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”
Category: Books and Arts
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?
Waheeda Rehman, the Real Outlier
The actor is the first Muslim woman to get the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, startling given the legacy of Muslim women in Hindi film
Trauma Has No Expiry Date
In the aftermath of a prominent Bengali director of plays and films being criticised for casting an actor-director accused of sexual predation, theatre practitioner Shuktara Lal reflects on the impact of trauma on stage artistes. And what genuine allyship might look like.
[Trigger warning: sexual assault, child sexual abuse]
The Dreams and Yearnings That Technology Gave Us
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
Once Upon a Library
I dream most often of my grandmother. But these days, the image of my grandfather’s study keeps visiting me
Shabaash Mithu, and the Hindi film’s inability to handle micro-humiliations
Shabaash Mithu acknowledges what I found to be the sportswoman’s main problem in India—the un-seeing of women’s sport as proper sport. The un-seeing of women as equal citizens. The result is a thousand daily indignities, such as no money to travel, no international exposure, hand-me-down uniforms of the men’s team, bureaucratic scorn. The story of women’s sport is a search…
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,…
Why Does the Muslim Woman Need Saving in Hindi Film?
The Muslim man has been recast as a beast in mainstream blockbusters. But the Muslim woman we see in projects like Special Ops, War or Bajrangi Bhaijaan is either infantilised or simply erased In Special Ops, the web series by Bollywood director-producer Neeraj Pandey, there are two Muslim women characters with speaking roles among a dashboard of bloodthirsty Muslim men…