ABSTRACT
In this chapter I offer readings of the video industry that operates across Purulia district, West Bengal, India. Popularly known as “Manbhum” videos, these feature-length videos comprise a series of short fictional episodes interspersed with often unrelated songs and dance sequences. Manbhum videos may be examined in relation to the growing number of media industries that have been developing across the Global South in the last couple of years. I argue, however, that these videos have their own specificities in the ways in which they are produced and circulated locally, contesting both Bollywood blockbusters and mainstream films of the region. I examine subjects of community, topography, speech, and culture, and underline the problems of re-presentation. By presenting an overview of their complex political history, I read Manbhum videos as a dynamic negotiation with mainstream Bengali cinema, and with a longer history of economic-cultural marginalisation. I read the “comic mode” of these videos in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) analyses of “folk humour”, “grotesque realism”, and “carnival”. I examine the subversive nature of Manbhum videos, and show how they can disturb the force of dominant industrial structures, while expressing the complexities of their own geopolitics.
