The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and Visible in the Margins of Mumbai

This is a book review of The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and Visible in the Margins of Mumbai (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018)

The Spectral Duration of Malayalam Soft-porn: Disappearance, Desire, and Haunting

This paper examines the spectral nature of the genre of Malayalam soft-porn that emerged in the late 1980s but has now disappeared with rapid changes in the industry. I argue that the memory of soft-porn bleeds into the present, as if in an attempt to negotiate retroactively with the end of the celluloid era and to recoup the memory of the form that has been pronounced dead and gone by the end of 2000s. By examining the modes through which cinematic memory carries the charge of the immanent past into the contemporary moment both in terms of narrative strategies and the physical space of the cinema, I look at S.P. Theater in Trivandrum, the film Kanyaka Talkies and the installation Kuliyum Mattu Scenukalum by Priyaranjan Lal, all of which reflect the form of soft-porn as remnants of the past that haunt the present in significant ways. S.P. Theater, located in the outskirts of the city of Trivandrum, insistently maintained its status as a popular destination for soft-porn aficionados even after the form had fizzled out in the industry. On the other hand, the film Kanyaka Talkies traces the life of a fictional soft-porn theater that was converted to a Church. One of the crucial moments in the film features the installations that would later become part of Lal’s Kuliyum Mattu Scenukalum to reflect the inner contradictions in the built space of the Church/Theater. Between the fictional rendering of the soft-porn theater in the film, and its “real” variant in the form of S.P. Theater, I argue that the current cinema-scape is marked by a lingering ghostly presence of a recently deceased film form.</jats:p

Satellites of Belonging

Abstract The proliferation of Malayalam satellite television in the Gulf indicates the primacy that Indian nationals from Kerala have attained as a significant televisual demographic. In this paper I locate Malayali diasporic media formations from the late 1990s onward and examine how they contribute to the construction of the ‘Gulf-Malayali’ as a prominent vector for the satellite television industry based in the south Indian state of Kerala. The entertainment industry not only produces content for this demographic, but also works with expatriate Malayali communities on content that empowers them as creators of their own stories. In this paper I examine how stratified audience categories are targeted by satellite television programming. In interrogating the matrices through which regionality, entrepreneurship, ethics and success as migrants are woven into such programming, I track how different agents use varying strategies to showcase heterogenous migrant experiences mediated by class, caste and fluctuations of capital.</jats:p

The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela

This paper looks at the genre of soft pornography in the Malayalam-speaking south Indian state of Kerala and the precarious stardom of its female stars through a close look at the career of Shakeela, an actress who became the emblematic soft-porn star of the 1990s. It interrogates how Shakeela's outsider status and her heavyset body type foregrounded her as the locus of Malayali society's conflicted relationship with sex and desire while also creating a set of parallel film practices that challenged the hierarchies of the mainstream film industry. By 2001 more than 70 percent of the total films produced in Malayalam were soft porn, and a good number of them featured Shakeela. The mainstay of soft-porn productions was the strategic positioning of the female lead as a cultural outsider—a transient figure who is both a threat and a source of exoticized desire. Shakeela's emergence as a “liberated” woman who flaunts her sexuality despite social norms was so strong that it destabilized Kerala's hero-centric mainstream industry for a time, leading to what was popularly called Shakeela tharangam, the “wave of Shakeela.”</jats:p

Rated A

In the 1990s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema and maps the genre’s circulation among the Indian diaspora in the Middle East. She explores the soft-porn industry’s precarious labor structure, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form navigate their social lives. By surveying the tense negotiations among sexuality, import policy, and censorship, this study offers a model for understanding film genres as entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries. “A groundbreaking historical analysis that immediately joins the ranks of essential porn-studies texts.” — Peter Alilunas, author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video “A model for future film scholars. The decade-long research that went into making this book is evident in its rich historical details, insightful conversations, and multisited fieldwork.” — Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema “A formidably researched counterhistory of Indian cinema and a brilliantly synthetic work of adult-film history, Rated A dazzles with insight.” — Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s “Don’t be tempted to think you know porn if you see it. Mini’s analysis invites us to see soft-porn as a social construction that reflects the borders of sexual agency and gendered respectability.” — Vicki Mayer, author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy “This remarkable book on the Malayalam-language soft-core porn industry of Kerala arrives as a bold feminist and ‘southern’ intervention in porn studies that is bound to animate conversations across disciplines.” — Bhaskar Sarkar, author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partitio