After completing my BA in Economics from the University of Delhi, a research visit for my Master’s in Media and Development at the University of Westminster took me to my ancestral village in North India. I have been associated with the field of Gender and Communication since then. The issue closest to my area of research is how women’s relationship with the mass-media is much more complex than meets the eye owing to various limitations they face, as compared to their male counterparts. As part of public engagement, I was invited twice onto Doordarshan, the autonomous public service broadcaster founded by the Government of India, to discuss the change that film-engagement is bringing to the lives of young women in villages of India. I am keen to do further research on a sociological approach to create effective ICT strategies for younger women in non-urban setups.

Women’s everyday film consumption in rural North India

My research explores what it means to be a woman living in a village in North India who loves Hindi films in today’s time. Does being a female film consumer in a non-urban space only mean watching films or consuming it in various forms? Or does it have a more significant cultural and social significance that has changed the everyday-ness of this rural space in some ways? What kind of relationships do women of different age groups and classes have with popular Hindi cinema and how do these contradict each other? My study is situated on the brink of a revolution in the Indian film distribution system with the advent of Digi-plexes. It is centred around women for whom film-consumption is considered to be a transgressive activity by the rural community, and how they negotiate around those rules to build and sustain their engagement with Hindi films.