A Media Anthropology of India

Introductory Conversations           

1 Introducing A Media Anthropology of India

Preeti Raghunath and Haripriya Narasimhan            

2 Doing Media Anthropology in India: Critical Interrogations of a Historical Trajectory

Britta Ohm and William Mazzarella 

3 The Value of Surprise: Reflections from Researching the Hindi Film Industry

Tejaswini Ganti         

Visuality

4 The Representational ‘Excess’: Caste-bodies and Spectatorial Pleasure in Malayalam Cinema

Ratheesh PK  

5 Female Cinema Audiences in Early Post-Independence India

Damini Kulkarni        

6 A film audience sans filmgoing: The complex film audiencehood of women in rural India Charusmita      

Subjectivity   

7 Adivasis in Indian Cinema: Critique, Representation and Gaze

Sneha Mundari

8 Politics of Representation: Locating the adivasi subject through film (making)

Arpit Gaind    

9 Communicating Development through Desia Nata: An Ethnographic Reflection

Sourav Gupta 

10 Jugaad ethnography: context and contingency in decolonial media studies

Bridget Backhaus      

Interstitiality            

11 Changing journalism practices: An anthropological study of journalists in The Hindu newspaper

Madhavi Ravikumar  

12 Negotiating gender and change in the fish markets of Kerala, a phone at a time

Janaki Srinivasan

13 Gendered dimension of digital timepass: Notes from Peri-Urban Gandhinagar

Sayantani Saraswati

14 Navigating Fragile Narratives: Exploring the Interplay Between Present-ness and Futurity in Digital Addressable System (DAS)

Sushmita Pandit         

Digitality       

15 Mining Digital Data: The Ethnographic Way

Shriram Venkatraman and Venkata Ratnadeep Suri 

16 Platformization of Indian Journalism: A Research Agenda

Darsana Vijay

17 Communication, Social Media Practices and Selfie Sharing of Durgapuja Festival Visitors in India and Finland

Xenia Zeiler   

18 Anticasteist Killjoys: Resisting Brahmanical Patriarchy in Diasporic Digital Space

Pavithra Suresh          

Biography

Haripriya Narasimhan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad, India. Her research interests are in two areas: anthropology of the media, and medical anthropology. She has worked on projects focused on issues of caste, class, gender, kinship, globalization, and migration, in rural and urban India, and amongst the Indian diaspora. Her current research interests include digital health, social aspects of medical technologies and anthropology of aging.

Preeti Raghunath is Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the School of Sociological Studies, Politics and IR, University of Sheffield, UK. Over the last 15 years, her interdisciplinary research has focused on communication technology policies and practices, by taking a long view and centring lived experiences. Her current research on lived experiences of AI-data policies, infrastructures and practice. Preeti is the author of Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach (2020), which was a policy ethnography of media policymaking across India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Her research has been published in the International Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication, Global Media and Communication, among others. She has edited Critical Political Economy of AI: Southern Experiences (2026) and special issues on media policies in South and Southeast Asia.