Tag Archives: Art and Culture

The dramatic and intriguing cover of the volume under review catches one’s attention even before one registers the title. Two sassy and confident women, seemingly joined at the hip, stand facing opposite directions, one with headphones, eyes shut, most likely listening to music, one hand on a gramophone record…

Keshav Desiraju’s Of Gifted Voice: The Life and Art of M.S. Subbulakshmi, is a connoisseur’s delight. It brings her extraordinary life to us embedded in the detailed narrative of the intricate musical world and contemporary social history of the 1900s.Desiraju’s scholarship has sharpened the understanding of the music of Subbulakshmi and her times…

There is a famous photograph by photographer Roger Fenton of a barren field, on straining one’s eye you get to notice a few canon balls strewn in the foreground. This one believes is the first war photograph famously known as ‘Valley of Shadow of Death’. The image was made in 1855 when Fenton was sent from London to cover the Crimean War…

Film scholarship across the world has been using various theoretical concepts to deal with aesthetics, especially the visual aesthetic of different genres of cinema. These broader theoretical approaches are linked to semiotics and representation, ideology and mass mediation…

What makes Devika (the little goddess) Rani (the queen) so unique in the history of Indian cinema? And what has sustained public imagination on this enigmatic lady till now? Is it her ethereal beauty, acting ability, radiant personality, pedigree or upbringing…

Sometime during the early decades of the 1900s, with India in the throes of the anti-colonial movement, Kulsumbai decided that her family—the couple and their six children, three boys and three girls—would move to England, and the kids would be admitted to a boarding school there…

In this virtual world where image consumption on the screen is the norm and many web-based platforms offer our eye the luxury to look at the work of talented photographers, coming across the printed picture is an experience that still goes unmatched. The materiality of paper…

The ownership and manner of use of built heritage brings out intense emotion among people. This is true whether the heritage belongs to society at large or even when it is owned by private parties as evocatively shown in the popular film, Gulabo Sitabo. Meha Mathur’s maiden book…

There is a photograph of Romila Thapar smiling that you see as you open the book. She is sitting at the entrance of a cave site in Maijishan in China and it was taken when she was a twenty-six year old postgraduate student. Most of her reading public and scores of her students…

In 2019, the Aleph Book Company brought out an imprint of Fatima Bhutto’s freshly penned book New Kings of the World: The Rise and Rise of Eastern Pop Culture. They decided to wrap the hardcover meant for Indian audiences in a shocking bubblegum pink. And placed a smirking Shah Rukh Khan top centre…

Representation is a tricky word as there can never be an authentic representation. Any act of representation conceals a lot and only offers a timid glimpse of reality. Cinema is well known for such deception. It often claims to be a reflexive comrade that would showcase.

More than a cinematographer extraordinaire, Shyam Benegal is a phenomenon, an institution of sorts. So strong is his influence on the parallel or new cinema of contemporary times that one may easily speak of the Benegal school of film-making. It is another matter.

The large majority of books on Kathak that offer a historical, theoretical and practical approach to the study of the dance form are in Hindi. Some are also available in other vernaculars like Bengali. This itself makes Kathak: The Dance of Storytellers.

The sixty papers published in these two volumes were all presented at the 14th International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History (ISIPH) held at Delhi in 2013. The first of these seminars was held at Goa in 1978 on the initiative of the late Father John Correia-Afonso.

This book presents a fairly comprehensive primary coverage of the heart of the Lepakshi temple town where lay its religious and trade basis. Its richly painted ceilings take us beyond an identification of religious iconography to tell us about the shifts.

Sebastian & Sons is the intriguing title of a book on the brief history of mrdangam makers. The striking photograph of Madurai Ratnam, Sebastian’s first cousin, adorns the cover. When Krishna was asked who Sebastian was, he responded: ‘Sebastian was the oldest.

Purushottam Agrawal’s edited book on Nehru, provocatively titled Who is Bharat Mata?—among many other admirable qualities—has the grace of opportune timing. It comes at a precarious moment of our history when the memory of Nehru is dimming, almost irrevocably one.

Divided into four sections, the fifteen essays in Nine Nights of the Goddess are a coming together of disciplines, methodologies, sources and places on traditions of the nine-day Navratri celebrations, also known as Navaratra, Mahanavmi, Durga Puja, Dasara or Dassain throughout South Asia.

Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), who has been one cultural icon, admired as much in Bengal as in much of the world, continues to inspire filmmakers and scholars of different hues. Besides making twenty-eight feature films, all in Bengali except Shatranj Ke Khilari.

Muslim Devotional Art in India explores the rather wide arc of the growth, spread, and ever so dynamic forms of Islamic religious art in India by bringing together a wide range of sources and methodologies in six sections. While Islamic art in India has traditionally drawn upon Central Asian imagery.