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, 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 macro-political 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 th