Akshaya Kumar
Biographic Data
| ID | 3648730 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Akshaya Kumar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Akshaya |
| FAMILY NAME | Kumar |
| SIGNATURE | KUMAR A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indian Institute of Technology Indore |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1309-2947 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Asian platform capital: An overview
In the introduction to this special section, we interrogate the question of capital in platform capitalism. We argue that the present paradigm for exploring platform capitalism emphasizes procedures and infrastructures of datafication, but tends to neglect the strategic intent of capital. We therefore revisit notions of ‘data capital’ and ‘platform capital’ that rest upon the broad hegemony of ‘Big Tech’ and an assumed equivalence between data an…
Capitalization of social mobility in India: Venture capital in edtech-fintech combines
Household platforms as transactional infrastructures: The case of Urban Company
Much of the literature on platform labor in the Global South has focused upon the hyper-visible workforces of urban transport and influencers in the attention economy. Nonetheless, there have been significant attempts to ‘platformize’ the often invisible economies of domestic labor. In this article, we interrogate the case of Urban Company, a household platform offering domestic services in urban India. UC offers its upper middle class clientele …
Popular Culture in South Asian Context
The telecommunication engine of India’s streaming market: Reliance Jio’s vertical integration amidst regulatory silence
This article examines the transformative impact of Reliance Jio, an Indian telecommunications company, on the digital media landscape in India. By securing the digital rights for the immensely popular Indian Premier League (IPL), a cricket tournament known for its massive viewership and cultural significance, and streaming it for free on JioCinema, Jio disrupted the over-the-top (OTT) video platform market. This move highlights Jio’s strategy of …
Wellness as Self-Governance: Digitalization, AI, and Indian Healthtech
The Indian health-care system, characterized by decreasing public funding and a rapidly increasing number of private health-care facilities, has awakened to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) - efforts are underway for aggregating innovations within a digital health architecture. Analyzing the emerging narrative around 'smart' wearable gadgets, healthtech platforms, and their chatbots, this article investigates the paradigm of wellness pred…
A Critical Political Economy Perspective on Indian Television: STAR, Hotstar, and Live Sports Streaming
The Indian television industry is transforming via an increasing number of Over-the-Top (OTT) platforms. This shift from broadcast to OTT has given rise to research assessing the impact on the television ecosystem. With the case of Star Network, this study examines how the emergence of live sports streaming has affected the power dynamics in the sports broadcasting ecosphere. This study employs the Critical Political Economy framework to address …
Mediatization via Mourning and Vice Versa: Television, Mass Grief, and Liveness in Kerala
This article engages with the corporeal and mediated intensities of mourning publics at celebrity funerals in Kerala, attended both in person and via TV and other live-streaming platforms. Live coverage transforms discrete emotional valences of these events into monumental media spectacles, consolidating an affective economy of grief based on the expression of “liveness” in all its urgency. This urgent expression results from the historical trans…
The libidinal economy of vernacularisation: Modernity, sexuality and Bhojpuri media
The last two decades have witnessed a notable proliferation of media industries producing low-budget digital films and music videos. These media industries routinely stage a confrontation between modernity and a fantasy of pure cultural traditions. The bulk of their content deploys the male star as an extraordinary crossover figure – the only one capable of bringing modernity and its vernacular outsides on the negotiating table. Drawing upon the …
Re-Visioning Caste in Indian Cinema
Adding nuance to the accusation of sustained caste blindness against Indian cinema, this article situates Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi blockbuster Sairat (2016) within the trajectories of Marathi cinema, and vis-à-vis the historical traffic between the Hindi film industry and its southern counterparts. The article grapples with sociological and formal valences of realism and melodrama, which co-constitute Sairat, so as to argue that the re-visioning …
Deriving a tangible promotional calculus: Platform Monopolies and Political Advertising
This article describes how the monopolistic capitalism of platform economies gets appropriated by political campaigners by highlighting the critical role of derivative valuations in the market without any 'fundamentals'. I argue that platform economies help generate both the rhetorical flourish and dubious metadata, which provides an unreliable yet vital anchorage towards political campaigns. In this cross-promotional bidding for statistics, the …
Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea
Translating the Sacred in the Age of Design: New Typographic Experiments
The debate of Orientalism notwithstanding, there is resurgence in the translation of sacred Indian texts, of late. If the arrival of new media writing, digital printing, computer graphics and multiplying e-resources has enabled the modern-day translator to maneuver the textual space in unprecedented ways, the change in cultural practices has encouraged him to experiment afresh with the so-called originary sacred. The eclipse of ideology and a con…
Capital and popular cinema: The dollars are coming
Media Portfolios after Credit Scoring: Attention, Prediction, and Advertising in Indian Media Networks
Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this essay draws upon media history in South Asia to tease out the repackaging of stardom in a changing media ecosystem, which commands the celebrity function to be more flexible and more willing to mount increasing debt upon its diversifying palette. The rise of calculable creditworthiness and sophisticated systems of prediction thus securitize media portfol…
Deswa , the film and the movement: Taste, industry and representation in Bhojpuri cinema
In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi fi…
Cultural Studies in India
Item Number/Item Girl
‘Item’ is another one of the many English words that have acquired a life of their own as they are rendered in Indian languages. By itself, the item, as an object, puts a mere playful spin over the
Animated Visualities and Competing Sovereignties
Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investable capital. This article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that revolved around…
The Unbearable Liveness of News Television in India
The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has established itself in the meanwhile not merely as a source of information but also of entertainment. Available in all regional languages through several competing channels, and presented elaborately, television news has come to establish a mode of address, which defines one’s sense of time and space, and configures one’s sense of the dramatic situated in …
Routledge handbook of Indian cinemas , by K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake
Laughter and Liberalization: Cultural Economy of TV Humor in India
Indian culture, frequently cast as “oriental” due to its idealism, is not without its native traditions of humor and laughter. Some of these traditions have received critical notice of late. What remains largely neglected by academic critical debates is the sudden explosion of popular humor in Indian television, post-'90s. As economy leaps over national barriers, Indian laughter gains confidence and enters into cultural collaboration with other c…
Satyamev Jayate: Return of the Star as a Sacrificial Figure
This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by film star Aamir Khan, in terms of its politics, Khan's stardom and the attempt to reframe the social on television. Grappling with the broad contours of the cultural economy of justice on national television in India, I suggest that the star descends upon television as an avatar promising empathy to a variety of victims of social injustice. In so doin…
Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural economy of north-Indian small-town nostalgia in the Indian multiplex
This paper looks at the journey of new small-town films and analyses the cultural economy of this small-town nostalgia. Looking at the reconfiguration of Indian cities as a key phase, the paper attempts to argue that small-town nostalgia is produced by these reconfigurations as the small-town seeps into the big cities and produces its cinematic variant from within the urban imaginary. The paper conceptualises the small-town as a space marked by p…
New Media and Its Audiences
Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural economy of north-Indian small-town nostalgia in the Indian multiplex
This paper looks at the journey of new small-town films and analyses the cultural economy of this small-town nostalgia. Looking at the reconfiguration of Indian cities as a key phase, the paper attempts to argue that small-town nostalgia is produced by these reconfigurations as the small-town seeps into the big cities and produces its cinematic variant from within the urban imaginary. The paper conceptualises the small-town as a space marked by p…
Animated Visualities and Competing Sovereignties
Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investable capital. This article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that revolved around…
The Unbearable Liveness of News Television in India
The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has established itself in the meanwhile not merely as a source of information but also of entertainment. Available in all regional languages through several competing channels, and presented elaborately, television news has come to establish a mode of address, which defines one’s sense of time and space, and configures one’s sense of the dramatic situated in …
Deriving a tangible promotional calculus: Platform Monopolies and Political Advertising
This article describes how the monopolistic capitalism of platform economies gets appropriated by political campaigners by highlighting the critical role of derivative valuations in the market without any 'fundamentals'. I argue that platform economies help generate both the rhetorical flourish and dubious metadata, which provides an unreliable yet vital anchorage towards political campaigns. In this cross-promotional bidding for statistics, the …
Deswa , the film and the movement: Taste, industry and representation in Bhojpuri cinema
In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi fi…
Item Number/Item Girl
‘Item’ is another one of the many English words that have acquired a life of their own as they are rendered in Indian languages. By itself, the item, as an object, puts a mere playful spin over the
Laughter and Liberalization: Cultural Economy of TV Humor in India
Indian culture, frequently cast as “oriental” due to its idealism, is not without its native traditions of humor and laughter. Some of these traditions have received critical notice of late. What remains largely neglected by academic critical debates is the sudden explosion of popular humor in Indian television, post-'90s. As economy leaps over national barriers, Indian laughter gains confidence and enters into cultural collaboration with other c…
Wellness as Self-Governance: Digitalization, AI, and Indian Healthtech
The Indian health-care system, characterized by decreasing public funding and a rapidly increasing number of private health-care facilities, has awakened to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) - efforts are underway for aggregating innovations within a digital health architecture. Analyzing the emerging narrative around 'smart' wearable gadgets, healthtech platforms, and their chatbots, this article investigates the paradigm of wellness pred…
The libidinal economy of vernacularisation: Modernity, sexuality and Bhojpuri media
The last two decades have witnessed a notable proliferation of media industries producing low-budget digital films and music videos. These media industries routinely stage a confrontation between modernity and a fantasy of pure cultural traditions. The bulk of their content deploys the male star as an extraordinary crossover figure – the only one capable of bringing modernity and its vernacular outsides on the negotiating table. Drawing upon the …
Satyamev Jayate: Return of the Star as a Sacrificial Figure
This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by film star Aamir Khan, in terms of its politics, Khan's stardom and the attempt to reframe the social on television. Grappling with the broad contours of the cultural economy of justice on national television in India, I suggest that the star descends upon television as an avatar promising empathy to a variety of victims of social injustice. In so doin…
Negotiating Nationalism(s): Hindi Poetry During and After the Colonial Period
Stages of life: Indian theatre autobiographies , by Kathryn Hansen, Ranikhet
The multiplex in India: A cultural economy of urban leisure
The multiplex in India: a cultural economy of urban leisure, by Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010, ix + 244 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-46837-4 This is a pioneering attempt to situ
Retro-modern India: Forging the low-caste self
Retro-modern India: forging the low-caste self, by Manuela Ciotti, New Delhi, Routledge, 2010, xix + 292 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-56311-6 Manuela Ciotti's book is primarily a reflection on the moves of
Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural economy of north-Indian small-town nostalgia in the Indian multiplex
This paper looks at the journey of new small-town films and analyses the cultural economy of this small-town nostalgia. Looking at the reconfiguration of Indian cities as a key phase, the paper attempts to argue that small-town nostalgia is produced by these reconfigurations as the small-town seeps into the big cities and produces its cinematic variant from within the urban imaginary. The paper conceptualises the small-town as a space marked by p…
New Media and Its Audiences
Routledge handbook of Indian cinemas , by K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake
Laughter and Liberalization: Cultural Economy of TV Humor in India
Indian culture, frequently cast as “oriental” due to its idealism, is not without its native traditions of humor and laughter. Some of these traditions have received critical notice of late. What remains largely neglected by academic critical debates is the sudden explosion of popular humor in Indian television, post-'90s. As economy leaps over national barriers, Indian laughter gains confidence and enters into cultural collaboration with other c…
Satyamev Jayate: Return of the Star as a Sacrificial Figure
This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by film star Aamir Khan, in terms of its politics, Khan's stardom and the attempt to reframe the social on television. Grappling with the broad contours of the cultural economy of justice on national television in India, I suggest that the star descends upon television as an avatar promising empathy to a variety of victims of social injustice. In so doin…
The Unbearable Liveness of News Television in India
The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has established itself in the meanwhile not merely as a source of information but also of entertainment. Available in all regional languages through several competing channels, and presented elaborately, television news has come to establish a mode of address, which defines one’s sense of time and space, and configures one’s sense of the dramatic situated in …
Cultural Studies in India
Item Number/Item Girl
‘Item’ is another one of the many English words that have acquired a life of their own as they are rendered in Indian languages. By itself, the item, as an object, puts a mere playful spin over the
Animated Visualities and Competing Sovereignties
Beginning with the mid-1990s when a visual opulence saturated in color and light appeared on the Hindi film screen, a battle between visuality and performativity ensued so as to regulate the star-body while retaining its ability to withstand different orders of investable capital. This article argues that the multiplex economy made multiple tiers of stardom possible so as to shift Hindi cinema away from the high-risk industry that revolved around…
Media Portfolios after Credit Scoring: Attention, Prediction, and Advertising in Indian Media Networks
Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this essay draws upon media history in South Asia to tease out the repackaging of stardom in a changing media ecosystem, which commands the celebrity function to be more flexible and more willing to mount increasing debt upon its diversifying palette. The rise of calculable creditworthiness and sophisticated systems of prediction thus securitize media portfol…
Deswa , the film and the movement: Taste, industry and representation in Bhojpuri cinema
In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi fi…
Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea
Translating the Sacred in the Age of Design: New Typographic Experiments
The debate of Orientalism notwithstanding, there is resurgence in the translation of sacred Indian texts, of late. If the arrival of new media writing, digital printing, computer graphics and multiplying e-resources has enabled the modern-day translator to maneuver the textual space in unprecedented ways, the change in cultural practices has encouraged him to experiment afresh with the so-called originary sacred. The eclipse of ideology and a con…
Capital and popular cinema: The dollars are coming
Deriving a tangible promotional calculus: Platform Monopolies and Political Advertising
This article describes how the monopolistic capitalism of platform economies gets appropriated by political campaigners by highlighting the critical role of derivative valuations in the market without any 'fundamentals'. I argue that platform economies help generate both the rhetorical flourish and dubious metadata, which provides an unreliable yet vital anchorage towards political campaigns. In this cross-promotional bidding for statistics, the …
The libidinal economy of vernacularisation: Modernity, sexuality and Bhojpuri media
The last two decades have witnessed a notable proliferation of media industries producing low-budget digital films and music videos. These media industries routinely stage a confrontation between modernity and a fantasy of pure cultural traditions. The bulk of their content deploys the male star as an extraordinary crossover figure – the only one capable of bringing modernity and its vernacular outsides on the negotiating table. Drawing upon the …
Re-Visioning Caste in Indian Cinema
Adding nuance to the accusation of sustained caste blindness against Indian cinema, this article situates Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi blockbuster Sairat (2016) within the trajectories of Marathi cinema, and vis-à-vis the historical traffic between the Hindi film industry and its southern counterparts. The article grapples with sociological and formal valences of realism and melodrama, which co-constitute Sairat, so as to argue that the re-visioning …
A Critical Political Economy Perspective on Indian Television: STAR, Hotstar, and Live Sports Streaming
The Indian television industry is transforming via an increasing number of Over-the-Top (OTT) platforms. This shift from broadcast to OTT has given rise to research assessing the impact on the television ecosystem. With the case of Star Network, this study examines how the emergence of live sports streaming has affected the power dynamics in the sports broadcasting ecosphere. This study employs the Critical Political Economy framework to address …
Mediatization via Mourning and Vice Versa: Television, Mass Grief, and Liveness in Kerala
This article engages with the corporeal and mediated intensities of mourning publics at celebrity funerals in Kerala, attended both in person and via TV and other live-streaming platforms. Live coverage transforms discrete emotional valences of these events into monumental media spectacles, consolidating an affective economy of grief based on the expression of “liveness” in all its urgency. This urgent expression results from the historical trans…
Popular Culture in South Asian Context
The telecommunication engine of India’s streaming market: Reliance Jio’s vertical integration amidst regulatory silence
This article examines the transformative impact of Reliance Jio, an Indian telecommunications company, on the digital media landscape in India. By securing the digital rights for the immensely popular Indian Premier League (IPL), a cricket tournament known for its massive viewership and cultural significance, and streaming it for free on JioCinema, Jio disrupted the over-the-top (OTT) video platform market. This move highlights Jio’s strategy of …
South Asian Cinema and Culture (18 works) · Political science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Art (12 works) · History (12 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (9 works)