Chennai saw the flood of the century in 2015, which claimed more than five hundred lives. Four years later, the city hit ‘day zero’, where all the city’s reservoirs dried, and 11.2 million residents had no water.
The book opens with an introduction that discusses the theoretical underpinnings and contestation about cultural globalization and whether it tends to erode the identities and culture of societies or not. Vivek Mohan Dubey starts the theoretical discussion with the ‘Traditional School of Thought’
South Asia has arguably been the cradle of the visual from times immemorial. Story telling in picture form from fables to epics has a place in the history of the subcontinent. Painting, sculpture, printing, weaving, sketching are practices that the people have used continuously.
A full page, at the very beginning, carries an arresting photograph of Sayed Haider Raza. We see a young Raza, somewhere in the early 1950s, sitting with his hands clasped around his raised left knee, apparently photographed in that reflective moment, with a painted canvas on the easel.
The term ‘biography’ can mislead at times. A person can be written about in so many different ways—popular forms include scholarly studies, trade bios and dictated memoirs—and ‘biography’ encompasses them all.
The book under review is a treat for scholars and students of Indian ‘cinematology’ embedded in social science. The landscape, timeframe and theoretical debates around Hindi cinema have been deliberated in an extensive way. The idea of ‘Social Language’, its construction and meaning in reference to the Dalit have been explored.