Producing Disability Affect:

Lived, Corporeal, Material and Social Processes of Disability Construction as a New Bollywood

Illustration created by author

In my doctoral dissertation, which I am currently converting into a book manuscript, I foreground the production cultures of New Bollywood and the preoccupation of filmmaking practitioners with diversifying its content through the actors, networks, and assemblages that produce variants of the corporeal figure of the disabled body. The questions guiding this anthropological exploration include: how do filmmaking practitioners distinguish and collaborate their gaze, voice, and sense-making of disability constructivism? What is the significance of the corporeality of everyday life in understanding disability in the dynamism of contemporary public culture?

To address these questions, I trace the relational and processual materiality of disability construction in Bollywood. Through this approach, I unpack the myriad labor practices, belief systems, reflexive tactics, and preoccupations of filmmakers and audiences. I critically engage with the situatedness, routineness, and eventfulness of everyday experiences that influence, interrupt, and inform the production, representation, and reception of disability. With most studies focusing on tracing the causality, precarity, patterns, popularity, processes and politics of affect that influence and inform how films are produced, distributed and read, this study fills the lack of scholarship addressing the circulation of affect.

Keywords: New Bollywood, India, production culture, disability, affect, labor precarity, industrial reflexivity

Scripting Disability as the ‘New’ Bollywood: Pitching, reflecting, researching and negotiating

In this article, I explore the role of screenwriters and dialogue writers within the more extensive filmmaking process of New Bollywood. Drawing on ethnographic data, I foreground the creative tools, research and negotiations that prompt screenwriters to conceptualise and pitch character arcs that feature disability while positioning the writer as central to diversifying film genres. By building on scholarship on production cultures, scripting and disability studies, I draw upon factors that navigate the writer’s gaze from non-hereditary filmmaking networks to foreground disabilities in scripts and character arcs in efforts to strategise that they do not classify as reductive pathologisations and supercripping cultures. This article pays close attention to the conditions, identity politics, biases and situated vulnerabilities of writers that shape the assemblages of scripting disability rhetorics. The data from semi-structured interviews, with an explicit focus on three films and their script ideation and production pedagogies, illustrate these interlinkages and insights.

Keywords: disability, filmmaking, identity, India, New Bollywood, screenwriting

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Copyrights for pictures provided by the National Film Archive of India (Pune).

Negotiating content: the interplay of politics, audience, and gender in Internet-based production cultures in India

(Co-authored with Dr Smith Mehta)

In this article, we investigate the integrated commodity forms within Internet-based production cultures in India based on four key transactional affordances adopted by Indian creators, which include screenwriters, directors, producers, and editors. We argue that these affordances encompass gendered transactions, negotiations within sociocultural contexts, and politics of censorship (state, platform, and self-censorship). To do so, we highlight the self-reflexive practices of creators and their commercialized social life that shape content creation, commissioning, circulation, and popularization of India’s platform productions. Through illustrative examples, we demonstrate that Indian content creators are deeply influenced by social, political, and gendered interactions across both local and global networks within Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Digital India’s various converging, overlapping and interconnected new media industries.

Keywords: creator labor, Digital India, Internet-distributed streaming, media markets, platform production.

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Picture credits: Unsplash

Picture clicked by the author

‘Bhadraloks’ on the move: the Bengali diaspora in Singapore

(co-authored with Dr Jayati Bhattacharya)

Bengalis, a South Asian sub-ethnic group in Singapore, mainly hail from the Hindu majority in West Bengal, India and the Muslim majority in Bangladesh. Although they share similar linguistic, culinary preferences, cultural innuendos, and the collective trauma of the Partition of 1947, the ambiguity of Bengaliness in Southeast Asia permeates their everyday lives, cultural placemaking, and notions of identity and belonging. This research addresses the microhistories and transnational Bengali networks in Singapore beyond the overwhelming scholarship on the South Indian labour migrant communities in Southeast Asia, that is also distinct from the Bengali diaspora in the UK and Europe. It focuses on the less-studied Bengali Bhadralok (the ’gentlemanly’ class) that channelled cultural continuities and discontinuities of placemaking through foodways, bridal diasporic networks, occupational affiliation, language integration, cinema and festivals to foreground their distinctiveness within Singapore’s multicultural and multiracial landscape that homogenised the Indian diaspora within migrant labour/ Tamil speaking Indians.

Keywords: Bengali; Bhadralok; diaspora; minority; transnationalism

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Copyrights for pictures provided by the National Film Archive of India (Pune)

Cultured Women Do not Act in Films (Tracing Notions of Female Stardom in Bombay Cinema (1930s–1950s)

Women were absent from the archives and rendered invisible within the film business that was changing the urban landscape of Bombay city in the 1930s through talkies. Questions were raised about female sexuality and respectability primarily due to a morality discourse closely associated with women acting in films. Tension, moral panic and distress had emerged from the dominant stigma regarding film-making industries being a heterosexual and hybrid workspace. Moreover, an economy that capitalizes on the voyeuristic pleasures of its male audience by objectifying women’s bodies. So, even though it offered women higher salaries unlike other professions, it was deemed as “dangerous” for women. Therefore, “cultured women”, essentially from the upper class, were discouraged from being a part of the studio film industry in the cosmopolitan Bombay city. Taking forward Neepa Majumdar’s (2009) dialogue on the denial of agency to women in Indian cinema, this paper traces the incorporation of feminist agenda into filmmaking. This paper is limited to studying the biographical, autobiographical details and picturisation of three eminent actresses: Nargis, Kanan Devi and Durga Khote. Further, I would elaborate on the struggles undertaken by them and the roles they played in films to deconstruct the notion of female stardom and an “ideal Indian woman” picturized in Bollywood from the 1930s–1950s. This period holds relevance in film historiography due to the ideological construction of female stardom that had its pros and cons, which I discuss in the paper.

Keywords: Cultured women; female stardom; scandals; neo-realism; male gaze; feminist agenda; Bollywood.

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Image derived from EPW Engage

Margarita with a Straw: Female Sexuality, Same-Sex Love, and Disability in India

Do we identify women with disability as sexual beings? Have films reiterated disability and sexuality as incongruent identities, or has the trend been undergoing a transition? Margarita with a Straw (2014) raised these relevant questions about women’s disability and sexuality in India and further identified the extent to which Bollywood has misconstrued identities and glorified femininity by adding to the negativity associated with women’s disability in India.

Keywords: Margarita with a straw; sexuality; disability rights; LGBTIQ representation; bodily integrity

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