Society & Culture
‘Dhamaal 4’ and the problem with laughing at the margins
Indian comedy is capable of laughter-filled entertainment that does not depend, like in ‘Dhamaal 4’, on body-shaming, misogyny or the caricaturing of labouring and indigenous communities. The challenge is not to become less funny, but...
Who owns a woman’s story? Rumours, reputation and resistance in ‘Maa Behen’
Maa Behen (Mother-Sister) are everyday North Indian words that serve a double function – the most sacred of kin relations and simultaneously the category of the most common expletives. To name a film after an...
When Jotirao Phule came to Dayanand Saraswati’s rescue
Inviting Dayanand to Pune and helping him expand his footprint in Maharashtra was a pragmatic move on the part of Ranade and other Brahmin reformers. They were not enamoured of Dayanand’s Veda-centric spiritualism but they...
Vijay Varma plays his part in Nagraj Manjule’s realistic portrait of 1960s-70s Bombay
‘Matka King’ is a confident, character-first swing by a director in the process of expanding his range. It celebrates the intoxicating dream of upward mobility while unflinchingly tracing its human cost, writes Neeraj Bunkar
Bastar’s aspirational Adivasi schoolchildren have few viable futures
This contradiction lies beneath the language of ‘mainstreaming’. State institutions encourage young people to become disciplined, aspirational, and...
Sarhul: Reverence for nature informs this Adivasi farming festival
At a time when the world is obsessed with “Paris Accord” and “carbon footprint”, the philosophy underlying Sarhul...
‘Gail and Bharat’: An intimate portrait of solidarity with the public
There is an informal feel to Somnath Waghmare’s filmmaking that is worth noting. Waghmare himself appears in several...
Casteism among Muslims and the battle for rights
This book ‘Pasmanda Jan Andolan 1998’ becomes even more relevant in the context of the current sociopolitical scenario....
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