Now that you are up there, Riten, tell your thakma how much you admired her Dear Riten, I first met Ila Mitra through you in March 2021, deep in the global panic of Covid19, although she was already gone 19 years then. I had glimpsed her in disparate blogs and some newspaper articles in Bengali online but she was the…
Category: Books and Arts
The Seedling That Birthed a Tree of New Storytelling
50 years of Ankur. 50 years of Shyam Benegal, the anchor of the New Wave movement in Hindi cinema In that last light of day before it is all gone and the crickets have begun calling, a man hurries through paddy fields swollen with the rain that has fallen all day to a hovel that stands across his sturdy home,…
The Stories Before Imane Khelif
The Long and Troubling History of Sex Testing in Sport, a Practice Reserved Exclusively for Female Competitors Competitive sport has a long and unsettling history of forcing women athletes to prove their womanhood. Compulsory sex testing was introduced at the 1966 European Athletics Championships in Budapest, which required women to walk in the nude before a group of gynaecologists. One…
Maagh: A companion piece to Haider that does even better
Aamir Bashir’s film treads the same contours–half widows, disappeared people, unmarked graves, the melting sanity of the people. But more quietly, more forcefully led by a magnificent Zoya Hussain, and a stunningly detailed and beautiful background score
Palan: A filmic tribute to Mrinal Sen gets everything wrong
National Award-winning filmmaker Kaushik Ganguly’s Palan is a sequel to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij, the story of a Bhadralok couple whose apathy is responsible for the death of a “servant” boy. The film won the jury prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Aside from plain silliness, Palan is bloated with misdirected sympathy for the Bhadralok Palan is billed as a sequel…
100 Years of Mrinal Sen
From using real footage to voice-overs by Amitabh Bachchan, the legendary middle name in the Ray-Sen-Ghatak trinity set many trends
Citizen Kumar
Kumar became a part of an awareness campaign to encourage backward-class or Pasmanda Muslims to take advantage of the OBC reservations that were recommended by the Mandal Commission report. This was 1990, and Kumar had been considered a living legend for at least a quarter-century by then
Seeing the World in A Grain of Bengal
Three years after independence from 200 years of British rule, a debutant film-maker who came of age in colonial India started making a film in Bengali about a village in Bengal. Satyajit Ray worked almost entirely in Bengali, building a bridge “between his beloved Bengal and the rest of the world”
How Satyajit Ray and 80-year-old Kolkata firm Signet Press changed publishing in India
The Calcutta publisher that published the first edition of Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India in 1946, is known for outstanding cover art and illustration, clean layouts, stylish typefaces
Satyajit Ray and the Case of the Missing Women
Ray’s cinema is known for its magnificent portrayal of the inner lives of women. But Ray the writer, whose legacy of young adult stories in Bengali is even greater than his films, has a pathological absence of women in his books. What might this chronic exclusion amount to in the minds of his fans?