A Vision for Screen Studies in South Asia

Abstract

A journal of Screen Studies for South Asia needs to take certain issues on board at the outset, however wellworn some of these issues and debates may seem. These are primarily issues of definition and ambitionwhat constitutes the area, South Asia, as an object of research; and what is the spectrum of media and related cultural forms the journal would like to consider. Above all, perhaps, we need to consider the relationship between media practices and the spaces in which they are produced, circulated, and consumed, and the cultural universe through which they are rendered meaningful for media practitioners and audiences.Clearly, there is a longer history of area studies we at least need to signpost, even if we can do this only in a schematic way. The backdrop to this mode of organizing knowledge lay in the formation of nation-states after the World War II, the influence of the Cold War, and the division of the world into cross-national regions, by the metropolitan west. Such a division arose from strategic policies that involved military pacts, funding, and the cultivation of academic knowledge. Arguably, while South Asia is a pertinent frame for policy, funding, and academic fields, in the US, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere in the subcontinent, it has remained mainly the concern of policy makers, whose business is to evaluate the threats and possibilities of this geopolitical space. It has not provided a geographical frame for most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, at least after the division of the subcontinent in 1947. From this time, separate nation-states defined the context of study, in contrast to the colonial period. Even in the study of the colonial period, research and teaching rarely moved beyond the main arenas of nationalist (and counter-nationalist) movements. The history of the Indian subcontinent did not consider Nepal or Bhutan, and it rarely ventured further afield to Burma (Myanmar), or into Southeast Asia. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper have recently shown in their study of armed nationalist movements during the World War II how powerfully interconnected eastern India and Southeast Asia were (Bayly and Harper, 2004). More generally, histories of migration, and of the constitution and contest over borders and frontiers, underline the violence done to a more fluid sense of the territory.For the period after Independence and Partition, the study of Indian cinema, in terms of popular writing, archival collections and academic-professional engagement, has focused on Indian, rather than South Asian cinema. This has been so despite the fact that the key spaces of production, such as Lahore, continued to be an important cultural center that carried on the rich linguistic, musical, and cultural heritage of the pre-Partition period, as well as housing key figures of the film industry. Such continuities in the history of a Hindustani cinema, however complicated, cry out for analyses which refuse to be bounded by nation-state divides Roundtable BioScope 1(1) 5 -9

A reflexive turn in television studies? Conjectures from South Asia

“…More generally, histories of migration, and of the constitution and contest over borders and frontiers, underline the violence done to a more fluid sense of the territory'. 26 The editors also exhibit how compulsive it is, even within the emerging agenda of 'interconnected histories', to assume a centre (India in this case) from which the business of tracking the connections starts. Along with India, another 'centre', duly acknowledged by the editors, in the South Asian screen studies is film: 'It is perhaps not surprising that South Asian media studies has largely meant film studies .…”