"Maiki"

The following is an exclusive excerpt from Nilanjana Bhowmick’s ‘Lies Our Mothers Told Us: The Indian Woman’s Burden’, which takes a closer look at middle-class Indian women and the structural inequalities that frame their lives. The book will be out on July 5
Read more

Much has been written about Ranveer Singh’s untraditional off-screen persona, so on the heels of ‘Jayeshbhai Jordaar’ we instead deconstruct the actor’s displays of masculinities across his filmography to understand how he has chipped away at the toxic convention of a “mass hero” — whose contemporary avatar has increasingly been playing to the Hindutva imagination — and the innate gentleness that underpins several of his roles
Read more

‘Sharmaji Namkeen’ marked a pivotal departure for mainstream Indian cinema with the casting of Paresh Rawal as the same character played by Rishi Kapoor, who passed away unexpectedly during the filming. We consider the willing acceptance of this unconventional solution — likely encouraged by Ranbir Kapoor’s personalised introduction before the opening credits — and what it says about Indian spectatorship, celebrity culture and the audience’s relationship with Bollywood’s “first family”
Read more

Economist and author of the popular book ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy’, Shrayana Bhattacharya breaks down her findings on romantic desire and freedom, fantasising as a form of self-care and how the Bollywood superstar’s icon interacts with the socio-economic structures that define our deeply capitalistic notions of romantic love
Read more

Film-maker Jyoti Nisha scripts bittersweet scenes from her past as she traces the early loss of the innocence that once guided her younger self – a girl who loved commercial Hindi films and dreamed of one day making them – until she became keenly aware of the wilfully ignorant patriarchy and caste prejudice that sustains them and the world they represent
Read more

When Vanya Lochan thinks back to the time she felt the flicker of first love, she is transported to her school days, specifically to her one-sided infatuation with a 15-year-old classmate she reveals only as “M”. Now 25, the writer is learning how to make space for his friendship in the present as their old dynamic lurks in her subconscious (CW: Contains instances of fatphobia and internalised fatphobia)
Read more

Taking inspiration from Kalidasa’s long poem ‘Ritusamhara’, in which specific elements of nature are personified as lovers, South-Goa-based Vivekananda uses the practice of psychic automatism to draw up feelings that live in the depths of their being, translating them into colours, patterns and bodies that come together in sensorial self-portraits. These multimedia works that represent the act of creating art are accompanied by the interdisciplinary artist’s poetic musings
Read more

S. S. Rajamouli is known for his fantasy and adventure films that are derived as much from Amar Chitra Katha as they are from Westerns like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Prathyush Parasuraman examines the defining elements of the Telugu director’s filmography, as well as the controversies of representation which have plagued the Baahubali series, which catapulted Rajamouli to the status of a pan-Indian icon
Read more