Media Anthropology of India

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 is on lived experiences of AI-data policies, infrastructures, and practices. 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.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 among the Indian diaspora. Her current research interests include digital health, social aspects of medical technologies, and anthropology of aging.

• List of Contributors; Foreword; Acknowledgements; List of Figures. Part I Introductory Conversations; 1 Introducing A Media Anthropology of India PREETI RAGHUNATH AND HARIPRIYA NARASIMHAN; 2 Media Anthropology in India: Critical Interrogations of a Historical Trajectory BRITTA OHM AND WILLIAM MAZZARELLA; 3 Researching Media Industries: Lessons Learned from Bollywood TEJASWINI GANTI; Part II Visuality; 4 The Representational ‘Excess’: Caste-bodies and Spectatorial Pleasure in Malayalam Cinema RATHEESH KUMAR; 5 Female Cinema Audiences in Early Post-Independence India DAMINI KULKARN; 6 A film audience sans filmgoing: The complex film audiencehood of women in rural India CHARUSMITA; Part III Representation; 7 Adivasis in Indian Cinema: Critique, Representation and Gaze SNEHA MUNDARI; 8 Seeing like an Adivasi: Rethinking Representation through Adivasi Media in Jharkhand, India ARPIT GAIND; 9 Communicating Development through Desia Nata: An Ethnographic Reflection SOURAV GUPTA; 10 Jugaad ethnography: Context and contingency in decolonial media studie BRIDGET BACKHAUS; Part IV 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; Part V Digitality;15 Mining Digital Health Transaction 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; Index.