Dipannita Dutta’s book Ashapurna Devi and Feminist Consciousness in Bengal: A Bio-Critical Reading comes at a time when debates concerning possible trajectories of feminist politics and activism in India have critically intensified.
The historical is not defined by the past; both the historical and the past are defined as themes of which one can speak. The historical is forever absent from its very presence. This means that it disappears behind its manifestations; its apparition is always superficial and equivocal; its origin, its principle, always elsewhere.
The book provides interesting insights into key developments that have informed and configured the Indian news media in recent times.
Since the advent of television in India the number of licensed television sets in India grew from 55 in 1964 to a lakh in 1975 and to just over two million connections in 1982; in 1991 a total of thirty-four million families owned television sets, growing to 65% of the Indian population owning television sets by 2014—the societal and political landscape has transformed quite dramatically.
In the age of digital photography where more and more images are being taken to be stored in the hard drives of computers a certain fascination with photography of the distant past has resurfaced.
Chapter 4, on page 99 of Zitzewitz’s book The Art of Secularism begins with a quote by painter Gulammohammed Sheikh where he says, ‘in one sense it is the communal situation that opened doors to understand the role of religion in life.