This book by Bhaskar Ghose, a former civil servant is about a college founded in the 1880s by a group of scholars from a monastic order based in Oxford. This is his fifth book. Two of the previous ones, Doordarshan Days and The Service of the State were non-fiction. The other two, The Teller of Tales and Parricide were fiction, like this one.
The Miss Burma in the title is Louisa Bension, the daughter of Benny, a Jew, and Khin, belonging to the Karen minority. And, she is also the mother of Charmaine Craig, the author of the book.
Saeed Naqvi in the editor’s Preface states that his belief is that Urdu has served as a link language for many centuries, and that writers of Urdu literature should be better known for the common thread of humanity discernible in their stories. Perhaps for the sake of retaining the focus on the Urdu language and literature, the editor skirts the vexed history of language politics…
It is not easy to put together an anthology. One could finalize a theme with relative ease but inclusion and exclusion of texts around the decided theme can be an unusually challenging task. At a time when literary and academic circles, for the most part, swear by theoretical propositions that deny individual choice its due, the compiler must gear up for answering a series of questions on why some pieces were included and others were not.
Why do we make documentaries? How do we make them? For whom do we make them? Where are our films shown and who sees them? What, if any, is the impact of our work? These are some of the compelling questions that are foregrounded and discussed in Towards A People’s Cinema edited by Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee.
Few other film-makers in the history…