Category: Short Journal Essays

1 Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1969, hereafter Goopy Gyne)and the follow-up fantasy Hirok Rajar Deshe (In the Land of Diamond King, 1980) are two parts of a trilogy of fabular musicals for children.[1] Or so is what they have been mostly, if not always, remembered as. Ray had often felt that films for children made locally were unable to satisfactorily capture their imagination. More often than not, those films sentimentalized childhood, or treated them as part of a sealed…

Photo by Monthaye/Unsplash (Co-authored with Rajendran Narayanan) How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock. Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War In The Shock Doctrine, renowned journalist Naomi Klein presents a searing account of how disasters were used as cover to steamroll market fundamentalism by authoritarian regimes in Chile and Argentina, among others. The title alludes to the practice of psychiatric shock therapy used in the early twentieth century. She calls this disaster…

A promo still from the film Uri, 2019. Once upon a time in Hollywood, socially conscious cinema would be frowned upon. It was a standing joke in Hollywood that a studio-era executive, on hearing a sober, earnest script with deep substance would swoop down on the table and say: “if you want to send a message, use Western Union.” (Westwell 2013). While the humour drives home the apathy, it also draws attention to the nature of cinema itself. Cinema…

Clive Street, Calcutta, early 20th century. Photographer Unknown. Historiography of the modern city must be cognisant of the historical moment in which the metropolitan space made the first gains from modernity as a deterritorialised and yet organising principle of self-articulation. The modern city is the first global space in the modern period, a space beyond narrow nationality, compressed social hierarchy and older orthodoxy. Moreover, that historiography is to be, unsurprisingly, contestable, complicated as it gets by the multiplicity of articulation,…

Soumitra Chatterjee on stage as Lear in Raja Lear. How an actor’s never-ending quest for the perfect role produced a lifetime’s worth of great cinema. 1959. APUR SANSAR. A man in his early 20s, a loner and drifter, a struggling writer, a reluctant father and a fretful widower, finally finds home in his estranged little son. His departure into the horizon with his son on his shoulders is also the moment which marks his arrival on the scene. 2011.

Poster of The Japanese Wife, 2010 Indian indie favourite Aparna Sen’s new film The Japanese Wife, about love through letters, lacks style and diction. THE phonetic possibility of her surname Sen makes Indian indie filmmaker Aparna Sen’s films a fine fodder for all sorts of rhetorical puns in English, most obviously for a word, like say, sensational. But sadly her latest outing The Japanese Wife does not lend itself to the word because the film is anything but an…