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In 1998, commemorating fifty years of India’s Independence (1947–97), artist Vivan Sundaram installed a year-long site-specific project at the Durbar Hall of Victoria Memorial Museum in Calcutta, calling it a Journey Towards Freedom: Modern Bengal, which was subsequently re-christened as the History Project. Almost twenty years later, under this latter name—that according to art critic Geeta Kapur…

Tilt Pause Shift:Dance Ecologies In In-dia edited by Anita E. Cherian is a remarkable book. It is remarkable for many reasons, in a context where hagio-graphies about dancers, coffee table books on dance with glamorous production values abound—here is a book that is scholarly, incisive and very aware of the politics of bodies in performance.

The Radical Impulse by Sumangala Damodaran is a valuable archive of IPTA’s musical repertoire across languages and regions of India as well as a sophisticated analysis of the political and cultural climate of the early to mid-twentieth century in which this music evolved. Formed in 1943, the Indian Progressive Theatre Association made one of the first conscious attempts to use music and performative forms as modes of political activism and protest and to develop a self-conscious ‘people’s aesthetic’ that had a momentous impact on literary cultures of the time.

Banaras, generally characterized as the longest continuously living city and as a microcosm of Hindu civilization, has long enjoyed epithets of an eternal, timeless, unchanging, and archetypal Hindu holy city. It has, perhaps, for a city of its size, attracted much more attention from scholars of repute, and many of them, in recent times, have forayed beyond the domain of the sacred, to unravelling the complexity that Banaras represents.

India is a diverse country with several re gional cultures and histories. We implicitly acknowledge this diversity as a badge of identity. However, when it comes to modern architecture, we expect all buildings to look ‘modern’, whether they are built in Maharashtra or Bengal, Punjab or Kerala. Even critics don’t expect otherwise. But the ground realities reveal a different picture and some critics are beginning to realize that modern architecture in India is not as homogenous as it is imagined.

This is a remarkable tale of a remarkable man who went by several names, trained in espionage by the brother of the celebrated writer Ian Fleming and who undertook among other things the safe keeping and travels of Bose as a fugitive. The life of Bhagat Ram Talwar, alias Silver is a story that is incredible and mysterious even as it is formed and sculpted by extraordinary macro-political events that the second great war and the new balance of power accompanying the rise of the Axis powers and of the Soviet Union came to embody.