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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2019
Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Infantile Crisis: Youth in Contemporary South Asian Film and Media, Jul 2019
Infantile Crisis: Youth in Contemporary South Asian Film and Media, Jul 2019
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Pakodas, jugad and the vernacular fetish: Youth subcultures in late neoliberal India
More LessMy article talks about the vernacular in terms of a fantasy relation, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s understanding of love/desire as a fantasy that is always staged through a concrete setting, ‘the place where the subject encounters herself already negotiating the social’. This site of fantasy is moreover the one triggered by the trauma of natal separation. This in-between reality of the vernacular as a lost memory as well as a fantasy of the real makes it an ideal fetish figure for our times. I explain the fetish for the concrete in the context of a post-hegemonic, post-ideological capitalist state that has abandoned its role of catering for the subsistence needs of food, clothing and shelter of its most marginalized people as well as those who are unemployed. The compensatory succour that used to be obtained from the reproductive work of women’s domestic labour is also in crisis, given the commoditization of their care work. My article then looks at the gendered nature of the youth voices and subcultures filling this lack of systematic all-round care through the language of jugad. The valorization of jugad or the positing of concrete solutions to abstract problems actually gives us a lesson in the meaning of abstract labour, as something not merely confined to the realm of labour but to social forms (or use-values) constituted beyond the ambit of the market and judicial structures.
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Between the lost childhoods of our parents and the infantile public of the Hindu Rashtra: A personal take
More LessWeaving personal history into a reflection on the escalation of communal politics and rhetoric under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this article foregrounds the importance of childhood as a concept that can illuminate the nature of Hindutva fascism – its particular appeal to the adult followers of this ideology and the consequences for children. Briefly, while childhood is increasingly denied and taken away from Muslim children, Hindutva followers are forming into an infantile public utterly supplicant in its devotion to authoritarian figures. Against the Hindutva project and its infantile public is the memory of Partition and the anti-colonial dreams of an egalitarian, socialist society – a history remembered by adults for the sake of children.
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Standing the provincial ground: Childhood and parental authority in Dangal (2016)
More LessIn the sales pitch for the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, the gender question was heavily foregrounded to hail the sports biopic of a commonwealth gold medallist from rural Haryana. However, the film was also criticized for the patriarchal control of the desires of the wrestler-daughters, who gradually take cognizance of their potential. This article argues that we need to address a different trajectory to make full sense of the film, in spite of its marketing strategy. Taking its cues from sports biopics, figurations of obstinate provincial masculinity and neoliberal childhood, Dangal revisits much-maligned parental authority to foreground the question of moral resourcefulness. The state and nation in Dangal, I would argue, are decoupled from a provincial vantage point. Standing apart from generic biopics, Dangal’s heroes are in a standoff with the state’s essentially colonial character and its metropolitan kernel. Their public insubordination deserves a robust analysis of the antecedents from within film history, to reassemble Dangal’s urgent critique.
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The unemployed hero in Indian Tamil cinema: Perspectives on youth, gender and aspiration
More LessIn this article, I explore the portrayal of the information technology (IT) boom in Indian Tamil cinema to think through representations of unemployed youth. Three main questions anchor this article: one, what are the ways in which unemployment is problematized? Two, how are depictions of unemployment (and employment) gendered? How do gendered representations of unemployment feed into dominant tropes of language, given the Dravidian orientation of Tamil cinema? Three, how are these crises resolved, and what imaginaries do they present of relationships between men and women? Through a reading of three recent films that directly or indirectly relate to the IT boom, I offer an analysis of the privileging of certain professions, skills and academic disciplines under capitalism, its effects on employment prospects for youth, as well as its gendered implications. I argue that the films assert a subculture of masculinity that represents the subaltern male’s encounter with the globalizing city and its many transformations – most visibly the feminization of labour represented by the IT industry. Refuting the claim that cinema has positively embraced neoliberal subjectivity and celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of youth, I show that the ‘unemployed hero’ is constructed as a social conscience to highlight the problems of a globalizing world. Though many aspects of late capitalism are productively critiqued through such consciousness-raising, the breakdown of traditional gendered roles appears as a leitmotif, exposing the gendered nature of anxieties accompanying the IT boom. The remaking and consolidation of masculine identity then becomes a way to manage these anxieties.
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‘This sperm hits the bullseye’: Bollywood, youth and male (im)potency as a neoliberal game
More LessThis article, by closely examining the trajectory of the upcoming Bollywood star Ayushmann Khurrana, tries to unravel the constitutive fantasies that provide a significant degree of coherence to his star-image. Through a close textual reading, the article aligns these fantasies with the diurnal realities of neoliberal India. In these fantasies, the male protagonist is found to be (a) the privileged embodiment of a surplus/lack that comes to signify the ‘thing’ called the modern, but (b) the man and his sociality is not prepared yet to accept this ‘thing’, thus triggering comedy; it is only in romantic conjugation with (c) a working woman can this excess charge of the modern be resolved within the narratives. Using psychoanalytic insights, the article unpacks these fantasies as ones involving both a crisis and an ultimately infantile reaction to it.
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Rebels for every cause: Mythologies of youth in contemporary India
More LessThe processes of globalization and liberalization currently underway in most parts of the world address young people as agential subjects, even as a primordial fear of the raw, uncontained, chaotic force symbolized by unrestrained youth persists. In such a context, I argue that youth becomes an aspirational subject position signifying different things to various social actors. Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ notion of ‘myth’ as a sign in a second-order semiotic system (Mythologies, 1993), I examine various popular cultural texts of the mid-2000s such as the popular Hindi film Rang De Basanti (‘Paint me the colour of spring’, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra 2006), as well as select advertisements, music videos and public service campaigns in order to unravel the ‘mythologies’ converging in the figure of youth in contemporary India.
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Coaching centre as camp: Structures of feeling in popular representations of India’s coaching industry
More LessIn the last two decades, critical representations of the Indian education system have gained prominence in Hindi-language popular media. Centring on concerns about both pedagogy and inequality, these media texts have recently begun to incorporate fictionalized depictions of schooling beyond school – the vast ‘shadow education’ system that prepares students for school tests and competitive examinations in engineering, medical, civil service and other primarily technical and professional fields. This article explores the political significance of ambivalences that inhere within and between representations of the coaching industry. These ambivalences produce a narrative of enclosure in which upper-caste middle classes endure persecution while simultaneously engaging in forms of disciplinary self-fashioning in service to the nation. These ‘structures of feeling’ resonate with social theories of the camp, reconsidered from the Indian context.
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Diglossic youth identity: The semiotic negotiations of fandom in North India
By Abir MisraThis article looks at the activities of a fan club dedicated to Shah Rukh Khan for the purpose of discerning how young men and women negotiate their identities vis-à-vis a mainstream culture that perpetuates negative stereotypes about fans. The members of the club are upper middle class from New Delhi. The study of fan culture in India is primarily organized around the assumptions that its membership comes from the urban poor youth (men) and that it is a phenomenon restricted to South India. In other words, there is a sense that fan cultures like youth subcultures develop in direct opposition to the mainstream. My contention is that youth culture in neoliberal India exhibits a more complex form of negotiation with the mainstream marked by notions of ‘timepass’ (leisure time as ‘wasteful’), compromise and ‘diglossia’ (language meant to negotiate opposed cultural perceptions and expectations to gain an entry into symbolic capital). This becomes necessary because mainstream culture maintains a consistent approach of being opposed to fan culture.
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Laughing matters: Stand-up comedy and enjoyment in the age of late capitalism
Authors: Sakshi Dogra and Shweta KhilnaniStand-up comedy has emerged as an immensely resonant youth-oriented pop-cultural form within the Indian landscape. This article studies the form and content of stand-up comedy to foreground its implicit banality. By analysing the subtleties of this banality, we argue that contemporary stand-up comedy has the capacity to produce a peculiar kind of enjoyment. The moment of laughter and the consequent enjoyment instills a sense of fleeting thought. This unintended contemplation, coupled with banality, has the potential to produce an enjoyment and a cultural form that can possibly resist complete appropriation.
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Lost spectacle: Media consumption by Kashmiri youth in the absence of cinema halls
More LessHardline militants forced the cinema halls in Kashmir into closure in 1989. As heavy militarization ensued, several spaces, including cinema halls, were transformed into structures where people, especially young men, were detained and tortured by soldiers and militia. The generations born after the 1980s, therefore, grew up in a cinema-less, militarized world. In the absence of functional cinema halls, they, for years, relied on the state broadcaster for movies and media. Later – although under tremendous threat from extremists – a network of local cable TV operators, who functioned without licences, provided some succour. They were followed by pirate video-cassette and compact-disk parlours that provided people with a means to stay connected to movie culture. And, while the scene changed with the arrival of satellite TV, computers and later the internet, which connected the youth of the region to the larger global media culture, the absence of cinema persists. This article aims to explore how youth, born after the 1980s, associate with cinema halls of Kashmir and what the loss of the cinema viewing culture means to them. To this end, I intend to look into cinema culture before the 1990s and the politics around the closure of cinema halls. The article will also put into perspective the arrival of satellite TV and the circulation of pirated video cassettes, compact disks and videos of the funerals of rebels that were filmed and circulated by rental shops. These practices and processes, which shaped the childhood and youth of several generations in Kashmir, offer insights into the media consumption and the role the state and its apparatuses have in shaping the youth in a conflict-ridden and militarized region of the Global South.
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