Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2090679
A. S. Zia
ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the inclusion of piety politics and populist masculinities in any analysis of the governance and international relations between two South Asian rivals and nuclear neighbours; Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. It offers a comparative case-study of the redeemed Sufi masculinity of the recently deposed Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, and the ascetic Hindutva one performed by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. The study finds that the nativist, capitalist and gender discriminatory regimes of both populist leaders depend on subduing any dissenting resistance offered by subaltern masculinist and feminist politics. The conclusion finds that military-pious-heteronormative masculinity serves to stabilize patriarchy in both ‘manly states’ and underwrites regional security policies. It also points to how subversive movements are constantly challenging these hegemonic masculinities.
{"title":"Pious, populist, political masculinities in Pakistan and India","authors":"A. S. Zia","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2022.2090679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2090679","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the inclusion of piety politics and populist masculinities in any analysis of the governance and international relations between two South Asian rivals and nuclear neighbours; Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. It offers a comparative case-study of the redeemed Sufi masculinity of the recently deposed Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, and the ascetic Hindutva one performed by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. The study finds that the nativist, capitalist and gender discriminatory regimes of both populist leaders depend on subduing any dissenting resistance offered by subaltern masculinist and feminist politics. The conclusion finds that military-pious-heteronormative masculinity serves to stabilize patriarchy in both ‘manly states’ and underwrites regional security policies. It also points to how subversive movements are constantly challenging these hegemonic masculinities.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"181 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41776941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2049515
B. Ohm
ABSTRACT Departing from the extensive internet shutdown (2019–2021) that the Indian government imposed on the annexed state of Jammu and Kashmir, this essay traces a historical trajectory of Kashmir’s invisibilisation in India’s popular imagination. Focusing film and television serial productions from the 1960s onwards, my argument proceeds from the forming of the cinematic master narrative on Kashmir towards the forcefully aborted TV serial Kashmeer (2003). I contend that in order to understand the large public acceptance both of Kashmir’s annexation and its digital closure, we need to engage a more capacious conceptualisation of censorship that captures the variety of its political influences in everyday entertainment and its formative role for audiences. Moving beyond the official interference with imagery and story lines (through the Central Board of Film Certification, CBFB) I examine on the one hand, how the visual framing of Kashmir, and its absence, has been dependent on a structurally, ideologically and economically shifting televisual field that bore interlinked modes of vertical/state and horizontal/populist censorship as well as manipulative corporate intervention. On the other hand, in conjuncture with these conditions, I argue for a stronger consideration of the functional significance, at specific historical moments, of different formats and genres in fictitious storytelling, whose respective logics of production and consumption are themselves carriers of emancipative opening and closure.
{"title":"Aborting Kashmeer, erasing Kashmir: A trajectory of storytelling and political censorship in India","authors":"B. Ohm","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2022.2049515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2049515","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Departing from the extensive internet shutdown (2019–2021) that the Indian government imposed on the annexed state of Jammu and Kashmir, this essay traces a historical trajectory of Kashmir’s invisibilisation in India’s popular imagination. Focusing film and television serial productions from the 1960s onwards, my argument proceeds from the forming of the cinematic master narrative on Kashmir towards the forcefully aborted TV serial Kashmeer (2003). I contend that in order to understand the large public acceptance both of Kashmir’s annexation and its digital closure, we need to engage a more capacious conceptualisation of censorship that captures the variety of its political influences in everyday entertainment and its formative role for audiences. Moving beyond the official interference with imagery and story lines (through the Central Board of Film Certification, CBFB) I examine on the one hand, how the visual framing of Kashmir, and its absence, has been dependent on a structurally, ideologically and economically shifting televisual field that bore interlinked modes of vertical/state and horizontal/populist censorship as well as manipulative corporate intervention. On the other hand, in conjuncture with these conditions, I argue for a stronger consideration of the functional significance, at specific historical moments, of different formats and genres in fictitious storytelling, whose respective logics of production and consumption are themselves carriers of emancipative opening and closure.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"77 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45652603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047447
B. Menon, Ratna Tripathy
There is an air of deceptive obviousness about the idea of the ‘region’. Inheriting a sense of assurance from long established linguistic, geographical, and historical boundaries and contours, one feels secure in taking a somewhat simplistic cartographic view of the matter even as one acknowledges the overlaps and the blurring margins. But it shouldn’t take long to understand that the very use of the term ‘regional’ may imply that a researcher has probably placed himself/herself squarely at the center, taking recourse to binary contrasts through a construct such as Bollywood or some other imaginary nub or vantage point from where she surveys the cultural margins, the nooks and the by lanes. What if one reverses this view to see things from within the region aiming one’s sights at the distant cultural firmaments? This is not mere wordplay but only an instance of everyday living! The real purpose here is to underline the plurality of stances, perspectives and viewpoints that may be applied for the study of culture. The ‘regional’ thus may mean not simply a location but also a stance and a perspective to be made explicit and to be acknowledged. When you do try to locate a region physically on a map, you may often find your pointing finger hovering around a large mass of territory, peoples, settlements, and cultural milieus in their splendorous plurality, instead of hitting a bull’s eye so to speak! In the context of the new media backed by digital technology and the internet, it indeed becomes possible to seek and find a comfortable scholarly locus amidst the vast network of pathways that connect Delhi or Chennai to Assam or Kerala, Kolkata to Purulia, Mumbai to Patna and thence to the smaller towns of Chhapra and Ara. And yet, to enter the realm of the regional is to find a world that is distinctive in ways that are relatively easy to describe and characterize. The empirical comfort and concreteness of the regional lies in that it is mostly possible to physically locate the regional through maps, place names as well as people with residential addresses. Paradoxically, those who move their scholarly attention from the secure perch of the ‘centre’ to the region soon find that they are dealing with an empirical reality that seems far more concrete and tangible than constructs around mainstreams like Bollywood, Bangla cinema or the stridently sweeping ideas such as South Indian cinema. A focus on the region may also help us see the variety and pluralities within the larger monolithic constructs such as Bollywood or Tamil cinema, incrementally lending nuances to our broader generalizations and constructs. The regional also carries some subtler shades of meaning – as entities of secondary importance, as neglected or unknown locales, allowing investigations into the narrow chinks of the wider social fabric and telling tales yet untold. These unintended or overt, existential or parochial biases are indeed real hazards for a researcher wishing for a clear v
{"title":"Re-situating the Region: Media Technologies and Media Forms in India","authors":"B. Menon, Ratna Tripathy","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2022.2047447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2047447","url":null,"abstract":"There is an air of deceptive obviousness about the idea of the ‘region’. Inheriting a sense of assurance from long established linguistic, geographical, and historical boundaries and contours, one feels secure in taking a somewhat simplistic cartographic view of the matter even as one acknowledges the overlaps and the blurring margins. But it shouldn’t take long to understand that the very use of the term ‘regional’ may imply that a researcher has probably placed himself/herself squarely at the center, taking recourse to binary contrasts through a construct such as Bollywood or some other imaginary nub or vantage point from where she surveys the cultural margins, the nooks and the by lanes. What if one reverses this view to see things from within the region aiming one’s sights at the distant cultural firmaments? This is not mere wordplay but only an instance of everyday living! The real purpose here is to underline the plurality of stances, perspectives and viewpoints that may be applied for the study of culture. The ‘regional’ thus may mean not simply a location but also a stance and a perspective to be made explicit and to be acknowledged. When you do try to locate a region physically on a map, you may often find your pointing finger hovering around a large mass of territory, peoples, settlements, and cultural milieus in their splendorous plurality, instead of hitting a bull’s eye so to speak! In the context of the new media backed by digital technology and the internet, it indeed becomes possible to seek and find a comfortable scholarly locus amidst the vast network of pathways that connect Delhi or Chennai to Assam or Kerala, Kolkata to Purulia, Mumbai to Patna and thence to the smaller towns of Chhapra and Ara. And yet, to enter the realm of the regional is to find a world that is distinctive in ways that are relatively easy to describe and characterize. The empirical comfort and concreteness of the regional lies in that it is mostly possible to physically locate the regional through maps, place names as well as people with residential addresses. Paradoxically, those who move their scholarly attention from the secure perch of the ‘centre’ to the region soon find that they are dealing with an empirical reality that seems far more concrete and tangible than constructs around mainstreams like Bollywood, Bangla cinema or the stridently sweeping ideas such as South Indian cinema. A focus on the region may also help us see the variety and pluralities within the larger monolithic constructs such as Bollywood or Tamil cinema, incrementally lending nuances to our broader generalizations and constructs. The regional also carries some subtler shades of meaning – as entities of secondary importance, as neglected or unknown locales, allowing investigations into the narrow chinks of the wider social fabric and telling tales yet untold. These unintended or overt, existential or parochial biases are indeed real hazards for a researcher wishing for a clear v","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"1 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46006107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047453
V. Parthasarathi, A. Srinivas
ABSTRACT The anxieties of consolidation and concentration have been central to the study of the media business across the world. Debates on media ownership have either pointed at business models and regulatory conditions leading to market concentration or the increasing accumulation of interests by political actors in the media business. This paper delves into the simultaneity of such dynamics in India, as refracted in the business of TV distribution. Once merely a downstream segment of the visible and highly researched broadcasting segment, cable distribution has emerged as the prime commercial locus, technological driver, and regulatory site in India’s TV business. Our paper unearths the modes of expansion of leading cable distribution companies across various regions of India. We find the expansion of cable companies rested on a dual engagement with regional ecologies of distribution: first, pursuing commercial growth by capturing, rather than developing, pre-existing regional markets, and second, flexibly engaging with, rather than uniformly steamrolling, incumbent regional actors. To manage these interests, a complex network of subsidiaries, interlocking directorships, and web of employees were created. Such a business-model not only propelled the expansion of what have today become gigantic, cross-regional cable companies but also spawned their peculiar ownership structure.
{"title":"Labyrinths behind the screen: Ownership and control in TV cable distribution","authors":"V. Parthasarathi, A. Srinivas","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2022.2047453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2047453","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The anxieties of consolidation and concentration have been central to the study of the media business across the world. Debates on media ownership have either pointed at business models and regulatory conditions leading to market concentration or the increasing accumulation of interests by political actors in the media business. This paper delves into the simultaneity of such dynamics in India, as refracted in the business of TV distribution. Once merely a downstream segment of the visible and highly researched broadcasting segment, cable distribution has emerged as the prime commercial locus, technological driver, and regulatory site in India’s TV business. Our paper unearths the modes of expansion of leading cable distribution companies across various regions of India. We find the expansion of cable companies rested on a dual engagement with regional ecologies of distribution: first, pursuing commercial growth by capturing, rather than developing, pre-existing regional markets, and second, flexibly engaging with, rather than uniformly steamrolling, incumbent regional actors. To manage these interests, a complex network of subsidiaries, interlocking directorships, and web of employees were created. Such a business-model not only propelled the expansion of what have today become gigantic, cross-regional cable companies but also spawned their peculiar ownership structure.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"133 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45406268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047461
Jenson Joseph
ABSTRACT The article uses the controversy around the March 2018 cover of the conservative Malayalam magazine Grihalakshmi to reflect on the implications of the collapse of the earlier distinctions between the public and the private. Though the magazine cover comes from the field of print media, representing the values and traditions of the old media regime, I argue that it can be understood as a response to the processes through which popular practices of the internet and social media have destabilized the coherence around the notions of the public, the private and the political that we have come to take for granted. I propose that we could try to make sense of the contemporary by relying on theoretical frameworks that engage with two ongoing processes: a) new media’s popularity, and b) the post-industrial economy’s expansion into the domains previously considered as reproductive and/or unproductive.
{"title":"Mutations of the interior: The political in the new media regime","authors":"Jenson Joseph","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2022.2047461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2047461","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article uses the controversy around the March 2018 cover of the conservative Malayalam magazine Grihalakshmi to reflect on the implications of the collapse of the earlier distinctions between the public and the private. Though the magazine cover comes from the field of print media, representing the values and traditions of the old media regime, I argue that it can be understood as a response to the processes through which popular practices of the internet and social media have destabilized the coherence around the notions of the public, the private and the political that we have come to take for granted. I propose that we could try to make sense of the contemporary by relying on theoretical frameworks that engage with two ongoing processes: a) new media’s popularity, and b) the post-industrial economy’s expansion into the domains previously considered as reproductive and/or unproductive.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"119 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46589241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047459
S. Mukherjee
ABSTRACT The hypersexualized song and dance spectacles of Bombay cinema known as item numbers are hybrid ensembles that operate as standalone ‘attractions’ outside narrative and theatrical cinema to later acquire a life via the internet and live circuits. With digital as the vortex, this multimedia constellation of the item number and its loudness cartographs spaces and renders visible bodies that are increasingly affected by a powerful sensorium. This article maps the auditory afterlife of the item number based on case studies of election campaigns, low-cost media consumption, and club culture. It demonstrates the recalibration of sense-perceptions in specific socio-economic urban formations, as the item number moves through a complex matrix of sleaze, power, and labor.
{"title":"Aural Sleaze in Urban Mohalla: Loudness and the New Digital Sonotope of Item Numbers","authors":"S. Mukherjee","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2022.2047459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2047459","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The hypersexualized song and dance spectacles of Bombay cinema known as item numbers are hybrid ensembles that operate as standalone ‘attractions’ outside narrative and theatrical cinema to later acquire a life via the internet and live circuits. With digital as the vortex, this multimedia constellation of the item number and its loudness cartographs spaces and renders visible bodies that are increasingly affected by a powerful sensorium. This article maps the auditory afterlife of the item number based on case studies of election campaigns, low-cost media consumption, and club culture. It demonstrates the recalibration of sense-perceptions in specific socio-economic urban formations, as the item number moves through a complex matrix of sleaze, power, and labor.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"47 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44773965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047458
L. Subramanian
ABSTRACT The paper looks at the circulation of music in new spaces produced by technologies of recording, amplification, and transmission. It argues for the making of new categories that go beyond ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ especially in the context of southern India and the tradition that is identified as Carnatic music. It looks at Radio and televisual broadcasting to capture new listening communities and their acoustic aspirations. It argues for new radio geographies that reinforced identity of regions and their practices and gave them greater leverage in relation to the nation and national pool of resources. In contrast the television as a medium of spectacle and entertainment impacted listening experiences quite differently even as it expanded the viewership beyond the confines of the nation space.
{"title":"Classical, popular and media technologies: Staging music in new geographies in post-independence southern India","authors":"L. Subramanian","doi":"10.1080/14746689.2022.2047458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2047458","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The paper looks at the circulation of music in new spaces produced by technologies of recording, amplification, and transmission. It argues for the making of new categories that go beyond ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ especially in the context of southern India and the tradition that is identified as Carnatic music. It looks at Radio and televisual broadcasting to capture new listening communities and their acoustic aspirations. It argues for new radio geographies that reinforced identity of regions and their practices and gave them greater leverage in relation to the nation and national pool of resources. In contrast the television as a medium of spectacle and entertainment impacted listening experiences quite differently even as it expanded the viewership beyond the confines of the nation space.","PeriodicalId":35199,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Popular Culture","volume":"99 ","pages":"15 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41279213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047449
Madhuja Mukherjee
ABSTRACT This paper grows from the research conducted on the video industry located in Purulia District, West Bengal, India, namely ‘Manbhum videos’. ‘Manbhum’ signifies both place and idiom, and the videos are imagined and produced in relation as well as in opposition to its big Other(s), which include Bollywood, and reputable Bengali language cinema. Manbhum feature-lenghth videos, comprise discreet episodes, which are intercepted by songs and dances; working within popular narrative strategies and modes of address, some of these videos use unique voices, of both singers and dubbing artists, to tell the story. Such application of music and voice do not only re-present specific conditions of production, but also inform us about the ways in which the actor’s ‘body’ and ‘voice’ may be used within parallel industrial practices. Therefore, besides addressing the industrial contexts and proliferation of video industries across Global South in the era of the digital, this paper considers subjects of language, community, culture, geography, politics and the problem of Jhumur (songs) transfiguring into a so-called ‘vulgar’ form, and thereby, examines particular videos to study the characteristics of production, and the question of narration and recounting, in such intermittent videos.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047457
Koonal Duggal
ABSTRACT In 2007, the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan wore an attire similar to calendar image of tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh, and performed a ritual baptism, which became controversial. This article will show how this controversy opens up two significant issues: first, questioning the egalitarian ethos of caste equality upheld by the Sikh religion, and second, with regard to authenticity of religious practice – of what is deemed Sikh and non/un-Sikh practices. The controversy became the fulcrum for questions of visuality and material practices around imageries of Sikh gurus in the domain of popular religiosity and visual culture. This historically relates to the much-debated status of images around gurus in contemporary Punjab. The image and ritual become a crucial site of conflict with regard to questions of Sikh identity, religion and caste. Questions of iconoclasm, authenticity and representation have emerged around the images—largely audio-visual in nature--of the Sikh gurus. In this article I will analyse music video/s that engages with the genre of Sikhi (Sikh principles or faith) highlighting crisis in Sikh identity through lyrical and visual references, for instance to the institutions of popular religion, such as Deras. I then mainly argue that the DSS event cannot be grasped without understanding the modes of engagement and ritual practices around images of Sikh gurus. Such an analysis will not only underline contestations around the ‘vexed’ status of images comprising both Sikh and Dera gurus but will also critique the normative understanding of Sikh identity and religion.
摘要2007年，德拉萨查·绍达（DSS）上师拉姆·拉希姆·辛格·英桑（Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan）身着类似第十任锡克教上师戈宾德·辛格（guru Gobind Singh）日历形象的服装，进行仪式洗礼，引发争议。这篇文章将展示这场争议如何引发两个重大问题：第一，质疑锡克教所坚持的种姓平等的平等精神，第二，关于宗教实践的真实性——即被视为锡克教和非锡克教实践的真实。这场争论成为流行宗教和视觉文化领域中锡克教大师形象的视觉性和物质实践问题的支点。这在历史上与当代旁遮普邦围绕古鲁的图像地位备受争议有关。在锡克教身份、宗教和种姓问题上，形象和仪式成为冲突的关键场所。锡克教上师的图像主要是视听性质的，围绕着这些图像出现了反传统、真实性和再现性的问题。在这篇文章中，我将分析与锡克教（锡克教原则或信仰）流派相关的音乐视频，通过抒情和视觉参考，例如对德拉斯等流行宗教机构的参考，突出锡克教身份危机。然后，我主要认为，如果不了解围绕锡克教古鲁形象的参与模式和仪式实践，就无法掌握DSS事件。这样的分析不仅会强调围绕锡克教和德拉古鲁图像“棘手”地位的争论，还会批评对锡克教身份和宗教的规范理解。
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2022.2047456
Gaurav Rajkhowa
ABSTRACT Popular singer-songwriter-composer Bhupen Hazarika has exerted enormous influence in shaping the aesthetics of contemporary Assamese popular music. As an artist and public intellectual who often engaged with contemporary political questions, his songs have come to be regarded as a distilled expression of Assamese linguistic-national identity in postcolonial India. This paper deals with his entry into the Hindi music market in the mid-1990s, with songs for films and two music albums. Specifically, it maps the transformation of the Bhupen persona through this period as a conjuncture overdetermined by two relatively autonomous logics – first, the emerging cassette culture of the 1980s and its effects on the market for popular music; and second, the articulation of linguistic national identity in the wake of the Assam Movement (1979–85). The paper begins by showing how Bhupen’s foray into Hindi music tied together the economics of bringing a regional star into the Hindi market with the ongoing reconstitution of linguistic-national identity in the post-liberalisation Indian ideology. Then, through a reading of his live performances and the Bhupen-related fan literature appearing at the time, it looks at how these ventures came to be seen by his Assamese fans, to argue that the Bhupen persona here becomes an ambivalent figure through which the internal schisms within Assamese national identity came to be articulated.
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