Media Meddlers: Feminism, Television and Gendered Media Work in India Available to Purchase

This article explores and historicizes the rise of the woman filmmaker in India in the late 1970s and the 1980s in two overlapping domains: a vastly expanded communications infrastructure, including the spread of television, and second wave feminism. It takes as a case study the media maker Sai Paranjpye, whose eclectic career across a range of media—theater, TV, cinema, print—in multiple formats—ad films, documentaries, educational shorts, TV films, full-length features—was fairly typical of the nature of women's media work at this time, as women took whatever work they could find in a rapidly mutating media ecology. The article suggests that these media migrations provide a model of gendered media work that is constitutively intermedial, and thus reorders the aesthetic and narrative protocols of mainstream cinema.