Darshana Sreedhar Mini

Telegeographies of Indian Migration: Media as Transregional Homemaking

Since the mid-20^th century, at least two Asian regions—Southeast Asia and the Middle Eastern Gulf—have been home to different contingencies of migrants who fanned out of the Indian subcontinent both as part of indenture systems, as well as voluntary economic migration. In case of the former, it was indentured laborers who were taken to the Strait settlements in Southeast Asia for plantation labor as coolies under the colonial regime in the late 1850s to the 1920s, and in the case of the Gulf, the primary constituency were economic migrants who started moving out in search of jobs 1960s onwards to transcend the constraints of limited caste and class mobility. In both cases, media forms have played an outsize role in defining the discourses around citizenship and belonging of the Indian diaspora—this includes newspapers and journals, as well as in more recent times, radio, television, film, and the internet. In principle, migrant media as a site of enquiry allows us to examine how risk, opportunities and challenges are navigated by migrant and diasporic communities and documented for the generations to come. To this end, this research will consider materials such as photographs, memoirs and other media-based narratives such as short films, radio programs, and diasporic newspapers to interrogate how migrants negotiate new ways to connect with their host communities, while retaining a relation to the home society. Through this multi-modal approach, this project makes a case for understanding trans-regional specificities and the relevance of media in writing the social history of the region.

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (UC press, 2024) and co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and Obscene (Routledge, 2024). Her research interests broadly include South Asian Cinema, Feminist Media, Global Media Cultures and Migrant media. Her work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Communication, Culture & Critique, Film History, Porn Studies, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, South Asian Popular Culture and South Asian Film & Media.