Hindi cinema, or if one may, Bollywood, is such a fascinating subject of study that almost any lens through which you might choose to look at it offers myriad possibilities of providing fresh perspectives on history, culture, society, politics, nationhood, gender etc. The precondition of course is that the exercise should…
In his autobiography Nirad Chaudhuri describes how on his wedding night he asked his young bride Amiya if she had heard of Beethoven. To his relief she had indeed heard of the composer and even spelt out the name correctly. This anecdote may not seem amusing any longeranxious Bengali babus…
There are not many Indian authors who had the courage and confidence to write about the United States of America despite the fact that many young and not-so-young men, and young and no-so-young women in post-Independent Indiaespecially from the 1950s and 1960s onwardshave literally grown up loving American popular fiction, popular music and popular cinema (Hollywood).
Divided into four sections, each one with an introduction, this book is with five essays on the renaissance in Europe, four on the Indian subcontinent, and two each on eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and ‘Art and Philosophy’, the scope of this book is quite vast even if it is largely Eurocentric…
Reviewing Shanta Acharyas previous collection of poetry, Shringara (2006), I had called it a sheaf of grief, an elegiac volume about the loss of loved ones, through which a rawness of the pain still throbbed. In the present volume, her fifth collection, we see her emerging out of that phase with the help of those precious resources…
Following the publication of her ambitious doctoral book The Hindi Public Sphere in 2002, Francesca Orsini was promptly acknowledged as one of the more knowledgeable and capable Hindi scholars teaching in the West and writing in English. (A fair proportion of them happen to be, like Orsini…