Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2025

This article critically examines how contemporary Kokborok music videos from Tripura, Northeast India, mediate the fraught dialectic between safeguarding Indigenous Tripuri cultural identity and negotiating mainstream Bollywood influences. Tracing the ‘Bollywoodization’ of these vernacular screen texts, it explores how traditional Tripuri expressions intermingle with Bollywood modalities, forging hybrid ‘neo-Bollywoodized’ subjectivities. While this hybridity facilitates a commercially inflected recalibration of popular aesthetic codes to integrate Tripura into the Indian cultural mainstream, it risks attenuating Tripuri indigeneity, as these virtual representations eclipse and estrange themselves from lived realities. The article contends that these videos enact a dual process of ‘double indigenizing’ and ‘double fetishizing’, not only Indigenous Tripuri culture but also Tripura itself vis-a-vis mainstream metropolitan India – internalizing and reinscribing the very colonial gaze they ostensibly resist. It situates this phenomenon within discourses of cultural imperialism and contested identities, interrogating whether this ‘indigenizing the global’ ultimately debases or reconstructs Tripuri indigeneity amid globalization’s homogenizing tendencies.

This article provides an overview of the development of film exhibition spaces, audience formation, and audience practices and experiences in Karachi from the colonial era to the late 1970s in postcolonial Pakistan. Cinema houses developed in Karachi as it grew from a colonial port city into a megacity, serving its heterogeneous population across class and ethnolinguistic boundaries. The lived culture of audiences and their embodied practices and social experiences were often not acknowledged in accounts that sought to classify them into social categories and displayed anxieties about them. Contrary to these social categories, the exhibition sites across the city provided unique experiences to their audiences situated within their social, cultural and historical contexts. This article presents how the development of exhibition spaces evolved over time in Karachi and the social and aesthetic functions those sites served for its diverse audiences. It maps the heterogeneous constitution of audiences across the sociocultural terrain of the city and explores their social and sensorial relationships with the diverse exhibition spaces and programmes in a single location of Karachi.

This article critically examines Freudian ‘psychology of love’, and the idea of a Freudian queer identity and self as observed in the 2015 Indian Hindi Film Margarita with a Straw. It inspects the protagonist, Laila’s life journey and her gamut of relationships with men and women, including her mother. Through the lens of Freudian theories, post-Freudian and Lacanian theories, and South Asian Cinema theories, this article argues about constructing Laila’s singular, exceptionally liberated queer identity and feminist self, which ultimately transcend the classical Freudian concepts by counter-arguing them. Furthermore, to bolster its hypothesis, this article discusses distinct ideas of sexuality, including ‘incest’, ‘perversion’, narcissistic self-love, desire, autoeroticism and homoeroticism.

In this article, I will discuss Anurag Kashyap’s film No Smoking (2007) in order to explore questions about the nature and limits of masculinities in contemporary India and the ways in which these are refracted through representation in certain kinds of newly emerging popular cinema. In studying a film that seems to capture in the space of two hours a confusing and bewildering proliferation of sexed images (that are nonetheless, and significantly, not really about sex), I study the devices that popular cinema, in a putatively globalized India, seems to adopt and manoeuvre in order to come to terms with its complex identity, and in doing so what systems of traditional heteronormativity and masculinity it reinforces and/or dispels.

Review of: Modernities and the Popular Melodrama: The Suchitra–Uttam Yug in Bengali Cinema, Smita Banerjee (2023)

Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 312 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-35442-452-6, p/bk, ₹10453

Review of: New Media and Public Diplomacy: Political Communication in India, the United States and China, Parama Sinha Palit (2023)

Abingdon: Routledge, 194 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-42929-814-1, e/bk, £28.49

Review of: Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics, Dilip M. Menon and Amir Taha (eds) (2024)

New York: Routledge, 244 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-03272-747-9, p/bk, USD 54.99

Review of: Sufi Rituals and Practices: Experiences from South Asia, 1200–1450, K. Ghani (2023)

New York: Oxford University Press, 306 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19288-922-5, h/bk, USD 110