Welcome to Our Imagination
Lists, of any kind, are subjective and offer only a partial view. Given the rich history of non-fiction films in India on the urban – across time and geography – condensing them into a list will always be an incomplete task.
In Part One of this two-part conversation with The Third Eye, Bhan discusses the making of the ‘urban’ in policy versus reality, the lack of identity for the urban poor, what urban practitioners should have learnt from the Covid pandemic, and the great disruptor entering urban studies—the Anthropocene.
Manjima Bhattacharjya is a feminist researcher, writer and activist. She offers intriguing insights in how the Internet was changing digital intimacy, a short minute before the advent of Tinder and similar apps.
My first meeting with Annu was over a Zoom call at 7 pm on a Thursday. The past few months I had been meeting with women from rural areas and kasbahs who shared with me their stories of being ekal (single).
Kolkata, the city, has been shaped by its location, the wars that have been fought via its ports, the waves of migration from across the borders, and of course, the ubiquitous British presence and its shape shifting morality.
In this episode, Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own travels to the tehsil of Ajmer, Kekri in Rajasthan, and meets Annu, a 31-year-old woman who gives it her own meaning. What does this room look like today?
Jyoti was the first girl from her village, Sawau Moolraj in Rajasthan to migrate to the city for a better education—a decision taken by her parents because the village had no such infrastructure. Since then, Jyoti has been an outsider-insider, moving in and out of her village home.
Throughout the first Covid induced lockdown of 2020, Jyoti sent us her Vlogs. She would take her phone and walk around her village, as if looking for what she left behind. As a certified shehri ladki (city girl), she found herself at an intersection of gazes: looking, and being looked at.
On Pandita Ramabai’s 164th birthday, we bring you a rare glimpse into her life as an image maker and archivist. During the 19th century widow reformation movement, Pandita Ramabai set up Mukti Mission. Here, she created photographs that only archive a precious moment in feminist history, but also challenge the ongoing conjugality project that offer up alternatives to coupledom and the traditional family set-up.
The period between 1870 and 1920 may be regarded as the high moment for pushing the conjugality/new conjugality project Nae Dampatiya Rishtey (Ek Vivahit Jode Ki Ek Nai Kalpana) across India and this is well reflected in Maharashtra too.
