Blogs

Visitors to epw.in would have been noticing a number of changes on the site since late 2012.

While Indian cinema of 1950s is mostly blank on the subject of Partition, poet Saifuddin Saif’s Kartar Singh (1959), a Punjabi film from Pakistan is perhaps the best specimen in which we can see the way Partition was explored in moving pictures by a generation that had been recently and directly impacted by the events of 1947.

The other day we watched the four part mini series production of Hanif Kureishi’s novel, the Buddha of Surburbia.  It is a wonderful screen adaptation of that novella about two generations of south Asians negotiating their pasts and futures, their possibilities which abound, and their limitations which are all over and around. There are familiar tropes:  of fathers and sons inhabiting different cultural orbits. Of arranged marriages and corner shops. But there is more. A good writer, Milan Kundera once said, is above all, an honest writer.

The question of what arouses outrage or “moral panics” in societies is a fascinating one. In Jamaica, members of a powerful Evangelical Christian fundamentalist lobby group have decided to rally their troops in a crusade against the University of the West Indies because the contract of one of their members as head of an organisation named CHART (Caribbean HIV/AIDS Regional Training Network) has been terminated.