Orient Blackswan

Imprint	Orient BlackSwan
Year of Publishing	2025
Number of pages	416
ISBN	9789354428920
Format	Paperback
Language	English
Dimensions	140 x 216 mm

Imprint

Orient BlackSwan

Year of Publishing

2025

Number of pages

416

ISBN

9789354428920

Format

Paperback

Language

English

Dimensions

140 x 216 mm

the Book
the Author(s)
Table of Contents

Studies of forms of media have focused on either political or cultural histories of media. Political histories study media growth and literacy, and the emergence of liberal democratic institutions in Western and postcolonial societies.

Cultural histories study the multiple origins of media technologies, seek lost or marginalised cultural objects, and examine how artefacts are connected to earlier modes of production and consumption.

What is lost in both is the idea that media and technologies have an independent existence, with their own lives, histories, and afterlives. Inhabiting Technologies/Modernities fills this gap, showing how media and technologies create the human condition even as they are created by it. The authors highlight this through everyday artefacts like the book, newspaper, radio, photograph, film, television and activism on digital media.

The chapters study diverse forms of media/technology in a range of spaces: technological and cultural transitions negotiated in Indian journalism; the popularity of Bollywood films in Nigeria; the depiction of urban spatiality in Malayalam cinema; contested ideas regarding choices of script and technology in south and Northeast India; and the production of textbooks in the Telugu language.

The volume offers a fresh understanding of interconnections between media, technology, and history, communities, including caste and sexual identities.

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P. Thirumal is Professor of Communication Studies at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad.

K. A. Nuaiman is Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Calicut.

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Abbreviations
List of Images and Figures
Acknowledgements
Publisher’s Acknowledgements

Foreword
Arjun Appadurai

1. Introduction
P. Thirumal and K. A. Nuaiman

2. Telegraphy and Journalism in Colonial India, c. 1830s to 1900s
Amelia Bonea

3. Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities
Brian Larkin

4. A Community in Print: Islam and Print Culture in Malabar, South India
K. A. Nuaiman

5. Listening to the Sonorous: Digital Archiving as a Political Practice
P. Thirumal and Sai Amulya Komarraju

6. From Invisibility to Hypervisibility and Back? The Lost Same-sex Object in Media History in India
Ashley Tellis

7. Cast Out Worlds in Print: Iyothee Thass (1845–1914) and the Tamil Public Sphere
Dickens Leonard

8. ‘Reality Must Improve’: The Perversity of Expertise and the Belatedness of Indian Development Television
William Mazzarella

9. City as a Continuum: Cinematic Geography of Kochi in Malayalam Cinema
Carmel Christy K. J.

10. Lampooning the Raj: The Cartoon in Pre-independence Tamil Journalism
A. R. Venkatachalapathy

11. The Machine in the Colony: Technology, Politics, and the Typography of Devanagari in the Early Years of Mechanisation
Vaibhav Singh

12. Politics of Script Selection and Meetei Identity, 1978–1979
Thongam Bipin

13. The Late Colonial Telugu Textbook: A Material Embodiment of Dissent, Debate, and Knowledge
Sasi Kiran R. Mallam

Notes on the Contributors
Index

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Inhabiting Technologies/Modernities

Media and Cultural Practices in South Asia

P. Thirumal and K. A. Nuaiman (Eds.)

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