Papers – Page 4 – ECSAS 2023

From Balaji Telefilms to ALTBalaji: The Role of Original Web Series in Pushing Broadcast Television’s Boundaries

The Indian television industry is transforming via an increasing number of OTT platforms. This shift from broadcast to OTT has given rise to research assessing the impact on the television ecosystem. With the case of Balaji Telefilms, an Indian media company, this study examines how the emergence of OTT platforms has affected the power dynamics […]

A different kind of TV: youth audience of foreign OTT fiction shows in India

Television audiences in India have been exposed to programs from overseas way back from the 1980s, from Urdu dramas from nearby Pakistan to English comedies from the UK and USA. Television market exploded with the liberalization of Indian economy in 1991 and arrival of foreign channels like Star TV and private-owned Indian channels like Zee […]

Preserving Pious Personas: moral regulation in Pakistani TV dramas’ digital worlds

This papers traces how creators of Pakistani entertainment television cultivate digital public personas centred on Islamic piety. Drawing from ethnographic data collected in Karachi, Pakistan in 2018 and 2021 and ongoing digital ethnography, I focus on social media content produced in conjunction with Pakistani’s core media industry – the serialised television drama – by individuals […]

Television Serials and Traumatic Triggers: Exploring ruptured engagement with narrative of Prime-time Hindi Language serials.

Ien Ang argued that soap operas offer their viewers ‘emotional realism’ (Ang, 1985:45), in that the audience can relate to the emotion(s) portrayed by the characters within the programme, while the situation which give rise to such emotions may not be relatable. Through her ethnographic study of Indian women television viewers, Purnima Mankekar (1999) found […]

Moviegoing as “Pilgrimage”: Digital nationalism and the new Cine-mobs of Hindi Cinema

In what has been termed an era of “chest-thumping nationalism,” India’s leading commercial entertainment industry in Mumbai, has been at the forefront of a socio-political Culture War. In this moment of industrial reckoning, the site of the film theatre has become a key site of contestation. Recently, multiple incidents of sloganeering, swearing, and hateful rants […]

Cinemas on Fire: field notes on mythologies of audience in the early 1980s Bombay film industry

‘They’ll burn down the cinemas if we show….’ was a recurring refrain among filmmakers in the Bombay industry of the early 1980s. Their well-developed working assumptions about their audience became one focus of my fieldwork: over my 18 months in Bombay, I gained access to the lives and conversations of many mainstream filmmakers of the […]

Nitrate Cities: Theorizing Spectatorial Exertions in Urban South Asia

Nitrate Cities investigates urban transformations in South Asia through spectatorial practices and identity politics around cinema. The paper draws on my ongoing project that examines the way spectators alter their lived urban environment through peaceful as well as agitational activities. I invoke the nitrate materiality of celluloid, which once made film stock highly unstable and […]

Crowd Conjuring: The Visual Politics of Gathering in RRR

This paper explores the simulated crowd, focusing on fictional representations rendered using digital visual effects. Visual effects create crowds by algorithmically multiplying digital figures (known as agents) and by blending these digital figures with real performers (in profilmic space). Such crowds may be depicted onscreen as emerging spontaneously in response to spectacular story events; of […]

Sound Cinema, Language, and Regionality: The Making of a Malayali Audience

Produced and largely circulated in the South Indian state of Kerala, Malayalam cinema has, in its almost-century-long history, played a key role in the social and cultural integration of the people of the state. Although the first sound film in Malayalam (Balan) came out in 1938, sound films in other languages such as Tamil and […]

Imagining “Neomobile” Audiences of “Bharat”

With mobile phones becoming the dominant screens where more people in India are watching streaming content, producers and distributors of both long-form (OTT/SVoD players like SonyLiv and Hotstar) and short-form video content (InstaReels and Moj) increasingly sketch user-scenarios of making their content for the newly mobile or “neomobile” audiences. How are these so-called “neomobile” audiences […]