Transnational Cultures of Malabar Home Films from South-West Asia: Faith and Frames

This book examines the emergence, circulation, and cultural significance of the Malabar Home Film movement. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, and advanced students in Media Studies, Film Studies, Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Migration Studies. This book examines the emergence, circulation and cultural significance of the Malabar Home Film movement, an independent video film culture that developed in northern Kerala in the late 1990s and subsequently expanded across transnational migrant circuits in the Gulf. At its core, the study investigates how a seemingly modest, low-budget video genre becomes a powerful site for negotiating religion, modernity, migration and media within postcolonial South Asia. The volume offers the first sustained academic account of a Muslim video film movement in India, moving beyond macropolitical narratives of Islamism to examine the everyday aesthetic labour through which religious publics are assembled. By integrating political history, media ethnography, and textual interpretation, it demonstrates how home films operate as a “double mirror,” reflecting both intra-community anxieties and wider shifts in national and transnational political life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kerala and the Gulf, interviews with filmmakers and activists, and close readings of samples drawn from over two hundred films, the study situates the genre within the crises of India’s postcolonial developmental state, the acceleration of globalization and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics. The primary readership includes scholars, researchers and advanced students in Media Studies, Film Studies, Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies and Migration Studies. It will also attract journalists, documentary filmmakers, cultural critics and policy researchers interested in religion and media, minority politics in India, Gulf migration and vernacular digital cultures.