Guest Editors: Gopalan Ravindran (gopalanravindran AT rediffmail DOT com) and Angad Chowdhry (angad DOT chowdhry AT gmail.com)
Subaltern Studies Media and Communications Collective is proud to collaborate with the International Journal of Žižek Studies in bringing out a special issue of the journal for writings on South Asia, either to elaborate on or critique the ideas of Slavoj Žižek. We welcome papers analysing/theorising South Asia on the topics given below (though not limited to).
Hello people, back in action. We have finished the book, collected and edited the chapters, argued and started blood feuds amongst each other, but in the end, and perhaps because we have reached the end, we say “it was worth it”
So this is what it look like:
INTRODUCTION
NDTV 24 X 7, the Hanging Channel: News Media or Horror Show? - Prof John Hutnyk
Editorial! Where art Thou? News Practices in Indian Television: An ethnography of Star News and Star Ananda -Somnath Batabyal
Identities in ferment: Reflections on the predicament of Bhojpuri cinema and language in Bihar - Dr Ratnakar Tripathy & Jitendra Verma
‘Dress Indian! Say no to rum:’ Mela’s and the Redefining of Cultural lives. - Dr. Atticus Narain
The Roja Debate and the Limits of Secular Nationalism - Meenu Gaur
Environmentalism among the middle classes in India: locating media influences. -Deepty Shastri
Can a money shot trigger psychosis? -Angad Chowdhry
The Facts of Life: Sex-Surveys, Marriage and Other Intimate Truths in Urban India - Dr Kriti Kapila
Autopsies of laughter - Angad Chowdhry and Aditya Sarkar
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SMC has now gone into book writing mode - well, in addition to our other post-doctorate, work, marriage, teaching, art modes etc - so blog updates shall be now be less forthcoming. You probably have noticed this already. Besides, the cool people already know thatBLOGGING IS SO PASSE. We will of course have a more information posted about the book here and other of our events / plans as they emerge but meanwhile please feel free to visit our abundant content accumulated over the past few years. We created this just for you to so you can navigate our older pastures while we type away the future of media studies in India … (yes, you can click on the 3D tag cloud above).
Another one on the Mumbai bombings by our own Som, traveling somewhere in warm India as we speak. As usual, click HERE or on the image to access the PDF.
We are helping a MA student show his film so plugging it in here. The specifics follow - hope to see you there:
FRESH
a T.O.M. Hand film.
…..7 days to find out who you Aren’t……
completed: 2008; run time: 80 min; filmed: mini-DV.
Monday December 8th, 7.30pm, B102, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, Russel Square.
Rose experiences the excitement, but also fear, that goes with exploring whether identity should be fixed or fluid. Set within university freshers’ week, we start with a glimpse of ‘day 7′, but then build back up to the end of the week from ‘day 1′. How does Rose cope with having her grasp on her own personality challenged?
The screening will be followed by a short Q & A with the director, plus wine and nibbles.
Presented by Sacred Media Cow and SOAS Centre of Media and Film; certificate 15 (local classification).
Wonder if this is the first time Baudrillard’s has been quoted in an Indian tabloid - all hope is not lost. Som’s great column about the Mumbai bombings (pdf HERE or clicking on the image):
Folks, We recently showed Pradip Saha’s film on the Sunderbans and the vanishing landscape due to climate change which was very well received. He has started a blog on the climate change at http://climatenoise.wordpress.com
Yesterday’s candle light vigil was something that was asking to be photographed. And it wasn’t just me. No. Pretty much every Mumbaikar wandering around near Leopold’s, Marine Drive, and the Taj, was standing there with cell phone outstretched, clicking away. There was this incredible drive to bear witness. And in my case, I wondered whether or not part of my need to do so was borne out of a desire to outsource my reaction. Well here are the pictures. Make what you’d like out of them. They aren’t photographs of the recycled news material of flames and smoke billowing, or of that beady-eyed gunman entering the Taj, or of mobs, relieved tourists, martyrs, teary-eyed survivors. This was just the neighborhood of South Bombay, lighting candles, holding hands, singing, and wandering around with that vaguely cheery expression that seemed to wryly comment “aise to hota hai…†but with a gentle reverence as well. It was Bombay’s Dia de los Muertos…
11 PM IST
VT station
Capital cinema has a shoot out on now
Oberoi Hotel had a blast, some news about Oberoi hotels having perpetrators hiding inside
Taj Hotel had firings
Leopolds cafe has firings
Ville Parle
Grant Road
Taxis used to deliver explosives
Highways jammed
Mobile Networks Jammed
7 areas firing has taken place, a few shoot outs still on
Rumors about blasts in Napean sea road
Rumors about the airport
Two years ago, as SMC was starting off, the first event we organised was the premiere of Pradip Saha’s film “Faecal Attraction: The Political Economy of Shit.†I am delighted to tell you that Pradip is coming back with his new film, “Mean Sea Levelâ€, a documentary on the first climate change refugees, the inhabitants of Sagar island in the Sunderbans in West Bengal.
The film will be screened at the Khalili Auditorium, SOAS, Russell Square Campus on November 21st, 2008 at 7 pm. It will be followed by a question and answer session with Pradip. For those of you who saw the earlier film, you would know that it is an event not to be missed. For the rest, have a look at the details of Mean Sea Level below. Hope to see a lot of you at the event.
Mean Sea Level
Around 7500 Kms from the heart of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] in Geneva or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] secretariat in Bonn, Ghoramara and Sagar islands are going through their own testimony of climate change related phenomena.
The new academic sessions have now coughingly started and SMC is getting out of the slow blog summer mode and back to organising events at and around SOAS. The first of these is an exciting event with the acclaimed Film Director Saeed Mirza who is visiting UK for a retrospective of his films. SMC alongwith the South Asian Cinema Foundation is organising a one day screen writing workshop at SOAS with Mirza on Nov 8th at the Russel Square Campus, Room 116. See the full poster below or enlarged by CLICKING on the image.
The seats are limited, just 30. If interested, please email info<[at]>southasiancinema.com to reserve a place or call them at 02082305765. Unfortunately, there is a small fee of 10 pounds to cover expenses but the event runs from 11 am till 5 pm so you can pack in a lot. Hope you will enjoy them!
In a television interview on 5th October by a major Indian news channel the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi got one more chance to expound on his views on terrorism. Known for his tough stance on terrorism, Modi suggested a number of measures including additional laws to deal with the menace. We thus need both, a nice thick clutter of laws and a heavy fist to restrain the terrorist. According to Modi, the trouble with terrorism is that we have been very soft on it, and that automatically and logically implies that we are complicit. Modi’s solution to the problem is summarized in a Hindi expression – ‘eent ka jabab patthar se’, meaning respond to ‘brickbats with stones’ [or pebbles with rocks]. He also emphasized that Gujarat now has a most sophisticated academic centre of Forensic science. This is clearly meant to compensate for the recent wrecking of academic freedom in the Gujarat universities by Modi government, in case you are complaining.
So if Bombay was the ‘-dividual city’ - that is, the forces that come before the individual: flows, moorings, speeds, halts, accelerations - now the case shall be the contrary. London. I am interested in seeing London as a city of ur-individuals, that is, that which supercedes and exceedes the individual. Not less or before the individual - but that which is more than the individual: individual++?
Cities like London are the promised playgrounds of lifestyles, of fashion, of trends, of branding, of being cool. Go to areas such as Bricklane and Shoreditch you can see people form all over the world performing their individuality to the maximum. So the obvious outcome of this, therefore, is not to see London as a city which precedes the individual (the -dividual city) but rather seeing it as a city that is MORE than the individual, that which is in excess of it: of branding, of fashion, of advertisement, of musical subcultures, of utopian reflections of one’s self projected onto the canvas of different lifestyles and imagined freedom. And what else better way to explore this than to take pictures of that which is more than what is, to introduce that which EXCEEDS the individual into everyday life in London. So for this purpose, to begin the first stage of this experiment, I will breed artificial characters into everyday scenes from London. Avatars. Virtual realities bleeding into imagined realities until both seamlessly inhabit the same space we live in. Call it, again, perhaps, the magical realism of the 21st century where instead of spirits and surrealism of the everyday minutae, virtual reality-bred creatures invade the London we are familiar with and cause a little bit of havoc .
The next art-research-practice-theory experiment/project that I am starting aims at combining game-engine-created characters (such as Spore) with scenes from my everyday life in London as an experiment for photography, graphic novel/animation and film. Call it the new magical realism of the 21st century … well, the theory here is around “locative media” and “ubiquituos computing” where the overlap of virtual and non-virtual reality is predicted to be the next evolution of the Internet. I am especially interested here in conceptualizing the blurry notion of reality between the virtual and non-virtual as an experiment in both content and form. Something close to evolutionary art but not quite. I will host some of the experiments here and, despite not being South Asia per se in orientation, will show these at our beloved SMC.
This is the first rough “sketch” v 00001. Think of the following image: trendy Londoners having a pint with monsters that I will breed just to fit the particular scene of the city I am working with in photo / animation / video. My own private zoo of dubious characters I can mix with everyday scenes from my daily life London. I used a picture from Bombay here merely because I had the images ready from my last experiments to test the idea/concept. This was done in 20 minutes to see if it is possible - the particularities of all this still need to be worked out. This will be also in full color. All comments appreciated!
I found this article quite hilarious befitting with the pictures I have been taken recently. The images in the ads a point proven: smiling children, faces, teeth - the fetish of ordinary people. From New York Times (thanks Kishore!):
NEW DELHI — An old woman missing her upper front teeth holds a child in rumpled clothes — who is wearing a Fendi bib (retail price, about $100). In Vogue India magazine, a child from a poor family modeled a Fendi bib, which costs about $100.
A man modeled a Burberry umbrella in Vogue that costs about $200. Some 456 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day. A family of three squeezes onto a motorbike for their daily commute, the mother riding without a helmet and sidesaddle in the traditional Indian way — except that she has a Hermès Birkin bag (usually more than $10,000, if you can find one) prominently displayed on her wrist.
Elsewhere, a toothless barefoot man holds a Burberry umbrella (about $200).
Was just in Bombay doing some research and some pixelography (me and a friend came up with this term as photography does not quite do it justice anymore …). The aim here as the idea evolved is to create a portrait of the city in terms of what I like to call ‘-dividualism’ — that which precedes the individual. See the first “sketches” below or HERE if connections are slow:
We have seen too many picture of smiling faces, or more specifically, too much photography of teeth. Of individuals and teeth. Of the National Geography imaginary of the exotic world that we all grew up on. But for anybody who stays in Bombay for more than a few days will know that in such an enormous metropolis, most of the people we never can or will experience as individuals. Rather, it is the non-linear mass of collective movement, flows, moorings, accelerations, trans- and inter-actions that we experience. This is what I call the “-dividual city.” So I am more interested in seeing a kind of an a-anthropocentric vision of the world: not seeing frozen moments, but seeing fluctuating frame-rates, seeing different timescales of existence from cars to people to buildings to nature bubbling in-between…
The other day my friend Joe mentioned to me a curious experience with his academic peers. Having recently submitted an MPhil thesis on cricket at the English and Foreign Languages [EFL] University, Hyderabad, he showed a paper to his friends hoping for critical comments. The most outstandingly critical comment he got was this – ‘your writing is too simple. It requires no effort to understand’. This was followed by according to Joe, the disgustingly sage advice – ‘if you continue to write this way, you may damage your academic career. If people can understand you without any strain, they will not value your work.’
Culture Unplugged is an unique initiative with a really remarkable collection of films. This makes for great news for independent film makers. So do go and have a look see. Fellow conspirator and independent documentary film maker Meenu Gaur’s film is show cased in this body of work at http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/464/Paradise-On-A-River-Of-Hell
For those who are watching and following the unfolding situation in Kashmir, I am putting up some useful background pieces. The first is ‘Kashmir: State Cultivation of the Amarnath Yatra’ by Gautam Navlakha.
The origins of the conflagration in June in Kashmir on forest land allocation for construction of facilities for the Amarnath yatra lie in open state promotion of the pilgrimage. The yatra has caused considerable damage to the economy and ecology of the area. The high-handed actions of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board only aggravated the situation.
Also revisit the post from more than a month ago on SMC when the protests had just erupted by our Guest Writer in Kashmir who had pointed out the the ways in which the yatra has been communalised over the years.
We have been meaning to put up this report on the site for very long but the recent events in Kashmir have had everybody’s attention elsewhere. However, here is the recent report done by the APDPÂ on mass graves in Kashmir.
Dear friends,
We are sending a report titled “Facts Under Ground“, recently released by Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a constituent of Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society. The report is a result of the fact-finding mission on nameless graves and mass graves in Uri region of Jammu Kashmir. We have been able to identify 940 persons buried in these nameless graves and mass graves.
The report has evoked a strong public response. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Asian Federation Against involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) and many more human rights groups have so far issued the statements.
We would appreciate if you could:
1. Issue a statement of support
2. Organise solidarity manifestations
3. Send urgent action appeals to Government of India.
Regards,
Khurram Parvez
Here is a related article by by Angana Chatterji published in the Etala’at - Disquiet Ghosts: Mass graves in Indian Kashmir.
The recent explosions in Bangalore, Surat and Ahmedabad have sent renewed shivers among the common citizens all over India, where we have a rich variety of ‘terrorists’. As usual, there has been a spate of articles and statements demanding stricter laws and better intelligence. And yet no one is willing to admit that if an individual/group seriously decides to kill people and is willing to pay the price, there is nothing much you or me or the state can do about it except after the event. All you can do is keep an eye on how kids are growing up in your neighbourhood over time. Call it communal policing if you want. But this is not a counsel of despair.
Ironically, as the terrorists discover greater individual liberty and empowerment on behalf of the common citizen, it is often the common citizen that ends up becoming the target of these attacks and not the state – a zero sum game. Hitting out at the state via the common citizen is a very unethical but also a very circuitous idea. I reckon that in any terrorist group, half the members would be people with qualms, and the rest must be men and women who were anyway on their way to turning into suicides, serial killers, or child and wife beaters. It’s just that they find an excuse in a cause, and settle down to a humdrum career in violence. Many such people in India become cops and political leaders and succeed in sublimating their bestiality to various extents.
Our contributor Ratnakar has recently started a blog that I have the pleasure of promoting here. He describes its aim the following way:
Through a series of studies, discussions and comments, we intend to focus on the many cinemas in India and beyond. It seems an interesting idea to juxtapose different cinemas with distinct identities and idioms and to underline the diffrences and similarities between them. This raises the questions of cinematic styles, broader cultural similarities and differences, and also the varied industrial and business environments. Such focus may also allow us to not simply unravel the political culture of a given region, but also of politics in its subtler everyday sense.
SACREDMEDIACOW is an independent postgraduate collective on Indian media research and production (and much more) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.
We will of course have a more information posted about the book here and other of our events / plans as they emerge but meanwhile please feel free to visit our abundant content accumulated over the past few years. We created this just for you to so you can navigate our older pastures while we type away the future of media studies in India … (yes, you can click on the 3D tag cloud above).
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