A Song Sung True
Gopal Gandhi Her name responds with images. Of her. O.P. Sharma has a lovely photograph of her. A ‘late’ Kamaladevi, picture-daters would say. She is seated at a table, her hands stretched across...
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Isobel Armstrong’s Material Imagination
Steven Connor I draw the phrase ‘material imagination’ from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe two intersecting things: firstly, the ways in which the material world is imagined, not just by...
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Accidental Insights Into Reading
Manash Bhattacharjee The new Seminar issue, ‘A Country of Our Own’ (April 2012), became an interesting prospect when I saw Nauman Naqvi’s name among the contributors. I started reading his essay the night...
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The Civic & the Ludic
Rajarshi Dasgupta & Prasanta Chakravarty Abstract This dialogue, written in 2008, tried to unpack the terms of thinking about the transformations in Indian politics, especially in West...
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Pancho Adrienzén, Late 1970s & Peruvian Films
NOTE ON PERU IN THE 1970s In October 1968, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry was ousted in a military coup and succeeded by General Juan Velasco Alvarado. Velasco's government was one of contradictions. It...
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Beware the Swiss Bearing Sausages?
Prasanta Chakravarty In a 2007 art summer school held in Irsee, southern Germany, the English artist Clive Head and the Anglo-Cypriot writer and art theorist Michael Paraskos held a joint class. Head and Paraskos had previously taught together at...
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For Some Gup-Shup (Conversation With Laughter) In Faridabad
Faridabad Majdoor Samachar To contribute to radical social transformations that are mushrooming all over the world, feel free about : stammering, fragmentariness, incoherence, missing steps.... Social (and natural) reality are very complex...
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Post-colonial Kali
Arindam Chakrabarti Before Independence, patriotism often took the shape of mother-worship. The rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ or balidaan bridged the gap between the political and the religious. In these post-patriotic times, should we, globalized urban intellectuals,...
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Bashonti
Chandril Bhattacharya Is this Bashonti Sanyal who imprints red-lac dye and rubs lotus-petals on her palms. Is this Bashonti Mukherjee who lights candles every morning on the window sill so that her lover...
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The Multicultural Empire
Saroj Giri Unfortunately Niall Ferguson has managed to distract Pankaj Mishra from the main theatre of empire-building today which is more than just western superiority or domination. Both reify ‘western domination’, crediting it...
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Darkness & Emancipation: Talking to Juliet Mitchell
Sunit Singh On November 23, 2010, Sunit Singh conducted an interview with psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell at Jesus College in Cambridge. Although Professor Mitchell’s rehabilitation of Freud is well chronicled, the attempt...
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London Stopped & Searched
Saroj Giri The black youth, together with the ‘feral scum’ of other colours, has always been stopped and searched, detained. But what happens when he stops and searches, detains the city? Clarence Road...
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Off Modern: A Conversation with Raqs
1. Moinak Biswas: Your recent show in Calcutta, 'Premontions', seems to speak of the fractures within the flow of time that we all inhabit. An internally anomalous time has engaged you as...
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Ideal & Waste?
Amiya Dev We know that Châr Adhyây (Four Chapters) was Rabindranath’s second political novel. We also know that like Ghare-Bâire (The Home and the World), 1916, the first, it fared ill with nationalists,...
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