Ishita Tiwary

Ishita Tiwary is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Media and Migration at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. Her research interests include video cultures, media infrastructures, migration, contraband media practices, and media aesthetics. She has published essays in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, Culture Machine, MARG: Journal of Indian Art, and in edited collections on topics of media piracy, video histories, and streaming platforms. She is currently working on two projects. The first is her book monograph that traces the history of analog video cultures in India through an infrastructural lens. The second research project tracks the migration of pirated media objects and people from China to India via the Nepal border through bazaar spaces. 

Title and Abstract:

Suitcase Networks: Media and Migration Across the India China Border

Ishita Tiwary (Concordia University)

This presentation is situated at a period when both India and China opened up their economies in the 80s. I explicate the complex everyday transactions that take place between the countries by tracking the migration of media equipment, media content, and personnel from China to India via the Nepal border.  I will illustrate different ontologies of globalization, through an ethnographic and archival study of the transit border bazaars of Hong Kong Market in Siliguri, India and Dhulabari Market, Nepal. With a migrant workforce consisting of Indians, Nepalis and Bangladeshis, there is a complex web of class, religious, caste and linguistic dynamics that influence the way these trade networks are run. The demand for these goods, primarily media hardware and software, creates infrastructures such as video theaters/parlours and fosters demand for additional commodities, popularized by films, thereby indicating an aspirational desire to be connected to the larger world via commodity culture. I thus argue that pirate bazaars are reflexive of the migrant experience.