Debashree Mukherjee will deliver a lecture on ‘Intimacies of Three Continents: Cinema and Indenture’. It will be chaired by Ravi Sundaram.

Date: Friday, January 9, 2026

Time: 4 pm

Location: CSDS Seminar Room, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054.

In 1933, Mr. S. Partap from Suva was exhilarated when he watched the silent film Anarkali. Fiji Indians were able to watch, for the first time, “a film produced in their own country.” In this talk, I track the reception, meanings, and uses of cinema in the plantation societies of India’s “old diaspora.” Based on ongoing archival research in Mauritius, South Africa, and Fiji, I follow some marginalized itineraries of cinematic pleasure and politics in post-indenture landscapes. These audiences comprise Indian cinema’s earliest diasporic spectators. They also allow us to approach early cinema through multiple lenses: as a space of fantasy and mobility, of political contestation, and for visibilizing infrastructural networks of labor migration.

Debashree Mukherjee teaches film and media studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and is co-director of the Center for Comparative Media. Author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), Debashree is currently working on a second book project, Tropical Machines, which develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation modernity.

Ravi Sundaram is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.