Sudhir Mahadevan (He/him/his)

Who am I?

I am an Associate Professor in CHID, and Cinema and Media Studies. My PhD was in Cinema Studies. I am the author of "A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India" (SUNY Press (US), 2015; Permanent Black (India), 2018), as well as essays published in Framework, Screen, Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, TransAsia Photography, and Studies in South Asian Film and Media.

My research and teaching encompasses South Asian film, photography, and visual culture. 

Current research interests

 I am motivated by the challenge of developing new research methods to make sense of India's massive cinematic output (in numerical terms, the world's largest). Tens of thousands of movies have been released in the Hindi language alone between 1931 and the present.

My second research project is tentatively titled Iconic Images and I undertake a large-scale project of thematic criticism and formal analysis that foregrounds iconicity as a recurring  component traversing the organic and inorganic, the technical and the natural, the living and dying, in Hindi commercial cinema and visual culture of the post-Independence era in India. As in the research methods that culminated in my first book project, my approach is speculative. I am interested in exploring what, if anything, makes cinema "cinematic" in India; in finding pathways between the histories of still photography, animation, moving image media (analog and digital), and South Asian visual culture; and in drawing on myriad disciplines ranging from religious studies, anthropology, and history to art history and film studies, to make the movies speak to us in several registers: as historical documents, as archives of cultural history and everyday life, as formal configurations of sight, sensation and sound, and as media. 

Literature-cinema relations are another emerging facet of my aforementioned interest in medium specificity. In 2021, I wrote about a recently re-discovered queer film from India. In recent writing for an edited volume currently under production, I  look closely at the Hindi novel that inspired that movie. 

I have recently completed work on two essays (one forthcoming, and the other completed and awaiting submission) that look closely at the function of still photography in the movies.

For more public facing work, see my online exhibition: From Film Festivals to Songbooks based on a private collection of film memorabilia. 

Updated: September 1st, 2025