Impersonation & Identity In India

buntyandbabli

UCLA’s Center for India and South Asia sponsors tomorrow’s lecture-cum-visual presentation by Purnima Mankekar, an associate professor in Asian American Studies and Women’s Studies. Extracted from a larger project on the role of transnational mass media in the production of South Asian public cultures, “Unsettling India: Impersonation, Mobility, Identity” juxtaposes impersonation in different contexts—by employees of call centers in Gurgaon, India, and by Bunty and Babli, the leads in a Bollywood blockbuster—to explore how it might provide a lens to understand contemporary Indian identity and cultural production.

Manekar is the author of Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India, an ethnography of TV viewing focused on the responses of upwardly mobile, middle-class urban women to state-sponsored entertainment serials (including Ramayan, Mahabharat and Hum Log).

More: Purnima Mankekar

— Pavani Yalamanchili
February 26, 2007

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