Soumya Vats ’22 Tackles Indian Streaming Controversy in New Essay

Film and Media Studies alum Soumya Vats ’22 has had her essay on the controversy surrounding BBC One’s A Suitable Boy published in the latest collection from Archive Books, Stretching the Archives Toward a Global Women’s Film Heritage. The open-access volume, published on January 25, 2025, is available now for download.

The collection, which focuses on “feminist cultural memory and film heritage in the Global South,” is the culmination of two years of collaboration between filmmakers, scholars, and archivists.  Edited by Lizelle Bisschoff, Ana Grgić and Stefanie Van de Peer, the volume spans some 564 pages, with over 30 contributors from various fields.

“It immediately caught my attention,” said Vats, recalling the notice where she first learned of the call for submissions. “It talked about the project as an attempt to expand the idea of film heritage—one historically defined by Western-centric ideas dominated by male theorists—to include newer perspectives.”

Vats contributed the essay “‘You too will marry…’: Inclusion and Exclusion at the Uneasy Wedding in A Suitable Boy.” The piece is a study of filmmaker Mira Nair’s 2020 adaptation of Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy (Harper Collins, 1993) for BBC One. Vats explores the pushback from right-wing groups in India in response to the television show’s depiction of interfaith love and arranged marriage, against a larger backdrop of female representation in adaptations from the time of the novel’s release to the series’ debut.

Vats' interest in the Mira Nair series was one that developed from the larger cultural context that surrounds the show, which was distributed globally by Netflix (excluding the U.S., Canada, and China). “I placed A Suitable Boy within a praxis of Hindi films depicting arranged marriage to trace how this portrayal of the institution evolves with time, accelerated specifically through the streaming medium.”

For Vats, A Suitable Boy—“a BBC production set in an Indian landscape streaming on an American platform”—was a case study in the effect of international streaming on India’s film and television industry. “Censorship has been an especially pressing issue since the far-right BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party]-led government came to power in India in 2014,” she said, noting how it further emboldened the country’s already strict Central Board of Film Certification.

Streaming however, offered a new way for projects like A Suitable Boy to come to fruition, and find an audience. “These international platforms brought in a transnational mode of production,” said Vats, one that operated outside of the government's formal mechanisms for censorship. In response, Vats noted the rise of right-wing hate speech surrounding the production, “a fundamentally false narrative” pushing the conspiracy theory of ‘Love Jihad’ in which Muslim men court Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam.  

The outcry particularly concerns a scene in which the series’ Hindu protagonist kisses her Muslim suitor in front of a Hindu temple. The ensuing controversy was an attempt to “push the creators to self-censorship by making an example out of this case,” Vats explained.

“It was this novel juncture of the rise of streaming and onslaught of censorship that initially got me interested in A Suitable Boy,” she said.

The essay also draws from Vats’ larger thesis project, “Mandate for Nationalism: Streaming, Opposition and Censorship in Contemporary India through Mira Nair's A Suitable Boy,” written with the support of advisors Professor Jane M. Gaines (Film and Media Studies) and Associate Professor Debashree Mukherjee (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies).

Vats is currently a Writing Tutor at Ashoka University outside of New Delhi, where she continues her research. You can download the full collection including Vats’ essay here.