Ratnakar Tripathy will deliver a lecture on ‘Readings of Film Songs: A Pedagogical Foray’ 18 June 2026. It will be chaired by Ravikant. 

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ZOOM ID: 85329953692            PASSCODE: csdsdelhi

The presentation marks an attempt to draw Hindi film songs into the interpretive-analytical domain they fully deserve. Often neglected by cultural/film studies, the large body of songs seem to have been pushed into a limbo where literary analysts and cultural commentators have allowed them to stay. Seen as neither literature nor substantive texts, these piecemeal cultural texts embody the trajectory of popular music as well as literature, with no one willing to own them up as valid objects of study. With the help of clips, the talk tries to posit them as amorphous texts that come in many shapes as part of full-fledged cinematic narrative, as independent visual material, as well as pure audio consumed as fragments of musical narratives.

Ratnakar Tripathy is Visiting Faculty at Asian Development Research Institute, Patna, and the author of Singing Languages: Regional Music Industries in the Hindi Belt. He has researched extensively in areas that form a continuum: theatre-music-regional languages, linguistic/ cultural politics in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh.

Ravikant is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Thursday, 18 June 2026, 4.30 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/4eJqfas