Shadow Lines: Tracing the Cinematic Legacies of the 1940s Indian Left Cultural Movement

ConTrust Research seminar „India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia“

With Manishita Dass

My talk explores some of the methodological challenges and insights that I have encountered and gained, respectively, while working on Left Luggage, my book-in-progress about the cinematic legacies of the vibrant left cultural movement spearheaded in the 1940s by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India. How did my notion of “cinematic legacy” and approach to tracing it change in the course of doing archival research for this book? How do we map the subterranean ecology of intermedial, political, and affective networks, routes, and intersections through which the creative energies, utopian impulses, and political contradictions of the IPTA movement travelled into Bombay’s commercially oriented Hindi cinema and Calcutta’s film culture in the 1950s-early 1960s? How do we excavate the structures of feeling and unrealized possibilities of a transitional moment in film and cultural history?

A Reader in Film & Global Media at Royal Holloway, University of London, Manishita Dass is the author of Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Cloud-Capped Star (BFI Film Classics Series, Bloomsbury, 2020). Her research explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics, questions of modernity and cosmopolitanism, and intersections of film, visual, literary, performance, and leftist political cultures in South Asia through intermedial history, formal analysis, and a transregional lens.

For further information: Click here…