Shubham Shivang is an anthropologist and a media scholar. His research examines how digital media and cinema forge new paradigms of identity and occasion new modes of doing political work. His current book project, The Sound of Bhojpuri: Screen Media, Language, and Politics in Vernacular North India, takes up the North Indian instance of the Bhojpuri language to unpack how visuality and language are entwined and reshape existing models of ethnolinguistic identity in South Asia. His research shows that in Bhojpuri’s case, the vernacular ceases to be a mere speech form and language becomes more than a nominal classificatory category for cultural media. It makes the claim that cultural media, such as the practices named Bhojpuri, reveal how the black box of ‘culture’ is made an everyday object of concern and politics in contemporary South Asia.