Cultural Press

Still from Anjan Dutta’s Ranjana Ami ar Ashbona, 2011. Anjan Dutt’s new rock musical is low on cultural memory and high on imagined nostalgia, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury Can five ageing rockers, none of them stars but charismatic individuals, drifters and iconoclasts and dedicated to music in their real and reel life, make for successful Bengali cinema? Is the rock music scene in Calcutta that important to sustain a prolonged narrative about its many trails? Is the making of a female…

William Kentridge is as different in his art as in his films. William Kentridge is a South African artist and animator and an influential figure in the country’s art scene. His exhibition, till recently on display at the Seagull Art & Media Resource Centre, gave a sampling of his art and cinema much of which has been viewed widely across the globe but not in India. This exhibition is, however, a sampling of his vast body of work and in…

Ranjan Palit is so soft speaking that in between the first and the fifth row at Max Mueller Bhavan’s partly refurbished auditorium, his voice was almost lost. But he is not a singer but a cameraman and filmmaker, a maker of some of the most well-received and critically acclaimed documentary pour une cause in the last three decades, and hence it was film and his camera that did all the talking. And what a cracker of a film he showed! He…

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…

When a famous, globetrotting writer writes a book describing in commanding detail the decaying mansion whose limestone peels were scattered across your own childhood, about urban legends that fluttered in your youth, the imposing porches above crawling footpaths that you manned at night or the sweating streets from your summers past, you are bound to be momentarily carried away. But the reverie does not last long because in A Dead Hand: A Crime in Kolkata, Paul Theroux is only occasionally…

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni carries a reputation, somewhat disagreeable for an Indian origin writer of English fiction, of selling a redoubtable mash of dishy and desi exotica wrapped in a clever, bare-bone style of storytelling. But that has not come in her way of mastering a following in her adopted country, the US. She has also been able to marshal a fan base in India, the country of her birth, a readership with a high constituency of women, who are sophisticated…

Three films that examine communism in a revisionist light that leaves the past with nowhere to hide “I would go on to cover the more punitive mood towards East Germany’s Stasi oppressors; the unending saga of complicity and blame; the arrival of the deutsche mark and the transition from “We are the people”, to “We are one people”, as unification became inevitable. It was the birth of a different Europe, free of old divisions and shackles, the one still coming…

Once the Bengali bands made a splash with new albums and signature shows but now it’s all whispers with no new bands making any impact. Is this about the short shelf life endemic to bands globally or have Bangla bands lost their way? Mohiner Ghoraguli was the Frantz Kafka of Bengali rock scene — avant-garde and discovered to high critical acclaim only much after its death in 1981. Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod brought Kafka to the world. In case…

Lion in the making. Kumortuli, Calcutta. Autumn of 2009. Photo by author. Kumortuli’s fame is in its transience. Like the Spring Flower, it bursts into activity, fame and business for no more than three months in a year. Only that it does so during autumn and not spring. But in that short span, it enjoys a lot of attention. Or so has been the case for the last two centuries or so. So much so that over the years, Kumortuli…

Idols coming into form. Kumortuli, 2009. Photo by author. The journey to the confluence of Ganga and Durga was a throwback to the collective past, finds Sayandeb Chowdhury and Joyjit Ghosh Chhalat chhal chhalat chhal chhalat chhal Ghater sathe golpo kore nadir jal (Splish‘n’ splash splish‘n’ splash splish ‘n’ splash The ghat hears the river’s tale go back‘n’ flash) The best person to ask about the ancestry of the ghat-river rendezvous would be the visiting goddess because the ancestry…