A woman tearfully leaves her newborn in the lap of a giant statue of Shiva during a thunderstorm and keels over dead. Hindu brothers are separated when one one falls into a raging river, presumed dead, but actually rescued and raised by a thief. Boys from good homes […]
Like George Costanza, I’ve often wanted to pretend to be an architect, and an offshoot of this dream is to do some kind of major study of the architecture of evil spaces in Hindi movies. The most distinctive visual marker—physical manifestation, even—of evil in Bollywood is the villain […]
“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, […]
Alluvium looks at Raja Nawathe’s Gumnaam, a 1965 Bollywood adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. “Gumnaam is perhaps best known in the West for its song and dance sequence ‘Jaan Pehechan Ho’ in which Laxmi Chhaya is accompanied by the rock and roll group Ted […]
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 […]
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The Cultural Gutter 