Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2025

The article situates the corpus of Sambalpuri films by Sabyasachi Mohapatra within western Odisha’s broader sociocultural, political and literary imaginings to examine its textual and contextual configurations. It interrogates the filmic texts at the intersections of tradition and modernity, literary and cinematic, to identify distinct intertextual motifs, visual aesthetics and figurations employed in the narratives and disseminates the defining cultural circuits of Sambalpuri films. The article also discusses Sambalpuri cinema as a site of study to address questions on regional and subregional identities through their digital inter-mediations. It examines how Sambalpuri cinema challenges a region’s conventional imaginations to extend Odisha’s cinematic public sphere while offering a fresh assessment of regional auteurship. It incorporates excerpts from personal interviews and contemporary media-archival materials to comment on the subregional subjectivities of Sambalpuri cinema as an emergent film culture.

This article is an attempt to assemble a pre-history of the heroic struggle of film ‘extras’ for unionization as ‘junior artistes’ in the Bombay film industry. It argues that official histories of film industry institutions, especially those of these cine-workers, are mostly incomplete, sometimes flawed, and often oblivious to their struggles for unity; it also maintains that such histories go further back than their official accounts. Through this narrative, the intent is to suggest that this institutional amnesia regarding their labour histories is not only glaring evidence of cine-workers’ precarious lives but is also detrimental to the cause of contemporary ongoing labour struggles in India’s film and media entertainment industries, where film labour historians have a crucial role to play – however insignificant it may seem.

Review of: Rated A: Soft Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India, Darshana Sreedhar Mini (2024)

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, xii + 219 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-52039-745-3, p/bk, USD 34.95

Review of: Politics of Recognition and Representation in Indian Stand-Up Comedy, Richa Chilana and Rashi Bhargava (eds) (2024)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 240 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03139-427-0, e-book, EUR 119.83

Review of: The Vanishing Point: Moving Images after Video, Rashmi Devi Sawhney (ed.) (2022)

New Delhi: Tulika Books, 404 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-19471-758-4, p/bk, INR 1200