The gift of an Amrita Pritam book in Soni feels like a little revolution. So does the library scene in Manikarnika There is a moment in Manikarnika that nothing had prepared me for. The film is a biopic on the well-known historical figure Rani Laxmibai, a heroine of our high-school history. The trailer underlined the notes of this familiar story, of an…
Category: Books and Arts
Nagarkirtan: Unusual Loves and Marginal, Gig Economy Lives
This love story is also a portrait of the urban precariat–the life of a food delivery worker who earns on commission is not so different from the life of a ‘hijra’ who earns for each ‘performance’ I came to Nagarkirtan several months after my homo-unaware parents exhorted me to watch this “adbhut chamatkar” (strange marvellous) film. I call them homo-unaware…
How to Tell a Story of Beauty and Sexual Abuse
Gitanjali Kolanad’s novel Girl Made of Gold tells the story of Devadasis without shying away from the paedophilia and abuse that lie at the heart of a stunning art form I came to Girl Made of Gold after three months immersed in Ashapurna Debi’s magnum opus Pratham Protisruti set in late 19th century Bengal. I thought that no English-language book…
Kshudito Pashan: A Ghost Story with a Hindustani Classical Soundtrack
Although the Tagore story is based on the Victorian imported template, the score by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan uses none of the jump scares and creaks typical of the genre I had seen Lekin many years before I came to Kshudito Pashan, the Bengali film from which it is said to be inspired. I knew it has the template of…
Agantuk: What the Bhadralok Dislike for Ray’s Final Work Tells Us
If feel-good storytelling leaves us warm and happy at being alive, what can we call cinema that leaves us uncomfortable? How about be-better cinema? The film Bengali Bhadralok Ray-lovers dislike the most is his last work, Agantuk. I loved it when I saw it first, as an 8-year-old who watched a near-complete Ray retrospective late nights on Doordarshan the year…
Why Do Women Carry the Mantle of Mental Health in Hindi Film?
A number of recent projects, headlined by major Bollywood stars reveal a sensitivity and awareness, likely prompted by the Modi government’s Mental Healthcare Act. But men, whose mental health figures are far more worrying, are shown as mentors and caregivers and support figures In the Hindi film Judgemental Hai Kya (Are you Judgemental), something happened for the first time. The…
Neel Akasher Neechey: When it was possible to make a hit film about the friendship between a Chinese vendor and a Bengali activist
This Mrinal Sen work became the first film to be banned in independent India in 1962 The Bengali film Neel Akasher Neeche, the second film directed by Mrinal Sen, is a marker of a time when it was considered unproblematic to cast a Bengali as a Chinese man and use make-up to pull his eyes into slits. But it is…
Kharij: The Killing of a ‘Servant Boy’
Mrinal Sen’s clear-eyed unpeeling of the cruelty of the great Indian middle class A young, upper-middle class family, Anjan and Mamata Sen, hire a boy ‘servant’ not much older than their own son in 1980s Calcutta, administered by a Communist government, in the film Kharij. The ‘servant’ boy dies one night, possibly due to a gas leak in the kitchen,…
The ‘Maid’ Who Lies and Loses Her Temper
Ilo Ilo offers what Roma does not–a loving ‘domestic help’ who sometimes gives it back The difference between the Mexican-American film Roma and the Singaporean film Ilo Ilo is that the “maid” Teresa speaks here. She has a point of view, unlike in Roma where we see Cleo mostly as the recipient of conversations, barely a participant even in her…
Asukh: A Father-Daughter Chamber Drama with Bowel Movement Talk at Dinner
A decade and a half before the Hindi film Piku, this Bengali feature offered the gender opposite of the mother-daughter drama, the Autumn Sonata, Unishe April, Tehzeeb genre As much as I love Piku, there is a father-daughter film with similar strains but darker in its comic and emotional notes that arrived a decade and a half before it. Asukh…