing, and most forms of western clothing set the vamp apart from the heroine. Since the late 1980s, consumer capitalism in India has flourished, as have films that combine the display of material excess with conservative moral values. New film costume designers, well connected to the fashion industry, dress heroines in lavish Indian outfits and western clothes; what had previously symbolized the excessive and immoral expression of modernity has become an acceptable marker of global cosmopolitanism. Material scarcity made earlier excessive costume display difficult to achieve. The altered meaning of women's costume in film corresponds with the availability of ready‐to‐wear clothing, and the desire and ability of costume designers to intervene in fashion retailing. Most recently, as the volume and diversity of commoditised clothing increases, designers find that sartorial choices “on the street” can inspire them, as they in turn continue to shape consumer choice.

Clare M. Wilkinson‐Weber

TAILORING EXPECTATIONS

ABSTRACT This article conducts empirical research on the use of new media by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). It critically engages with its DVD campaign launched under the Cinemas of India (COI) label in 2012. This is done with a larger view to assess the after-life of New Cinema and map the creation of an alternative archive. The digitally restored NFDC films constitute valuable empirical tools for film studies; the DVDs have made the text ‘attainable’ in the hands of a film scholar. However, the article does not seek to textually analyse the content of the films restored, nor is it a technical study of DVDs, instead the DVDs are assessed on their archival potential to study New Cinema – i.e., (Hindi) films that were made and supported by the Corporation during the 1970s to early 1990s. In the end, the article tries to hint towards the challenges of doing film history in a digital age.

Sudha Tiwari

New Cinema and new media: Hopes for resurrection

ABSTRACT The article critically analyzes how historical narrative redesigns the past to serve the needs of present and construct a palimpsest that is subject to constant erasure and revision. The study chooses Jodhaa Akbar as one of the example to examine whether the cinematic representation is able to fully articulate the historiography of the past on to the postcolonial present and provide a linkage to the audience to identify and personalize the history. The findings graphically summarize the impersonation of the past on the screen by using Atlas.ti; a qualitative data analysis tool that put forth a holistic design of the History film as a mode of historical thoughts which in case of Jodhaa Akbar is attempted in the form of the nationalist narrative and as a measure bridging the communal cynicism.

Reema Chowdhary

Shaifali Arora

Nirmala Menon

Designing a visual palimpsest through film: A critical examination of Jodhaa Akbar and the nationalist narrative

Swapnil Rai

Bollywoodizing Netflix or globalizing Hotstar? The cultural-industrial logics of global streaming platforms in India

Gendered violence and masculinity gained popularity in Malayalam cinema during the last decade, and this study explores the aspects of masculinity, hegemony, gendered space, and violence by examining two recent films: Kumbalangi Nights (2019) and Uyare (2019). The study discusses the construct of masculinity in Malayalam cinema over the decades concerning these films and investigates the hegemonic maintenance of masculinity based on Connell's Masculinities. Understanding masculinity as a construct relies on the 'complete man' image of Shammi, Govind, and Vishal. The study also identifies the diverse masculinities in the films to examine the concept's inclusive nature. The two varied treatments of masculinity, (1) as madness and (2) as crime, based on Foucault's Madness and Civilization, explore the masculinizing gendered spaces of public, private, and domestic. These movies analyze the two patterns of violence put forth by Connell: (1) one is the physical verbal violence that the privileged group uses to sustain their dominance, and (2) that claims masculinity among men in group struggles.

None Liyana E

Aju Aravind

Shammi hero a da hero : Construction of masculinity in recent Malayalam cinema

Lavanya Lakshminarayan is the author of Analog/Virtual and other simulations of your future which has recently been released in the UK and the USA as The Ten Percent Thief as part of a three-book deal. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the 'Times of India AutHer' Award and the 'Valley of Words Award', both prestigious literary awards in India. Her work has also been longlisted for a BSFA Award. Lavanya has been published in several magazines and anthologies, and her short fiction is forthcoming in the anthologies, The Best of World Science Fiction: Volume 2 and Someone in Time, among other publications. Lavanya's occasionally a game designer, and has built worlds for Zynga Inc.'s FarmVille franchise, Mafia Wars, and other games. She lives between the cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad in India and is currently working on her next novel. Lavanya is in conversation with E. Dawson Varughese is a Snr Fellow at Manipal Centre for Humanities, (MAHE), Manipal, India whose research on post-millennial fiction in English currently focusses on speculative and dystopian fiction. She has recently completed a manuscript for Bloomsbury on Indian speculative fiction in English and ideas of desi dystopias.

E. Dawson Varughese

Speculative India: In conversation with Lavanya Lakshminarayan, author of Analog/Virtual (Hachette India, 2020) published as The Ten Percent Thief (Solaris USA/UK, 2023)

The right-wing extremists, BJP and RSS, have a long-term mission to construct a Hindu nation bound by Ramrajya, a political model derived from the epic Ramayana. In its nationalistic project, the Hindutva desires to incorporate Dalits. For achieving the same, it usurps Dalits by appropriating Ambedkar – through strategically eroding his radicalism. Additionally, it uses Ramayana as a cultural tool to de-ideologize Dalits. It promotes Ramayana as an egalitarian epic to Dalits – for subsuming them within the Ramrajya politics. Dalits are losing political consciousness and they are disoriented by the Hindutva. In this article, I explore how a Tamil film named Kaala, directed by Pa. Ranjith, has countered these efforts of the Hindutva in the popular culture. In Kaala, Ranjith challenges the Hindutva's appropriation of Dalits by re-creating Ambedkar's radical legacy on the big screens. In the film, he re-narrates the epic from an Ambedkarite perspective to counter the Hindutva's efforts in de-ideologizing Dalits. Ranjith is a radical director who makes various transformations in Tamil cinema. His vision is to carry forward Ambedkarite politics in the popular culture. In this article, I explore how he effectively counters the Hindutva. To accomplish the objectives of the study, I use Ambedkarite framework as an analytical tool.

Sree Govind Bharatvaraj

Kaala , a counter-narrative to Hindutva from an Ambedkarite perspective

The paper examines two films, Haanduk (2016) and Jwlwi: The Seed (2019), which explore the issues of identity and insurgency in Assam. Insurgency began in Assam during the 1980s when the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), an organisation that emerged along with the Assam Movement (1979–1985), started an armed uprising for an independent Assam. Meanwhile, the Bodos also engaged in violent insurrection, seeking to establish an independent state. As a response to these uprisings, the Union Government implemented several measures, such as the enactment of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (AFSPA), that transformed Assam and the Northeast region into a heavily militarized area. The military executed multiple counter-insurgency operations to quell the armed rebellions. However, in the middle of these occurrences, accounts of violence promoted by the state, violations of human rights, and instances of torture emerged in both local and international media outlets. This engendered a feeling of apprehension and psychological distress among numerous people throughout Assam. The paper aims to critically examine the ideological dimensions of how the concerns related to insurgency are depicted in the select films. Additionally, it will also examine the portrayal of trauma and breaches of human rights in the select films.

Bornil Jonak Phukan

Screening trauma and violence: Representation of insurgency in select films from Assam

Axone is a recently released Indian film revolving around Northeastern cuisine. Through culinary reimagining, the film raises several issues regarding Northeastern migrants who largely remain invisible in the public discourse. The present article attempts to examine the embodied experiences of the Northeasterners in the Indian capital, Delhi, through the analysis of the film from a culinary lens. Affirming the film's status as a food film, the article first tries to locate axone in the Indian culinary order, which has been hegemonized by the caste ideas of ganda (dirty) and gandha (smelly). Secondly, it engages with the politics of otherness played around the Northeastern food by employing social and sensorial boundaries. Thirdly, it brings to the fore the discourse of racism, which is central to the experience of Northeasterners living in the city. Lastly, the article delists the Northeastern migrants only as victims of the city and explores their place-making strategies by taking into account the agentic potential of their culinary culture.

Rajbir Samal

Binod Mishra

Otherized food, racialized bodies: Discourses of food, smell and racism in Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone

The identity of a disabled individual is inextricably knitted with socio-culturally prescribed gender roles and heteronormative postulates of sexuality. The present article scrutinizes the complex interplay of disability and masculinity in two Indian films- Bhansali's Guzaarish (2010) and Basu's Barfi! (2012). In Guzaarish, illusionist Ethan, rendered quadriplegic after an unfortunate accident, willfully resists perceiving manhood beyond the roles of protecting, providing, and sexually gratifying women. He perceives his body image as shameful and embarrassing due to vulnerability and sexual impotence and appeals for euthanasia. In contrast, the eponymous protagonist Barfi, deaf-mute by birth, strategically exploits hegemonic masculine tropes as compensation for sensory impairments, following the body-behavior ideals culturally expected from a man in melodramatic heterosexual relationships. The article employs qualitative methodology with a thematic study. Social constructionism and symbolic interactionism are utilized to scrutinize the socio-cultural scripting of corporeal dimensions and the intersectionality of corporeal differences and gendered realities. The work finds that both disabled protagonists' self-understanding of their personhood is manipulated by the internalized stereotypes of masculinity, disseminated and reinforced through phallocentric prescriptions – while one succumbs to shame embodying the lack, the other tries overcompensating the lack. The article illustrates how identity is rooted in the corporeal body; while disability experience is intertwined with gender scripting, masculinity is also constructed in relation to certain corporeal differences.

Sayan Das

Md Moshabbir Alam

Sandip Sarkar

Anoop Kr. Tiwari

Moksha Singh

Identity in corporeality: Interplay of disability and masculinity in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Guzaarish (2010) and Anurag Basu’s Barfi! (2012)

The developmental projects like dams and other capitalist structures in India, allocate the natural water reserves to elite industrialists and state apparatuses, leaving the local ecosystems impoverished and in the hands of capitalism driven policies, which milk the indigenous population to mollify the materialistic needs of the affluent. This predicament is vividly illustrated in Subhash Vyam's graphic narrative Water that employs the traditional Gond Art to anchor the consequences of the 'Slow Violence' rendered to the local ecosystems owing to the development policies. As the revered natural sources of water in Vyam's village are regulated through a dam, the rural Indigenous community is deprived of its basic rights to survive, vandalising the pious 'human-water' relationship, resulting in 'a serious ecological crisis'. Drawing theoretical insights from Rob Nixon, Ramachandra Guha and Vandana Shiva, the proposed paper attempts to emphasize that the graphic narrative Water, through its remarkable graphic visuals, conjoined with local customs and folklores, is a reflection of the agony of the indigenous communities. Further, the paper analyses the grim reality that privatisation not only leads to exploitation and consequent depletion of the natural resources, but also robs the local communities of their ways of survival and resource sharing practices.

Manvi Sharma

Ajay K. Chaubey

Local water bodies and the threat of Slow Violence in Subhash Vyam’s Water

The paper studies the Common Man political caricatures by R.K. Laxman, a staff cartoonist at the Times of India, to understand dominant political discourses in postcolonial India. It argues that constructs like the 'common man' and 'vote bank' through popular cultural discourse like caricatures have a critical impact on the political landscape of the country. While the former is associated with an urban English-educated middle class, the latter is used to denote the socially marginalised sections of the electorate voting en masse as a form of political assertion. The latter is perceived as an aberration in the modern secular democracy and its political voice is often delegitimised. Further, the former is associated with economic liberalisation, development and anti-corruption. The paper demonstrates how Laxman's Common Man is a proponent and mascot of these in the popular imagination. Thereby indicating that the popular cultural archive has indeed had a visible impact on the political, economic and sociological cartography of the nation.

Srimati Ghosal

Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

This article analyzes the localization strategies of Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar, positing India as a distinctive cultural-industrial contact zone. The Indian market's size, scale, and cultural and linguistic diversity make it a remarkable region for an epistemic inquiry into global industrial contact zones created by transnational streaming platforms. I map the relative power of Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar in relation to India's strong local film and entertainment industry. In doing so, I identify two types of localization strategies: the cosmopolitan local and the indigenized global. These strategies encompass content, aesthetics, audiences, and local industry dynamics. This essay explains the cultural and global mobility of media forms tied to cricket and Bollywood and argues that these forms accord the Indian mediascape a distinctive agency, presenting an antipodal inversion of imperialistic discourses of Western hegemonic media power.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the social media-induced affective notion of fame from the perspective of people living in peripheries, such as the region of Northeast India, whom the mainstream media (and by extension, the popular imagination) have always obscured, or somewhat suppressed. When they come across these visibility-inducing social media platforms, does this lead to the creation of new forms of celebrityhood? This article observes three specific people from the region – a filmmaker, a small-time Bollywood actor, and an Instagram dancing sensation. The case studies outline their usage of the affordances of the social media platforms through which they acquire a kind of cultish fame. It examines how they leverage fame to instil the greater North-east region in the popular national imagination. This article claims that social media is not merely a platform for these artists to connect with and maintain their audiences, but also a place to create awareness, to define their identity and reveal the socio-historical fractures that they have inherited. This article extends the notion of micro-celebrity (Senft, ”Keeping It Real on the Web”) to dwell on the relationship between media-managed obscurity and social media-enabled self-promotion to conceptualise the category of in-betweeners.KEYWORDS: Visibility infrastructuresmicro-celebritysocial mediaNortheast Indiafamecelebrityinfluencer Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The popularity of the film can be gauged from its 7.44 rating at IMDB, a 91% approval from Google users and over 31,000 people following its Facebook Page. See Ankur Pathak, ‘Kung Fu Hustle: Made in Assam’, Mumbai Mirror, August 9, 2013.URL: https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/entertainment/bollywood/kung-fu-hustle-made-in-assam/articleshow/21723423.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst.2. Kenny Basumatary (Filmmaker) in discussion with the author, December 2016.3. See ‘Assamese Action Film Made in Less Than Rs 1 Lakh – Times of India’. 2018. The Times of India. Accessed March 13, 2018. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/assamese-action-film-made-in-less-than-rs-1-lakh/articleshow/21723279.cms.4. Bijou Thaangjam (Actor), discussion with the author, December 2016.5. Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom is an Indian amateur boxer and the only female to become World Amateur Boxing champion for a record six times, the only female boxer to have won a medal in each one of the first seven World Championships, and the only boxer (male or female) to win eight World Championship medals.6. Ibid.7. His cat Buddy is a regular feature, so are his friends and colleagues in the industry. He also has a series of posts dedicated to exposing his multiple talents.8 On September 11, 1958, the President of India approved the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) when faced with difficulties in controlling the increasing violence in the North-eastern states. In short, AFSPA gave armed forces wide-ranging powers to maintain public order in disturbed areas which included the seven states of the Northeast region. The act has been quite controversial with human rights organization deeming it aggressive. Irom Sharmila from Manipur went on a hunger strike from 2000 to 2016 opposing the Act.8. See ‘The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958’ (”Government document, Place of Publication), 1–2. See also The Hindu Net Desk, ‘What is AFSPA, and where is it in force?’ Thehindu.com, April 23, 2018 and May 10, 2019 URL: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/what-is-afspa-and-where-is-it-in-force/article23648102.ece9. See Mike Isaac, ‘Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger’, New York Times, January 25, 2019.URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html10. In Indian politics, since the arrival, in power, of the right-wing government in 2014, the Northeast region has seen an increase in not only projects on digital infrastructure, but investments and general interest in the population (Saikia 69–84; Bijukumar 176–194).11. Thaangjam in one of his social media posts highlighted how his friend and colleague was not selected for a role even after a good audition since he did not have massive followers in his Instagram profile (Thaangjam).12. Pointing out the contradiction of being a micro-celebrity, Marwick remarks that even though thousands of people might practice the ‘components of micro-celebrity’ which includes maintaining an ‘easily consumable persona, responding directly to readers, and sharing personal information to enhance emotional ties with fans’, none of these can ensure an audience. See Alice Marwick, “You May know me from YouTube” 333–50.Additional informationNotes on contributorsSagorika SinghaSagorika Singha is an International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies-Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (IRGAC-RLS) Postdoctoral Fellow at The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi as well as an affiliate at the Centre for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), UNC, Chapel Hill. She completed her doctoral studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2020). Her research focuses on contemporary celebrityhood, new media forms, mobile media cultures, and subcultural politics. Previously, she was a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum.

短名
Journal Impact	0.43
国际分区	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q4)

ISSN	1474-6689, 1474-6697
h-index	18

涉及主题	社会学艺术政治学历史哲学法学计算机科学文学类语言学视觉艺术美学地理性别研究媒体研究艺术史政治心理学考古电影院物理生物神学人工智能经济
出版信息	出版商: Routledge，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 非开源
基本数据	创刊年份: 2003，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 9.46%

South Asian Popular Culture

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<i>Shammi hero a da hero</i> : Construction of masculinity in recent Malayalam cinema

Speculative India: In conversation with Lavanya Lakshminarayan, author of <i>Analog/Virtual</i> (Hachette India, 2020) published as <i>The Ten Percent Thief</i> (Solaris USA/UK, 2023)

<i>Kaala</i> , a counter-narrative to Hindutva from an Ambedkarite perspective

Screening trauma and violence: Representation of insurgency in select films from Assam

Otherized food, racialized bodies: Discourses of food, smell and racism in Nicholas Kharkongor’s <i>Axone</i>

Identity in corporeality: Interplay of disability and masculinity in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s <i>Guzaarish</i> (2010) and Anurag Basu’s <i>Barfi!</i> (2012)

Local water bodies and the threat of Slow Violence in Subhash Vyam’s <i>Water</i>

Drawing the lines: Studying the <i>Common Man caricatures</i> by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

Bollywoodizing Netflix or globalizing Hotstar? The cultural-industrial logics of global streaming platforms in India

Digital expression from the shadow states: The <i>in-betweeners</i> in the late-capitalist era

TAILORING EXPECTATIONS

New Cinema and new media: Hopes for resurrection

Designing a visual palimpsest through film: A critical examination of Jodhaa Akbar and the nationalist narrative

Bollywoodizing Netflix or globalizing Hotstar? The cultural-industrial logics of global streaming platforms in India