Suryansu Guha

SURYANSU GUHA, then a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles, California, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “One Stop (Sweat)shops: The Indian Service Economy and the Work of Film Post-Production,” supervised by Dr. Denise Mann. The dissertation looks at the history of racialized and devalued labor in the industries of film and media visual effects (VFX) work in India from 1995 to 2015. The labor-intensive nature of creating digitally rendered graphics in live-action films, ever since its advent in the 90s, has compelled Hollywood studios to seek out solutions to cut costs by outsourcing it to countries with low wages and a skilled workforce. This has led to the creation of a skilled industry of VFX outsourcing in India where artists labor in VFX “sweatshops” to produce supposedly “low-value” and “technical” work that are nevertheless necessary for Hollywood studios to routinely churn out effects-heavy tentpoles. The research demonstrates that a systematic effacing of the VFX artists in India and a disavowal of their work as non-creative, technical or menial is instrumental to its co-optation by those that hold and profit off the intellectual property right to the finished product. It lays bare a widespread cultural belief which understands work undertaken by Indian artists as “back-end” or “technical” work that is not creative in itself but is nonetheless always in service of someone else’ creativity.