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,…
Category: Essays
Of our 33 crore gods, only the goddess Shakti can be called a true sports hero
In our two epics, Ram, Lakshman, Arjun are star warriors, but battles are not won on their skill alone. Divine intervention and deception are needed. The story of Durga’s 10-day marathon battle that cemented her place among the top of the gods underlines her strength, willpower and stamina—all the things that count in sport The story about physical exercise that…
The Autopsy of Phulmoni Dossee (and Bengali progressivism)
A prominent choral strain in the Kolkata protests against the RG Kar murder and rape is the argument of Bengali Liberal values. “How could such a savage crime against a woman take place in Kolkata?!’ But look back at the history of the 19th century Bengal, and you see a people no more exceptional than the rest of the sub-continent…
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”
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
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,…