Desert(ed) nuclear scapes: a geontological reading of Uday Singh’s Pokhran: a novel Karuna Gupta, Raj Thakur Cultural Geographies, 2026 This paper argues that the nuclear deserts of Pokhran in Northwest India are appropriated under ‘developmental regimes’ that employ wastelanding and erasure as strategic tools. Mobilizing Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s concept of ‘geontopower’ and Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we read Uday Singh’s fictional treatment Pokhran: A Novel (2020), which deals with the Pokhran-I nuclear test carried out in 1974, as narrating a tale of power that not only seeps through institutions related to human/life/bio but also as probing socio-materialities through active geo/nonlife/nonhuman entities. These critical taxonomies frame Pokhran-I as a complex site of human-nonhuman entanglements. Human agency has predominantly informed the prevailing discourses on desert(ed) scapes as ‘sacrifice zones’ devoid of agency. However, we interrogate Pokhran as a discard scape, first, via geontopower which evidences wastelanding and erasure, and second, as a potent agential nonhuman entity.
Recast(e)ing sports on screen: A critical study of popular postmillennial sports films in India Sonakshi Malhotra, Raj Thakur European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2026 This article envisages an alternative Dalit sporting imaginary that challenges the normative structure of popular Indian sports cinema. The study begins with the historical examination of sports and physical culture in India, and its long-standing caste rigidity in sports, inviting the structurally interwoven interrogation—Can Dalit play? Can there be a Dalit Sporting imaginary? As the genuine representation of Dalit agency in sports cinema still remains a fairly untapped genre, the emergence of new-wave Dalit cinema possibly deconstructs the prevalent narratives that exclude Dalit bodies from the mainstream sports cinema. Examining selected films like Skater Girl (2021) and Jhund (2022), this article re-imagines and strategizes an anti-caste sporting aesthetics. The films depict how the distinct Dalit body at play not only critiques the notion of hegemonic masculinity but also reclaims space through the spatial praxis and subcultural sporting codes. The contest and resistance in the sporting field project varies popular-playful ways and means of affirming Dalit identity.
Dalit Sporting Imaginary and Jhund Raj Thakur, Sonakshi Malhotra Popular Culture in South Asian Context, 2025 The politics of recast(e)ing sports on screen through Dalit-centered sports films is based on the long-standing evidence that caste-based exclusions are inherent in sports oft assumed apolitical, all-inclusive resolve. The study offers a contrastive reading of sports dramas Lagaan (2001) and Jhund (2022) to re-trace the shifting dynamics of the Dalit sporting body at play. Jhund not only offers a post-Kachara sporting figuration but locates sports like football as a ‘contact sport’ within the Dalit fold. Moreover, such a proposition problematizes the dominant haptic economy of sports and physical culture attributes in India.
Hydrosocial Precarity and Postmillennial Indian Fiction: Reading Prayaag Akbar’s Leila Karuna Gupta, Raj Thakur South Asian Review, 2024 This paper aims to make a contribution to the debate on how hydropolitics help us understand the socio-spatial dynamics of urban space and identity formation by reading the speculative city in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017). The paper attempts to give Leila, frequently read under dystopic genre fiction, a hydropolitical reading, an overlooked critical paradigm, particularly in the context of postmillennial Indian fiction. To that end, it draws upon the concept of hydrosocial territories to spatialize the city-splitting in Leila. This kind of approach critically reconfigures water, as a new social, that shapes the spatial. The paper charts how the neoliberal “Council” in Leila governmentalizes the hydrosocial relations. Central to its hydroterritorial apparatus is the utilization of different contours, including pipe politics, water time, and hydraulic citizenship that induce hydrosocial precarity.
Bollywood celebrities as bioconsumers of reproductive technologies in neoliberal fertility markets: A study of popular public discourse Isha Malhotra, Eva Sharma, Raj Thakur International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2023 The article makes a biopolitical study of commercial surrogacy in India through the case studies of Bollywood celebrities prioritizing bioengineered babies through surrogacy. Drawing upon the theories of the culture industry and neoliberal subjectivity, the entanglement between the cultural economy of celebrity and the medico-industrial complex is decoded. The study attempts to focus on the existing popular public discourse using newspaper articles, tabloid press, interviews, and journal articles to investigate how Bollywood celebrities, as bioconsumers in the neoliberal surrogacy market, further genetic essentialism and neoliberal eugenics. Celebrities, as agents of new reproductive subjectivities, invite critical forays into bioeconomies of intensity, intimate life and belongings through the affective bonds of familial ties and kinship. Examining the moral economy of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in India, the study highlights the exploitative use of the reproductive labour of surrogates, who are treated as effaced entities and as collateral ‘prosthetics’ in the ART industry.
Atypical athletic corporeality and clinical embodied deviance: A case study of dutee chand Isha Malhotra,, Raj Thakur Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021 The paper outlines the politics of gendered athleticism appropriated and instrumentalised through the medico-juridical apparatus of the sports governing bodies. The biomedical discourse governing the atypical athletic body and the embodied nature of its pathologised deviancy is drawn through the critical reflection of athletic regulatory bodies’ testing regimes and policies. It is through the detailed analysis of the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand’s case that one of many confounding disqualification charges and trials of hyperandrogenism against athletes with differences of sex development (DSD’s) is foregrounded. Drawing on the critical scholarship of gender theorists and activists, the legitimacy of the stipulated biological mechanism of testosterone as a regulatory performance index in female elite sport is contested and problematized. Pertinent here is Dutee Chand’s narrative of trial and triumph that destabilises the reductive embodiments of sex institutionalised in and beyond the sporting track. Significantly, the paper also delineates the premises of the constitutive exclusionary and arbitrary regulatory regimes propounded by the athletic governing bodies like the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). These concerns border on the geopolitics of race and nation framing the normative, prescriptive and reserved rights of femininity, able-bodiedness and heteronormativity in international women’s elite sport.
‘Balla Ghooma Stadium jhooma’: Shifting discourse of cricket commentary in India Raj Thakur South Asian Popular Culture, 2021 Broadcasting commentary has developed a unique relationship with cricket wherein it performatively mediates the changing discourse that surrounds the game. Although, the social history of cricket in India has gained a considerable academic space, the cultural history of cricket commentary in India remains a fairly uncharted territory. The paper by placing it within the cultural studies framework attempts to trace cricket’s auratic presence in the popular imagination. Cricket’s acculturation in India is unique to its radio sonic mapping, televisual spectacle and its experience with modernity. It argues how the cultural economy of cricket through radio and television commentary, covering cricket’s varied format over the years constantly informed and negotiated its linguistic, cultural and economic registers. The attempt is to foreground the ways in which its distinct structures of listening experience uniquely fostered decolonisation and indigenous appropriation of the game. Above all, interpreting the materialistic aesthetics of the broadcast medium, the shifting trajectory of cricket broadcast delineates how IPL’s subcultural sporting codes challenges the discursive ‘Englishness’ of cricket. What anchors in IPL through the playful transaction of the contemporary cricket culture, especially, through commentary, is the tension between global cultural reproduction and the forces of indigenisation at work.
Visualizing memory scapes: A spatio- affective study of select war memorials of Jammu and Kashmir Ritika Pathania,, Raj Thakur Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021 The paper through iconographic and spatial dynamics, critically engages with the performative aspect of the select war memorial sites in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. While the interdisciplinary study of war memorials in relation to memory and commemorative politics have been studied, its materialistic aesthetics informed through spatial and affective contours remains a burgeoning field of enquiry if not an unexampled one. The study is premised on the photographic field work of the sites envisioned through the cultural geography of war memorials. In approaching war memorial sites as a landscape of memory, we take the position that memory is simultaneously a material and immaterial phenomenon and these cannot be detached from affective and visceral human bonds and their roles in (re-)formulations in space and place. The materialistic aesthetics of memory- memorial continuum are ideated through spatial and affective contours, which, in turn, inform the predominant and everyday experience of grief and bereavement, both imagined and lived. The study dominantly attests its claims through Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ in relation to commemorative sites. The heterotopic tensions of multiple experiences and belongings are unpacked through both tangible and affective domains ranging from dominant public commemorative sites to parks and shopping complexes.
Terrorism as a media specific event: Performative frames of uri and pulwama reportage in indian news media RAJ THAKUR, ISHA MALHOTRA Media Watch, 2020 The Uri attack in 2016 and the Pulwama attack in 2019 by terrorist in Jammu and Kashmir have brought to the center-stage the Kashmir conflict as a core issue between the two South Asian neighbors, India and Pakistan. This research analyzes the mediatized indulgence of terror in reporting of these two incidents in television and print media. The politics of representation in this analysis entails that these frames do not just involve reportage but an act of performance, how events are choreographed and predated on emotions and sentiments as cultural practices mobilizing its effective economy. This paper through the prism of media-industrial-terror complex draws upon the theory of critical events and focuses on how particular events – Uri and Pulwama activate and mobilize a discursive master narrative of Pakistan inspired/directed terrorism by ascribing a particular meaning to the war on terror. The semiotics of media reporting of Uri and Pulwama is analyzed through the tripartite motive quotient of gham (remorse), gussa (anger), and garv (pride).
