It is always fascinating to read about the meaning underlying the imagery in Nathdwara paintings. For instance, the different aspects of shringara are related to the season and time of the day, and the rasa that they choose to evoke, leading to ultimate ananda in devotees. Shringara of Shrinathji features an essay by Amit Ambalal, which gives a comprehensive view of the symbolism in the painting related to the Pushtimarg tradition.
A new biography by journalist Reema Desai Gehi provides a long overdue examination of the cultural arbiter. Gehi conducted extensive research, delving into archival material, interviewing people who knew Rudy, visiting his friends and family in Europe, to piece together a portrait of the man who did so much to support the artists who forged a new visual arts language in the early 20th century.
While I continued to interact personally with SH Raza, MF Husain, and KH Ara of the Progressive Artists Group, Souza remained an elusive personality—though I gravitated towards all his distinct canvasses and drawings at every exhibition or collection.
When his daughter Chanda is born to Rao Mahar Sahadev, her beauty is extolled far and wide and at the age of four she is betrothed by her father to another chieftain’s son named Bavan. When she arrives at her husband’s home at the age of 12, she finds Bavan to be one-eyed and impotent. Her virtue thus intact, she returns to her father’s home where she whiles away her time sighing from balconies, where she is thus espied by a passing bard who now sings passionately of her beauty, his stirring verses reaching the ears of Rao Rupchand in Rajpur.
On the face of it, this absence of reference material hinders any serious study of cinema in Odisha. However, the ‘black hole’ in Odia cinema’s history throws up uncanny silver threads. Patnaik turns to personal memories of men and women who literally embodied Odia cinema from its halcyon days in the 1960s and ‘70s to its present.
A long introduction sets out the contour of the work in which the ‘endeavour is to map the varied formations of the modern that the Suchitra-Uttam films articulated and to trace these responses to these formations in the reception circuits and journalistic discourses’.