The city of Chennai was remembered until the early 2000s for its huge banners lining most of the arterial roads. Huge hand painted film hoardings battled for prominence with equally massive ads for consumer products. And then suddenly the denizens of Chennai felt that these hoardings were not really aesthetic and were also…
The adaptation of fiction into films is one of the earliest interventionist modes of analysing cinema and bringing the cinematic medium at par with the written word. Cinema needed ‘respectable’ literary moorings to step out of the shadows. James Naremore in his seminal work on film adaptation…
This book is a collection of essays in English by Satyajit Ray, dating from as early as 1949 to 1989, collated from different newspapers, journals and bulletins on cinema from India and elsewhere. Twenty-two written pieces have been arranged accordingly in three segments titled,…
Donald Preziosi in his, A Crisis in, or of, Art History? recounts an instance which will become the cornerstone to radicalize the conventional disciplines of art history. He talks about the 1982 Winter issue of Art Journal which was dedicated to the theme of ‘The Crisis in the Discipline’.
Abiography is usually the life of a person and Douglas Knight’s book features Balasaraswathi, a Bharatanatyam icon. He meticulously traces her life as a dancer, emphasizing her family’s influence on her career. As a child, there was an initial brief period when Bala, as she was popularly known…
Not by pen, nor by author, nor indeed by technique, but life by its own motion went on spreading, page after page, on paper, as if there had sprung up a mighty living tree on earth’, says Krishna Sobti about her novel, Zindagi Nama Ek Zinda Rookh. It is nothing short of a tour de force, a fascinating kaleidoscope of the life and times of pre-partition Punjab…