The Promise of Portability: CENDIT and the Infrastructure, Politics, and Practice of Video as Little Media in India 1972–1990 (original) (raw)

THE DIGITAL TURN? TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE HISTORY OF DOCUMENTARY CINEMA IN INDIA

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Re-situating the region: Media technologies and Media Forms in India

South Asian Popular Culture , 2022

Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The editorial is a 7000 word essay that takes the question of "regional cinema and media" from merely problematising to situating the category in the intersecting nodes of technology, place and form. Through the thematically curated essays we argue that the region in film and media is a relational concept that are often mobilised through interlaced histories of movement of media technologies and social labour

The Video Turn: Documentary Film Practices in 1980s India

This article focuses on the technology of documentary filmmaking in India, drawing attention to its materiality and its historical transformation after the arrival of video there in the 1980s. Two aspects of the 1980s video-making are emphasized: on the one hand, a focus on possibilities that video created for non-professional filmmakers; and on the other, the novelty of video-documentary practices in India is questioned. I argue that in a context in which documentary activities were already established, video technology enabled these practices to increase in number, become small-media practices and go beyond state restrictions.

The apparatus and its constituencies: On India’s encounters with television

In my attempt at exploring possible connections between nation and the television ‘form’, I have in this essay tried to track a major trajectory in television studies, that of the theoretical investments in the formal aspects of the televisual experience. The essay heavily draws upon the recent debates around the notion of ‘flow’ in the work of Raymond Williams and relates them to another movement which is also, not surprisingly, called ‘flow’ i.e. the flow of programs and programming from one country to the other, the most familiar route being from the North America to the rest of the world. The object is to investigate whether television inclines towards offering a specific kind of experience, whether, to put it more precisely, television comes closer to being an ‘ideological apparatus’. We try to locate the Indian context—with its particular histories of performance—vis-à-vis this apparatus and show that, to a large extent, the so called ‘pre-capitalist’ traits in the Indian popular performative traditions are homologous with what western theorists try to specify (though in contradicting terms) as a somewhat ‘central’ televisual experience. One of the main aims is to account for this correspondence of televisual form to the heteronomous popular of the territories that consistently refuse to harbour fully bourgeoised state-form and that continue to be highly heterogeneous in production relations. The paper tries to investigate into the specific imports of this relation in the post-liberalization cultural lives of television in India with special reference to a somewhat novel way television has started imagining the nation. I shall draw upon various instances from the history of television in India to demonstrate the currency of this dialogue between the pre-television modes of addresses and the televisual flow in the constitution of televisual subjects in India. The significance of the Indian popular film form in lending a major legacy to televisual reception would be a key area of concern. The series of works in Indian Film Studies over the last twenty years, in their insistent emphasis on the political economy of popular audio-visual cultures, gives the paper a major point of entry into the study of location of the televisual apparatus in a post-colonial context.

‘New Media Overtures Before New Media Practice in India’

Sharing an excerpt from my essay, ‘New Media Overtures Before New Media Practice in India’ -- first published in Marg, in 2009 and republished in Domus in Jan. 2015. My formulation of a genealogy or ‘pre-history’ for India’s new media practices of the 1990s is based on a well-developed theoretical position that I have manifested over the last decade through my lectures and essays published in anthologies. I chart this ‘pre-history’ through the collaborative endeavours, experimental films and photographic experiments of Akbar Padamsee, Nalini Malani, Tyeb Mehta, M F Husain and Krishen Khanna during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Dashrath Patel’s transdisciplinary practice from the 1960s to the 1980s. This is part of my commitment to retrieving the lost histories of art, and to writing art history against the grain of received narratives. During the 1960s and 1970s, when these experiments were being conducted, the art world in India was fixated on painting as the premier form, so these were seen as aberrations if they were noticed at all. Art criticism was still obsessed with the questions of modernism, indigenism and authenticity, and had not expanded to be able to embrace such experiments. There was no critical framework or cultural context for them. That is why I have analysed the history of Indian new media art as a passage from ‘no-context media’ from the late sixties to ‘new-context media’ of the nineties. *

Book Review: Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. 7: 116-119. 2016.

To what extent is cinema, or any technology, an aggrandizing, autonomous force that demands the reorganization of the environment around it according to its own technological needs? In the US, the railway system demanded the alienation of land and the coordination of time as a condition of its technical operation. Air travel commanded an instant redefinition of the concept of property—particularly air rights over individual plots—to facilitate flying from one part of a country to another without trespass. Technology, in this sense, is a standardizing, overcoding force that erodes local difference according to its own technological needs. The dispositif of cinema, in this light, can be seen as such an overcoding. The architectonics and screening practices of cinema are remarkably familiar, often instantly recognizable whether we are looking at 1920s Iowa City, Ibadan, Sunderland, Lucknow or Chiang Mai. Despite massive cultural, political, and religious differences, the cinematic apparatus takes on a familiar shape and any attempt to analyze the emergence and history of technological media has to take this capacity of overcoding into account. The turn toward materialism in the recent critical thought, represented in such diverse domains as the archaeology of media, new materialisms, and actor-network theory, asserts the agentive, deter-minative power of technologies and rejects the idea that technologies and objects " are just there to be used as a white screen on to which society projects its cinema " (Latour, 1993, p. 53). On the other hand, to what extent is this overcoding technology vulnerable and porous to the environments it finds itself growing within? The version of technology presented in the opening paragraph is based on an assumption that the ontology of a machine is formed at its moment of invention, and that once formed, it is simply transported from place to place. This is, particularly, the case with media archaeology whose critical effort is focused on revealing the conditions of possibility from which media emerge rather than the ways in which those media, once existing in the world, continue to mutate and grow. A more infrastructural view of media places emphasis on standardization and extension. The invention, in the work of someone like Gilbert Simondon (1992), is a single phase in an ongoing process of individuation that will have multiple phases. Cinema, in this sense, comes to be. It is a porous instrument whose internal structures are in constant mutual exchange with a host of external forces—other technologies, modes of economic organization, political formations, legal regimes, religious disciplines, and so on.

Not So) Far from Bollywood: Videocinemas of India

Companion to Indian Cinema, 2022

Focusing on the South Asian videocinemas of Manipur and Malegaon, two media "industries" with distinctive compulsions and motivations, this chapter explores how local exigencies inflect and shape rooted cultural pursuits of a global contemporaneity. While Bollywood, the Korean Wave, and Hollywood provide paradigms of success, inspiration, and direction, place-bound media cultures embody markedly singular actualizations of global aspirations. In their bottom-up and frequently piratical modalities, and fraught relationship to both the nation and the state, these videocinemas instantiate informal and improvisational forms of participation that invoke, but cannot be subsumed by, models of DIY cultural citizenship. Most strikingly, in all their vigorous mediations of affiliation and identity, they espouse no obvious notion of authenticity or purity, nor any predetermined political logic of resistance or complicity. In establishing their own infrastructures, working out their own aesthetics, and articulating their collective political concerns, these plastic media formations forge their own lo-tech, low brow digital modernities that complicate extant accounts of cultural globalization.

Bringing up TV: Popular culture and the developmental modern in India

The essay suggests that the ideologies of the privatized satellite television in India remain largely inconceivable unless one takes into account the complex relationship between the Indian state and realms of ‘popular’ down from the 1960s. It takes a close look at the way India’s state-controlled television tried to frame a certain aesthetics of ‘development communication’ involving issues of pedagogy, nationhood, citizenship, sexuality, morality, autonomy and publicness. One of the key arguments is that the State’s moralizing effort to conceive a modern televisual public as antagonistic to what it thought to be a ‘vulgar’ cinematic public, along with a concurrent obligation to make television popular and profitable, created a host of contradictions within the hegemonic projects of the state. This, however, also led to possibilities of negotiation between the statist forms and the emergent consumerist forms of citizenship post-1982. In this sense, we are looking at the conditions of possibility of the way post-Liberalization satellite television most aptly demonstrates the inter-constitutive relationship between the State and the Market, the historical liaison between democracy and capitalism.

Media Education Policy in India: A Historical Perspective

Mass Media, 2015

This research paper traces the birth of media education policy in India. It examines various reports with regard to development of media education. It also deals with the initiatives of UNESCO in the promotion of media education in Third World countries and analyses its impact on India. The research paper determines some serious concerns that have been existing in media education since its inception and provides suggestions for its removal. It is an analysis of historical development of media education policy in India.