South Asian Popular Culture

Abstract This article focuses on responses to issues of sexual intimacy, community discourse and the viewing of Hindi films by young British‐Asians in London. Emerging from a twenty‐eight month study of youth audiences during which I conducted numerous in‐depth personal interviews with young viewers in London and Bombay, this article explores the ways in which some young British‐Asian viewers' sexual attitudes, values and behaviours are played out in public and private contexts. Whilst considering the ways in which these young viewers experience sex and sexuality in the contemporary arena, I specifically address questions about the personal significance of Hindi film sequences in the development of their understandings of ethnicity, sex and sexuality. Saliently, I will argue that the ways in which British‐Asian community discourses on sex and sexuality operate, while exaggerated or reinforced by certain Hindi films, are sometimes also undermined and challenged by the meanings that young people take away from their viewings of these films. Notes 1. A version of this article was presented under the title ‘Sex, Lies and Hindi Films: Young British‐Asian viewers discuss sex/uality on and off screen’ at a conference on ‘Sex, Sexuality and Relationships Education’ at the Institute of Education, University of London, on 29 May 2003. 2. Rachel CitationDwyer, for instance, writes about Indian popular culture, ‘I look at the audience's presence within the texts themselves, at how they are interpellated by these texts’ (Citation2000, p. 5) and Ashis Nandy (Citation1995, p. 205) implicitly assumes interpellation when arguing that ‘the basic principles of commercial cinema derive from the needs of Indians caught in the hinges of social change’. 3. In ‘Why the World Loves Hindi Movies’ IMDiversity.Com, 2003, reprinted from Himal, The South Asian Magazine, 1999. (http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/Article_Detail.asp?Article_ID = 809) 4. Between September 2000 and April 2003. 5. Believing that the experiences and attitudes one may explore with regard to sexuality, religion and gender, when discussing these issues in a cinema queue or other public venue might be significantly different from those emerging during ‘private’ interviews, I carried out public interviews when doing observations at cinemas. I analysed these as ‘evidence’ of a different psychosocial kind to that emerging from the one‐to‐one interviews that make up the primary data in my study. 6. I employed a number of strategies for contacting respondents, including communicating with them initially through student unions, lecturers or teachers if they were at college or school, through friendship‐groups intermittently, via work colleagues or neighbours, by posting notices in local libraries, chemists, doctors' clinics and corner shops as well as on the internet‐movie‐database and other Hindi movie bulletin‐boards and via several local youth outreach organizations. I was inundated with requests from young people for me to interview them. 7. To ensure confidentiality, all interviewees' names have been altered throughout, although their pseudonyms are consistent with the region and religion of the originals. 8. Given the horrific sexual violence being perpetrated against Muslim men, women and children in Gujarat by organised groups of rightwing Hindus, just weeks prior to this interview, Manish's comments were disturbing and had more than a throwaway significance. 9. In the last three years, a number of articles discussing homosexuality, homosociality and representation in Indian films have been published. Some of the most interesting are those by R. Raj Rao (Citation2000); Gayatri Gopinath (Citation2000); Muraleedharan T. (Citation2002); and Shohini Ghosh (Citation2002). 10. When discussing Kuch Kuch Hota Hain, Nisha remarked, ‘I'm not a pretty little dream girl, not girlie. I like to think about things. So I understood [Kajol] in that film. Oh but she had to lose the basketball game before she married him. [Sadly] The girls lost in the end.’

Shakuntala Banaji

INTIMATE DECEPTIONS

Shikha Vats

Recasting a forest legend in the event of climate crisis: Jungle Nama (2021), Sundarbans, and the art of storytelling

在气候危机中重塑森林传说：《丛林娜玛》（2021）、孙德尔本斯与叙事艺术

Globalization and transnationalism have expanded the physical territory of television and are responsible for global reshaping of media industries and cultures. In the contemporary mediascape, Indian television industry is an interesting site for excavating new transnational patterns wherein the circulation of Indian TV content extends beyond the diaspora and caters to non-diasporic audiences, especially, in South Asia and South-east Asia. The popularity of Hindi language TV soaps in Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, etc., have aided in mapping a new ‘tele’-visual geography of popular culture that deems Western media influence as almost insignificant, if not absent. Chronicling the success of two Indian TV programmes – the story of a ‘child-bride’ Balika Vadhu (2008–16) in Vietnam and a Hindu mythological Mahabharat (2013–14) in a Muslim-populated Indonesia; this paper traces the transnational circulation of Indian TV content amongst non-diasporic markets in South-east Asia. Drawing from Daya Kishan Thussu’s notion of ‘contra-flows’ and Brian Larkin’s conception of ‘parallel modernities’, the paper argues that the success of Indian television programmes in non-West media markets diverts our attention towards new kinds of transnational media flows which I have termed ‘neo-global’ flows that operate amongst emerging centres of media production and need not be mapped against dominant Western flows.

Ritika Pant

From global to neo-global: Mapping the ‘tele’-visual geography of South Asia through a transnational lens

从全球到新全球：通过跨国视角映射南亚的“电视”地理

Food is an important means of signification in cinema and forms a vital part of its semiotics. The article attempts to analyse food symbolism in the Assamese movie, Aamis (2019), directed by Bhaskar Hazarika. In the film, Bhaskar Hazarika parallels the taboo associated with certain meat-eating traditions in Northeast India and the forbidden relationship between a married woman and a young man to create a unique aesthetic rich in food symbolism. In this way, the film tries to destabilise the age-old societal conventions and moral codes. The paper attempts to problematize the cultural imaginary of Aamis (2019) rooted in the vegetarian/non-vegetarian binary. It scrutinises how Bhaskar Hazarika’s attempt to create a subversive critique of societal norms and morality ends up in reiterating and appropriating the binary oppositions and cultural associations rooted in hegemonic discourses.

Harsha Vincent

Problematizing the binaries: A study on food symbolism in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis

解构二元对立：巴斯卡尔·哈扎里卡的《阿米斯》中的食物象征研究

Debajit Bora

Between popular and populist: Reading the shift of mobile theatre repertoire

从流行到民粹：解读移动剧场剧目转变

The paper studies the Common Man political caricatures by R.K. Laxman, a staff cartoonist at the Times of India, to understand dominant political discourses in postcolonial India. It argues that constructs like the 'common man' and 'vote bank' through popular cultural discourse like caricatures have a critical impact on the political landscape of the country. While the former is associated with an urban English-educated middle class, the latter is used to denote the socially marginalised sections of the electorate voting en masse as a form of political assertion. The latter is perceived as an aberration in the modern secular democracy and its political voice is often delegitimised. Further, the former is associated with economic liberalisation, development and anti-corruption. The paper demonstrates how Laxman's Common Man is a proponent and mascot of these in the popular imagination. Thereby indicating that the popular cultural archive has indeed had a visible impact on the political, economic and sociological cartography of the nation.

Srimati Ghosal

Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

划定界限：研究R.K.拉克斯曼的《普通人漫画》以理解后殖民印度围绕合法政治竞争的主导政治话语

The developmental projects like dams and other capitalist structures in India, allocate the natural water reserves to elite industrialists and state apparatuses, leaving the local ecosystems impoverished and in the hands of capitalism driven policies, which milk the indigenous population to mollify the materialistic needs of the affluent. This predicament is vividly illustrated in Subhash Vyam's graphic narrative Water that employs the traditional Gond Art to anchor the consequences of the 'Slow Violence' rendered to the local ecosystems owing to the development policies. As the revered natural sources of water in Vyam's village are regulated through a dam, the rural Indigenous community is deprived of its basic rights to survive, vandalising the pious 'human-water' relationship, resulting in 'a serious ecological crisis'. Drawing theoretical insights from Rob Nixon, Ramachandra Guha and Vandana Shiva, the proposed paper attempts to emphasize that the graphic narrative Water, through its remarkable graphic visuals, conjoined with local customs and folklores, is a reflection of the agony of the indigenous communities. Further, the paper analyses the grim reality that privatisation not only leads to exploitation and consequent depletion of the natural resources, but also robs the local communities of their ways of survival and resource sharing practices.

Manvi Sharma

Ajay K. Chaubey

Local water bodies and the threat of Slow Violence in Subhash Vyam’s Water

Subhash Vyam的《水》中的地方水体与缓慢暴力的威胁

The identity of a disabled individual is inextricably knitted with socio-culturally prescribed gender roles and heteronormative postulates of sexuality. The present article scrutinizes the complex interplay of disability and masculinity in two Indian films- Bhansali's Guzaarish (2010) and Basu's Barfi! (2012). In Guzaarish, illusionist Ethan, rendered quadriplegic after an unfortunate accident, willfully resists perceiving manhood beyond the roles of protecting, providing, and sexually gratifying women. He perceives his body image as shameful and embarrassing due to vulnerability and sexual impotence and appeals for euthanasia. In contrast, the eponymous protagonist Barfi, deaf-mute by birth, strategically exploits hegemonic masculine tropes as compensation for sensory impairments, following the body-behavior ideals culturally expected from a man in melodramatic heterosexual relationships. The article employs qualitative methodology with a thematic study. Social constructionism and symbolic interactionism are utilized to scrutinize the socio-cultural scripting of corporeal dimensions and the intersectionality of corporeal differences and gendered realities. The work finds that both disabled protagonists' self-understanding of their personhood is manipulated by the internalized stereotypes of masculinity, disseminated and reinforced through phallocentric prescriptions – while one succumbs to shame embodying the lack, the other tries overcompensating the lack. The article illustrates how identity is rooted in the corporeal body; while disability experience is intertwined with gender scripting, masculinity is also constructed in relation to certain corporeal differences.

Sayan Das

Md Moshabbir Alam

Sandip Sarkar

Anoop Kr. Tiwari

Moksha Singh

Identity in corporeality: Interplay of disability and masculinity in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Guzaarish (2010) and Anurag Basu’s Barfi! (2012)

身份与肉身：桑杰·里拉·班萨利的《Guzaarish》（2010）与阿努拉格·卡施亚普的《Barfi!》（2012）中残疾与男性气质的交织

Axone is a recently released Indian film revolving around Northeastern cuisine. Through culinary reimagining, the film raises several issues regarding Northeastern migrants who largely remain invisible in the public discourse. The present article attempts to examine the embodied experiences of the Northeasterners in the Indian capital, Delhi, through the analysis of the film from a culinary lens. Affirming the film's status as a food film, the article first tries to locate axone in the Indian culinary order, which has been hegemonized by the caste ideas of ganda (dirty) and gandha (smelly). Secondly, it engages with the politics of otherness played around the Northeastern food by employing social and sensorial boundaries. Thirdly, it brings to the fore the discourse of racism, which is central to the experience of Northeasterners living in the city. Lastly, the article delists the Northeastern migrants only as victims of the city and explores their place-making strategies by taking into account the agentic potential of their culinary culture.

Rajbir Samal

Binod Mishra

Otherized food, racialized bodies: Discourses of food, smell and racism in Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone

他者化的食物，种族化的身体：尼古拉斯·哈孔戈尔《阿克索内》中的食物、气味与种族主义话语

Abbreviation
Journal Impact	0.43
Quartiles(Global)	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q4)

ISSN	1474-6689, 1474-6697
h-index	18

Publication Information	Publisher: Routledge，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2003，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 9.46%

South Asian Popular Culture

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INTIMATE DECEPTIONS

Recasting a forest legend in the event of climate crisis: Jungle Nama (2021), Sundarbans, and the art of storytelling

From global to neo-global: Mapping the ‘tele’-visual geography of South Asia through a transnational lens

Problematizing the binaries: A study on food symbolism in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis

Between popular and populist: Reading the shift of mobile theatre repertoire

Recasting a forest legend in the event of climate crisis: Jungle Nama (2021), Sundarbans, and the art of storytelling

Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

Local water bodies and the threat of Slow Violence in Subhash Vyam’s Water

Identity in corporeality: Interplay of disability and masculinity in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Guzaarish (2010) and Anurag Basu’s Barfi! (2012)

Otherized food, racialized bodies: Discourses of food, smell and racism in Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone