Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India
Published by New York University Press, 2025

Projecting Desire explores how architecture and media industries have jointly shaped new, gendered ways of experiencing cinematic space in post-liberalization India. Since the late 1990s, multiplexes in India have almost always been located inside malls, making it impossible to inhabit one space without also engaging the other.

This fusion of commercial architecture and screen culture coincides with a dramatic shift in the spectatorial imagination—from the subaltern male audience of single-screen theaters to the globalized, consuming middle-class woman. The mall-multiplex, as a hybrid space of leisure, has radically transformed how cinema is consumed, where it is consumed, and for whom.

My book traces this transformation across media industries, architecture and design, popular cinema, and urban public culture. It situates the rise of the multiplex within a longer history of Indian architectural discourse, marked by caste-, class-, and gender-based anxieties.

Bringing feminist film and media theory into dialogue with media industry studies, spectatorship studies, and architectural history, the book argues that architectural mediation is central to how the contemporary media city is imagined, built, and regulated.

Based on industrial ethnography, in-depth interviews, participant observation, discourse and textual analysis, and archival research, Projecting Desire maps the understudied nexus between new media architectures, cultures of public leisure, and cinematic modernity in the Global South.