My city Kolkata, that I love and hate in equal measure, has featured in many of my films. How could it not have? As I have said many times before, there is no escaping it. I am the city and the city is me. I know all its sounds and silences, its nights and days, its still afternoons, its raging Nor’westers, its wild musical evenings, its calm morning ragas, its poignant Rabindra Sangeet.
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In Kanchenjunga, moreover, the landscape that is produced is not merely a generic visualscape; rather, it attains autonomy and becomes an integral aspect of the narrative. The film became a yardstick of uses of colour in cinema, as cinematographer Subrata Mitra’s wellknown greyscale was transformed into natural tones, and to a colour palette which explored hues such as Ochre, Siena, Umber, Scarlet, etc.
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Working with the Jesuit social communication organization Chitrabani in Calcutta, a group of Bengali-leftist photographers aimed at positive social change by photographically documenting the everyday drudgery of the poor and the middle-class Calcuttans from the late-1970s through the early 1990s.
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The Indigo Revolt or the nil vidroh was a peasant movement and a subsequent uprising of the indigo farmers against the British indigo planters, originated in a village of Nadia in Bengal in 1859 and was led by the Biswas Brothers. The scar left of the revolt was so deep that not a seed was ever sown in the soil of Bengal after that.
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Emotionally intense experience that Ghatak’s films are they are also a reflection on consciousness, nature, and human destiny. They invite us to make connections with cultural pasts and political landscapes, and open up a space for thinking the history of the present. Cinema rarely affords us this adventure of ideation.
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I’m no longer in Jatra because the Jatra no longer has any use for me. Now I perform two or three shows a year at Sitaramdas Onkarnath Thakur’s ashram, where it is against the custom for women to perform. He has written some good plays. There, I do the direction, supervise the stage, mike, lighting arrangements the setting of the mikes, everyone’s makeup, do my own makeup and then play the main part. I really have to slog. But still, being in the midst of my work makes me happy.
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Visiting the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the India Art Fair 2019, I noticed a growing interest in using handmade paper as an artistic means of expression among the exhibiting Indian artists. Here I’m not talking about artists buying handmade paper to draw and paint on, but artists who use pulp, their own produced paper or manipulate pulp and paper in untraditional ways as an artistic statement.
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