Pratilipi's new issue: Freedom Special

The new issue of the bilingual literary magazine Pratilipi -- brought out in English and Hindi -- is finally out!

The lead feature on Freedom is something I've worked especially hard to put together, and it's chock-full of exciting new work -- fiction, essays, memoirs, poetry, as well all of the above in translation. Here's a link to the lead feature, and here's my introduction to it. The excellent writers and translators represented include Parvati Sharma, Arunava Sinha, Ratika Kapur, Nisha Susan, Aruni Kashyap, Sumana Roy, Daisy Rockwell, Upendranath Ashk, Ashapurna Debi, Syed Mujtaba Ali, Salma, Lakshmi Holmstrom, Ambarish Satwik, Manisha Pandey and Smriti Ravindra, among others.

Other things in the issue include features on writing by and for children (including  by Prabhat and by Musharraf Ali Farooqi); features on three modern Indian greats -- Ajneya, Naiyer Masud and Shrilal Shukla; a focus on bilingual Danish poet Claus Ankersen; fresh work by ten young Hindi writers, a text for open debate on realism and comparative literature, the full text of a Krishna Baldev Vaid play in Alok Bhalla’s English translation -- and plenty more. In all, the issue features more than 70 writers from 12 languages.

Happy reading!

Post Facto: Trains of thought

My Sunday Guardian column this fortnight.

	o get on a train in India is to enter a different world. You may carry your mobile phone and check Twitter on it, you may carry a dongle and browse the internet on your laptop, but you can do nothing about the speed of the train itself. In the 1800s, when trains first began to transport people across distances that might have taken weeks or days in a matter of hours, they were the most vivid symbols of speed, of technological modernity. Now, in a world where the aeroplane has become more commonplace and accessible, they appear as gentle lumbering beasts. It is a pace that encourages involved arguments and intense heart-to-hearts; at the very least, gupshup. We are on a train from Delhi to Banaras. It is delayed by several hours because of the fog. But no-one is complaining. Since the previous night's train did not even depart, people are just glad they are on a train at least. The family sitting with us – a tall 60-something man with an impressive but tidy white beard, his bespectacled and much smaller wife and their 20-something son Nadeem – are regulars on this route. The parents live in a village near Dildar Nagar, a small town past Banaras. Their elder son lives in Delhi, in Okhla, and they visit him often. This time they are returning from a long stay that involved a gall bladder operation for the old man. They offer us keema-roti, we offer them oranges. Later, at Allahabad, their married daughter arrives at the station with freshly-cooked puris and a flask of strong tea that is unrecognizable as being the same substance as the 'dip chai' that is sadly becoming ubiquitous on Indian railways. The father and son are full of train stories: trains which seemed strangely empty and turned out to be crawling with bed-bugs, summer trains with crowds clambering atop them waiting for the water tank to be filled, puja special trains without taps in the toilets. From Delhi to Patna there are a huge number of trains, partly because of Laloo Yadav's stint as Railways Minister. But the number of travellers between Delhi and Bihar/Eastern UP seems still to outstrip the supply of berths – a ticket is hard to get at short notice most times of the year. There is also a clear hierarchy of trains. The 'good' trains, say our companions, are almost always full. A train that is running half-empty is likely to be a train on which the well-informed know not to travel, because it has a reputation for running late, or being dirty, or having bad service. "There's no pantry car on many of these trains. And the bedding they give you – well, it's like we're giving you this, you can use it – or not. Not is more likely," laughs Nadeem. { I’ve never been to Nagpur, but I know oranges must be imagined – and hopefully bought – at the station. I’ve never been to Khandwa, but I know to get off the train double-quick and buy lassi and shrikhand from the wonderful dairy cooperative shop.
	rain stories are anchored to place-names: "Arre, that time we took the train from Begusarai" or "Remember when we were returning from the wedding in Lucknow?" Some places you think you know are places you have never been to: they are the names of stations passed on the rail journeys of your childhood. I've never been to Nagpur, but I know oranges must be imagined – and hopefully bought – at the station. I've never been to Khandwa, but I know to get off the train double-quick and buy lassi and shrikhand from the wonderful dairy cooperative shop... (The piece carries on)  Read the whole of it here.

Film Review: In Dabangg 2, Salman stuck to old tics, Fevicol se

My review of Dabangg 2, published in Firstpost.

Everyone in India knows at least one little brat whose every antic is deemed cho-chweet by his doting parents and grandparents, no matter how pointless or ridiculous or annoying it might seem to the rest of the world. Salman Khan is that brat writ large.

And for some reason, a disproportionately large section of the Hindi cinema-going audience has taken it upon themselves to play his adoring family. They clap if he so much as stands up, they thrill to his unsophisticated dance moves, they giggle with abandon when he makes silly faces. In the face of such a loyal loving khaandaan, who could possibly summon up the courage to suggest that the brat isn’t really that cute?

Who will risk death-by-comments by suggesting that while the floppy-haired boy-lover of Maine Pyaar Kiya vintage might have been reasonably thought of as attractive, with more than a whiff of vulnerability, it is hard to feel the same way about the nudge-nudge wink-wink persona of the thick-necked, thick-skinned 47-year old of Dabangg 2, whose tears seem like they had to be squeezed out of him with a wringer?

Dabangg 2  manages to  give the audience the good time that it seeks, in an idiom and humour that is staunchly located in Eastern UP

Not me. Instead, let me speculate about what the figure of Chulbul Pandey does for Salman Khan. The first thing to note is that he doesn’t quite sleepwalk through this particular role as he did through a Bodyguard or aReady (and consequently, that we don’t either). Perhaps those are just particularly lazy films—films where rather than creating a character for Salman Khan to play, there’s simply a kind of Salman-shaped hole in the middle of the film, which he knows he can fill by wriggling into it any which way. The only recent Salman Khan film where there was something like a role written for him was Ek Tha Tiger, where the presence of Katrina Kaif seemed to bring out a tenderly romantic side of Salman that no one had seen for years.

In Dabangg 2, it certainly isn’t love that makes the world go round. Chulbul Pandey’s idea of romantic love—more or less in line with the recent Khiladi 786’s idea of marriage as a union of earners and spenders—is letting his wife buy a shiny new sari with his money. “Hum aa gaye hain. Loot macha lo,” says our hero with generous swagger.

Abhinav Kashyap’s masterstroke with Dabangg (2010) was to create in Chulbul Pandey the kind of hero we’ve been used to seeing from the beginning of Hindi cinema up, until the 1980s—a hero with a past. Like practically every Amitabh Bachchan character in the 70s and 80s, Chulbul Pandey’s anger and rebelliousness was explained not solely by his adult life but by the traumas of his childhood. Having watched the child Chulbul’s complex relationship with his mother (Dimple Kapadia), and his consequent anger at his stepfather (Vinod Khanna) and stepbrother (Arbaaz Khan) gave the adult Chulbul’s violent rages and sentimental outbursts something like depth, an emotional quotient higher than a merely professional present would have done.

Sadly, the current film – a sequel crafted not by Abhinav Kashyap, but by Arbaaz Khan, who is Salman Khan’s brother – is left only with the present.

Chulbul Pandey, having finally made peace with his father and brother, has moved to Kanpur, and is now a happily married husband and expectant father. The villain of the previous film, Chedi Singh (Sonu Sood), has been replaced by a new bad man, Bachcha Bhaiya (Prakash Raj), who comes with two younger brothers called Chunni and Genda. (Deepak Dobriyal’s Genda must be singled out here as providing his characteristic touches of brilliance to the oft-repeated role of the lecherous small-town goon. His lines are good and he delivers them even better: witness the careful calibration between menace and patronisingness in “Arrey Aunty, maar kahan rahein hain, abhi toh hum batiya rahein hain”.) And Pandey has a new boss: the wonderful Manoj Pahwa biting greedily into a rare meaty role as the gluttonous SP Anand Mathur.

Despite this surface change of locale and introduction of new characters, there’s nothing new or unpredictable about Dabangg 2. The earlier film had set a fresh benchmark, creating the fearless cop whose status as hero was not compromised but in fact cemented as identifiable by his happily unabashed bribe-taking. This one carries on in that now-glorious tradition of “ab itni seva karte hain toh thoda mewa toh kha hi sakte hain”.

Dabangg 2 is a sort of sequel-lite: banking more or less entirely on its audience’s enjoyment in the return of an already established character, with both they and he happy to revel in his already established tics.

What Dabangg 2 does manage to do is to give that audience the good time that it seeks, in an idiom and humour that is staunchly located in Eastern UP. For instance, I thoroughly enjoyed the songs: the recycling of the familiar in a Gilori bina chatni kaise bani, the sweetness of Tore naina bade dagabaaz re and the beautiful brash hybridity of Chipka le saiyan Fevicol se.

Kareena Kapoor’s plushness in Fevicol se seems even more of a mismatch for the hoarse and unsophisticated pleasures of Mamta Sharma’s voice than Malaika’s was for Munni – but perhaps it’s the kind of deliberate mismatch that plays to different desires simultaneously.

Sonakshi Sinha, being the wife, only gets to display her gleaming fleshy back, while remaining otherwise fully clothed in saris and full-sleeved blouses. But in this universe, in which it is deemed perfectly natural for two brothers, both happily married, to celebrate by going to a kotha together, it’s a pretty remarkable thing that the wife gets to match steps with a kothewali at all.

This is a film that knows and reflects its world. And while it isn’t out to change it by any means, it wants to make sure the image in the mirror is the nicest possible.

Post Facto -- Used Goods: Cities, capitalism and the obsolescence of things

My Sunday Guardian column this fortnight:

	mong the numerous imaginative triumphs of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is Leonia, the city which refashions itself every day. "[E]very morning people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck." "It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new," wrote Calvino. In his brilliantly prescient fashion, Calvino seemed to see how the world of high capitalism was weirdly beginning to echo one of the oldest forms of economic activity, one that that it had derided as irrational and in fact banned — the Native American practice of potlatch, in which your status was measured by how much you could give away, or sometimes, destroy. The vision that Calvino conjured up in 1972 — of a world in which the enjoyment of newness is built upon the pleasure of discarding the old — is no longer one we need to see in our imaginations. We all live in Leonia now. The cycle of capitalist production sustains itself on the inbuilt obsolescence of things: the replacement of something rather than its repair, and the throwing away of objects as outdated even if they are still in perfect working order, is integral to hypermodernity. And yet, it's not entirely clear to me that the things we throw away should be seen as being outside capitalism. It's probably true that the used-goods market operates on the fringes of capitalist production proper, but surely the very idea of the second-hand emerges from a capitalist vision of the world in which things aren't automatically assumed to be passed on through generations, a vision that marks these goods as having a (perceived-as-illegitimate) second life? { The cycle of capitalist production sustains itself on the inbuilt obsolescence of things: the replacement of something rather than its repair. In Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, among the most remarkable texts ever published about a 19th century city, the second-hand market already occupies a fair bit of space. Originally published in 1851, Mayhew's mammoth three-volume exploration of Victorian London is among the most detailed, illuminating and entertaining sociological records of the street life of any modern city. The desire to create an exhaustive urban compendium marks Mayhew as a man of his time: he categorised the "street folk", "those who obtain a living in the streets of the metropolis", into six types: street-sellers; street-buyers; street-finders; street-performers, artists and showmen; street-artisans, or working pedlars; and street-labourers. The street sellers include separate sections on sellers of second-hand metal articles, second-hand musical instruments, second-hand weapons, second-hand telescopes and pocket glasses, second-hand curiosities (which seems to mean coins, buckles and shells like the cowrie which were "money in India, for his father was a soldier and had been there and saw it"), and a huge section on second-hand clothes that was further subdivided by neighbourhood, wholesale or retail, and so on.
	ut this encyclopaedic bent led neither to a dull listing of facts, nor lofty theorising. Instead, the book displays a marvelous ability to turn each encounter into a vignette. Mayhew had begun his writing career as a dramatist, which may account for his superb ear for dialogue—the attention he gives a memorable turn of phrase, the fearless mimicking of accents. And it is in his recounting of something a second-hand clothes seller says to him that we find this telling detail: "If people gets to wear them low-figured things, more and more, as they possibly may, why where's the second hand things to come from?" Already then, in the 1840s, the complaint about thinner and poorer cloth is linked to things that are seen as being in vogue — "them new-fashioned named things often is so—and so they show when hard-worn". The second-hand market today seems either to cater to the highest-end consumer, whose desire is for objects whose survival in time has somehow lifted them out of their older economic circuits and placed them on a different plane of value — or to the lowest-end consumer, who cannot afford the new, even the cheapest, mass-produced new. But even as the second-hand object, the reusable whole, gets rarer, what we have more and more of is trash—stuff that must be dismantled, torn apart into its various constituents, in order to be plugged back into the cycle of production: recycled. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that in Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, probably among the most remarkable texts yet produced about a 21st century city, the recycler's gaze is pervasive. A boy wears a shiny oval belt buckle "of promising recyclable weight"; a stretch of the airport road is "unhelpfully clean"; a hotel brochure advertising for a New Year's party is printed on "glossy paper, for which recyclers paid two rupees per kilo". The scavengers and waste-pickers of Annawadi have no access to the products (or lifestyles) advertised in the post-globalisation megacity—until they have been turned into garbage. In imaginary Leonia, the street cleaners were welcomed like angels. In our all-too-real version, they have been banished beyond the city's borders, only allowed in take away the trash.

Film Review: ‘The Last Act’ tries to be more than some of its parts

The best thing about The Last Act is its unpredictability. It’s rare enough to sit down to a film – especially a film that’s coming out of the Bombay film industry – and have little idea what to expect. If you go in with the expectation of an “Anurag Kashyap film”, you might be disappointed.

By handing over its 12 segments over to 12 young directors, the film manages to keep us from ever quite settling in. Just as we start to get used to a particular style or mood or pace, the film is up an running, transporting us to a different place, in the hands of a different guide.

The film’s 12 directors were chosen via an all-India contest by Anurag Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra and Chakri Toleti, and asked to make 10 minute short films that would be part of a larger story, whose plot was written by Anurag Kashyap.

That original plot is a simple one. A corpse is discovered on the road, so badly disfigured that it cannot be identified. Twelve clues are discovered on or near the body, each leading to a different place. So we begin in Mumbai, where the ‘clue’ leads to a theatre troupe led by Saurabh Shukla. Then we move to Ghaziabad, where the trail leads to an English coaching centre. Then comes Calcutta, where the clue leads to a crumbling old house; Delhi, where a man seems to have disappeared; Kalyan, where it’s a woman who is missing, and so on until all 12 cities have been covered and we return to Mumbai for the last act.

It’s not a bad idea, though the “clues” being solved in different cities make the film seem even more like a puzzle than murder mysteries already do...

(Review continues)

Read the whole review here, on Firstpost.

Book Review: dates.sites, a publication of PROJECT CINEMA CITY

This review was published in the Nov-Dec 2012 issue of Biblio.

dates.sites
Project Cinema City 
Bombay/Mumbai         

Tulika Books, 2012.
Rs. 995 
              

Bombay was where the cinema made its first appearance on the Indian subcontinent, when the Lumiere Brothers’ ‘Living Photographic Pictures in Life-Size Reproductions’ were shown at the Watson’s hotel in Kala Ghoda in 1896. Since that originary moment, the city of Bombay/Mumbai has been irrevocably linked to the cinema -- as an industry that supports thousands of people, as ‘its most adored public institution’ and perhaps most significantly, as the lens through which the city acquires its visual primacy in the imagination of the rest of India (and the world).

One of the outcomes of a artistic-cum-archival project called Project Cinema City conducted by the arts initiative Majlis, dates.sites takes this fundamental connection between the city and cinema as the basis for a decade-by-decade account of events that might constitute a ‘cinematic history’ of 20^th century Bombay/Mumbai. It calls this a “timeline” – a word chosen precisely, Madhusree Dutta tells us, for its 21^st century Facebook-and-Twitter-inflected connotation of stitching things from various sources into a personalised narrative of the self.

At first glance, it is a book that seems straightforward in its aims – a historical ready-reckoner, a vast compendium of facts about the city and its film industry, arranged chronologically. And it is that, at one level. But as you spend more time with it, it begins to reveal itself as a quirkier creature: an artifact in its own right, a space where facts about the transformation of land and labour, law and life in the city can share the page with cinema history, inflected by chatty, opinionated commentary – a list of ‘Archetypal Urban Characters of the 70s’ ends with “Mother of all Indian men: Nirupa Roy in Deewar”; Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982) receives the somewhat catty three word description “Bollywood on Bollywood”.

A page from the book

With a narrative as unconventional as this, there are as many ways to ‘read’ it as there are people. Some might want to dip into it at random, or pick a decade they’re interested in. Someone else might choose to be guided by the cornucopia of images. The visuals in the book are of two kinds. There are found images, often in fragmented form – old photographs, postcards, advertisements, logos, letters and telegrams, magazine images, paintings – and also a series of 100-odd ‘calendars’ created by several artists as a contemporary homage to the long popular history of calendar art in India. Both kinds act as triggers to the imagination, sending the brain off in all sorts of associative directions. Most are anything but illustrative, working instead as a tangential narrative that can open up the text in new ways. On p.19, for instance, there is a series of images of sea and ships – what looks like a picture postcard, a stamped envelope dated 5-9-1972, a technical drawing of a ship. These bear no actual relationship to the early 1900s timeline on that page, but they do somehow alter one’s appreciation of the fact that the foundation of Alexandra Dock was laid in 1905 “to meet rising traffic of goods and traders”. Other images are more strictly historical. For instance, Abeer Gupta’s calendar for 1949, ‘Liberty’, is a faux-advertisement for Liberty Cinema: ‘Showplace of the Nation’, with the Indian flag flying above it and the theatre-front displaying a poster of Mehboob’s Andaz, which was indeed the first film shown at Liberty when it opened in 1949 as the first airconditioned theatre in Bombay that was devoted to Hindi films.

It is a volume that lends itself to randomness. Playing conscientious reviewer, though, I decided to go from beginning to end. I paused often, arrested by a particular constellation of facts or images, but resisted the temptation to skip ahead. As I went through the sequence of events in chronological order, however, I kept finding myself wanting to draw diagrams that would somehow link up events in 2000 with events in 1914, or 1973, on a thematic basis: real estate, or land reclamation, the history of the labour movement or the history of popular performance – or create a map that would somehow contain, in the name of a neighbourhood – say ‘Pila House’, or ‘Girangaon’ – everything that it had ever been.

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

So wrote Italo Calvino in his now-classic Invisible Cities, a book even more strange and wondrous than the one under review. Like the mythical Zaira, “city of memories”, Bombay/Mumbai cannot tell its past; it can only contain it “like the lines of a hand”. dates.sites might be seen as a Calvinoesque effort to make that past visible, by mapping -- in the words of Invisible Cities -- the “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”.

Certainly the text is sensitive to space in a way that few historical timelines are. Whether describing communal and caste riots, the newsreels shot after Tilak’s death, or the arrival of migrants to the city, the timeline takes every opportunity it can to double up as a ‘spaceline’. So we learn that from 1904 to 1910, Sunni Tolawalas and Bohra shopkeepers clashed over the route of the Muharram procession in Bhendi Bazaar. We learn that newsreels of Tilak’s funeral procession on 13. 02. 1920 shot it from Crawford Market to Chowpatty. We learn that Tamil migrants to the city in the 1920s mostly worked at construction sites or at tanneries in Dharavi, and later that Sikh refugees after Partition were accommodated in camps in Sion Koliwada and many of them started automobile workshops in the Opera House area, resulting in both areas later developing “a distinct Punjabi flavour”.

The book’s history of cinema in the city – its production as well as its consumption – is equally attentive to local geography. Iconic places might get a whole explanatory paragraph, like in a dictionary: eg. “Pila House—hybridization of Play House—a cluster of theatres staging Parsi theatre plays and Tamasha performances – bordered on the east by red light area of Kamatipura (names after the Telugu-speaking community of masons) , and on the west by migrant courtesans and other entertainment artists at Congress House (named after the office of the Congress Party nearby—is at its peak at the turn of the century.” But it is the visible revelling in anecdote that lifts the book from a staid recounting of facts into a storied, personal, almost gossipy register. So a typescript entry for 1975 reads: “The queue for buying [Sholay] tickets at Minerva Theatre, showing the 70mm print of the film, extends to a bus stop 3 kilometres away”, followed by the ‘handwritten’ note: “prompting the bus stop to be renamed as Sholay stop”.

dates.sites is a real goldmine of stories, allowing itself the luxury of the suggestive anecdote: the sparkling, free-floating detail unbound by the ponderous footnote. The text continually throws up real-life characters whose mythification in urban lore was immortalised by the cinema. The most well-known are mafia dons whose lives have been the source of endless film plots: Karim Lala, Haji Mastan, Varadarajan Mudaliar onwards, down to the post-textile-mills era which saw the rise of Arun Gawli, Arvind Dholakia, Rama Naik and so on. The book also digs up more minor figures, like an Inspector Bhesadia whose crusade against hath bhatties (crude breweries) in Dharavi Creek in the 60s was apparently the inspiration for Amitabh Bachchan’s originary demolition of the illegal liquor den in Zanjeer (1973). (Bachchan, of course, went on to demolish many liquor addas, in other cities as well – I remember the one on the outskirts of Delhi in Trishul.) 

My pick for the most fascinating real life character, though, comes from a much earlier era: “Flamboyant Tamasha artiste” Patthe Bapurao, whose first appearance in the timeline is in 1927, when he visits Ambedkar “flanked by two women dancers dressed in finery” and offers to contribute the proceedings of eight Tamasha shows to the Mahar Satyagraha Fund, a campaign for the entry of Dalits into temples. “Ambedkar rejects the offer on moral grounds.” The second reference to Patthe Bapurao is in 1941, when he “dies in poverty”. It is in this entry that we are told that he was born a Brahmin (Shridhar Krishnaji Kulkarni) and underwent “caste conversion in order to work in Tamasha and … married a Mahar woman”. A biographical film was made on his life by Raja Nene in 1950, and Falkland Road in Pila House was renamed Patthe Bapurao Road after independence. Most tantalizing of all is this tidbit: “His persona influences several significant tragic poet-hero characters in later films such as Devdas, Pyaasa.” Since Devdas was based on a 1917 Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, one must treat the Bapurao connection as a suggestive supplement at most.

But however provisional it might declare itself to be, a timeline is not the sort of text in which arguments can really be incorporated. So an entry for 1933 tells us that “Music director Madhav Lal used Chinese and Japanese singers from Safed Gulli (White Lane) (demarcated area for prostitutes with fairer skin than Indians) to create a ‘Far East ambience’ in Hatimtai”. It has been suggested by other writers that Safed Gali acquired the name not from its prostitutes but from its customers: it emerged to cater to white soldiers. But a timeline, no matter how playful, does not allow the space for both possible interpretations to be included.

On the other hand, a timeline enables unexpected juxtapositions, creating fertile ground for suppressed histories and new thoughts to emerge, just by being on the same page. On p. 118-119 for instance, we learn that comedian Johnny Walker’s “urban actor-character-actor prototype in the tramp mould” and Raj Kapoor’s Awara date to the same year: 1951. Both were responses to Chaplin, sure – but how often do we credit Johnny Walker with creating the Indian tramp persona? Another example connected with the influence of foreign cinema: Italian neo-realist films shown at the first International Film festival of India (1952) are credited with influencing Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953), while on the same spread we learn that Sohrab Modi’s Technicolour extravaganza Jhansi ki Rani (1953) was shot on an ‘imported on rent’ camera by Ernest Heller, cameraman of Gone With the Wind. The juxtaposition of these two facts, which might otherwise have been neatly boxed into two very different histories, produces a vivid sense of the multiplicity of world cinematic style, and how Bombay filmmakers negotiated their places within that world.

Sometimes a juxtaposition serves as comment. For example, AIR’s highhanded attitude to Hindi film music (leading to the rise of Binaca Geetmala on Radio Ceylon from 1953 onwards) is presented without judgement. But then you read of KA Abbas’s daring effort to make a song-less film (Munna) crashing at the box office in 1954, and it is quite clear that the nation-state’s battle against the market can only be a losing one.

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, both theorists of the urban mass culture that emerged in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, pioneered the study of cultural fragments and surface phenomena as unconscious revelations of the epoch. “[T]he quotidian landscapes of life – posters on the wall, shop signs, dancing girls, bestsellers, panoramas, the shape, style and circulation of city buses – are all surface representations of the fantasy energy by which the collective perceives the social order,” writes anthropologist Brian Larkin in a wonderful essay on the materiality of cinema theatres in the Nigerian city of Kano. dates.sites is a Benjaminian archive of the materiality of cinema in Bombay/Mumbai. Accessible, joyful and packed with possibility, this is a book every film-lover should have on her shelf.

Published in Biblio.