The transgender community in India, commonly known as hijras, consists of people who were born as males but address themselves as females. They have been considered as the third gender in India for millennia and have had specific religious and sociocultural values and roles, but are forced to live in shadows in this day and age. Isolation of this community is also reflected in the way transgender characters are represented in Indian entertainment media. The study analyses two transgender themed films semiotically and the audience reception of those representations by 20 members of the transgender community. Semiotics is a helpful tool to understand the ways signs communicate ideas to viewers. This study applies syntagmatic and paradigmatic analyses to understand how images are used to represent and relay information to the audience. Reception theory along with double colonization has been incorporated in this study to analyse the ways in which the transgender community interprets the representations in entertainment media.

This inaugural volume of the CoRSAL Occasional Publications is a collection of traditional and personal texts in Thadou, Saihriem, Hrangkhol, and Ranglong, four languages of the Barak Valley region of Northeast India. The narratives were collected, transcribed, and translated by Dr. Pauthang Haokip, who is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India and a member of the Thadou community. This text collection includes grammatical analysis presented in the form of interlinear glossing and accompanied by audio recordings in the Languages of the Barak Valley collection in the Computational Resources of South Asian Languages archive. The collection will be of lasting interest to historical, comparative, and typological linguists, as well as speakers connecting or reconnecting with cultural and linguistic traditions.