Fellow in Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters"
May – June 2019

Early Indo-German Cinematic Exchanges: Poetics and Politics

The early 20^th century witnessed a number of collaborations between emerging film industry networks in Berlin and Bombay. Shambhavi Prakash's project at EXC 2020 examines the cinematic languages that emerged from these cultural contexts through circulations and translations of texts, themes, tropes and film techniques as well as through the movement of individuals. In so doing, the project's focus is on German-language films on India produced in Berlin and on Hindi-language films produced in Bombay through Indo-German collaborations. Tracing the influence of 19^th and 20^th-century German-language literary works dealing with India, theoretical writings on cinema from the Weimar Republic, and their possible connections with the films in question, the project explores the intermedial poetics and politics of film and literature in their manifold transcultural entanglements.

Shambhavi Prakash is assistant professor at the School of Languages, Literature and Culture Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her fields of research include German-language travel literature, memory studies, cultural studies and documentary film. She is especially interested in questions related to poetics of knowledge as they emerge from the intersection of history and anthropology with film and literature.