Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2022

This article analyses how a Bangladeshi documentary film Bishkanta (The Poison Thorn) (2015) directed by a feminist and cultural activist Farzana Boby negotiates the gendered war narrative of Bangladesh and how the film is being used as an enabling platform for the Birangonas (‘war-raped women’) to express their long-time endured suffering and outrage. The Liberation War of Bangladesh (1971) is amongst the most represented themes in Bangladeshi media culture. However, feminist scholars have been critical about the gender blindness of the depictions, with women’s experiences encoded only as victims. Hence, a documentary demanding recognition of women’s contributions and enabling space for women to speak about their losses, pains and grievance is an exception. By analysing the narrative techniques (i.e. plot, perspective, language and frames) this article shows how Bishkanta represents the stories of female rape survivors and make a claim for gender justice. Our findings suggest, despite Boby’s good intentions, Bishkanta has been reproducing the mainstream victimhood narrative ascribed to these women and occasionally reinscribing the gendered ideology of Liberation War in the mainstream nationalist discourse.

1970s Hindi formula films have been described within Hindi film scholarship as melodramatic, and masochistic fantasies, the latter in terms of the hero’s desire to return to a pre-Oedipal state. In my analysis of Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978), the biggest hit of the year, I focus on its staging of scenes of fantasy and dream-like episodes and its foregrounding of childhood episodes involving father substitutes, primary figures I argue in the staging. By examining the film’s psychical–spatial terrain, I also consider the figure of the rival and villain, played by Amjad Khan, and I argue that Khan’s villainy reworks scenes of staged enmity with the hero into reconciliation. I conclude with some observations on the contemporary circulation of formula films on YouTube, where the films and their songs remain remarkably popular and generate a large archive of likes, views and comments, and user-generated content.

This article explores how feminism is practised and communicated on digital platforms. Feminism in India and Khabar Lahariya are two online platforms studied with interviews of respondents to understand how the online spaces are used for knowledge sharing that take feminist perspective. New media opened up spaces for people to communicate from any part of the world, create media content and circulate it. Visibility, privacy, accessibility and risks are negotiated by the reporters and content creators to produce alternative cultural production from an intersectional feminist standpoint.

Review of: Re-Focus: The Films of Shyam Benegal, Sneha Kar Chaudhuri and Ramit Samaddar (Eds) (2022)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 255 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47445-286-1, h/bk, £90

Review of: The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Bhaskar Chattopadhyay (2021)

Chennai: Westland Publications Private Limited, 315 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-39123-424-9, p/bk, ₹449

Review of: DigiNaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India, Anjali Monteiro, K. P. Jayasankar and Amit S. Rai (Eds) (2020)

Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 276 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-35287-906-9, p/bk, ₹695

Review of: Regional Language Television in India: Profiles and Perspectives, Mira K. Desai (2021)

London and New York: Routledge, 320 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-42927-042-0, h/bk, £96

Review of: Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media, Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee (2021)

London and New York: Routledge, 275 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-42932-602-8, e-book, £39.99

Review of: Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony, Rochona Majumdar (2021)

New York: Columbia University Press, 320 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23120-105-6, p/bk, $35

What is implied by the absence of signifiers of identity in film? Analysing the forms of concealment and dissembling in the 2008 film Firaaq as an example, this article inquires into performance and pretence in both film and real life.