Migratory Technology: Piracy and Bazaar Culture in India and Nepal

Abstract

This interview between film and media scholar Ishita Tiwary and art historian Sarah Bassnett was conducted over Zoom in February 2023. It focuses on Tiwary’s research on the migration of photographic and media technologies from China to India and Nepal in the period from the 1980s to the present. The discussion concentrates on how piracy and the illicit trade in goods such as cameras and mobile phones has shaped border cultures and access to consumer culture in the global south. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Keywords:

• technology, photography, migration, piracy, India, Nepal, China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Figure 1. Dhulabari Market, Nepal, 2019. Photo: Ishita Tiwary.

Figure 2. Metro Bazaar, Kolkata, India, 2019. Photo: Ishita Tiwary.

Figure 3. Metro Bazaar, Kolkata, India, 2019. Photo: Ishita Tiwary.

Figure 4. Hong Kong Market, Siliguri, India, 2019. Photo: Ishita Tiwary.

Notes

1 Sandro Mezzadro and Brett Neilson, Border as Method: Or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

2 Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Duke University Press, 2017); Feminist International (Verso 2020); Gago and Luci Cavallero, A Feminist Reading of Debt (Pluto Press 2021).

3 Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: IB Tauris, 2002).

4 Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).

5 Gray market objects are goods that are sold in informal markets at lower prices.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Bassnett

Sarah Bassnett is a Professor of Art History at Western University in Canada, where she specializes in the history of photography and photo-based contemporary art. Her research focuses on the intersections of photography and social change, especially as it relates to issues of power and resistance. Her award-winning book Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City (2016) examines photography’s role in the liberal reform of early twentieth-century Toronto. She is co-author with Sarah Parsons (York University) of Photography in Canada, 1839-1989: An Illustrated History (2023).

Ishita Tiwary

Ishita Tiwary is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Media, Migration, and Cinema at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. Her research interests include video cultures, media infrastructures, contraband media practices, migration and media aesthetics in South Asia. Her current research project tracks the migration of pirated media objects and people from China to India via the Nepal and Tibet border through bazaar spaces and examines how it produces topographies of gender, labor, and commodities. Her work has been published in journals such as Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, Culture Machine, Marg: Journal of Indian Art, amongst others.