Music Videos and South Asian Indigeneities – Post/Coloniality, Media Infrastructures and Social Critique by an Ethnography of Popular Santali Songs

Presenter:

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Abstract

In the last two decades, music videos produced for South Asian indigenous audiences have become increasingly widely circulated. Drawing on popular Santali songs as an example, I will show how colonial and present-day representations converge in such music videos to contribute to ideas of what it means to be indigenous. Firstly, visual traits identified in colonial ethnographies as specific to particular indigenous communities serve as markers of indigenous belonging in the videos. Secondly, the current trend of consuming indigenous music videos via streaming and social media platforms (especially YouTube) represents one of a series of media vernacularizations in India, which began with the rise of vernacular music distributed on audio cassettes in the 1980s, continued with the boom of regional language newspaper editions, and more recently has come to include the adaptation and appropriation of content from more mainstream films and TV-series for local audiences. Thirdly, the production practices of a pan-Indian social field of cultural production – with close links to the trends of Bollywood cinema – have played a key role in the development of techniques for customizing film content for indigenous audiences. I will then argue that indigenous filmmakers are contributing to the creation of a specifically South Asian form of indigenous belonging in which concepts of culture rooted in colonial ethnography have a prime position and interconnect with local concepts. Moreover, filmmakers from the Santali film industry see themselves as cultural critics at the forefront of an – often progressive and liberal – transformation of indigenous society.