We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 14. no. 1.
The contributions to BioScope 14.1 place Indian cinema in the field of moral, reformist and democratic ideals, suggesting an enduring hold of a notion of the political on film journalism, spectatorship and star phenomenon. Ambili Anna Markose’s article charts the exceptional career of K.J. Yesudas, the iconic singer of mainstream Malayali films, which signifies the limits of minority discourses whereby embodied practices become the active domain of identity articulation and subjectivity. Harshit Nigam’s star study traces Khanna’s stardom from his rise against the backdrop of prime minister Indira Gandhi’s socialist rhetoric in the late 1960s, to his own political ambitions as a Congress member of parliament in the early 1990s. Nigam finds a (Mahatma) Gandhian prototype embedded in Khanna’s on-screen performances, which offered an ‘alternate’ masculinity by associating moral power with femininity. Meenatchi Saverimuttu offers a critical analysis of the film Bigil (Whistle, 2019, Attlee), a ‘sports film’ about a women’s football team, by positioning it within the broader context of Tamil ‘mass’ film and its disconcerting representation of masculinity. The last article, Where Adab Meets Film retrieves early Urdu film journals from historiographical neglect and obscurity. Here Sarah Niazi turns to the patchy archives of Urdu film periodicals to revisit the Hindi–Urdu language debate of the 1930s and 1940s and finds the vernacular film press importing themes on ethics and morality from the Urdu public sphere. The fieldwork section features a meditative essay by Supriya Chaudhuri on derelict and abandoned spaces in Naeem Mohaiemen’s Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown, 2020). Book reviews by Julian Ross (Asian Video Cultures), Shikha Jhingan (Dancing Women) and Mathangi Krishnamurthy (Ishtyle) conclude the issue.
Editorial