Coming of Age on Screen: Youthful Subjectivities in Contemporary Indian Media

Guest Editors:

Dr. Shreyansh Jain, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ (Deemed-to-be-University), Delhi-NCR, Ghaziabad, India.

Dr. Ruchi, School of Business, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India.

Link to the Journal: https://cinej.pitt.edu/ojs/cinej/announcement/view/6

CINEJ Cinema Journal is a free, online and print, open-access, Scopus and Web-of-Science indexed journal of film studies. It is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh -- cosponsored by University of Pittsburgh Press.

Concept Note

“Cinema’s characteristic forte is its ability to capture and communicate the intimacies of the human mind.” — Satyajit Ray.

Cinema has long functioned as a critical site for staging youth as a temporal, political, and affective category. From Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948), where youth figures as the allegorical remainder of postwar European trauma, to The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), which recast adolescence as countercultural resistance within late capitalism, coming-of-age cinema has historically mediated crises of modernity through generational transition. East Asian urban dramas such as Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) further situate youth within accelerated modernization, political repression, and emergent digital subjectivities, while Latin American social realist films including Y tu mamá también (2001) and City of God (2002) embed adolescence within structural inequality, state violence, and postcolonial precarity. Further, the flourishing genre of young adult science fiction – which includes The Hunger Games (2012-2023), The Maze Runner (2014-2018), The Giver (2014) – in the western digital spaces heightens self-society conflicts and addresses deeper nuances of personal identity by putting characters into politically induced dystopian scenarios. These traditions collectively construct youth as a liminal figure through which cinema negotiates institutional breakdown, mobility, and historical rupture. Yet dominant scholarship on cinematic youth continues to privilege Euro-American paradigms of adolescence, individuality, and generational conflict.

Contemporary Indian cinema and OTT narratives—Kota Factory (2019), Dil Chahta Hai (2001), 3 Idiots (2009), Tamasha (2015), Gully Boy (2019), Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020), Bandish Bandits (2020), Badhaai Do (2022), Dhadak 2 (2024), and Shabad – Reet Aur Riwaaz (2026)—enter this transnational genealogy but significantly recalibrate it. Here, subject formation is not merely framed as psychological maturation or generational dissent, but as structurally mediated through caste hierarchies, neoliberal educational apparatuses, queer visibility regimes, migration economies, and platform capitalism. If Euro-American coming-of-age narratives often privilege liberal individualism and autonomy as narrative telos, Indian youth cinema complicates this trajectory by foregrounding collective belonging, familial negotiation, and stratified mobility. In this sense, Indian screen cultures do not simply localize a global genre; they provincialize dominant theoretical models of adolescence and produce an alternative grammar of becoming—one attentive to postcolonial modernity, uneven globalization, and digitally mediated aspiration in the Global South. Further, drawing upon postcolonial theory, cultural studies, youth studies, and digital media theory, these narratives reveal how personal growth is inseparable from structural forces such as neoliberal education, platform capitalism, digital surveillance, migration, and identity politics. Indian films and digital media thus do not merely reflect social realities; they actively participate in shaping public discourse, rendering the intimate political and the personal profoundly cinematic.

In this way, Indian cinema and digital media have long functioned as cultural archives through which social anxieties, ethical dilemmas, and shifting subjectivities are articulated and contested. Foundational works in Indian film studies—such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen’s Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (1994), Ravi Vasudevan’s scholarship on popular cinema and melodrama (2000; 2011), Rachel Dwyer’s studies of Hindi cinema (2000; 2005), and M. Madhava Prasad’s Ideology of the Hindi Film (1998)—established cinema as a crucial site where nationhood, modernity, and social regulation are negotiated. More recent interventions by Ranjani Mazumdar (2007), Ravi Sundaram (2010), Tejaswini Ganti (2012), Aswin Punathambekar (2013), and Purnima Mankekar (2015) have extended this critical tradition by foregrounding urban experience, media globalization, industrial transformation, affect, and digital circulation as central to contemporary screen cultures. Building upon this theoretical foundation, this proposed special issue seeks to reposition the Global South—and particularly contemporary Indian cinema and digital media—as a generative site for rethinking youthful subjectivity within transnational media ecologies. It will critically examine how contemporary Indian films, web series, television narratives, and digital media texts represent youth and the transition into adulthood in Indian society, with its different norms, codes, and practices that involve caste, class, religion, heteronormative gendered values, clashes of cultures, and so on. Consequently, the Indian young adult narratives offer a distinct, at times challenging, perspective on Western counterparts, with Westernised values and cultural interference in Indian tradition, language, and culture, becoming sites of conflict and identity negotiation for the youth in series like Bandish Bandits (2020).

The issue advances three interconnected theoretical interventions:

Based on its scope, this special issue proposes to advance three interconnected theoretical interventions:

• Decentering Euro-American Models of Youth

There is a clear decentralization of contemporary youthful subjectivity in digital media and cinema—firstly, from the traditional orthodoxy of caste, religion, and cultural intolerance rooted in Indian social practices despite the pervasive multiculturalism that problematizes personal identity for the marginalized youth; secondly, from the Westernised models of becoming, since Indian young adult cinema, beyond the liberal individualism (separation from the tradition), simultaneously renders personal identity in deep relation to the collective belonging, familial negotiation, and stratified mobility. In this sense, Indian screen cultures do not simply localize a global genre; they provincialize dominant theoretical models of adolescence and produce an alternative grammar of becoming—one attentive to postcolonial modernity, uneven globalization, and digitally mediated aspiration in the Global South. Thus, by foregrounding caste, religion, regionality, and postcolonial governance, Indian coming-of-age narratives complicate dominant Western models of adolescence rooted in liberal individualism.

• Coming-of-Age under Platform Capitalism

Contemporary OTT ecosystems transform the aesthetics, temporality, and circulation of youth narratives with streaming infrastructures reshaping spectatorship, genre conventions, and youth address, linking local stories to global distribution networks. Under platform capitalism in India, coming-of-age is increasingly shaped by algorithmic visibility, data extraction, and precaritised aspiration. Youth identity is formed not through futurist rebellion but through continuous self-branding, affect, and platform-mediated validation, marking a shift from developmental autonomy to entrepreneurial subjectivity governed by digital infrastructures. The issue would also welcome article proposals that conduct data-based analysis of youthful subjectivities of self-image and the digitalized validation of social and personal identities. 

• Youth as Structurally Produced Subjectivity

Drawing upon postcolonial theory, cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, and digital media studies, the issue conceptualizes youth not as a demographic category but as a political formation shaped by narrative conventions, visual regimes, digital mediation, algorithmic visibility, and industrial logics that frame desire. In this theoretical approach, the emerging Indian youth is believed to be a product of exposure to widely distributed regional and international media and cinema content through platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video, MX Player, and Apple TV.

Through these interventions, the issue positions Indian screen cultures as a site for generating theoretical insights that resonate across the Global South and transnational contexts.

Scope and Comparative Orientation

While contemporary Indian cinema and digital platforms provide a central axis, the issue explicitly invites:

• Comparative analyses between India and other Global South contexts
• Studies of diasporic and transnational youth narratives
• Analyses of co-productions and global streaming flows
• Theoretical essays that use Indian case studies to rethink broader frameworks in cinema and media studies

Suggested Themes Include (but are not limited to):

• Adolescence, liminality, and cinematic temporality
• Youthful subjectivities in film and streaming media
• Gender, sexuality, and queer coming-of-age narratives
• Caste, class, and regional identity formations
• Migration, education, aspiration, and precarity
• Urban–rural transitions and peripheral youth voices
• Digital cultures, social media, and mediated selfhood
• Generational conflict and family structures
• Negotiations between tradition, modernity, and global youth culture

Call for Papers (CFP)

• Deadline for Paper Submission: August 2026
• Please submit the papers through the CINEJ Journal portal and select “Coming of Age on Screen: Youthful Subjectivities in Contemporary Indian Media” section (not the Articles)

For more information, please contact the Guest Editors at skjain.jain000@gmail.com; ruchi18.iitr@gmail.com

For further details related to the submission of full articles, please visit: https://cinej.pitt.edu/ojs/cinej/announcement/view/6

We look forward to your contributions.