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Browsing by Author "Suresh, Adith K."

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Amitabh Bachchan’s revived star text in Bollywood cinema
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Monti, Gloria; Shingler, Martin
The Indian popular film industry, known internationally as Bollywood, is home to big superstars who embody active masculine corporealities that define their larger-than-life star identities onscreen. Here, stars live in the realm of imagination, where their star text is constructed, historicized, and reproduced for a long time, thus extending the image of the star to multiple contexts that signify different aspects of stardom. The transformations a star has to undergo are crucial in deciding their fate. A star’s identity that was established in a particular era is often threatened when circumstances change. In order to survive in a new era, stars adopt new vehicles to renegotiate themselves by either abandoning their past glory or carrying a different version of it to the present. Among the many Indian superstars, Amitabh Bachchan can be identified as a classic example of a surviving star. With a career that spans more than five decades and two hundred movies, Amitabh Bachchan is considered one of the greatest actors in Indian cinema and a popular cultural icon. Famously endowed with titles such as “Star of the Millennium,” “Big B,” and “One-Man Industry,” Bachchan’s exceptional celebrity status as an actor, a producer, and a former politician in India is unparalleled, even expanding its impact to global levels and becoming a recognizable cinematic identity from the Asian diaspora. From the 1970s–1980s golden era that established him as the Indian “Angry Young Man” superstar persona to the short and failed political career surrounded by controversies and allegations of corruption, Bachchan’s on- and offscreen performances have been an important subject for both public debates and critical discourses. After a semiretirement from acting, Bachchan revived his career in the 2000s, when he started to appear in films that reflect the identity of an “aging star.”
The angry young man strikes: an exploration into Lindsay Anderson’s political satires
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Kitchen, Will
Provides new scholarly interpretations of films by British director Lindsay Anderson New interdisciplinary research on Lindsay Anderson Fresh interpretations of neglected texts using contemporary critical themes Contains international contributions from both established and emerging academics Following the centenary of Lindsay Anderson’s birth (1923-94), this edited collection of original essays re-examines the work of one of British cinema’s most iconoclastic and challenging directors. Building upon existing scholarship and authorial frameworks, the chapters included engage with a range of highly contemporary interpretive themes and approaches, including regionalism, reception, trauma, queer theory, genre, collaboration and gender representation. Addressing a number of methods and key themes which have arisen in the years following Anderson’s death, ReFocus: The Films of Lindsay Anderson offers a diverse exploration of his screen work from a contemporary critical perspective. The chapters provide fresh insights into some of the most significant texts in the history of British cinema, including films, concepts and creative relationships that have shaped modern screen culture.
Aversion and othering: the discourse of food disgust and subalternity in Indian cinema
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Roy, Pinaki
Food plays a significant role in the cultural integration and rejection of identities. It is because the notion of food and its associated signifiers contribute to the very structural framing of public discourses in relation to the power dynamics that define social status. Food choices and eating are related to socio-cultural contexts, environment, economy, and political power (McMichael). The symbolism of food in arts and literature has been so profound in many forms and they are often used to contextualise the violence, discrimination, inequality, racial prejudices, and excommunication of certain categories of people and their histories of resistance, cultural communications, and social inclusion (Ojwang 68). Food can be viewed as a unique and powerful "semiotic device" that provides meaning to those who consume them (Appadurai 494). The cultural and political character of food shapes the public identity of a class in a hierarchical social order. Food studies are often integrated with cultural studies to examine how food as a metanarrative gives information about individual subjects and their positions in the world around us (Ashley, Hollows, Jones, and Taylor).
Between the borders of life and art: Roman Polanski’s transgressive negotiations
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
Roman Polanski’s films are noted for their subversive psychological style that explores themes of sexuality, desire, alienation, and violence. His narratives often reflect a dark sense of humour through which the director perceives the absurdity of the human condition in relation to his own cultural dislocations and artistic eccentricity. This article investigates how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Roman Polanski as a filmmaker. It specifically explores how the polysemy of transgression structures Polanski as an artist whose real and cinematic negotiations are often intertwined. Through the constant subversion of moral, cultural, and social discourses, his visual style and narrative ideology maintain a notorious affinity that disturbs the notion of reality and manipulates it with new narrative texts. It is the idea of transgression that changes the way Polanski’s auteur status is perceived, appreciated, and rejected for his actions and creations in the past and their repercussions in the present. Polanski’s works use historical, social, and personal realities to renegotiate his transgressive image in real life by incorporating his contested victim status and persecuted selfhood in narratives that manipulate both the past and present.
Beyond the boundaries of jump scare: OTT platforms and the discourse of elevated horror
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Petridis, Sotiris
The way horror films attract audiences from all over the world reflects a universality tethered to the genre’s structural identity that depends on transgressive acts that produce fear. Horror fans are audiences whose existence is defined by this affinity to explore the realm of fear and the thrilling experience derived from it. But what really satisfies a horror fan? Is it the occasional viewing of narratives that offer repetitive “out of the blue” jump scares or the experiments that try to portray new formats of horror? In the present time, it is not only the structural changes but the medium of distribution that affects the viewing experience of horror. In the 21st century, one can find horror films that do not follow the typical jump-scare methodology to evoke fear getting more attention than those that adhere to it. (Changes in the media environment and global entertainment industry have led to such productions receiving more recognition and appreciation on an international level. An emerging context where perspectives and stories from non-Western worlds gain visibility has both challenged and redefined the attitude of horror in general. The most observable aspect of this is arguably the deconstruction of the emotion of fear. Questions related to what constitutes fear and what contributes to its construction are essential to a more critical definition of horror, and more crucially they add insights into the renegotiations that surround its redefinitions. Subgenres like techno-horror, ecohorror, and body horror have found new relevance in the changing social, cultural, and political scenarios, and their significance is more pronounced in terms of the psychological effect they produce. Real-life conflicts associated with technological expansion, ecological degradation, global disasters, and violence related to gender, race, and religion are traumatizing enough to nourish fear, and horror based on such tears affects the mental health of characters. Some critics define the 2010s as the decade of “grief horror,”' where the portrayal of psychological degradation through narratives that emphasize loss and grief contextualizes a new mode of elevated horror cinema that focuses on evaluating imminent threats of suffering that do not merely come from the external but, on the contrary, are part of the psyche of the subject who suffers.- Films like The Babadook (2014), It Tollows (2014), The Witch (2013), Mother! (2017), Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and The Lighthouse (2019) are noted for their treatment of subjects different from the conventional Western notions of horror. Such films often experiment with the genre of psychological horror and can be cited as examples of the “revival of horror” with a new ideology of horror that goes deep into discussions about topics rather than just scaring the spectator with momentary cheap thrills.
Bodies that need queering: the queer hetero-topias in Malayalam cinema
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
This edited volume offers a comprehensive understanding of the queer space in tandem with the transforming socio-cultural-political relationships in a country that exhibits diversified shades of ideologies and history – that is, India. The featured essays deal with the presence of queerness in visual media, particularly in films and the digital arena, from multilingual and multicultural perspectives, thus creating an exhaustive discourse encompassing argument and analysis. This book aims to depict the plurality and complexity of the Indian scenario, fostering mass acceptance of queerness, a rare scholastic endeavour.
Bollywood self-fashioning: Indian popular culture and representations of girlhood in 1970s Indian cinema
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
This article investigates how Bollywood cinema represented girlhood experiences in India in the early 1970s. It argues that the films during this time focused on representing girls who displayed a variety of new fashion styles and attitudes, some of which were borrowed from western cultures. This was a sign that there was a new way of representing girls which broke with the submissive, dull and melancholic sari-wearing Indian female stereotype entrapped within domestic settings. The immediate result of this was the emergence of new style leaders and popular icons in Indian popular cinema. This study uses Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Guy Mankowski’s idea of self-design to examine how Indian girlhood was renegotiated in the 1970s as an individual-centric idea with more agency and power. Here, self-fashioning refers to the way girls adopt new elements of fashion, styles and attitudes to distinguish their identity from earlier archetypal modes of representation in film and culture. It specifically analyses the emergence of Jaya Bhaduri in Guddi (1971) and Dimple Kapadia in Bobby (1973) as case studies to understand the transformation of girlhood representations in early 1970s Bollywood that opened a new space for girls to redefine their selfhood through the assimilation of consumerism, western culture and fashion styles.
Conceptualizing people’s cinema: John Abraham, Agraharathil Kazhuthai (1977), and the indie cinema of South India
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Sarkar, Jayjit; Sarkar, Anik
Malayalam filmmaker John Abraham (1937–1987) is often ranked among the greatest experimental independent filmmakers in India. His films are not only significant for discussions involving the social, cultural, political, and philosophical problems they deal with but also for the very process of filmmaking involved in their creative evolution. Abraham’s involvement in the formation of Odessa Collective—a people’s film movement for independent film productions based on public intervention and funding—made him one of the passionate proponents and forefathers of independent cinema in India. This chapter examines the crucial role of John Abraham in the development of experiential independent filmmaking in India by analysing one of his magnum opuses, the National Award-winning film Agraharathil Kazhuthai (1977) (trans. Donkey in the Brahmin Village), noted for its bold criticism of orthodox social institutions of caste, class, and subalternity that resulted in its banning and exclusion from mainstream discussions. This chapter investigates how this film became a precursor to John’s rise as a radical figure in the realm of parallel cinema in India, especially its role as a controversial work of independent art that pioneered a “new wave” movement in South Indian cinema. After winning the National Award for Best Tamil Feature Film, Agraharathil Kazhuthai reinforced the filmmaker’s quest for making authentic independent films by abandoning all possible elements of commercial mainstream cinema and developing the notion of ideal independent cinema through collective participation.
Constructing a universal star: the intersection of cine-politics and comradery capital in Kamal Haasan’s cinema
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Lam, Celia; Raphael-Luu, Jackie
This chapter examines the multifaceted persona of Kamal Haasan, exploring his evolution from a regional icon to a transnational star, through the lens of comradery capital. It analyses how Haasan shaped his star image within his Tamil Nadu fan base, where fans, communities, and fellow actors affectionately call him Ulaka Nayakan (Universal Star) as a sign of respect and comradery. This chapter argues that Haasan’s construction of his popular image denotes his versatility that appeals to a diverse audience, enhanced by his roles as actor, director, producer, and political figure. His unconventional cinematic endeavours have not only challenged traditional societal norms but also contributed to the commodification of his celebrity status, transforming him into a modern auteur.
Cultural monsters in Indian cinema: the politics of adaptation, transformation and disfigurement
(2022) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
In India, a popular trope is adapting cultural myths and religious iconographies into visceral images of the monster in literary and visual representations. Cinematic representations of the Indian monster are modelled on existing folklore narratives and religious tales where the idea of the monster emerges from cultural imagination and superstitions of the land. Since it rationalizes several underlying archetypes in which gods are worshipped in their monstrous identities and disposition, the trope of the monster is used in cinema to indicate the transformation from an ordinary human figure to a monstrous human Other. This paper examines cinematic adaptations of monster figures in Malayalam cinema, the South Indian film industry of Kerala. The cultural practice of religious rituals that worship monstrous gods is part of the collective imagination of the land of Kerala through which films represent fearsome images of transformed humans. This article argues that cultural monsters are human subjects that take inspiration from mythical monster stories to perform in a terrifying way. Their monstrous disposition is a persona that is both a powerful revelation of repressed desires and a manifestation of the resistance against certain cultural fears associated with them. The analysis of several Malayalam films, such as Kaliyattam (1997) Manichithrathazhu (1993) and Ananthabhadram (2005), reveals how film performance adapts mythological narrative elements to create new cultural intertexts of human monsters that are psychotically nuanced and cinematically excessive.
Diaspora dilemmas and deadlocks: the Indian immigration flux and struggled survival in Canada
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Rajan, S. Irudaya
The diverse and complex experiences of the Indian diaspora in Canada are defined by a range of social, political, and cultural parameters. This chapter examines how the recent dramatic increase in the rate of Indian immigration to Canada has intensified challenges related to identity crises, acculturation, discrimination, and racism. It argues that the concept of Indianness unites culturally distinct sub-groups to shape the diasporic community’s existence. Pro-immigration policies often serve political agendas, influenced by Eurocentric biases. The reality of Indian life in Canada restructures transnational Indianness and diasporic existence, and the discourse of immigration plays a significant role in the construction of popular beliefs, which are often misconceptions based on falsehood.
Diasporic nostalgia in Indian cinema
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
The notion of home is often romanticized using the discourse of nostalgic sentimentalism, and narratives that glorify the cultural distinctiveness of regions get highlighted in visual media. The desire to revisit the homeland through imagination is a prominent theme in Indian cinema, which is unique in its stylistic narrative approaches to capture the syncretism of the Indian diaspora. This study analyses Bollywood cinema to understand how it propagates the cultural text of India through nostalgia. The global reception of Indian film stars like Shah Rukh Khan—who, for example, has been cited as the embodiment of the Bollywood romantic hero—invoked a diasporic emotional appeal toward India through blockbuster films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Since Indians are known for their ubiquitous presence all around the world, their stories interact with distinct cultural elements, ideological positions, and contradictory customs associated with the lands they live in. This chapter argues that diasporic nostalgia is not always about the desire to return to a homeland or the revival of an idealized cultural past. Nostalgia promulgates a discourse of cultural integration through which subjects negotiate their contemporary modern identities with historical, cultural, and ritualistic elements of the homeland. The emergence of Shah Rukh Khan in the 1990s Bollywood cinema can be observed as an icon of the new cosmopolitan hero whose existence shows how nostalgia is used as a tool to bring back conservative cultural values, nationalist sentiments, family dynamics, and individual freedom to a globalized arena of India’s post-neoliberal times.
Digital populisms and gender justice: the attack on female activists in cyberspace
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Kotaman, Asli; Şener, Gülüm
Focusing on various regions, this collection highlights a rich diversity of feminist activism. The ways feminist movements work, the tools they use, and the outcomes they achieve vary with local dynamics and cultural contexts. In Pakistan, digital activists resist gender-based violence through social media, while in Mexico, protests against femicide resonate globally through digital platforms. In Turkey, feminist video activism builds collective memory, and in Poland, women organize online against abortion bans. This diversity showcases the adaptability, creative strategies, and evolution of feminist movements as they navigate opportunities in the digital age. Feminist activism expresses itself in different voices and methods of resistance across regions, yet all these variations underline a global unity in the fight for equality. This collection demonstrates the expansive, dynamic nature of feminist movements worldwide and examines how local and global struggles intersect.
Disruptive desires and creative transgressions in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Hodge, Matthew; Barkman, Adam; Sanna, Antonio
Julie Taymor’s career as a stage director, filmmaker, and costume designer has demonstrated the many possibilities of artistic adaptations that visualize characters, situations, emotions, and reality as a whole in new ways. Her works deconstruct classic texts and creative worlds to bring an altered visual experience through which she challenges the relationship between creation, adaptation, and perception. Taymor’s investigations seek to extract what an artistic work contains and imagine how it can be presented using different mediums. Whether it is adapting dramas for the stage, directing films, or staging operas, she finds her own versions by incorporating elements and art forms that reinvent a fresh way of telling a story.
Engendering pleasures: children, gender identity, and the video game market
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Zaborskis, Mary
Video games have become a global mass medium and multibillion-dollar industry, engaging individuals across various cultural and geographic contexts. As children frequently access video games with themes of violence and sexual objectification, there is growing concern over the portrayal of gender and sexuality within these virtual spaces. Mature-rated video games, such as Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto introduce themes that shape children’s perceptions of gender roles and sexual identity in troubling ways. With online accessibility undermining age restrictions, parents and regulatory systems face significant challenges in controlling exposure. This chapter focuses on the portrayal of gender in video games and explores how these representations contribute to the marginalization and objectification of female characters. Game designers and developers, in response to market pressures, often prioritize visual pleasure for a predominantly male audience, perpetuating gender stereotypes. This portrayal not only reflects but also reinforces problematic understandings of gender and sexuality among young players, who internalize these virtual experiences as credible reflections of real-world dynamics. The chapter also examines potential strategies for content regulation, seeking to balance moral considerations with the demands of the gaming market.
Entangled empowerment: the divine dynamics of the snake woman in India
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Stevenson, Keri
'Entangled and Empowered: Agency in Multispecies Communities' is a collection that approaches the inevitable reality of entanglement between humans and other beings from a perspective of action and wonder. It argues that actors as diverse as bacteria, snakes, butterflies, ducks, and cacao trees can help us enact joy in fields as different as art, cinema, literature, and anthropology. While acknowledging the imminent reality of climate change, the sixth extinction, and other overwhelming threats to the Earth, this book argues that humans continue to live, and so do the beings whose lives are entwined with ours, for whom we can acknowledge and work to improve their existence. The nine essays in this volume trace that acknowledgment and work through three sections centered on visual media, queer and feminist readings of empowerment, and movements beyond the boundaries enacted by anthropocentric Western society. Drawing on theories such as new materialism, posthumanism, and ecofeminism, and with an international perspective from authors working at American, South Asian, and East Asian universities, 'Entangled and Empowered' finds hope in the shadow of despair. It engages with work by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing on entanglement, Donna Haraway on kin-making and multispecies communities, and Karen Barad on intra-actions, among others, while also showing how critiques of these ideas can make the world both more promising and more endangered. This collection will be useful for scholars working in all subfields of environmental humanities, especially those intersecting with the theories described above and as an archive of examples analyzing practical aspects of agency in diverse multispecies communities. Scholars studying texts as well-known as 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and as obscure as the codices of the Mopan Maya will find value in having both under one cover.
Every child matters: non-normative fatherhood of care and compassion in Malayalam cinema
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Podnieks, Elizabeth; Henriksson, Helena Wahlström
This chapter surveys the evolving portrayal of fatherhood in Malayalam cinema. The chapter examines how traditional notions of parenthood in South Indian society, often centered on biological and patriarchal roles, are being challenged by narratives of adoptive fatherhood. In analyses of films like Photographer (2006), Ottaal (2014), and Pengalila (2019), the chapter discusses how these stories depict fathers who adopt and care for marginalized children, and thereby subvert entrenched caste and class dynamics. These films serve as reflections of non-normative fatherhood in regional spaces, and underscore the significance of parental care in non-Western contexts. The chapter argues that such cinematic representations advocate for social justice, inclusivity, and empathy, challenging conventional views on family and societal norms in India. Malayalam cinema, portraying adoptive caregiving as a radical act of compassion and solidarity, offers alternative perspectives on family, inheritance, and societal belonging.
Fatherhood and precarity: protective fathers and dysfunctional families in Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam and contemporary Malayalam cinema
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Wilson, Bernard; Osman, Sharifah Aishah
This chapter examines how the notion of fatherhood is associated with precarity as a sign of a dysfunctional family in contemporary Malayalam cinema, the film industry of the South Indian state Kerala. It argues that recent Malayalam films such as Drishyam (2013) have portrayed the family as a manifestation of the identity of the father. In other words, the psychological state of the father, his secrets and motives, ultimately decide the fate of the family as a structural unit in crisis, because the actions and anxieties of a paternal protagonist often emphasise the need to depend on masculinity and patriarchal privilege to solve problems. A detailed analysis of these films reveals that a male father figure is an essential component in conceptualising the notion of family in the Indian context, and his interventions and transgressions disturb the natural order of the family to conserve what is ideal for the father.
Forbidden spectacles of a bygone era: an analysis of Malayalam cinema’s soft-porn noon-show culture
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
The cultural paradigms of the soft-porn era in Malayalam cinema had an emancipatory quality where the sensationalized body of the ‘bombshell’ starlets captivated the voyeuristic perceptions of regional spectators.* The celebration of these films by a suburban audience constructed a new public space for the realization of carnal desires and taboo fantasies. This article investigates how the soft-porn noon-shows contributed to a unique cultural experience of film-viewing in Kerala in the late 1990s that challenged the cultural elitism associated with regional cinema. It investigates the role of the audience in defining the historical significance of the noon-show theatres, together with their origin, popularity and fall in the larger narrative of the evolutionary metamorphosis of Malayalam cinema. The softcore phenomenon was an organic subversion of the hegemonic ideology of cinema, which has been used by upper-class cultural powers to maintain their moral presuppositions.
Fragile fat masculinities: the narrative construction and masculine negotiation of fatphobia in Malayalam cinema
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Gayathri, G. R.; Suresh, Adith K.
The portrayal of the male fat body in Indian cinema is intertwined with prevalent social constructs and gender stereotypes regarding idealized masculine corporeality. The fat character is frequently depicted as a source of humour that not only reinforces fatphobic attitudes but also underscores the normalization of body shaming in Indian society. This article scrutinizes the representations and discourses surrounding fatness within the context of Malayalam cinema, the South Indian film industry based in the state of Kerala. It specifically analyzes two key Malayalam films to understand how visual narratives construct fat bodies using humour to shed light on the protagonist’s struggles with body image, societal prejudices, and self-acceptance. This paper argues that the construction of fatphobia degrades male characters and reduces them to objects of revulsion, thereby reinforcing stereotypes of desirability and beauty. These films use a common narrative that presents fat characters as kind-hearted, childish and feminized to create a humanized body image to conceal the fatphobia that surrounds their masculinity. These forced narrative negotiations reinforce fragile fat masculinities through the exaggerated social performance of fatness as something that invites a pleasurable gaze without destigmatizing the insecurities and societal norms around body image and masculinity.

Browsing by Author "Suresh, Adith K."

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