Event
Disruption and Persistence: Indian Entertainment Media in the Digital Era
The entry of digital streaming platforms like Netflix and the growing success of Hollywood films are characterized by Indian media producers as enabling new possibilities in terms of content, and disrupting business as usual within the media industries in India. This talk interrogates and contextualizes this narrative of change and disruption. It details the ways that mediated entertainment in India has been transformed due to digital platforms, but also how many features of the production culture have remained unchanged.
Tejaswini Ganti is Associate Professor of Anthropology and core faculty in the Program in Culture & Media at New York University. She has been conducting ethnographic research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press 2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition 2013). Her current research examines the politics of language and translation within the Bombay film world; the dubbing of Hollywood films into Hindi; the formalization and professionalization of film training through film schools in India; and a social history of Indian cinema in the U.S. She is currently writing a book, Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi: Media, Multilingualism, and Translation in Mumbai.