ABSTRACT

How do videos, movies and documentaries dedicated to indigenous communities transform the media landscape of South Asia? Based on extensive original research, this book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities take on radically new significances. Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia shows how in the portrayal of indigenous groups by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ imaginations of indigeneity and nation become increasingly interlinked. Indigenous groups, typically marginal to the nation, are at the same time part of mainstream polities and cultures. Drawing on perspectives from media studies and visual anthropology, this book compares and contrasts the situation in South Asia with indigeneity globally.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license. 

chapter 1|25 pages

Introduction

Screening indigeneity and nation

part I|77 pages

Vernacular popular culture

chapter 2|17 pages

Himachali indigeneity

Gaddi music VCDs and expressions of belonging

chapter 3|20 pages

‘Manbhum’ videos and their many contours

Contexts, contents, and the comic mode as a subversive form

chapter 4|24 pages

Films, flirts, and no dances

A village video night and the circulation of popular Santali VCDs among Birhor people in India

part II|66 pages

Politicising indigeneity

chapter 6|15 pages

Primitive accumulation and “primitive” subjects in postcolonial India

Tracing the myriad real and virtual lives of mediatised indigeneity activism

chapter 8|18 pages

From clanships to cyber communities

India’s Northeast in the digital age

chapter 9|21 pages

Projecting and rejecting indigeneity

‘From Bangladesh with Love’

part III|103 pages

Documenting and fictionalising indigeneity

chapter 10|23 pages

Made in India

Ethnographic films beyond visual anthropology

chapter 12|16 pages

YouTube and the rising trend of indigenous folk dance

The case of the sakela dance of the Rai in Nepal and their diaspora

chapter 13|17 pages

Identity, indigeneity, and cultural props

Portraying the Tai-Ahoms in two Assamese films based on the legend of Joymati

chapter 15|8 pages

Afterword

Meditations on media in digital times