Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia

This book talk delves into previously submerged histories and hidden voices of women directors and film entrepreneurs from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.  Drawing on neglected archives and rare field interviews with filmmakers and fans, I tell a comparative story of women’s creative authority and entrepreneurial labor in selected film industries of South Asia—industries and markets that share languages, arts, and geopolitical rifts. Using “transborder” to refer not only to territorial borders but also to institutional and conceptual ones, my story dwells on two eras of women’s cinema in this postcolonial region. In the era of the “star-authors” (50s-90s), I find female stars in Lahore, Dhaka, and Calcutta performing personas ambiguously to access infrastructures and direct fiction films that unsettle ethno-sexual borders. In the era of the “woman director” (2000s), even though opportunities for women filmmakers burgeon (in Bollywood, for example), I find women negotiating gender-based borders that come in less obvious forms of brand-making and censoring.  Rare film footage and archival materials will be used to illustrate this complex history of female filmmaking in South Asia.    

About the author: Esha Niyogi De’s research interests lie in South Asian gender politics, film history, and literary history.  She is the author of a new monograph on women’s cinema in South Asia (University of Illinois Press, 2024), an earlier monograph on sexual politics and postcoloniality in Indian literature and cinema (Oxford University Press, 2011), two co-edited books, and many journal articles and scholarly book chapters.  Esha is on the Faculty of Humanities at UCLA and a Faculty Affiliate of the UCLA Center for India and South Asia.