Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s novel The Secret of More is set in the Bombay of the early 20th century, when the motion picture industry was being born and the seismic political changes that shaped the age of democracy and nationalism were underway
Category: Essays
The Courtesan, the Sportsperson and the Desires of the Nation
The courtesan, a long-time fascination of Hindi cinema, is being replaced by the sportsperson. Corporeal labour and the art of sports is the kind of performance that the politics of post-2000 India celebrates. The courtesan represents women in pre-modern India, the sportsperson represents the ideal citizen of contemporary India. In particular, the sportswoman In the book Dancing with the Nation,…
The Unpaid Labour of Housewives
The Bengali films Tasher Ghawr and The Lovely Mrs Mukherjee show the domestic servitude written into subcontinental marriages Some days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi locked us down on 25 March with the battle analogy of the 18-day Kurukshetra war, the celebrity housework videos began. Then, the men who did not have cameras installed for easy recording provided dishwashing updates, and…
Why A Woman Who Reads is Still Unusual in Hindi Film
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…
Why are “servants” in Hindi film so heroic?
Gully Boy and Parasite have the same front-seat-back seat dynamic of “servants and masters”. So does Joker. But Gully Boy locates its problems in the abusive, alcoholic fathers of Dharavi. Why is Hindi film so shy about class conflict? Around the mid-point of the Oscar-winning Parasite, right before it pivots to another gear, is a conversation that sums up the…
Hindi Film Teaches Us More About Kashmir than New Delhi’s School Syllabus
Haider, Fanaa and Mission Kashmir, all major star vehicles, speak of listening to what both ‘nationalists’ and ‘terrorists’ have to say
The Ghosts of Albert Pinto
The lives of those who collect our trash, serve our meals and drive our vehicles are in focus again. The Hindi film has returned to working class concerns with Super 30, Gully Boy and Bharat
Are Independence and Partition Male Experiences?
In Hindi film, the woman is rarely the protagonist of a Partition or Independence narratives. But Bengali film always centers the experience of women in such narratives. An introspection The 2018 Bengali film Ek Je Chhilo Raja, while largely mediocre, has an interesting question towards its tail. The film centres on a real-life legal battle for property in India, known…
Why Don’t These Girls Work?
In the recent batch of Bollywood films set in bright, ‘mithai’-loving small towns, the heroines are assertive and sexually confident but rarely have careers or career aspirations
The Privilege of the 0.1%
If cinema is a lens to understand society, then both
Placebo and Munnabhai MBBS tell you two things–why doctors evoke such dislike, and why they themselves appear dehumanized and alienated, out of love with the work they have spent so
many years in training for.