Padma Chirumamilla

This article engages with the history of television and television studies in South Asia to reflect on how “media” can be re-imagined as an object of analysis and critique. Questioning the analytic primacy accorded to film, we develop the concept of televisual drag and argue that bringing television to the fore can reveal different temporalities, modalities, and logics for the evolution of South Asian screen media, both in their past forms and current constitution. We critically engage with recent studies—of Indian women filmmakers, Pakistani comic shows and YouTube videos, and small-town video circulation in India—to illuminate the currents of televisual drag at work in contemporary media scholarship. We conclude by reflecting how how televisual drag might be a critical method for drawing insights from media histories, practices, and environments that do not or will not follow an easily comprehensible path toward a seemingly inevitable digital horizon.

In this article, I argue for the necessity of studying the portrayal of technological infrastructures in popular cinema. Cinema provided a venue within which the potentialities of technological infrastructures could be codified, challenged and (irregularly) absorbed into everyday practice—a process that was especially fraught in postcolonial societies like India. I combine an analysis of the changes in Indian telecommunications policy in the 1990s with close readings of the telephone’s portrayal in two South Indian comedy films, Hello Pakkiram (1990) and Money (1993). These films imagined the telephone as a technology which undergirded a “middle-class” ethos which valued financial security above explicit moral commitment, in contrast to the explicit heroism of the “mass films” that shaped an earlier era of South Indian cinema. I conclude by reaffirming the necessity of thinking through mediations of technological infrastructures to gain more nuanced critical purchase on their place in our everyday lives.

In this article, I examine how television’s shifting presence in an unfamiliar venue – the repair shop – is illustrative of a broader tension between rhetorics of innovation and obsolescence. Investigating the nature of this tension, I argue, is crucial for understanding how television is changing in India. Through interviews with small-town and rural television repairmen in south India, and an ethnographic study of a small-town television repair shop, I explore how studying the television as a material object with a distinct life outside the walls of the home and the experiences of the individual viewer can open up new veins of analysis for scholars of television, both in India and elsewhere. Furthermore, I argue that the technological instability on display in the repair shop challenges persistent notions of a technologically empowered ‘digital’ future that have been promulgated by state governments in India.