“Looking for film noir in India is to miss the point of Indian cinema altogether.”–Lalitha Gopalan, “Bombay Noir,” A Companion to Film Noir. (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013). There’s a lot about Calcutta—the center of the Bengali film industry, metropolitan capital of the state of West Bengal, […]
I must have been eight or nine when I decided to put up a play for our annual Teachers’ Day. It was the only day each year when kids had the opportunity to go up on stage and present their creative work. My friends and I believed that […]
Mainstream Hindi cinema doesn’t particularly gravitate towards making superhero films. It hardly needs to, given what physical feats the average film hero can pull off anyway. But like many parts of the world, Indian audiences certainly have a taste for American-style superhero films, so home-grown characters pop up, […]
Readers of this website will hardly need a special occasion to watch a snake film, but since the Hindu festival celebrating snakes, Naag Panchami, generally falls around this time of year, I couldn’t resist. Snake movies are made by many different Indian film industries, and they tend to […]
To me, the films made during the decline and fall of Rajesh Khanna, India’s first movie hero to cause mass hysteria on an Elvis level, are far more interesting to watch than those from his reign as the throb of hearts and other parts. His peak straddles Hindi […]
If you don’t buy your drugs from an egomaniacal man in an orange wig, raspberry bow tie, pink ruffled tuxedo shirt, and sunglasses fitted with a metal nose cover, you’re doing it wrong. Charas is a fantastic example of what 1970s Hindi cinema does so well: packing a […]
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The Cultural Gutter 