Press Release: Ishita Tiwary’s groundbreaking book explores and examines the video revolution in India

PRESS RELEASE

Ishita Tiwary’s groundbreaking book explores and examines the video revolution in India

VIDEO CULTURE IN INDIA

The Analog Era

21 August 2024, New Delhi:

We are delighted to announce the publication of Video Culture in India: The Analog Era by Ishita Tiwary, Writer, Researcher, Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair at Concordia University, Montreal.

Published by Oxford University Press, this is one of the first books to explore India’s diverse media history of the analog video era. It lucidly reconstructs the 1980s ‘video decade’ through interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, archival resources, and discarded tapes. The book provides indispensable information on the socio-political context of video culture, which is often lost and overlooked in the existing digital media studies.

On researching the book, Ishita Tiwary reveals: ‘This book is the result of ten years of dedicated labor. At first, I was hesitant because I thought the 80s was an era of bad movies and pirated, sleazy content. While this may be partially true, I was particularly interested in knowing how people saw video as a medium of innovation—how they used it to create wedding videos, erotic thriller films, promote socio-religious ideas, and even voice resistance through video news magazines, a form unique only to India! Did you know Stardust-owned Hiba Films pioneered the straight-to-video-erotic thrillers, featuring leading actors like Urmila Matondkar, Persis Khambatta, Aditya Pancholi, Anju Mahendru, among others? It’s fascinating!’

‘My research included building an archive by tracking down videotape collectors, gathering oral histories, and piecing information from several archival resources. The book seeks to illustrate how deeply media histories intertwine with political and socio-cultural contexts, and that digging archives can be a fun and rewarding way to uncover forgotten histories’, she adds.

THE BOOK

Media plays a significant role in reshaping, restructuring, and recalibrating the existing understandings of society and politics, giving birth to new cultural forms. Video, as a medium, captures not only real-time events but also the ethos of a milieu.

Video Culture in India: The Analog Era narrates the history of video technology in India since its introduction in the 1980s, locating the moment within the country’s socio-political context. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of video technology in post-1980s India: one that speaks to its global history and context and fills the lacunae in the existing literature of the field. The monograph draws on diverse oral histories, discarded tapes, and forgotten archives to unravel the history of analog video in India.

Specifically, it looks at the widespread popularity of the marriage video, the little-known history of the video-film, the intensity associated with the video-news magazine, and the explosive imagination attached to the religious video. Analysing the multi-dimensionality of video provides the context for a better understanding of the proliferation of video culture in contemporary sites such as television news channels, digital photography, WhatsApp videos, and streaming.

As the first full-length study of analog video production and circulation in India, this book invokes the forgotten video era in India.

THE AUTHOR

Ishita Tiwary is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include video cultures, media infrastructures, migration, contraband media practices, and media aesthetics.

She has published essays in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, JumpCut, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, Culture Machine, and MARG: Journal of Indian Art, and in edited collections on the topics of media piracy, video histories, and streaming platforms.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

‘In a highly enjoyable, innovative, and insightful book, Video Culture in India, Ishita Tiwary examines the video revolution in India and the radical new possibilities it opened up. Locating the arrival of video technology within India’s sociopolitical context, the book illustrates how video recorders innovated new distribution infrastructures, new spaces of exhibition, and new media genres for Indian audiences. Blending entertaining detail with scholarly precision, Tiwary decisively shows how video was a revolution in aesthetics and grassroots media and, ultimately, a cultural force that reshaped the media landscape in India.’

—Brian Larkin, Professor of Anthropology, Co-Director, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University

‘In an era defined by digital screens and streaming video, it is easy to forget the transformative impact of analog video in postcolonial media cultures. Drawing on an impressive range of archival sources, trade materials, and interviews, Ishita Tiwary offers a compelling analysis of the cultural life of an influential but largely neglected media form in 1980s India. Imaginative and accessible, this book makes vital contributions to film and media studies.’

—Aswin Punathambekar, Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Director, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC)

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780198913221| Format: Hardback | Pages: 240 | Price: INR 1395