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’.
The Musical Maverick: An Authorized Biography of Shankar Mahadevan by Ashis Ghatak chronicles the life of the versatile music director, singer, and performer who has played a critical role in scaling up the soundtracks of not just Bollywood films but also genres like fusion jazz, Indipop, and a modern, refurbished aural universe of devotional music.
The third section of essays is ‘Post-cinematic Flows’. The title of this section hints at the changing nature of the cinematic medium and its viewing whether in public, semi-public or entirely private settings and transformations in its circulation and consumption. Madhuja Mukherjee’s essay on balances at play in video making in the Manbhum region of Bengal