Dissertation
Kahani Ab Tak: On Storytelling, Time, and a Pandemic in Mumbai's 'Daily Soap' Industry
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
05/2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000007405
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of the production practices of the Hindi soap opera, also known as ‘daily soap’, industry in Mumbai, India. I examine how contemporary daily soap making is organised through a set of production conventions that coordinates, as well as delineates, television workers' creative labour. In this study, I identify and examine three specific conventions, namely narrative, authorial, and temporal, that I argue simultaneously shape televisual imaginaries as well as conceptualisations of creative work in the industry. I show how daily soaps are made through distinctive aesthetic and fictive codes that are interpretively deployed by workers through production hierarchies, contested audience formulations, and performance of temporal labour. I further explore these production practices in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic using the conceptual lens of resilience. Production conventions, as I illustrate, reveal complex processes of serialised television making and media workers’ self-reflexive articulations of their creative work in a crucial Mumbai-based media industry.
Metrics
1 File views/ downloads
64 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Kahani Ab Tak
- Creators
- Sreenidhi Krishnan
- Contributors
- Clare M Wilkinson (Chair)Caroline Owens (Committee Member)Nishant Shahani (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of Anthropology
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 322
- Identifiers
- 99901220449301842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation