Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Current Issue

This article focuses on an increasingly popular social media advertising strategy, in the form of brand films circulated on YouTube for two prominent brands, Chitale Bandhu Mithaiwaale and P. N. Gadgil Jewelers, based in Pune in western India. Through close reading of these films, I demonstrate how their constructions of a ‘Marathi’ identity through discourses of tradition and culture are distinctly Brahminical. Through a focus on the embodied, linguistic and spatial referents of the advertisement films, I illustrate how the latter consequently produce Marathi Brahmin culture as Marathiness. I further argue that these films constitute a fertile site for the project of Marathi Brahmin self-making in the context of globalized, neo-liberal, urban India, an important facet of which is to showcase the community as liberal and progressive via an agential representation of women.

With Marathi cinema’s new turn, the contested city has emerged as a key textual preoccupation. This contested site of the urban either becomes the grounds for the negotiation of a hybrid identity – straddling the traditional and the modern – or it functions as a source of dissatisfaction. This article looks at the construction of the cinematic city in three films: Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai, Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai 2 and Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai 3. The trilogy, through the genres of romance and the family film, mystifies the operations of caste in family-mediated marriages, thereby demonstrating how love and the domestic can become a site for urban modes of caste.

The actresses from the Marathi film industry’s studio era (from the 1930s to the 1950s) were among the first in the profession to write autobiographies. Their writings emphasize the everyday aspects of their lives and reject the glamour and extravagance associated with the lives of film stars. This article studies the interplay between the media representations and autobiographies of Durga Khote (1905–91), Mi, Durga Khote (I, Durga Khote) and Hansa Wadkar (1923–71), Sangtye Aika (You Ask, I Tell), to understand the crafting of their celebrity personas. It argues for evaluating celebrities like Khote and Wadkar through their personas, which integrates their public image with their interpretations of themselves, crafted and performed through their autobiographies. Thus, this work studies their autobiographies as texts that respond to the narratives of their public image and examines whether the authors corroborated or contradicted the prevalent perceptions. In doing so, the article aims to facilitate an understanding of the agency of these celebrities in crafting their personas.

The cultural paradigms of the soft-porn era in Malayalam cinema had an emancipatory quality where the sensationalized body of the ‘bombshell’ starlets captivated the voyeuristic perceptions of regional spectators.^* The celebration of these films by a suburban audience constructed a new public space for the realization of carnal desires and taboo fantasies. This article investigates how the soft-porn noon-shows contributed to a unique cultural experience of film-viewing in Kerala in the late 1990s that challenged the cultural elitism associated with regional cinema. It investigates the role of the audience in defining the historical significance of the noon-show theatres, together with their origin, popularity and fall in the larger narrative of the evolutionary metamorphosis of Malayalam cinema. The softcore phenomenon was an organic subversion of the hegemonic ideology of cinema, which has been used by upper-class cultural powers to maintain their moral presuppositions.

Films are important for representing social issues and their consequences, such as the laws criminalizing a particular sexual orientation and its effects on the individuals concerned. The representation of queer¹ stories in films brings to light the challenges faced by this group and the resilience shown by them to create and expand spaces and communities around this law. This article analyses two films, Aligarh and Great Freedom, showing how a law can destroy lives and affect a whole generation. Aligarh, a courtroom drama, and Great Freedom, a prison drama, portray hard-hitting stories of two human beings who are forced to live a tragedy only because of their sexual orientation.