A Handful of Stories

Reportage on health, science and politics. And some meditations on film

Tag: Calcutta

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…

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…