Khadija Amedha (2:50)

hi everyone. Welcome to the New Books Network podcast. My name is Khadija Amedha and I'm your host for the day. Today I have with me two guests, Thirumal P. And Karmil Christie, K.J. i'm here to discuss their work featured in the edited volume Inhabiting Technological Media and Cultural Practices in South Asia, co edited with Nuayman Ka, published by Orion Black Swan, India. The book explores the independent existence of media from a post colonial perspective perspective examining their own lives, histories and afterlives. Thirumal P. Is a Senior professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, India. Welcome to nbn. Professor Dhirumal, Congratulations on the release of Inhabiting Technologies, Modernities. The edited volume brings together debates across media and cultural practices in South Asia, moving beyond linear and dominant frameworks. How would you like to introduce the volume to our listeners?

Thirumal P. (3:53)

Thanks Khadija, for having me at your podcast. You're doing a great job and congratulations. Let me give you a background for the, let's say, the motive to have this collaborative volume. I was teaching a course on history of media for a period of time. It began as a course on the history of newspapers, gradually extended to the history of modern Indian languages, print technologies, book histories, further meandering into medieval manuscript and looking at the fluorescence of the Bhakti movement's millennial literary cultures, including the making of the ancient Sanskrit Cosmopolis, its material and let's say, its ideological composition. I was trying to connect the works of Sheldon Kullock and this what he used to call his India Knowledge project, which included many collaborators. Then you had another set of scholars like Stuart Blackburn, Wasdad Almiya and others who are basically literary and cultural historians working in the early modern and in the colonial modern period, along with, you know, people who are writing on films like SV Srinivas, Ashish Radhyaksha and several other cultural studies scholar scholars. These scholars, I mean across different temporal epochs, were working with different materials and using diverse theoretical frameworks. But beneath this incommensurable projects, I sensed perhaps foolishly I don't know a possibility of bringing these different intellectual inquiries into conversation. What became obvious to me was a productive tension that existed between the modern Indian mass mediated culture and a particular manifestation of an ancient Indian Hindi past. That is, if you want to study the modern media, there is a way of connecting this to. To an Indic past. To an ancient Indic past. I realized I did not have a reference book to teach a course on racing this productive tension between Indian and what I later on called in elsewhere as Indic media. I used to borrow material from literary and cultural historians to teach this course. I realized that these scholars not only worked on media history. For instance, many of them worked on book history, but also problematized the three important categories, namely history, media and India. Many departments of communication and journalism. I think what even today teaching course based on history of press written by important journalists during the 50s primarily and these are primarily about the nationalist struggle in the English language. These materials were responding to the emergence of the nation state and wanted to bequeath the new nation state with an essentialist sense of history, Media and India, where the narrative would run as how the nationalists defeated the British through the use of modern institutions and practices including the running of newspapers and its ecosystem, namely telegraphy, photography, railways, steamships and so on. The book seeks to make available formulations about media, history, India or Indic that are open ended, uncontestatory in character. Rather than retain a hypostatized notion of history, media or technology. And opens it up both spatially. That is if you look at this essays. The Essays are of 20th, 19th century, 20th century. They belong to even post colonial India and also pre colonial India. So in that sense it opens up both spatially and temporally. In a way it speaks with and against the post colonial scholarship desire to restrict media histories to the colonial period and to argue for breaks. That is what the post colonial scholarship does, but tends to remain silent on continuities. It also takes on post colonial formulations by attending to the tense region specific pre colonial histories which seem to have a certain resource for the colonial media. This seems to be our loose framework. I take this opportunity to thank all the contributors including Professor Arjuna Padre who wrote the foreword of the book and my co editor Naya Maha.

Khadija Amedha (9:00)

Thank you for walking us through these initial ideas that led to the writing of the book. Before we go into the details, could you also walk us through some of the chapters discussed in the book? One central argument across the chapters seems to focus on perceptions of media and especially from the Global South. Can you elaborate on that?

Thirumal P. (9:21)

Because of the wide range of materials, methods, theoretical frameworks that are used by the contributors in terms of the kinds of media from films to broadcast to print, representational genres, from cartoon to news to other kind of genres to different time periods. I would want to believe that the volume lacks coherence, but that seems to be its both strength and weaknesses. I would like to invoke Wittgenstein's concept, what he called as forms of life. Forms of life. Scholars have interpreted this concept in two different ways. One refers to a unique universal human form and other refers to a specific civilizational historical cultural identity or practices. The collections in the volume move from a universal idea of doing media history to reading the inner complexities within the given civilizational culture that is across different, across temporal depth. It involves historical understanding of media technology that is within each historical equation and spatial view of history and the political civilizational form known as India. In that sense, it lacks a consistent theme period of framework. Media appears as an event, as a thing and sometimes as a process, as do history and political institutional forms. I'll briefly talk about three chapters, namely Amelia's work on telegraphy, Amulya's and my work on digital archives and Pangam Vipin on the controversial policy of Mita script. I chose these chapters because Amelia is using the perspective global historical, global history to understand the globalization process that was set in 19th century. And that emphasis is not merely imperialism or capitalism, but the. The intersection of technology, namely telegraphy and the cultural institutions of newspaper, which actually constitutes globalization in. In a certain way. Amulya and myself look at the way Dalit media activists were mobilizing digital archives articulate emancipatory movement very much against a solid indological archive that the national is used in the. In the. During the nationalist period. Bipin is interested in the state making process that happens through the contestation or script reforms. If you look at what. How script reforms are done in. I'll be talking about all this in a slightly longer way, in a slightly longer manner. But if you look at the script reform that happens in mainland India, the script reforms happens in mainland India, script reforms. And you know, the dictionaries are written, the scripts were standardized. They happen before the linguistic reorganization, whereas in the Northeast it is still happening. So it's a very. In the state making process. Actually, I would want to believe that Vipin is talking about the state making process that is happening in the northeast. And as you know, Manipur is a very controversial place in today's political landscape. Now, coming back to Amelia's work. Now this is the demand made by global historians that the intersection between telegraphy and journalism of the 19th century globally Network both telegraphy and journalism. Amelia focuses on movements of cultural and technological transition in Indian journalism. Her chapter undermines the predominant colonial and nationalist narratives of technological revolution. She argued that in addition to geopolitical and commercial considerations, global flows of news were also shaped by the rationale of the network. Thus, although London was a center for telecommunication during this period, the telegraph could facilitate the transformation of geographic peripheries into information centers and vice versa. Now this, this doesn't happen prior to telegraphy. That's a very important what do you call assertion of the globalization thesis that happens in the 19th century. During the past decades, in particular, an important body of scholarship which is. Which is set out to investigate the connection between news agencies, imperialism and globalization. And such work is part of a broader intent to recast the history the press and journalism as media history and has been strongly infused with the concerns of global historians to investigate connections and interactions beyond the traditional framework of the nation state, which has held particular appeal for many historians of the press in India. Now, these recent developments in media history and the global history of telecommunication so is also in some ways writing the telecommunication. Global telecommunication history provides a perfect momentum to examine and hear the history of Press in 19th century. Bonier's chapter belongs to a new genus of research which attempts to recast the history of the press and journalism as media history, an approach that has been strongly infused with the concerns of global historians who investigate connections and interactions beyond the traditional framework of the nation state and which has held particular appeal for many historians of the press in India.

Khadija Amedha (15:29)

Thank you so much for walking us through the different ways of writing media history and what media in itself can be. In the foreword to the book, Arjun Appadurai mentions that one of its significant contributions is to show that the decolonial without the pre colonial is incomplete. There are many examples illustrating this just like how you have mentioned now be it in the discussions of the digital archive, telegraphy or Muslim print cultures. How would you share this to our listeners?

Thirumal P. (16:04)

Before I I, I respond to this question, I would like to go to the previous question on the on the issue of the global south and I I thought I'll just, I'll just spend a minute, a minute or two.

Khadija Amedha (16:16)

Yes, please do, please do. We are so excited to know more about it.

Thirumal P. (16:21)

So inhabiting technologies, the title of the paper, title of the book maybe or should be replaced by a More democratic phrase, like inhabiting modernities, the singular modernity. And this argument has been made by many postcolonial scholars. But just to get the flavor of what is the global South. Here, the singular modernity connotes a historical derivation usually associated with the European Enlightenment, and indexes a particular way of thinking about and arriving at history. Such a deferred time, what, you know, historian Dipesh Chakrabarti calls as a waiting time of history calls it. Others have to wait for the time to arrive at history. Such a deferred time constitutes one axis of writing the history of South Asia and writing the media history of India. Among the several set of variables that constitute modernity, technologies of communication are considered the desired data for becoming and claiming history. In this narrative, history succeeds arrival of media. It is media that makes possible, that is in the narrative that we are providing. It is media that makes possible history and therefore knowledge. In a similar vein, media is expected to display its properties and functions everywhere as they were designed, designated in its place of origin, that is Europe. The fact that the same media technology can manifest different properties in a very cultural and civilizational context is missing in this framework of diffusion of technology, which is very. Even today we teach our students diffusion of technology. Technology, the entity and being of technology were conflated in the construction of modernity, history and the diffusion of media technology. And that's my bit on that Global South. Now coming to this question that you just mentioned about post colonial scholars have contributed greatly to media studies cultural studies in the last two to three decades. Somewhere cultural studies seem to invoke an undifferentiated popular to address the representational culture of cinema or television, mostly pre digital cinema or television. Now this kind of disciplinary report generally is used that indie culture is forever permeable and that nothing is essential and historically unassumable. That is everything that is indic culture is forever porous. I mean, that's the assertion in these cultural studies. Most scholarly work on modern India media rests on these assumptions of a non essential indic culture that is porous and forever changing. We would like to believe that the primary assumption of Indian cultural studies scholarship is to seek and understand historical intentionality within the space of inscribed history. Rarely it works with the supposition that there may be historically indeterminate structures of existence and traditional modes of being that crisscross the historically constituted every day. In other words, what I'm trying to argue is in the daily working of, let us say, a Brahmin family, they seem to cut into the capitalist temporality by. By performing Pujas or performing certain kind of rituals, certain practices. They seem to. These practices are ahistorical practices in that sense. And we were wondering. And these ahistorical practices, they interrupt appropriate and disappropriate the historically constituted everyday existence of modern institutions like newspaper organizations in colonial India. If you know that the Hindu newspaper they have only a vegetarian candy in their. In their. Whatever. I mean in their office. I mean that's what I was told. However, it is possible to suggest one of the several pre histories of modern media may be located and this I examined elsewhere. What I call is a erratic past of the Brahmanic Indic variety. In this kind of reading, the invocation of antiquity. You know, Partha Chatterjee calls something like there's something inner domain and outer domain. And even our Siddika Kabiraj uses the idea of antiquity, the nationalist discovered antiquity in order to provide anchor to the what. What you would call as an anchorless present. Now if one way to look at the temporality of the outer domain, of the inner domain, or what Sidha Kaviraj is talking about the inner the antiquity. It looks as if the distinction between inner domain and outer domain and also antiquity is not merely to connect itself with the rudderless contingent present, but also to renew its trist with the distance generating power of the erratic past. It's a complicated formulation. I may not be able to spell it out in great detail, but for now I think.

Khadija Amedha (22:27)

I think it's always fascinating how technology itself sort of embodies the different milieu's of the everyday life realities that we all live in. Yeah. Now moving ahead, I wanted to know more about, you know, the kind of shift that you are mentioning within fields like communication, dance and theater. Whereas other fields regarding South Asia like cultural studies and literary studies have kind of moved forward. I would like to know the nuances of teaching disciplines like this.

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Thirumal P. (24:28)

After three months, plan auto renews and $12.99 a month terms apply. The the problem with communication studies as well as with the dance and the performative. I think theater there has been a certain amount of theoretical, but not really great the performative traditions. It looks as if we don't have a strong research tradition. We have not. Artistry has a very strong research tradition, but not these disciplines. Since we don't have a strong research tradition, we are not able to provide any critical engagement either with the present or with the past. There is an impoverished theoretical environment when it comes to communication departments, media departments. No critical thinking is available as part of the pedagogy or as part of the research agenda. And that seemed to have. It's partly also because these disciplines, for instance communication, even if you look at what's happening in the private universities, they, they are, they, they are places of what can be called as vocational programs. I mean they, they, they, they are not designed as research programs. And that seemed to have. And they've always been like that. So. And dance could have a certain cultural component as well because the, if you, if you look at Kalakshetra, a lot of work has been done and how they have in some ways not being progressive in the way they thought about the pedagogy or about the research design. I mean that in short would be my take on that.

Khadija Amedha (26:33)

Thank you so much for that. Also I think from the performative theoretical traditions that we now talk, maybe now we can go more into the textual history of media that is being discussed in the book. One of the fascinating element was the conversation with critical indology, especially through the work of Sheldon Pollock. If Pollock sees the decline of Sanskrit and its commentorial traditions around the time of Vijayanagara Empire as a kind of intellectual rupture. How should we actually understand the early modern and 19th century periods? Did new media like print and the colonial encounter transform which Hindu texts were privileged? Also, does this mark a real break in intellectual history in itself, or can we understand that as a shift in medium as such? I'm sorry, this is a long question.

Thirumal P. (27:31)

Yeah, yeah, I. Let me see how I can engage with a question. Why? There seems to be a lot of scholarly work that suggests a very serious reordering of knowledge in the 19th century, which most postcolonial scholars have done. There's not been much focus on what may have been the vernacular forms of knowledge from the 16th to the 19th century. For instance, Shazal Pollock student Whitney Cox, the philologist, made this interesting observation on premodern theoretical contributions. He said India provides a center of gravity for a discussion. But this is important. We understand India to be a plural, polyglot, heterogeneous social and semiotic space, one that is defined by the interaction of its constraint part instead of as embodying any particular cultural essence. It's a very interesting statement. What it's simply saying is prior to the 16th century or after the 19th century, cultural forms, whether they're textual forms or performative forms, or they seem to possess a certain indic essence, as it were, but the 16th century says there is no particular essence that he can find in those indological texts. That's the point he's making now. Such a large logic would question the circuitous way in which certain Hindu texts like the Gita and Manusmithi would question Gita. The Manusmiti Dharma became so central to the unifying impulse in 19th century British India. What San is saying is San Pakar, he's saying is that it was a British who actually provided these kinds of texts and they said these constitute the essence of India. And that is how the nationalists took it up from the British and they made it the central text. The colonial officials and missionaries retrieved these texts and the nationalist thinkers like Aurobindo, Hilak and Gandhi had to produce a modern commentary about their cultural and ethical efficacy. Ambedkar went so far as to burn the Manusmithi. So in this three way interaction of colonial Indology, national is the pro qu creation, sabal resistance and condemnation each fed into the other, discouraging any efforts towards a longer view of history. Sutton approach forecloses the possibility of a richer interpretation of the immediate vernacular past that seems to have Been more variegated. So the vernacular past what what what is suggested the vernacular past seems to be more more variegated in its choice of religious texts, nuanced hermeneutics, opulent production of manuscripts and literary and performative cultures that were more likely to be working against the Greeks and fitig and Vedic tradition. There is this JNU artistry professor Naman Ahuja his excellent book on what he calls as ISHQ between language art and craft. I think something he Sundays of the 14th and 15th century Graphic art and and the rise of certain, certain languages in North India he's tying up to together and it's a very what do you call a rich way of Talking about the 14th century which seems to have kind of dissipated itself by the 19th century. That kind of a rich prolific kind of cultural expression. Now the in the Kannada Sai white folklore this period is referred to as one that saw the movement of religious and secular learning from the temple to the streets via iterant jengama mendicants who do not appear to seek patronage and powerful kings. Such a religious disposition allowed the offering of moral and spiritual education to the masses. Now these early colonial public places of learning and worship were known as Shale Gudi school and temple in Canada. Perhaps this was what I mean had Gay Longwood had in mind which he called it Big Ampura as a place of anti caste thinking. To your question did this mark a real break in intellectual history? I mean there are two positions on this. I, I, I, I would want to believe that for instance some somebody like Srilika Kavira who called the the 15th century 16 what do you call the Bhakti movement is a period of cognitive revolution. Now many people have not really what do you call endorse this view? In fact there is, there is Chris Minowski who argues that the Brahmins were exemplars of anti caste thinking and the Brahmins were also exemplars of of very orthodoxy. So it is, it is, it is a period where we do not know how to or there's a very mixed feeling about the cognitive shifts that was that was that was taking place. And this shifting could have been triggered by the manuscript culture of the 14th 15th century or the manuscript culture itself. And the scribal proliferation of the scribal cast itself could have been triggered by the political the regional qualities that were coming at that place. So it's a much more complex layering. I'm not sure if it could be reduced as a shift in medium and there's a Shift in intellectual history.

Khadija Amedha (33:53)

Maybe we can say that it is more like rather thinking through the layers of specific mediums and kind of make them come together in conversation as such. And now going ahead with our next question. The impact narratives of media often assume a universal model of history and technology where non Western cultural specificities are treated as theoretically marginal. If these narratives depend on separating life from knowledge, value from fact, and the sensible from the intelligible, how might literary sources, especially from non Western context, help us rethink media history by holding the intelligible and the sensible together?

Thirumal P. (34:42)

It's a very nice. What do you call. A very challenging question. Actually, in the introduction we are proposing a formulation that may appear to be premised on what can be called as a process metaphysics. Without going into what what that means. We are interested in understanding the how technologies can become, how human beings can become the growth of human being. Growth of what kind of environment require technology requires a particular environment to grow. Human beings require a particular environment. And there is a certain kind of relationship between the. The. The the for technology to become and for humans to become. And you kind of read that into different civilizations and different different cultures. And that's one of the moves that we are making here. But let me, let me. What do you call. Refer to what the book in, in what the introduction is saying? We are proposing a formulation that may appear to be premised on process metaphysics. How civilizations, cultures, technologies, academic disciplines are available to a continuous process of becoming an emergent tradition. It's not fully formulated in the. In the introduction, but I would think that there is a possibility of formulating that that theoretical framework. What is what I'm calling as emergent tradition based on a process metaphysics? An emergent tradition presupposes a departure from the impact narrative approach and a cultural history approach. It may be construed as an opening into the ways in which disciplines construct an object of knowledge and enable a rethinking of the discursive and non discursive practices that surround the staging and academic judgments of that object. Following the thread of an emergent tradition is to ask questions such as what sort of life is congealed in a colonial newspaper retreat from a dusty state archive? The desire of the lower caste to be free to think and act autonomously against the colonial master and the upper caste national Zelly was rarely coded in emergent journalistic discursive tradition. Such questions compel us to look at the constituent elements of media technologies, their many incarnations, multifaceted characteristics and unpredictable work in a given society. The point that I and I'm trying to emphasize, or we are trying to emphasize is it is not always possible for human beings to comprehend the varieties of uses that technology has potentiality for. So there is an open endedness of technology that we want to emphasize. Such questions compel us to look at the constituent elements of media technologies that many incarnations, multifaceted characteristics and unpredictable work in a given society. In other words, this approach tries to capture media technologies as ontological, existential matter with their own life, substance and afterlife, rather than as merely epistemological entities designed to represent and impact human life. The question that we are asking about technology is do we have. Do human beings or do indic. Indic civilization have a free and indeterminate relationship with technology? That's a larger question and this is not foregrounded in the book, but I think that's a larger question that these. This. These statements are making. My previous collaborative work was on Mizoram. I used a micro history approach. The method was pioneered by the great Italian historian Pablo Ginsberg. My guess is that something called historical memory among the non literate lower caste communities is colonial in origin. But there may be exceptions to these assertions. Ambedkar was conflicting mythology to history and thereby reducing some mythical characters and events to historical actors and historical events. Non literate communities become literate only through access to literacy and political struggles at some level. This volume is an attempt to aspire for a mode of writing that challenges majoritarian norms. By stringing together the sensible and the intelligible dimensions of the experience and destabilizing settled meanings. It gestures at alternative social solidarities and becoming of the masses as well. Yeah, I think I. I would leave it at that.

Khadija Amedha (40:06)

Yeah. Thank you so much. I think I really need to think through a lot when I'm using concept and when I'm using terms like media or technology conceptually, I guess. Now, going ahead with our next question, if we think of the Brahmanic compartment as a kind of pre theoretical orientation of an elite cultural community, one in which the world is already meaningful and recognizable, how do we understand its role in the early colonial period, particularly when it comes to the layered meanings that technology in itself carry?

Thirumal P. (40:48)

Elsewhere, I have suggested that Brahmanic comportment is not about one particular disposition. It's a range of orientations or directedness that the cultural elite have displayed towards technologies in general and media technologies in particular. And I was also suggesting that that range of orientations may. May start from being disruptive to being creative or undee restorative. Now if you look at the way the print has been treated by the Sanskritic elites, I mean they were exposed to print around 12th century, 13th century itself because of the, the Chinese travelers they carried the wooden types, the Tibetans had wooden types. So they knew about printing press at some level. So but even when it came via the Portuguese they're not fully into it for quite some time because they were worried about what kind of texts that are going to be religious text should not be available to everybody. It is a problem. Literacy was not supposed to be available to everybody. It was a problem. So the democratizing impulse of the machines was an issue for them. But you know they, by 19th century they, they've mid 19th century they think it's all right because by 19th century they had monopolized the press and they had also monopolized the. What do you call the representational artifacts. That's the texts which. The largest number of texts in my own understanding. For instance I worked on the Mysore, the Kannada Archives, the Kannada publishing history from 1818-17 or 1816. The first Kannada journal comes in one of those basal mission missionaries, you know, they bring out a periodical, the first published work. And till 1983 we have looked at the kinds of materials that was published in Kannada and interestingly we find the largest number of what do you call material that was published in. In a range of domains like history, science, you know, literature, etc. It was on religion that it continuously even in post colonial India the number of publications produced in Kannada on religion is still the highest. So there is a way that they seem to have, they seem to have come to terms with the printing press. Now irrespective of whether it's a deficient or positive response to technology, the logic and temporality of a spectrum of orientations and this is the point which I, I develop elsewhere. The spectrum of oriented are shaped by the invocation of a deep time and an erratic past. So they go back to a certain Vedic past and they seem to draw their. What do you call that, that aura as it. As the dis. Generating power as it is aura is nothing but disinterest from this erratic past. I think that would kind of tell you what the Romanic comportment means and how they seem to work with a range of orientations towards technology.

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Khadija Amedha (46:23)

thank you so much for explaining that to us. Now I guess going to a more contemporary question that the book is undertaking, which is on digital humanities. When digital humanities scholars speak of networked being, does this idea of entanglement between media, technology and life help us think across historical and cultural boundaries as well? And what would it mean to organize media history around these narratives?

Thirumal P. (46:58)

One of the ways of problematizing, you know, questions, you know, from a pre digital to a digital, what do you call era is to not necessarily bring a division between what I would see as the disciplines of technology, of humanities. I mean, now technology has to go with history, technology has to go with literature. Technology studies are there in almost every discipline. We are trying to bring in technology studies now in some ways suggesting that it's, it's very difficult to for us to understand human sciences without the intervention of technology. Now I think this is for me, a person who is over the last several years who have been reading on technology studies seems to be a somewhat superfluous question. It's, it's, it's superfluous in the sense that if one were to argue that human beings have always been engaged with technical practices or technology as to be human is also to be. What do you call, I don't know how to phrase it but basically trying to suggest that technology constitute humans and human constitutes technology. If that is the kind of formulation, if you have, then for the last. And if you look at the French school of thinking on this, from leroy grand to Stigler and Simondin and others for the last 50 years, it looks as if there has always been a certain way of understanding technology, not as technology is embodied in that. I mean, technology has always been embodied and the arrival of the human is also the arrival of the technique. If one were to make that kind of, if one were to make that kind of a formulation, then this network being has been. We have the, the moment we are being humans. We've always been networked. So in that sense, I'm thinking this idea of network being is at some level a superfluous one. But today it's obvious. I mean, it's very obvious. But earlier on it could be a flint. It could be, could be. It could be writing, it could be something else. I mean, we've always been technical in some ways or other. Without technical, the, the most latur also would tell you we, we socialized with things more than we socialize with people. So this network being, if, if that is much, if that is the way that we are looking at technology as artifacts, just artifacts, and not about the digital world, not particularly what is the world. We have been network beings for a very, very long time. What would it mean to organize media history around this trans, historical, transcultural perspective of if. And I'm assuming you're talking about Brahmanic comportment here, or you are assuming that is the network being as somebody who is today, because the digital world. I'm sorry, I think this is what you're, you're assuming in the digital world we are networked. So in the digital world, the meaning of artifacts, the meaning of which again goes back to what I was, what I was trying to make this point in an earlier discussion in the, in an earlier question that you were asking that there is something called a unique human form and there is something called a particular human form, which is about a particular civilization, etc. Now if I were to argue that big data belongs to this unique human form, whereas the. There are particulars of this unique human form and those particulars would look for anthropological data. That's why you do videographies, does autoethnography. Now people working with big data would, would look at this, what Wittenstein calls a life form, that is human being as a unique form, unique biological entity, or in that sense very different from Other, other species. Now I, I, I would want to believe that this big data, and let us say the auto ethnography, which is a small, which is a case study or individual day embodied kind of data that we generate in research these two entities, I mean if, if are, are how to, how to relate to, how to relate big data to anthropology is a very interesting question. And, and because the theoretical framework of anthropology is very different. So this writing, a media history based on universal media history and, and a very particular media history, or let's say the micro history as I, as I mentioned, are certain kinds of incommensurable incommensurabilities that I think we need to talk of and in a unified sense. But having the role particulars. It's a difficult question that you're asking me, but media history has to work with incommensurable variables, incommensurable theoretical models, and that is where its richness would be. I mean that's my, what do you call reflection on what are these very difficult questions of yours?

Khadija Amedha (53:53)

Yeah, I think this is a fantastic way to bring our conversation for the day together, which is to understand technology and its multiple meanings without any divisions or binaries as such. More like a diffusion in itself. Once again, thank you so much, Thirumal, for joining us here on the New Books Network podcast. And as a final question for the day, if I may ask, what are your future projects?

Thirumal P. (54:22)

No, as I was mentioning, this book is actually a product of my teaching and it, it's a partial realization of what I want to do. I, there could be, you know, you, we could, we could write books, you know, the, at the level of Sheldon Pollock, you know, there's so much of work that we could do, we could do at the level of literary and colonial cultural history along with Stuart Blackburn and others, or with SV Cheney and others. What I'm saying is it's, it, this book is a, is a, is a, it's a partial realization of a much larger project, should I say, and I'm not very sure because it requires a lot of collaborative effort, but I, I will keep doing my own bit of work. I would be happy if I can bring out some, two or three volumes on technology studies and, and historical and historical studies in, in the near future. I mean it's, it's not very clear to me, but there is something that, that is missing in the way we teach media history in departments. And I would think that gap can be filled by having more of technological studies component in media history courses that technology studies component is not very strong as of now. That's my understanding.

Khadija Amedha (56:16)

Thank you once again, Thirumal, for this enriching conversation. Now we have here with us Carmel Christie, KJ who has contributed a key chapter to the edited volume. Carmel is assistant Teaching professor at the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Syracuse University, New York. Thank you, Professor Karmal, for joining us today at the NBN podcast. I really enjoyed reading your book chapter, especially how it sort of brings together urban studies and media studies in such a compelling way to begin, could you tell us, our listeners, a bit about yourself and what drew you to take on a project at this intersection?

Karmil Christie (56:58)

Thank you, Khadija. Thank you for inviting me to your podcast and thank you for your kind words. I'm glad to know that you read the chapter and found it interesting So I grew up in Kochi and it is the space I attach myself to as formative of my being, even when I have gathered several homely belongings so far. So, you know, so it's kind of mixed with my, you know, effective ways of attaching myself to a place and my interest in scholarly commitment to understand this city better that led me to think about Kochi as a physical space and imagined space. So for instance, my memories of working to school school and around the neighborhood as a young girl in the 90s includes several cinema shooting locations in and around Girinagar, Panampuli Nagar and Kadavandra. So when I finished my first major work on caste and gender in Malayalam EDI in 2017, I wanted to work on Kochi, about its possibilities, its beauty, its water bodies, dispositions, entanglements and people. And I also did not want it want to limit it to an analysis of its growth and failures. But I kind of wanted this study to capture that space for its material affective being, along with the many disenchantments and dispositions. And since my first work, which I mentioned earlier, I have already been thinking about material spaces as an evolution of my previous work and previous work on public space and media. And I had already done a little bit of work on this by this time, especially by analyzing the life writings of CK Janu, who led this land rights struggle for a very long time in the 90s, and the life writings of Salina Prakanam as well. So all this work kind of guided me to think more about material spaces. And I also realized the significance of geography and space spatiality in everything I was looking at. And that's how I started thinking about bringing together cinema and spatiality together. So of course As a media studies scholar, I was trained to look at cinema a little bit. And of course, as I mentioned, I bring an avid cinema movie watcher. It also kind of helped to think through it and associate all my memories to what I was trying to analyze. But the difficult part was to bring urban studies and media studies together, because I had to train myself in urban studies to look at maps, to create maps and so on. So that was the difficult exercise. But I did find some interesting works by some scholars who have done, you know, cinematic geographies from. From, say, London, and also some scholars who looked at cinema as a space of modernity and so on. So all these were useful for me to think through and kind of bring both these disciplines, urban studies and media studies, together.

Khadija Amedha (60:57)

Thank you for sharing this journey with us. I really liked how you bring in the effective attachments we all have to our hometowns, to something vivid like cinema. Now, moving ahead to the chapter, in the chapter, you explore the effective relationship, just as you have mentioned right now, between city spaces and cinematic experiences. How would you introduce the idea of the city as a continuum, particularly in relation to cinema?

Karmil Christie (61:29)

So to do this, I definitely build on the existing scholarship on cities, you know, from earlier times. Scholars like Michel de Soto and several others illustrate that human relationship with places is a combination of the physical and as well as imagined ideological or affective belongings. And when I think about it, my own experience, each part of Kochi makes me feel differently. For instance, the way I feel about metropolitan Kochi is often a mix of opportunities and struggles I experienced. Sometimes it's the shame of living in a part of the city where displaced people from the shores lead and being identified as such in different contexts. But at the same time, living in the heart of the city made it possible for me to take part in the cultural events and institutions, such as, you know, the public library, Rotary clubs and so on, and all of which were very, very important in my development as a, you know, as a person. And when I think about my trips to my mother's ancestral home off the coast of the city, in the islands, and we have to take a boat to get there. So all those journeys gave me a different sense of nature and place. We had more space to run around, unlike the confined colony in which we lived in the city. And we could catch fish or pluck mangoes as much as we liked. So I began sensing the city spaces as multiple, especially in Kochi, where even geography is crucial in its structuring and distribution of people. And as we know, there is this longer history of how the current natural port in Cochin was shaped in the 14th century after a major flood erupted in this region. Because till then the port was not here, it was about 30 miles north to the current port. So it was this development of the port itself was a result of geographical happenings. And even today, when we look at the mainland, the islands, the slightly inland parts of the sea city, the geography is so different. So are people, so are culture cultures in these distinct sports. So. So for me, this experience and observing and learning with the tools I have gathered over a period of time, arriving at this idea of Kochi as a continuum in in terms of place, that is material place and imagined space, was a combination of my affective belonging in this place as well as my scholarly investment to expand the understanding of the city from multiple levels. And as I said, me coming of age and the growth of cinema based in Kochi was happening simultaneously in the 90s and later. As a scholar, I understood the dynamics through which each of these places were reproduced in such cinema, tapping into the deep rooted ideological associations with those spaces. And so that's how, through this, you know, combination of making sense of the spaces that I know and then when you see them on the screen and what do they actually who are the people who inhabit those spaces? How do they live in those spaces? What are the ideological and aesthetic tools through which they are reproduced in cinema? So it is this distinct geographies and distinct continuities that I tried to explore in paper, where I kind of, kind of show that both the city as well as cinema keep extending each other, keep extending the imaginations and materiality of each other one way or the other. So it is through this process of building on each other that I kind of started exploring and illustrating this idea of city as a continuum, especially through the ISO Cinema.

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Khadija Amedha (67:42)

thank you so much for this fantastic response. I was also particularly struck by your discussion of Kochi and the way its urban transformation is reflected in Malayalam cinema. You identify three distinct historical zones within the city. Regarding this could you walk us through these zones that you explain and how do they connect to shifts in filmmaking practices and narratives in Malayalam cinema?

Karmil Christie (68:12)

Oh, this is the most exciting part of the paper for me. I mean, I remember working through it, it was like, you know, it took me a while, but that process was really interesting for me to arrive at these three distinct zones and make these arguments that I'm making in the paper. So in the initial part of the paper, I show that Kochi was portrayed as a generic city space in the context of Kerala till the late 1980s. Most places that make it to the screen till then are structural landmarks of the city, such as Subhash park and the earlier forms of Marin Drive or the Kuchi Lake. And I argue that the technological framing, including the camera and editing during this time, create an effect of a tourist visiting these sites rather than inhabiting these spaces. For instance, if we watch movies such as Shyama Teshada, Nikoli, Karela, we'll see these very fast paced song sequences where they dance around these city landmarks and so on. But the flip side of this was these are characters who visited the space for a brief time and then they go back to their, you know, probably villages or elsewhere. So they are not necessarily Kochiites, but these are characters who come here and then they go back to their life, or some of these characters die in the city. So therefore the inhabitants, people from Kochi, were not necessarily part of the frames or the plot. I argue that this kind of changes in the 1990s with so many economic shifts, including the liberalization policies and structural development, such as the establishment of a new international airport in Kochi by the mid-1990s, you would find many more spaces beyond the usual sports and appearing in cinema since then, be it parts of Fort Koche or housing colonies in the metropolitan area in movies such as Inharihar Nagar or several other movies of this time. By analyzing movies such as Chapa Kurisham in Hariharnagar, Chota Mumbai, Anayam, Rasoolam and Dani, I show that cinematic spaces recreate a continuum in reproducing recurring notions around city geographies and communities. While metropolitan spaces are associated with such a full male protagonist without explicit religious or caste identities. Of course, in Indian context, always read it as upper caste Hindu. So these are the characters you would find in movies such as Hariharnagar or Chapa Kurisha as protagonists. While Fort Kochi and the islands of the city are clearly marked by Christian or Muslim religious identities of the protagonists in movies such as Big B, Unnamed Rasulam or Chota Mumbai. These three parts with distinct historical and development trajectories are conceived and presented using technologies of cinematography, screenplay and editing to align with the social reproduction of these spaces as marked through religion, caste and gender. I'll give an example from the film Unnamed Rasulam. In my paper I discussed the effective layers of board journeys created through the myths of cinematography and music as giving a sense of the different yet connected geographies of Kochi and Vai Pin as the mainland and the island. So the site where the story happens in the movie are named Resulam, where Anna's houses, it's mostly viping islands. And there are these scenes in which she travels along with other islanders to the city for work and so on. Yet the vibrancy of the visuals and the narrative is cut across by the silence of the woman protagonist Anna, who is marked as a Latin Catholic woman. Through several such examples from the movie, from this movie and others, I show that the cinematic space of Coche is very much produced and received at the intersections of economies of technologies as well as ideologies of religion, caste and gender. So these are the kind of three distinct zones. I also use some maths in a in a longer paper that I developed from this article to show these three distinct zones in relation to these movies, how they kind of come about in these cinematic cinematic narratives. So it is in some ways, as I said, connected to the affective technologies. But as well as how these places are in popular narrative marked through a certain idea of communities and geographies, I

Khadija Amedha (73:57)

must also add that it was Anim Rasolom that sort of opened the world of Kuchi for me. I have always longed to take those boat rides the protagonist take and did it when I visited the city for the first time in 2019 for Kochi Biennale, which we are also going to talk about now. With the Kochi Muzris Biennial becoming increasingly significant on the global art map, how do you see Kochi as an ongoing city which is constantly in the making? And what does this cultural moment tell us about the cities evolving identity as such?

Karmil Christie (74:34)

Yeah, yeah. It's so exciting that this Kochi Muziri's Bian Alle has been happening in the city since 2012. And it's so interesting to see how popular it has become in the city. And you know, it's kind of bringing global art for co chairs to see. It's an immense opportunity to expand, you know, one's, one's artscapes, one's imaginative scapes in a big vein. And I think another exciting thing is that this usually the Kochi Miseries Bhinn Alle has been from mid December or early December to March. And December is a very joyful and colorful month in Fort Coochie and Kutchee in general. In Fort Kutchee you have the carnival during the New year at that time and so on. So the Bain Alle coincides with, you know, this festive time. So it really feels like there is a lot coming together. Cultural, local, cultural expressions. Coming together with global expressions is a great thing. And as I said, I noticed that the Kuchi Muzris Bayana has somehow managed to keep it accessible for people, several other binaries in the world. It's not the same. The crowd probably is not the same. So in that sense it's kind of, kind of taking from the place, a lot of inspiration from that place, but it's also kind of keeping people inspired and engaged with this art. So in that sense I really see it as an opportunity for both the artist as well as Kuchiyds to engage with each other and to, you know, act more art and enjoy more art in that sense. So truly city becomes an imaginary continuum in this sense with this exposure to art for people. And also a lot of people visit Kochi during the Bhinnalay time. As you said, you yourself went there during the Bain Ali time. So it's an immense opportunity for people to like, you know, meets with a lot of people, which is what the spirit of Kochi is all about. As we know, Kochi, this region has a very long history of exchanges with people, travelers, traders from historical times. So I see it as an extension of that kind of exchanges that has been Happening forever. And something that some scholars, art scholars have noted about Cochin Bainale is about its naming. It's very interesting that they have Muzris in the name. So as we know, Muzris was this ancient port which is believed to have existed in history. So they say that probably it is the port that existed before the natural port in Cochin came about in the 14th century. So they have brought that name back as a very popular name with the, with the Bain Alle. So I think that's also an interesting kind of proposition to add this name and keep it relevant and popular. So in this sense, I feel that this event both symbolically and materially expands the geographical limits of what we know as the city of Kuchi today. So yeah, so I see it as an immense cultural moment where there are lots of possibilities. But as a scholar who is also invested in urban studies, this also makes me think about how we address questions of sustainability for the city in general and also with such global events becoming, taking shape in the city. So that's a conversation I feel like we haven't really had or we are still not taking with the seriousness it deserves. So as a city surrounded by water and the whole world is in this moment of climate crisis, climate change, so I think we still need to think through the best way for us to think about the city as inhabitable and sustainable for everyone. Effy.

Khadija Amedha (80:11)

Yeah, it's like connecting all the historical dots together through the process of art making within a city itself. Thank you so much Carmel, for joining us here and sharing about your work with us. As the last question for the day, if I may ask, what projects are you currently, currently working on?

Karmil Christie (80:35)

So this article was part of my

Khadija Amedha (80:39)

book project on Kochi.

Karmil Christie (80:41)

So this book project is my current major engagement. So I write about Kochi from different vantage points. So cinema is one, one of the sites from which I analyze Kochi. Then I look at the seashores development, the environmental questions that the city faces and how communities are navigating these changes. All of it is part of the project. So one of the things I'm trying to kind of present in this work is to think about spaces as very spaces, full spaces, spaces embodied spaces as agential and dynamic. So how it is to think about Kochi as a dynamic space in terms of its aesthetics, but at the same time also through several layers of relations of power and so on. So I need to complete this book this summer. So that's taking up my time. Apart from that, I have also been working, working on embodied life of caste and gender in Indian campuses, so that's that work is mostly done, so I'm looking forward to seeing that in print soon.