The Show Must Go On: How Cinema Refuses to Fade to Black in India
Indian cinema began contemplating its own mortality exactly four decades ago, prompted into self-reflection by the seismic effects of the television and video revolution across the country. In 1984, just two years had passed since the Asian Games were held in Delhi, an event that was responsible for the mass-scale
Best of 2024: Frontline’s Top 12 Stories on Books and Culture
Cultural performances at the INS Khukri Memorial Amphitheatre in Diu on November 14, 2024. | Photo Credit: President of India-X/ANI In his essay in Frontline’s 40th anniversary special, the artist and curator Shuddhabrata Dasgupta writes: “In any society, the health of culture depends on the willingness of practitioners to set
Zakir Hussain: Legacy of a Global Music Revolutionary
A musical titan bowed out too early. For six decades he mesmerised the world with his rhythms and melodies, defying close-minded orthodoxy of traditions, breaking musical barriers, creating new genres, and trying to heal a fractured world the way only a supreme musician can. And what is particularly tragic is
Does Rasam Hold the Secret to Transforming A Glum Day Into A Flavourful Experience?
As the sun slouches westward, are you having a day like mine? Snail-slow, all grimace and growl, stagnant, the very air in aspic—in a word, glum? Breakfast is a memory from deep time, lunch is a receding mirage—did I just see you reach for chai? Toxic masala or green detox?
Book Review: In ‘Nehru’s India’, Aditya Mukherjee Counters False Narratives About India’s First Prime Minister
At a time when the forces of Hindutva are relentlessly denigrating Jawaharlal Nehru’s contribution to the freedom of our country and the first 17 years of nation-building in independent India, the historian Aditya Mukherjee brings welcome clarification to the debate largely by citing Nehru’s own words and expanding on their
INTERVIEW We Now Have Means to Actively Build a Community and Train and Help Emerging Translators: Daisy Rockwell
The creative partnership of Daisy Rockwell and Geetanjali Shree is embodied in Daisy’s moniker, Shree-Daisy. But before her International Booker–winning partnership with Geetanjali Shree, Rockwell had already translated and curated a panorama of epoch-defining Hindi-Urdu novels probing the heart-wounds of the subcontinent. Over the past two decades, Rockwell has brought
Geetanjali Shree Interview: Language as Protest in ‘Our City That Year
Geetanjali Shree’s 1998 novel, Hamara Shahar Us Baras, rendered into English by Daisy Rockwell as Our City That Year (Penguin, 2024), is the story of a communalising city as experienced by a vulnerable narrator grappling with the task of lending language to the self-estrangement of her secular friends. The narrator, who is not
Avtar Singh’s Into the Forest: An Exploration of Isolation, Loneliness, and Human Fragility During the COVID-19 Pandemic
A homeless person sleeps on a storefront during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in Lyon, France, in 2020. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock There is a moment (around the 40-page mark) in Avtar Singh’s new novel, Into the Forest, that does not directly engage with the COVID-19 pandemic but
Freedom at Midnight Review: Book vs Web Series-Partition Through Two Lenses
Inside 10 Downing Street, the rhythms of a relentless clock fill the air. “May I have time to think?” Lord Mountbatten pleads, facing the burden of a crumbling empire. “You may,” Prime Minister Clement Attlee responds, “but be warned, Mountbatten—time is the one thing we’re running short of.” The ticking
“Past in Present: A Journey Through Downtown Srinagar” | A Frontline Perspectives Documentary
WATCH | Past in Present: A Journey Through Downtown Srinagar | A Frontline Perspectives Documentary This documentary offers a comprehensive look at Downtown Srinagar, a place of great significance for anyone curious about South Asian heritage, urban evolution, or the intersections of culture, politics, and art. | Video Credit: Reported,