The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Interests / Disciplines

Teaching

Students supervised

• Alice Tilche
• Giulia Battaglia
• Kavitha Chennoufi-Gilkes
• Shireen Mirza

Courses Taught

• Anthropology and Film
• Comparative Media Studies
• Comparative Media Theory
• Theoretical Approaches to Social Anthropology

Research

My work clusters around three main research areas broadly relating to the history of media in south India- 1) early film audience and exhibition; 2) musical performance and the emergence of sound media; and 3) religion, media and politics.

One area of research interest concerns the social and cultural history of silent cinema audiences in south India from multiple perspectives. Chronologically, this work covers the beginnings of commercial cinema in south India from its introduction by touring exhibitors at the turn of the twentieth century until the transition to sound films and the emergence of a distinctly Tamil cinema in the 1930s. Within this period I have examined the leading institutions, practices and discourses that variously defined the rapidly shifting conditions of audience composition and the film-going experience. The overall purpose of this work has been to rethink critically the historiography of early cinema in India through an investigation of its audiences. Conventional approaches to the history of cinema in India have consisted of an exclusive emphasis on the pioneering efforts of film production, film stars and classic films texts with little or no effort to consider the broader social and cultural conditions, which preceded and exceeded the films themselves. Therefore, in shifting this historiographic emphasis, I developed original ethnographic and historical research into a general approach for the study of cinema audiences. I treat audiences as people who attended the cinema and as abstracted social categories, both variously constituted through exhibition practices, government regulation, film genres, public debate and experiences of film-going.

My second research concentration focuses on the historical conjuncture of sound and modernity in south India. The overall argument is that, in contrast to a Euro-American association of vision/visuality with modernity, sound is the dominant sense of cultural modernity in south India. This work considers how over the first half of the 20th century the introduction of new sound media- harmonium, gramophone, radio, loud speakers and cinema- placed music at the centre of south Indian debates about modernity and reconfigured notions of the public and public space through new practices of sound broadcasting and listening.

The third area of research was started as part of my contributions to the collaborative research project I was part of at the University of Amsterdam- Modern Mass Media, Religion and Imagination of Communities: Different Postcolonial Trajectories in West Africa, India, Brazil and the Caribbean (see www.pscw.uva.nl/media-religion). As part of this project I developed a line of research using the study of Tamil cinema to address questions about the changing relations among mass media, religion and politics in south India. I have been working on an episodic history concentrating upon a series of key films and debates in the changing religious and political equation around Tamil cinema. Specifically I have followed the political debates surrounding initial religious orientation of Indian silent cinema through to its transformation into a Tamil film genre with the introduction of cinema sound in the 1930s. As Tamil cinema developed into a south Indian regional and linguistically defined sub-national film making tradition, Hindu mythological and devotional films featured prominently in a major realignment within south Indian cultural politics of modernity.

Expertise

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Available for

• TV
• Radio
• Press
• Briefings
• Special Study Programmes
• Short Term Consultancy
• Long Term Consultancy

Regional Expertise

• South Asia

Country Expertise

• India
• Sri Lanka

Languages

• Tamil

Publications