(Scholar) Fans and Fandom Studies

Although film-makers have always sought to affect the audience emotionally or persuade them to a viewpoint, film studies scholarship has largely neglected audience experience and reception. A large body of literature around films has remained excessively focused on filmic texts and their production. Analyses of controversial films, genre studies, and film histories have dominated academic literature. On the contrary, popular film literature catered to the fan readers and remained focused on star personalities and film nostalgia. Biographical works on star actors, film-makers, actor-politicians, among others are a staple of trade publications. Literature about the viewing publics in India (Mankekar 1999) is extremely limited and audience reception studies are late entrants in Indian film studies (Srinivas 2002, 2010, 2016). Serious accounts of film fan cultures are rare if not absent, although Rajnikant fans have recently received some scholarly attention (Srinivas 2013; Gerritsen 2016). With the publication of Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, fandoms would perhaps be taken more seriously and a foundational discourse of fandom studies (Cavicchi 2018; Mitra 2020) in India would be established.

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