Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Current Issue
Marathi Film and Media, Oct 2024
- Editorial
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Editorial
By Aarti WaniDespite Marathi cinema’s rich, varied, century-long history, scholarship has been sparse. It is only in recent years that we see a growing academic interest in the field. Speculating on whether the Marathi film industry’s collocation with the ‘national’ Hindi film industry is one of the primary reasons for this scholarly neglect, this focused issue collects four articles on diverse topics and with differing approaches to Marathi film and media culture by both established and early-career scholars to encourage Marathi cinema scholarship. The goal is to further our understanding of the other languages/regional versus Hindi/national binary.
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- Special Issue Articles
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Not quite the vanguard! Aspirations of ‘newer’ new Marathi cinema
More LessThree recent Marathi films, Kaul: A Calling, Trijya and The Disciple, feature a noticeable discursive cinematic experimentalism. These films have opened a new front for the ongoing new wave of Marathi cinema. In an attempt to conjecture the aesthetic and expressive differences of this unfolding trend, this article develops an interrogation of two ideas of new filmmaking in the regional context. The spatio-temporal dynamics in these films is interpreted in terms of reflexivity, which implicates the contemporary as a subjectivity. It is argued that the contemporary ‘perceptiveness’ about high capitalism, its overwhelming ‘reality’, can be read in narratives that present floundering personal aspirations. Moreover, the constitutive trope of ‘passage’ in these films allegorizes present-day scenarios since they reflect states of indecision and perplexity through textural and sensuous detailing of image and sound. The article contends that the films’ experiential mode, in which affect is articulated through spatial forms to trigger a redistribution of the sensuous, aligns them with the affective turn in art cinema indicative of a new textual politics where affectivity is the charge of narratives.
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Contemporary YouTube advertising and the making of the Marathi Brahmin identity
More LessThis 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.
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The city of new Marathi cinema and urban negotiations with caste
More LessWith 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.
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Conformity and subversion: Autobiographical strategies of Marathi film actresses in shaping their celebrity personas (1930s–50s)
Authors: Meghna Gangadharan and Ananya GhoshalThe 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.
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- Regular Articles
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The odi assan: Myth, liberation and caste in ‘If in the Shadows, a Leopard!’
Authors: Nandhitha Muruganandan and Sathyaraj VenkatesanCasteism, an unjust social stratification system, remains pervasive in India. Among the oppressed castes, the odiyans are unique for their shapeshifting, which allowed them to transcend their caste identities. Prakash Moorthy’s ‘If in the Shadows, a Leopard!’, a graphic narrative that is part of the anthology Longform (Volume 1, 2018), interweaves the nuances of odi and casteism. Moorthy revisits the odiyan myth through his protagonist, Kari, to examine casteism. Kari’s transformation through odi is a powerful portrayal of social mobility and liberation. Moorthy further observes the enduring presence of casteism and the significance of finding one’s voice within the narrative. Through his unique art style, which mimics the elusiveness of myths, the work invites readers to affectively empathize with Kari and sensitizes them to the realities of casteism. Collectively, ‘If in the Shadows, a Leopard!’, interwoven with themes of social justice, renders the text a compelling example of graphic justice.
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Forbidden spectacles of a bygone era: An analysis of Malayalam cinema’s soft-porn noon-show culture
Authors: Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. SureshThe 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.
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Freedom behind the bars: Exploring queer narratives in the films Aligarh and Great Freedom
More LessFilms 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.
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