Merchant and Ivory’s India-set films tend to rip out my heart and stomp on it—in a good way. Two years ago I wrote about Shakespeare-Wallah for Switcheroo Month, and here I am again, this time with a sort of bildungsroman, complicated by imperial socio-political goings-on. Heat and Dust […]
For Switcheroo Month, we were given basically infinite freedom to write about something outside our usual beat OR something reputable (rather than disreputable) OR both, and I barely knew what to do with myself. At first I thought I should tackle an Indian art film—parallel cinema, it is […]
Chori Mera Kaam (Theft Is My Job, dir. Brij, 1975) is one of those movies that nobody talks about when hailing the masala golden age, but everybody should.
What if James Bond went to Bombay in the late 1970s and wasn’t so much a secret agent as a stylist and interior designer for a particularly aesthetics-oriented villain? The plot of Shaan has very little to do with any of the Bond films that I can remember. […]
The Gutter’s own Beth Watkins reviews Aseem Chhabra’s Shashi Kapoor: The Householder, The Star for Indian Express. “Of all the Hindi film stars from the 1960s to 1980s, how could people forget Shashi Kapoor? He did everything. He was a major mainstream hero and a stalwart of multi-starrers, […]
Ajooba is one of those Bollywood movies that almost everybody dismisses—cheap costumes, awkward giant monsters, make-do special effects—until you get them to actually think about it. Released in 1991, this bank-breaking Indian and Soviet co-production features a plot that sounds more at home in the 1970s in the […]
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