Special Issue: ‘Reality Television in South Asia: Performance, Negotiation, Imagination’

Since the early 2000s, contest-based performance reality shows have become a major source of televisual entertainment in South Asia as well as an important site of publicity for musicians, singers, dancers and choreographers. They have become important venues for the performance of film, folk and classical music and dance, as well as sites where the aesthetics, meaning and status of these genres, and the boundaries between them, are recast. The reality show format has introduced new performance practices, new practices of viewing and audition and new modes of identification and evaluation. The articles in this Special Issue present case studies of the staging, curation and presentation of performance-based reality shows and the kinds of gendered, ethnic, classed and casted subjects produced and recruited through these shows. Moving beyond the more-studied Hindi belt, the articles focus on India’s south and northeast, as well as Pakistan and Nepal.