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- Convenors:
-
Lotte Hoek
(University of Edinburgh)
Madhuja Mukherjee (Jadavpur University)
Markus Schleiter (University of Tübingen)
- Location:
- 13L11/13
- Start time:
- 26 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
We explore how new video and digital technologies transform the forms, publics and sites of South Asiancinema. From 'indigenous' communities to 'self-made' video professionals, how do new publics and producers challenge our understanding of contemporary media worlds?
Long Abstract:
This panel proposes that the rapidly appearing and disappearing video and digital technology is fundamentally transforming the forms, publics and sites of South Asia's media consumption and production. Operating within particular cultural frameworks, languages and dialects, these media practices become part of mediating ideas of self, community, aesthetics and belonging. From mobile phones to low-cost CD players, the proliferation of screens is accompanied by a dramatic diversification of technologies for the production of video films, which include state of the art DSLRs to consumer-grade digital video appliances. It has revolutionized the domain of South Asian audio-visual media.
Within these cultural and technological transactions, different communities increasingly demand dedicated movies, music videos and documentaries. The creative use of cheap and flexible technologies and ideas of local audiences' taste produces new aesthetic and stylistic conventions, including visual references to identifiers such as religion, costume, material culture and landscape, while language tends to play a prominent role as well. This allows these media to be appropriated and adapted to new cultural worlds, including those of 'indigenous' communities previously excluded from the means of production and representations of popular cinema. This panel invites in-depth historical and immersive ethnographic explorations of contemporary digital video practices and detailed histories of these formats across South Asia.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Lidia Guzy (National University of Ireland)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses indigenous documentation projects of the Bora Sambar region as local attempts of empowerment, culture preservation and resistance. It also reflects on the engaged ethnographer’s involvement and role to support local empowerment struggles through mutual audio visual music productions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates on the one hand 1) the role of audio visual production as indigenous empowerment and 2) the role of the author as musician herself who together with indigenous musicians produced audio recordings for culture recognition and preservation projects.
The paper investigates the double process of documentation, engaged research and full participation in the audio visual music industry of contemporary India.
Haripriya Narasimhan (Indian Institute of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will take a comparative look at women audiences watching Hindi TV serials in two cities of southern India, and following them on online platforms, through ethnographic research.
Paper long abstract:
The few indepth ethnographic studies of Indian television daily soaps, referred to as TV serials, on audience reception (Mankekar 2009) and the process of production (Munshi 2009) show the nuanced ways in which various stakeholders view daily soaps, the stories and the characters. Even so, representation of women in daily soaps has come for widespread attention and criticism (CFAR, EPW 2003). Television serials in India are often dismissed as being regressive, unrealistic, and melodramatic, presenting some form of 'hyper-reality' (Ranganathan 2006). In the popular media, the "decontextualised television watcher" (Abu-Lughod1997), usually a woman, and a 'housewife', is assumed to be devoid of any agency in deciding on the serials to be watched, and to be rejected. However, the tremendous popularity of TV serials, and constant reference to well-known characters from the television world in everyday conversations, call for more scholarly attention. Based on recent fieldwork amongst women viewers, in Chennai and Hyderabad, and amongst online members of a forum dedicated exclusively to discussing Hindi television soaps, this paper argues that the 'average television serial viewer' is a non-entity. It will focus on the complex ways in which women viewers 'connect' to the characters, stories, and TV channels. The various ways in which live audiences and online fans simultaneously engage with, challenge, manipulate and internalise the stories and characters, bring forth the tremendous sense of agency and articulation, through use of multiple technologies, including the social media networks.
Mara Matta (University of Rome 'La Sapienza')
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims at discussing the preliminary work of some Chakma video-makers and their effort to debunk stereotypes affecting the representation (visual and political) of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs) indigenous people of Bangladesh.
Paper long abstract:
While the issue of political and visual representation of indigenous people is gaining momentum at a global level, with more scholars delving into this topic and more indigenous filmmakers and social activists exploring/exploiting the new digital technologies to produce videos and films able to debunk old stereotypes, the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh have remained so far out of the academic and filmmaking circles interests. However, the poetics and politics of representation of the indigenous people inhabiting the CHTs is worth to be taken into consideration, because the portrayal of the 'tribes' in the mainstream national media has been deeply affected by the political discourses which tend to marginalize the tribal population of Bangladesh and to reframe them as class-B citizens in their own country. Thanks to the effort of some committed video-makers belonging to the Chakma ethnic group, something is bound to change. This paper will explore their preliminary work, trying to pit it against the complex scenario of the CHTs, an area heavily militarized where the politics of representation are an extremely sensitive issue.
Markus Schleiter (University of Tübingen)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I will explore on basis of own ethnographic research with Santal and Birhor people, if there are socio-cultural aspects supporting film viewing in this village, thereby focussing on romancing.
Paper long abstract:
In the past decade South Asia saw the emerging of multiple smallscale film industries, producing vcds with popular films and music video clips in "indigenous" languages. The unfolding of these VCD circulations could be explained by the global success of "indigeneity" as an assertive category, conflating with an increasing accessibility of digital video technology by smallscale entrepreneurs.
I will, however, explore socio-cultural aspects of viewing popular Santali films in an "indigenous" village of Odisha. A conjoint village video night namely enters the cultural space of dance nights, which are within Birhor and Santal society "traditional" occasions for the youth to flirt, and thus is signified with the (hidden) attraction to provide a space for courting. At the same, a film carries a flavour of illicitness as love stories are depicted. A young woman then, requesting a film by an organizer of a video night, not necessarily intends on film watching, but might deliberately transgress an appropriate behaviour of her towards a man, creating a moment of attraction.
I will argue that film viewing in the village does not reflect a single-sided process due to the circulation of a (new) medium. I would stress rather that a cultural embedding of manyfold ways of engaging with films - which stands in a reciprocal reference to practices far beyond films - is decisive to let films continously reach into the village, and thereby shapes and upholds media circulation and its routes.
Madhuja Mukherjee (Jadavpur University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on video and digital forms in the politically, economically and culturally marginalized areas of Bengal, India. It addresses vernacular idioms, and problems of marginalization; and, illustrates how an oppositional landscape and labouring bodies appear in these films.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on contemporary video and digital cultures popular in politically, economically and culturally marginalized areas of Bengal, India. The paper presents empirical research conducted on films from Purulia District, Bengal, namely 'Manbhum' films (which shares boundaries with Bihar as well as Odisha), and tackles questions of political movements, community undertakings, language, and sub-regional industrial forms. Thus, writing about the 'other' side of cinema produced from Bengal it first, addresses the multiplicity of vernacular idioms, cultures and problems of political marginalization. Secondly, it illustrates the ways in which the issue of an oppositional landscape- explored in opposition to the imagery of lush green riversides of Bengal- become crucial from this perspective. Moreover, the subject of the labouring body, also framed by issues of caste and tribe, refigure in these films. The faces, actions and the comic gestures produce new cinematic vistas. In connection to this, this paper examines specific generic tendencies, the overlaps and connects it to the subject of local culture industries in order to study how these films throw back at us extremely popular, indigenous, subversive, boisterous, even vulgar and offensive images. Such narratives problematize our theoretical conjectures regarding mainstream-popular, as well as, alternative art forms and Bengali-Bhadralok cinema. Briefly, by analyzing the topics of national and regional cinemas, this paper engages with the politics of 'other' cinemas, and the complexity of peripheral aesthetics.