@inproceedings{bib_Navi_2025, AUTHOR = {Pradhuman Tiwari, Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Navigating Silence in Bangladeshi Partition Stories}, BOOKTITLE = {British Association for South Asian Studies Conference}. YEAR = {2025}}

The partition of 1947 represents a significant rupture in the history of modern South Asia. Current literary research on partition primarily focuses on Hindi and Urdu narratives from India and Pakistan. This paper aims to study the use of silence in Bangladeshi partition stories and analyze the use of various narrative tools such as ellipses, deliberate pauses, omissions, and atmospheric cues by their authors for producing this phenomenon of silence. This paper claims that the use of silence in these Bangladeshi partition stories is strategic and not accidental. It also demonstrates that this narrative silence resembles the kind of silence present in the testimonies of partition survivors. This analysis of silence is based upon close readings of The Escape (1950) by Syed Waliullah, The Exile (1987) by Hasan Azizul Huq, and Roots (1998) by Syeda Farida Rahman. These stories feature themes that are representative of the experience of general people during partition like displacement, identity, belonging, memory, psychological trauma, communal and sexual violence, etc. These short stories are written by Bangladeshi authors from diverse sexual and social backgrounds, who also wrote across different periods spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s.

@inproceedings{bib_Dise_2025, AUTHOR = {Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Disenchanted Tales from the Old Home in Qissa: A Tale of a Lonely Ghost}, BOOKTITLE = {Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in India}. YEAR = {2025}}

Disenchanted Tales from the Old Home in Qissa: A Tale of a Lonely Ghost Abstract: The temporal fixity of the event of Independence/Partition in nationalist historiography has allowed generations of Indians to imagine the Partition and the accompanying genocide as restricted to the year and event of 1947, and yet continue to repeat its violence in an attempt to complete the task of securing religious identities to their assigned national spaces. Just as the political histories of the nations created by the Partition continue to live with the spectres of its violence through repeated wars, so do citizen-subjects spawned by the new nations live in the shadows of old identities. This paper proposes that Singh’s Qissa: A Tale of a Lonely Ghost presents the viewer with the spectre of a partition that never ended. This paper shall explore the function of memory in Anup Singh’s 2013 feature Qissa: A Tale of a Lonely Ghost in producing and de-stabilizing gender, communal and familial identities, and real and imaginary histories. The paper shall look at specific stylistic choices of the film’s form to suggest that this historic cleavage the film populates with an indeterminacy of the corporal/non-corporal body, of the tentative presence of a ghost of days past, and the dead who didn’t stay buried. The site of memory here is inhabited by fluid bodies that lie between genders, in between the past, present and the future, and ultimately in between the living and the dead. Memory here serves as an imaginary history.

@inproceedings{bib_Mann_2025, AUTHOR = {Pranoy J, Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Mann ki Baat : Series of Conversations, Aesthetic Imperative or Vehicle for Propaganda?}, BOOKTITLE = {Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities}. YEAR = {2025}}

Mann ki Baat is a series of speeches made by the 14th Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi addressing the nation. Mann ki Baat holds significant sway over the Indian population as it is broadcast directly by the Prime Minister. As such, it is possible for this stream of speeches to carry hidden political intent or to act as a symbol to show that the government is in touch with the people. For this purpose, the English transcripts of 84 speeches from this series starting from October 2014 to March 2022 were analysed. For an overarching general analysis, Natural Language Processing tools were employed and later on, the speeches were juxtaposed with important events that have occurred in the country to investigate the responses as shown in Mann ki Baat. Moreover, 25 speeches were analysed individually in connection with 3 major events, each spanning a course of multiple months to validate the observations found through the employment of NLP tools and add to them. Observations have shown that Mann ki Baat does indeed carry political intent and works to better the image the people have of the Prime Minister and the ruling government, even at the cost of bending facts at times. However, it has also come to light that Mann ki Baat also works as a highly efficient means of spreading general awareness such as the instances observed during the Covid pandemic. Keywords: Mann ki Baat, NLP, Textual Analysis, Indian Politics

@inproceedings{bib_Know_2024, AUTHOR = {Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Knowing your way home: Service and Servitude in the Digital Age}, BOOKTITLE = {TFO International Seminar}. YEAR = {2024}}

Francesco Casetti recalling Andre Bazin, suggests in “The Relocation of Cinema” that the important question now, after a convergence of media systems is where, not necessarily what, is cinema. To fine tune this question, what is cinema now that it is everywhere? How and why do we recognise it such? The relocation of cinema away from public screenings to the viewership afforded by digital technologies of proliferation has reterritorialized a new form of spectatorship, allowing filmmakers to tell stories otherwise deemed too risky/risqué and attempt to re/claim a language of social and political critique. All productions circulate in and acknowledge new globalities, changed sexual and power relations of image cultures and the traction afforded to a deterritorialized screening space. However, they are bound by the exigencies of protecting and nurturing a particularly middle-class urban diasporic spectator from the vicissitudes of “too much critique.” This paper shall look at three texts from three different modes of recalling and “doing” Indian cinema in the digital age – short film Juice (Neeraj Ghaywan, 2017), limited release Is Love Enough? Sir (Rohena Gera, 2018) and top-grosser Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2024). The three films engage with a particularly Indian iteration of class and gendered labour. This paper shall read these films to understand the new freedoms and limits made possible in these films that are located in distinctly different ambits of production and circulation. It shall interrogate the ways in which these productions are recalled as cinema. Using Walter Benjamin’s distinction between Apparat (the material basis of a medium) and Medium (the way in which this material basis organizes our experiences) I shall think through how the new cultural form that is the digital medium of cinema hold old forms social organization in relations of power.

@inproceedings{bib_LSD__2024, AUTHOR = {Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {LSD and Anukul: An account of what it feels like to live in the early 21st century}, BOOKTITLE = {Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations}. YEAR = {2024}}

LSD and Anukul: An account of what it feels like to live in the early 21st century Keywords: Cinema, Digital technology, Affect Vivian Sobchack suggests in talking about post-cinema, “Insofar as the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic have each been objectively constituted as a new and discrete techno-logic, each also has been subjectively incorporated, enabling a new and discrete perceptual mode of existential and embodied presence.” That is to say, as they have mediated and represented our engagement with the world, with others, and with ourselves, photographic, cinematic, and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before each of them existed. This paper shall look at the particular articulation of this formation of a self in a digital culture of cinema and cinema-like technologies. It shall consider two films – short Anukul (Sujoy Ghosh, 2017) and Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Dibakar Banerjee, 2010) to suggest that digital technologies of cultural production create affective maps. These film and video works are expressive: in the ways that they give voice (give sounds and images) to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our society today, although it cannot be attributed to any subject in particular. The digital then in these instances, lies at the very heart of social production, circulation, and distribution. It generates subjectivity, and plays a crucial role in the valorization of capital.

@inproceedings{bib_Masc_2024, AUTHOR = {Meghna Mishra, Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Masculinities on Indian OTT: A Critical Analysis of Post Covid Netflix Originals}, BOOKTITLE = {Research Workshop on Gender, Youth, and Media}. YEAR = {2024}}

This study critically analyses portrayals of masculinity on Over The Top (OTT) platforms in India, which have seen a marked rise in viewership since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Netflix, cur- rently the largest investor in original content in India, offers a range of curated material in 31 languages. Masculinity over the years in Indian cinema, particularly the Bollywood industry, has largely been por- trayed through hegemonic notions of normativity. Through simple distinctions between good and bad, a clear contrast is set up between a hero and an anti-hero. R. W. Connell suggests a hierarchy of mas- culinities, in the middle of which lies Marginalised Masculinity. This study constructs this marginalised masculinity as working-class. We contend that at the intersection of class and socioeconomic status lies a particularly neo-liberal expression of masculinity. The Netflix original productions considered for this study exempt the working-class man from ethical obligations, in his conquest to liberate himself from his class position. Aspirational capitalism makes it okay to be ethically dubious, spawning a troubled masculinity. We use a three-step coding method to substantiate qualitative discourse analysis of Jam- tara - Sabka Number Aayega (2020, Soumendra Padhi), Class (2023, Ashim Ahluwalia), and The White Tiger (2021, Ramin Bahrani).

@inproceedings{bib_Titl_2023, AUTHOR = {Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Title: Think, Practice Thinking: Ritwik Ghatak today}, BOOKTITLE = {Conference on South Asia}. YEAR = {2023}}

Abstract: Ashish Rajadhyakshya’s recent book John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers is the latest in a recent surge in interest in the politically provocative cinema emerging from the New wave film movement in India. This paper looks at some of the ways in which the language of the cinema of the New wave, Ritwik Ghatak in particular, makes available a re-located political field in which the local idioms of revolution and protest that marked these films finds a new modality. This new relocation can be mapped, on the one hand, onto films that emerge from and speak to these cinematic traditions, and on the other, in the intellectual interest these films have generated outside of their reformist social-realist mandate. This paper considers the stakes of the filmic afterlives and re-territorialized audiences the regional cinemas of the Indian New Wave have spawned. I suggest that as the state changes the technologies of its control, these films provide a language of resistance that simultaneously evokes a shared past and animates present day strategies of resistance.

@inproceedings{bib_Folk_2023, AUTHOR = {Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Folk Horror and Angry Witches}, BOOKTITLE = {Memory, Ecology and Sustainability}. YEAR = {2023}}

Folk Horror and Angry Witches This paper looks at some recent film texts, in particular, Pari (Fairy, Prosit Roy 2018), Tumbbad (Rahi Anil Barve, Anand Gandhi 2018) and Bulbul (Nightingale, Anvita Dutta, Netflix 2020), widely regarded as folk-horror (in multiple Indian languages) critiques of gender-patriarchy and capital. A re-tooling of our understanding of film grammar maps an image of the non-human anthropo-body of excess across the three texts. This body, in keeping with genre expectations, gathers its essence in the Gothic tradition of the supernatural ephemeral human shape. I propose that this image under pressure yields the spectre of an ecological unworlding – the untenability of the human. The folk-horror provides a syntax that assumes to render intelligible radically interrupted and refashioned natural processes. I contend that the push toward this genre in the last decade results in an aesthetic mediation between a fantasy of a pre-capital world and an apocalyptic climate crisis. This recasting of folk-horror allows the Anthropocene to be recast as moral failure, not what Jean Luc Nancy calls a “civilisational catastrophe”… and “philosophic earthquake.”

@inproceedings{bib_Koma_2022, AUTHOR = {Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Komal Gandhar -- A Song and its Echo}, BOOKTITLE = {American Comparative Literature Association}. YEAR = {2022}}

Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime/E-Flat, 1961) is the second of the Partition trilogy films made by Bengali filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976). In this paper I argue that Ghatak uses music – centuries’ old traditional folk songs – to create a historical subjective consciousness in which the plot of the film can be played out. While plot progresses in time, an explicit durѐe is mapped on to the formal structuring of the film with the use of folk songs. The production of this duration, its specific grounding in a pre-modern Bengali aesthetic, and the centrality of loss, memory and performance in the plot, together posits a historical consciousness to stage the violence of a fractured relationship of citizen-subjects to their nation state. Komal Gandhar maps the possibility of a new living together in political engagement and theatre. Ghatak uses cinema’s ability to convey time as such to gesture towards a pre-modern historical consciousness. This historical consciousness can allow a new living together to materialize through political praxis. To live together again, class and community, history and myth, politics and art need to be reconstituted to allow for the recovery of past selves. Ghatak relocates the idea of citizen-subjecthood from urban nationalism to community formation. In this, he posits revolutionary politics and political theatre as the two cornerstones of an aesthetic-political praxis.

@inproceedings{bib_Ridi_2021, AUTHOR = {Sushmita Banerji}, TITLE = {Riding the white tiger calmly: Netflix in India}, BOOKTITLE = {Conference on South Asia}. YEAR = {2021}}

The relocation of cinema away from public screenings to the viewership afforded by Netflix has reterritorialized a new form of spectatorship, allowing filmmakers to tell stories otherwise deemed too risky/risqué and attempt to re/claim a language of social and political critique. All productions circulate in and acknowledge new globalities, changed sexual and power relations of image cultures and the traction afforded to a deterritorialized screening space. However, they are bound by the exigencies of protecting a particularly middle-class urban diasporic spectator from the phantom of the mobilisation of a class and nurturing a fantasy of individual mobility. This paper will look at two recent productions screened via Netflix – Sir (Rohena Gera, 2018) and The White Tiger (Ramin Bahrani, 2021) to interrogate specificities of the interpretive community created by an OTT platform in a country like India. Both texts interrogate social anatomies of desire in a class and caste based society. Yet, any oppositional gaze is necessarily bound by the conditions of distribution and reception specific to Netflix. This paper shall demonstrate that formal aspects of the aesthetics of these films simultaneously produce and preclude a critical space.