2022 Summer Graduate Research Fellow: Ankita Deb

Ankita Deb is a graduate student in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University and received a 2022 summer graduate research fellowship from the Center for South Asia. 

Learn more about the fellowships here

Deb's project, Medical Masala Films: Progress, Prohibition and the (Un)official Ecologies of Sex Education in India,  examines unofficial media ecologies of sex education films in India, and their long histories of exhibition, certification, and reception between 1973-1999. Deb examines these films and their afterlives within a frenetic landscape of political turmoil enmeshed in discourses of desire, national progress, and prohibition.

Project Summary:

Ankita Deb’s dissertation argues that the genre of sex education films and popular print culture on sexual science were shaped by censorship and other legal mandates. This project explores these films and their sustained presence over two decades by attending to underground sites of circulation and exchange. This project requires extensive ethnographic and archival work in India and has been generously supported by the Center for South Asia Research Fellowship. The fellowship helped her access censorship records, film posters, song booklets and film reviews for her project at the National Film Archive of India in Pune.

The Central Board of Film Certification and the Films Division archive in Bombay were equally critical in locating the State sponsored films on sexual and reproductive health of the country. Deb's time in India was also spent conducting ethnographic research on dilapidated and disappearing sites of exhibition such as the single screen theaters and video parlors. She collected oral testimonies of cinephiles, film distributors, producers and film theater managers to trace mainstream and underground exhibition circuits and reception cultures of these films.