Dr Priyam Sinha: "The Making of a New Bollywood: Pitching, Scripting and Producing a Disability Genre"

Abstract
In this talk, I will be journeying into the significance of screenwriters and dialogue writing within the more extensive and entangled film production practices of contemporary Bollywood cinema in India. Drawing on fieldwork conducted from 2021 to 2024, I foreground the creative tools, research and negotiations that prompt screenwriters to conceptualise and pitch character arcs that feature disabilities previously unheard of like cerebral palsy, autism, dyslexia, among others. In doing so, I attend to the conditions, identity politics, biases and situated vulnerabilities of writers that shape the assemblages of scripting disability rhetorics. By explicitly focusing on two films and the production practices of disability making, this talk is a trailer to my book project.

Short-bio
Dr Priyam Sinha is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award and is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies and production culture studies. Her work can be found at Media, Culture and Society, Communication, Culture and Critique, Economic and Political Weekly, among others. She is also a regular podcast host on NewBooksNetwork, a platform promoting public education. To learn more about her work, see https://www.priyamsinha.com/

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