Sarai-CSDS

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 India 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.

https://sarai.net/events/intimacies-of-three-continents-cinema-and-indenture-a-lecture-by-debashree-mukherjee/

Sarai is delighted to launch an online repository of its Distributed Research Network’. This repository collates information on various fellowships that Sarai has hosted over the years, including primary fellowship materials and holdings. Since 2000 onwards Sarai has supported Independent Fellowships, Student Stipendships, City as Studio fellows, FLOSS fellowships, Residencies, Social and Digital Media Fellowships, and Capture All Fellows . These together have formed part of Sarai’s distributed research network. It has nurtured a community of independent scholars, researchers, practitioners, and activists by fostering interdisciplinary contexts for critical practice and thought. This model of distributed research has yielded critical books, articles, graphic novels, art installations, performances, and software programmes. Over 400 individuals and collectives have been supported by the Sarai distributed research model over the last two decades. This rich history goes back to the fluid network architecture of the early internet before the emergence of media platforms. The release of the ‘Distributed Research Network’ repository on the website is meant to map, manifest and reactivate the rich legacy of this research model.

https://sarai.net/distributed-research/

The Listening Academy Delhi
December 9 - 14, 2024

Organised and facilitated by Brandon LaBelle, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and Suvani Suri in collaboration with Sarai-CSDS

In this Listening Academy, we’ll open a creative and critical framework for focusing on listening as a form of “writing” – where listening is positioned as a shared gesture towards authoring the world. Through critical discussions, lectures and creative explorations, the Academy will inquire into pronounced forms of listening, including reflecting upon “critical listening positionalities” and in what ways listening wields an effect on cultural identity, mediatic environments, social history, political struggle, and their significations.

Additionally, we’re interested to follow the trails of listening into the grey zones of meaning, framing listening itself as what connects us to the unnamable.

Furthermore, we’ll delve into the spectral and phantasmatic qualities of sound, listening toward sonic edges as a way to tune into the limits of existing structures and atmospheres , from daily environments and homes to larger social, political arrangements. Readings, prompts and dialogues will also delve into the relational fields of mediatisation of sound and the formation, destabilisation, dissolution or restructuring of listening publics and collective movements. The attempt is to reflect on and arrive at collaborative vocabularies and articulations of listening that are unique to one’s own practices and inquiries. This will translate to fictioning individual and collective worlds, situations and paradigms envisioning or enhearing new forms of connection.

Application details: https://sarai.net/events/call-for-participation-the-listening-academy-delhi/

Tomorrow is the last date to apply!

Modulating Realities: Networks of Sonic Thinking
14-15 December, 2023, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi

Symposium Registration Open
Link: https://forms.gle/hAmfv8TfikoD1MEJA

This symposium foregrounds and critically examines the multiplicity of sites and forms of sonic practice and thought that emerge from contemporary conditions in India, South Asia and Australia.

The two-day programme Modulating Realities takes off from the existing project Capture All: A Sonic Investigation– a collaboration between Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, and Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Modulating Realities in Delhi continues the focus on questions of situatedness and relationality that lie at the heart of sound and listening. Through a collection of artistic, experimental and research practices that are working through the complexities of the aural and mediatic environments, Modulating Realities attempts to lay out and propose a potential scaffolding of what it means to think with and by means of sound in the contemporary, and not merely ‘about’ it.

What are the ways in which an auditory turn affects and constitutes relational practices, positionalities and protocols today? How does the sensorium of sound lend itself to actively probing and unsettling systems and structures of control, capture and extraction? Can a reorientation towards the language of listening inaugurate a new vocabulary and imagination of networked and associative futures? To respond to some of these questions and concerns exploring the realm of sound thinking, the sessions will bring together thinkers and practitioners from across artistic disciplines, sound, film and media studies, artistic research, anthropology, literature, philosophy, cultural and aesthetic theory.

The public open event on the evening of December 14 will feature CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)– the artist collective that runs pad.ma and phantas.ma.

This programme is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Last date to register: December 7

https://sarai.net/events/modulating-realities/

Modulating Realities: Networks of Sonic Thinking This symposium foregrounds and critically examines the multiplicity of sites and forms of sonic practice and thought that emerge from contemporary conditions.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Date of workshop: 21 - 23 March, 2024
Venue: Sarai-CSDS
Call for Papers deadline: 10 December 2023

In the last two decades, digital media infrastructures have spread worldwide, including the global South. Mediatisation has emerged as a material field that drives circulation, sharing, and modification, generating intense rhythms of political engagement and action. The workshop is interested in this junction, where the combinations of sensory media infrastructures overlap with political metamorphoses.

Call for Papers: Twenty-First Century Media? Affective Bodies, Crowds and Collectives In the last two decades, digital media infrastructures have spread worldwide, including the global South. Despite inequalities of access, low-cost mobile devices and cheaper broadband have connected…

Join us for a lecture by Francis Cody on ‘Law at Large: The News Event in Public Mediations of Community’. It will be chaired by Ravi Sundaram.

Date and Time: Friday, 28 July 2023, 4.30 pm
Location: Seminar Room and Zoom
Link: https://bit.ly/43dFv6t

ZOOM ID: 88461683987 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi

https://sarai.net/events/the-news-event-in-public-mediations-of-community-lecture-by-francis-cody/

Law at Large: The News Event in Public Mediations of Community - Lecture by Francis Cody Francis Cody will deliver a lecture on ‘Law at Large: The News Event in Public Mediations of Community’. It will be chaired by Ravi Sundaram. Friday, 28 July 2023, 4.30 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom…

Sarai-CSDS, New Delhi, in partnership with Liquid Architecture, Melbourne is thrilled to have received one of six inaugural Maitri Cultural Partnership Grants, from the newly instituted Centre for Australia-India Relations.

Capture All is a multiyear collaboration, initiated in 2021, between Sarai-CSDS and Liquid Architecture, featuring artists, scholars, and writers based in India and Australia contributing to a series of critical intensives and dialogues, public programs and publications.

In 2024, Sarai and Liquid Architecture (LA) will co-host a symposium and exhibition at the Collingwood Yards arts precinct in Melbourne exploring the creative potentials and affective states of new technologies in sound and media.

Led by Suvani Suri (Sarai) and Laura McLean (LA), the program will bring together Australian and Indian artists, arts workers, and researchers to address situated ways of listening, and Indigenous and diasporic experiences contextual to the Asia-Pacific, creating grounds from which to visualise and audibilise entangled fraternities, histories, and futures together.

Sarai-CSDS, Liquid Architecture (Australia) Maitri Grant: 2023-24 Sarai-CSDS with Liquid Architecture, Melbourne has received a Maitri Cultural Partnership Grant, from the newly instituted Centre for Australia-India Relations.

We are happy to announce that the enrolment for 'Data Relations Summer School' is now open.

Data Relations Summer School' is a series of experimental workshops, discussions, performances and talks, with an emphasis on pedagogy and the sharing of ideas.

Dates: 16–20 February 2023

Enrolments Close: Monday 30 January 2023, 5pm
Read more and apply via the ACCA website:

https://acca.melbourne/data-relations-summer-school/

Data Relations Summer School is curated by ACCA in collaboration with RMIT Research Fellow Joel Stern and presented with the support of The Ian Potter Foundation, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S), RMIT School of Media and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australian Research Council (ARC), Capture All with Liquid Architecture x Sarai, ACMI and UNSW Sydney.

We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 13. no. 1.

The new issue of Bioscope has a special section on Media in the Pandemic. Pallavi Paul considers the media form of viral analysis, and different types of information-gathering and speculation that challenge the authority of medical expertise; Anirban Baishya looks at drone use during lockdown and the death-ravaged summer of 2021; Kuhu Tanvir explores the affective forms of the Zoom funeral; and Laleen Jayamanne captures the post-pandemic potentialities of Zoom in networks of political reflection on performative and disappeared bodies. Our main article section is devoted to Media Technologies and Publics. Isabel Huacuja Alonso develops a rich account of Radio Ceylon's popular film song hit parade, Binaca Geetmala, analysing publicity practices based on measurement of record sales and a focus on listener voting that parallels the emergence of electoral democracy in 1950s India. Sagorika Singha situates the popularity of Reality TV in Northeast India in advances in telecommunications and the importance of listener voting by landline and mobile telephony. Spandan Bhattacharya, analysing the Bedeni (woman snake-charmer) genre of 1980s Bengali cinema, and other "new" popular genres explores the industrial, legal, and technological contexts of their emergence, including the importance of video as technology and aesthetic. Finally, as we move through the 50th year of Bangladesh's independence, Srideep Mukherjee draws on Tanvir Mokammel's Chitra Nadir Pare (1999) to reflect on the tragic force of an ethno-religious nationalism that originated with the Partition in 1947, and continues to challenge the Bangladeshi nation today. And there are book reviews by Alastair Phillips on Priya Jaikumar's Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space, and Arpana Awwal on Harisur Rahman's Consuming Cultural Hegemony: Bollywood in Bangladesh.

Link: https://sarai.net/bioscope-volume-13-issue-1-june-2022/

We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 12. no. 1-2.

The Keywords Issue marks 10 years of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. We first conceived of this special issue in 2018 when we were nearing our 10th anniversary. At the time, the editorial group sought a celebratory stock-taking – a means of noting the dynamism of the field of screen studies from and about South Asia – and signalling emerging directions for the future. A lot has happened since 2018. Most dramatically, we are living through a global pandemic with devastating and differential impacts across South Asia. Stark inequalities within this region have tragically come to the fore, as have the geopolitics of vaccine patents, aid infrastructures and news reportage that exacerbate and consolidate the difference between the West and the rest. The current moment underscores the necessity to view the field of intellectual production itself with a diachronic and spatially comparative lens, one that is attuned to the past constructions of a place and its media and the ongoing ramifications of these constructions.

At its most polemical, the ambition of this issue is to confront the geopolitics of knowledge production and disciplinary norms. A keywords approach allows us to ask what some of the central epistemes currently at play in film and media studies are. Each keyword in this collection aims to present concise accounts of core themes and debates, thereby illustrating the conceptual underpinnings upon which the field has been built. As such, the issue serves to highlight important areas of media scholarship pertaining to South Asia and serves as a ready reference for those unfamiliar with this thriving field of study.

https://sarai.net/bioscope-volume-12-issue-1-2-june-december-2021/