Sunday Long Reads: Bollywood’s outsider debate, the legacy of Saroj Khan, sounds of nature, and more

READ MORE

Sohrab Hura: ‘It is important to constantly question my position in whatever I do’

Image is everything: Hura’s photograph from the series Rooftop (Picture courtesy: Sohrab Hura/Experimenter)

In 2014, you became a Magnum nominee. At the time, you had stated, “I really appreciate their rigour. I only have to be watchful that I don’t turn into a machine in the process.” How do you look at that statement in retrospect and your work in the interim?

This process has been really good for me. It has helped to know that I’m part of something larger in terms of community. I have been attending the annual Angkor Photo Workshops in Cambodia, working with other photographers in Kathmandu, Tamil Nadu and other places, and with friends in the larger region here. They have all been part of my larger ecosystem that has constantly reminded me that there are amazing voices and perspectives and that Magnum is just one platform. This let me work in the six-year period a lot more freely than I would have if I didn’t have this support system. Most importantly, photography and whatever else I did, remained fun.

READ MORE

How our experiences of life, love and food make us who we are

Through my articles and images I hope to make you ask questions more than find answers. (Source: Suvir Saran)

Each of us is born unique, into a moment in time that is altogether different even from the births in our own nuclear set that predate or post-date ours. This physical singularity is a requisite, yet it can be of no consequence. Character, individuality, personality, selfhood — these are our own markers and definitions. These are the traits that showcase our true uniqueness.

The society we are born into, the home that gives us our playground to come of age, the schools we study at, the friends we find in our early years, the habits we form — these are defining markers, too. Imprints associated with us until the completion of our journey. These early associations are most lasting in their informing powers. They never lose their grip on our psyche. Consciously or subconsciously, willingly or as puppets, we come back to them as guiding lights. Not always to our benefit.

READ MORE

Emma is a fun and exuberant retelling of a classic

Speaking her mind: A still from Autumn de Wilde’s Emma.

It’s hard to pull off a film with a leading lady who is rather unlikeable. Especially when that film’s focus stays steadfast on her. Emma. (yes, there’s a full stop at the end of the title, quite appropriately) in its latest filmed version, directed by Autumn de Wilde, manages that feat deftly: by the end of the film’s two-hour run, we move from exasperation to fondness, and that’s pretty much the path author Jane Austen had steered us towards.

Fans of Austen speak of Pride and Prejudice (1813) as their favourite, because Elizabeth Bennet wins the likeability stakes hands-down. Even her other novels (Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park), each one an affectionate yet sharply observed account of men and women, and their mores and manners, have pleasing prominent female characters. But Emma, with her meddlesome, I-know-best ways, takes some getting used to: she is a haughty little miss, all dressed up and everywhere to go.

READ MORE

How song and dance made love and desire visible on screen

Madhuri Dixit in Sailaab (1990)

The long and illustrious tradition of song-and-dance in Hindi cinema is increasingly seen as an unnecessary appendage, needed for marketing a film but to be finally parked in the end credits. But what do we lose when we cut ourselves off from it? In an essay in tiltpauseshift: Dance Ecologies in India (Gati Dance Forum, 2016), writer and filmmaker Paromita Vohra makes a case for Bollywood dance as a unique “symbolic language” and a way to simultaneously accommodate hybrid, even transgressive, ideas of pleasure, desire and sexuality. Vohra’s work as a filmmaker, writer and feminist, celebrates and articulates the queerness and non-hierarchical in Indian visual and pop cultures. In this interview, she speaks on how Saroj Khan took the song-and-dance aesthetic further, and why its dismissal is a part of a growing masculinisation of Indian culture.

READ MORE

Saroj Khan was clearly the leader of the pack: Dayanita Singh

Leading light: Dayanita Singh’s photograph of Saroj Khan, who passed away on July 3 in Mumbai (Credit: Dayanita Singh)

I was just watching Saroj Khan dance to Ek, do, teen (from Tezaab, 1988) at the Filmfare Awards, after she won the trophy for Best Choreography. That was the year (1989) the best choreographer award was especially instituted for her dance and I found this clip of her dancing, which I have now put on Instagram to keep viewing in a loop; I don’t know if (actor) Madhuri Dixit can dance to the song the way Khan did. She was like moving electricity!

In the past months, I have been going through contact sheets of four decades and only 10 days ago, I was looking at the folder that has images of Khan I took in the early ’90s. I first saw her on the set of Khal Nayak (1993, directed by Subhash Ghai). She was shorter than even me, and, yet, so light-footed, almost birdlike, a bundle of energy, and so graceful. The fact that she was the first woman choreographer in Bollywood, another male-dominated field, is also something that drew me to her.

READ MORE

Why we should listen to the many sounds of nature

A lion in Gir. (Photo by Ranjit Lal)

The recent lockdown made many people suddenly aware that there are sounds other than the blaring of bad-tempered horns, traffic roar, construction equipment going ballistic, lunatic VIP sirens and, more frequently now, the thudding of police lathis on the heads of young students.

Birds, of course, drew the most attention. I was always aware of birdsong and calls but there were other sounds which I suddenly heard — and didn’t — which came as surprises. Living next to the historic Nicholson Cemetery you would imagine I would have quiet neighbours. Well, yes and no. Yes, until back in the ’90s. No, after they cut most of the magnificent old trees there and I realised how effective they had been in blocking the incessant roar of traffic from adjacent Kashmere Gate — especially on winter nights. But, one morning, after the lockdown had just started, I was suddenly aware of a sound like that of the wind blowing through a casuarina grove on the beach. The trees in the cemetery were swaying and I was delighted to realise that this was the sound of that same breeze sussuring through them.

READ MORE