The Keywords Issue

The Keywords Issue marks 10 years of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. We first conceived of this special issue in 2018 when we were nearing our 10th anniversary. At the time, the editorial group sought a celebratory stock-taking – a means of noting the dynamism of the field of screen studies from and about South Asia – and signalling emerging directions for the future. A lot has happened since 2018. Most dramatically, we are living through a global pandemic with devastating and differential impacts across South Asia. Stark inequalities within this region have tragically come to the fore, as have the geopolitics of vaccine patents, aid infrastructures and news reportage that exacerbate and consolidate the difference between the West and the rest. The current moment underscores the necessity to view the field of intellectual production itself with a diachronic and spatially comparative lens, one that is attuned to the past constructions of a place and its media and the ongoing ramifications of these constructions.

At its most polemical, the ambition of this issue is to confront the geopolitics of knowledge production and disciplinary norms. A keywords approach allows us to ask what some of the central epistemes currently at play in film and media studies are. Each keyword in this collection aims to present concise accounts of core themes and debates, thereby illustrating the conceptual underpinnings upon which the field has been built. As such, the issue serves to highlight important areas of media scholarship pertaining to South Asia and serves as a ready reference for those unfamiliar with this thriving field of study. More significantly, this special issue also allows us to interrogate these central epistemes, illuminating both the promises and the challenges of South Asian screen studies. In a field dominated by Anglophone scholars trained in Euro–American paradigms of film and media studies, our work fundamentally operates with a double consciousness. At one level, we find great value in critical frameworks generated in French, American, or German contexts that help us approach and analyse South Asian media cultures. At another level, we often find that categories of analysis are contingent on the grounds (and languages) from which they have emerged.

One of the most contested terms in South Asian cultural studies, be it of literature or film, has been modernity. Civilisational and cultural wars have been fought over the location and origins of the modern, sealing the fate of many parts of the world in a perpetual limbo, forever waiting to properly enter into modernity (Chakrabarty, 2008). South Asian postcolonial historians have worked hard to dismantle ideas of developmental ‘time lag’ that undergirded European colonialism and continue to bolster racist narratives of superiority. These debates have long informed the disciplines of literature, art history and film studies in South Asia; some scholars refuse a sharp rupture between East and West by pointing to the circulation of cultural and political forms of modernity accompanying the global movement of capital, while others mark out a realm of difference by highlighting the multiple, even incommensurable, textures of the modern. This long conversation seeps into many of the rubrics that continue to interest and vex media scholars of South Asia today. Take, for example, the perennial problem of Hollywood. Because Hollywood in the twentieth century came to represent the acme of cinematic modernity, much ink is still spilled on questions as to whether other film industries and forms across the world are imitative, derivative or simply catching up. And then there is the complex question of the relation between melodrama and modernity. If Peter Brooks’ influential exegesis of melodrama was premised on the idea that melodrama is a transitional form that bridges the turn to a post-sacred world, how do we explain the persistence of the sacred and the devotional in South Asian film melodramas? And who are the audiences that are so susceptible to such emotional filmic address? South Asian scholars have made key interventions in each of these debates. Not only do we now understand the heterogeneity of the modern and the fallacy of a teleological historical imagination focused on plotting ruptures but we also recognise the deep colonial epistemes that construe audiences as naive, impressionable, and hence in need of paternalist protection. The point to highlight here is the push and pull of the double consciousness with which scholars of South Asian film and media continually grapple, the tension between difference and similarity, particularity and interconnection.

Each of the keywords collected in this special issue straddles this tension in different ways. We can broadly identify the operation of this tension along two principles: (a) situated knowledges, that is, those keywords that construe their analytical object explicitly from within the particular historical, material or linguistic context of their academic production, and (b) defamiliarisation, that is, those keywords that take a familiar concept and relocate it within new and specific sites and histories. Keywords that are relatively unique to South Asian film and media scholarship most self-evidently perform a mode of situated knowledge production. This is either because they are tightly associated with localised processes of production or circulation, such as song-and-dance sequence or Bollywood, or because they have been particularly applied to South Asian media forms, such as Islamicate, darshan(a), or double. That does not mean that they necessarily describe geographically bounded phenomena or that their intellectual purchase lies merely in their description of a form that is unfamiliar to the international academy. Rather, their analytical significance draws on vibrant and ongoing debates in the field, even as their critical purchase could be relevant to analyses grounded in other regions as well.

For example, the contentious term Islamicate entered into South Asian film and media studies to facilitate rigorous analysis of certain locally recurring film aesthetics and narratives (Bhaskar & Allen 2009; Dadi, 2016; Kesavan, 1994; Siddique this issue). However, the term Islamicate finds its origins in attempts to delineate cultural traditions associated with Muslim majority societies that are not exclusive to the South Asia region (Hodgson, 1974). Nevertheless, the term has generated rich and often polemical discussion in South Asian film studies about the objects it seeks to describe, participating in broader political contentions about the place of Muslims and Islam within the public cultures of South Asia, both before and in the wake of the Partition of British India in 1947. In this way, the analytical term Islamicate has come to have a very particular set of meanings in the context of its use in South Asian film studies. These do not necessarily carry over into discussions of other media forms nor are they easily applicable in other regions. Nonetheless, the conceptual debates that this term refers to and is entangled with, would be highly relevant to those whose research involves the understanding of minority media within the context of hegemonic national, religious or linguistic media landscapes.

It is also significant to highlight here that the supposed cohesiveness of South Asia as a region is itself shattered when we track the shifting locations and status of certain categories. The meaning of the term Islamicate translates very unevenly from the Muslim minority context of India, where it has been most popular and recognisable, to scholarly contexts in Pakistan and Bangladesh where the term is rarely used and only awkwardly applicable. Similarly, the meaning of the terms darshan(a) or Bollywood shifts significantly across regions within India and is transformed in the context of South Asian diasporic communities.

Alongside these situated practices of knowledge production, the second principle informing our selection of keywords was to point to the ways in which thinking media from South Asia allows us to nuance, even defamiliarise, conceptual frames developed in other geographical contexts. Here we can think about keywords such as genre or dubbing or stardom that could readily appear in other glossaries of media studies terms. What our inclusion of these keywords illustrates is not only that there are particular histories and practices associated with automated dialogue replacement or the star image in South Asia but also that any account of what dubbing is or how stardom works is necessarily a partial account that will never be amenable to universalisation.

Alongside these main selection criteria, we have also chosen to highlight some emerging trends that are still unfolding. Here, a keyword exercise was especially beneficial in teasing out submerged histories and pre-histories of methods and concepts that are now gaining critical favour. The keyword on intermediality applies current notions of cross-platform convergence and media assemblages to South Asian film history to frame a whole range of work, older and newer, that highlights the value of thinking cinema as fundamentally relational. In environment, the current turn to ecology in media studies is both historicised and situated. South Asia, with its specific histories of colonial resource extraction, postcolonial developmental logics and ongoing modes of indigenous resistance, offers an important vantage point for thinking the relations between media and ecology.

The resulting selection of keywords thus provides a wealth of scholarly insight and a handy reference guide to core themes and debates in South Asian film and media studies. Nonetheless, this issue is neither a comprehensive account of the terrain, nor does it claim to be authoritative. As an editorial collective, we brainstormed nearly 100 keywords, not all of which found an author. Keywords such as parallel cinema or translation were partially absorbed into art film and remix, while city, studio, flashback, camp and labour still linger on our spreadsheet. This process of selecting keywords, scouting for authors, and reading the resulting entries, has brought the state of play within the field of South Asian screen studies sharply into focus. A few contours are worth highlighting.

First, the process illustrated the interdisciplinary nature of the engagements within the field, with art historians, anthropologists, artists and legal experts complementing film and media scholars. These interdisciplinary research practices sit alongside a strong emphasis on film as the primal scene in this domain of scholarship. Film studies approaches and key texts, alongside significant archives, are joined by investigations emerging from fields as diverse as environmental humanities, religious studies and science and technology studies. We see these as a strong set of new enquiries that push us, as editors, to expand the remit of a journal dedicated to screen studies.

Second, our overview has underlined the durability of long-standing engagements with popular culture, drawing on wider visual and sonic formations in South Asia. Popular film acquired critical status in South Asia scholarship, as elsewhere, to counterbalance a focus on auteurs and realism within film studies. In a postcolonial context, popular cinema also allowed a vector to reframe the relation between culture and politics; the ways in which public and mass forms could enunciate critiques of bourgeois democracies and the ways in which they can mobilise alternate political possibilities (see public and audience). These concerns within film studies paralleled new historiographies of the subaltern and histories from below, even as a specifically mediatic ambit attuned film scholars to the politics of address that can reconfigure collectivities into masses, crowds or publics. We return in the contemporary moment to other forms in which the boundaries between popular forms and sites are scrambled, for example, through processes of remix, or new directions within the domain of the fine arts, for example, with installation art.

Third, and related, the keywords collected here underscore how a grounded view of technological change troubles assumptions about the ontologies and futures of a medium (see infrastructure, analog and digital, social media platforms). What does media obsolescence mean, for example, in places where the destiny of old celluloid and compact discs is not the museum or an online ‘vintage’ economy, but a silver extraction workshop or as decoration for cycle rickshaws? More pointedly, how does one grapple with the multiple techno-temporalities on view in places where a bioscope-wallah cranks out streetcorner peep show performances on a reassembled machine from the early twentieth century, while the latest 3D Hollywood blockbuster premieres on digital projection in the multiplex down the road? This coexistence of old and new technologies, big and small entertainment economies, and improvised cultures of recycling and reuse, troubles our need to narrate the history of media as a linear or singular story.

Fourth, it must be acknowledged that the focus of most of the research represented here pertains to India and was produced in well-established centres of scholarship and through academic networks that reproduce some of the hierarchies of access and privilege within South Asia. There are important questions here of institutional formation and funding, linguistic divides and Euro–American circuits of publication. Such hierarchies also refocus our editorial concerns about the relationship between the particular and the general, centre and periphery, within the region. Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan are less well represented in this keywords issue than we had hoped. Further, in a pattern that is visible also in other non-Western media contexts, South Asian scholars have often chosen to refer their local case studies back to the industrial–imperial metropole of Hollywood rather than consider other postcolonial or non-Western comparisons across Asia or Africa. Nonetheless, we are heartened to note a growth in cross-regional research and a focus on underrepresented sites of media production and circulation. The field of South Asian film and media studies requires the processes of defamiliarisation and situated knowledge production to operate not only between Euro–America and South Asia in the formation of its knowledge objects but also between India and its immediate neighbours in the region, as well as peripheral sites within India, so that these are not mere exotic differences or idiosyncratic ‘case studies’ incidental to the theorising that happens ‘at the centre’.

The overwhelming impression upon reading through all the keywords collected in this special issue is the vibrancy of an academic community in which scholars, both established and emerging, are engaging ideas and methods that help us discern a cohesive field of exploration. For this reason too, the special issue before you does not mark an end. We see the Keywords Isssue as a starting point for an ongoing stocktaking with analytical ambition. We aspire for the Keywords Isssue to be an open-ended process that maps the evolving field of media practice and scholarship related to the region. Some of the processual nature of this project will be apparent in the architecture of this issue. We are presenting the keywords in simple alphabetical fashion, rather than grouping them under specific rubrics. The seriality implied in an alphabetical sorting ideally allows for more keyword insertions in future iterations, at BioScope or elsewhere. Each entry lists three texts for further reference that pertain specifically to South Asian media. Across this issue, we have put the use of any of the current keywords in bold to facilitate reading across the entries. Readers online will be able to click on these to navigate through the entire issue. There is, additionally, an extensive bibliography at the end of the issue that demonstrates the breadth of literatures that our contributors draw on. You are invited to dive right in, starting at any place you wish.