From dak at sarai.net Tue Mar 1 18:12:16 2005 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 18:12:16 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Talk by TEJASWINI NIRANJANA Message-ID: <200503011812.16600.dak@sarai.net> MEDIA PUBLICS & PRACTICES SEMINAR SERIES Friday, March 4, 2005, 3:30 pm "Suku Suku What Shall I Do?" : Hindi Cinema and the Politics of Music in Trinidad by Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 54. Niranjana investigates the impact of Hindi popular cinema from India on the Trinidadian musical genres of calypso, soca, and chutney-soca. Ever since the first Indian film, 'Bala Joban', was shown in Trinidad in 1935, the descendants of the ex-indentured labourers who form the Indo-Trinidadian population have been incorporating elements from Hindi cinema into their own cultural practices. She suggests that in the musical public sphere of Trinidad, Hindi film as visual product is downplayed in favour of film music which seems to have played for decades a crucial role in the formation of "Indian" identities. The Hindi films themselves have aroused a host of ambivalent responses amongst East Indians, while the songs and their many "versions" continue to circulate in diverse spaces, including Creole-dominated ones. The paper will explore, with reference to contemporary Trinidadian music, formations of diasporic modernity which have taken shape outside the narratives of nationalist modernity in India, suggesting that these formations may help us re-think dominant representations of "Indian culture" in India. Tejaswini Niranjana is Director and Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. She is the author of 'Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context' and the co-editor of 'Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India'. -- Ranita Chatterjee Programme Coordinator The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net From dak at sarai.net Wed Mar 2 17:37:47 2005 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:37:47 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] MARCH 2005 Message-ID: <200503021737.47275.dak@sarai.net> CONTENTS: MARCH 2005 Seminar @ Sarai 4th 'Hindi Cinema and the Politics of Music in Trinidad', by Tejaswini Niranjana 10th 'Water Bodies of Delhi', by Sohail Hashmi 30th 'Urdu Hai Jiska Naam', a film on the history of Urdu, introduced by Sohail Hashmi Presentation @ Sarai 29th 'You Are Not Here', Poetry Reading by Jeet Thayil Film @ Sarai: Asian Horror Film Festival 11th 'The Eye', Dir. Danny and Oxide Pang 18th 'Bhoot', Dir. Ram Gopal Varma & 'Dark Water', Dir. Hideo Nakata 19th 'Gawi', Dir. Byeong-ki Ahn Call for Applications: Digital Video Image Masterclass ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ MEDIA PUBLICS & PRACTICES SEMINAR Friday, March 4, 3:30 pm "Suku Suku What Shall I Do?": Hindi Cinema and the Politics of Music in Trinidad by Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore Niranjana investigates the impact of Hindi popular cinema from India on the Trinidadian musical genres of calypso, soca, and chutney-soca. Ever since the first Indian film, 'Bala Joban', was shown in Trinidad in 1935, the descendants of the ex-indentured labourers who form the Indo-Trinidadian population have been incorporating elements from Hindi cinema into their own cultural practices. I suggest that in the musical public sphere of Trinidad, Hindi film as visual product is downplayed in favour of film music which seems to have played for decades a crucial role in the formation of "Indian" identities. The Hindi films themselves have aroused a host of ambivalent responses amongst East Indians, while the songs and their many "versions" continue to circulate in diverse spaces, including Creole-dominated ones. The paper will explore, with reference to contemporary Trinidadian music, formations of diasporic modernity which have taken shape outside the narratives of nationalist modernity in India, suggesting that these formations may help us re-think dominant representations of "Indian culture" in India. Tejaswini Niranjana is Director and Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. She is the author of 'Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context' and the co-editor of 'Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India'. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- URBAN CULTURES AND POLITICS SEMINAR SERIES Thursday, March 10, 3:30 pm Water Management in Medieval Times: Water Bodies of Delhi by Sohail Hashmi This is a short study of the step wells, reservoirs, natural water bodies and a few canals built in Delhi from the 13th to the 17th Century. The study woven around 100 transparencies locates these water bodies within the socio-cultural milieu of the 7 Delhi's and traces their links to the Traders, Sufis and Rulers and Amirs who had commissioned them. The study also touches upon the miraculous powers that some of these water bodies were invested with in popular perception due to their association with prominent Sufis of the times. The study explores at some length the planning that went into managing water supply for Shahajahanabad, for both quenching the thirst of its citizens and for keeping the temperatures within the walled city within tolerable limits. Sohail Hashmi is the Centre Director, Leap Years - a Creative Activity Centre for Children - Vasant Kunj. He has been active with SAHMAT. He is currently working on 'Shehernama', a 5 part series on walks through Shahjahanabad and a 90 minute AV on K. L. Sehgal. Hashmi also writes a fortnightly column for 'Altamash', an Urdu Journal published from Delhi. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE LANGUAGE SEMINAR SERIES Wednesday, March 30, 2005, 3:30 pm Urdu Hai Jiska Naam, 120 minutes A film on the history of Urdu Directed by Subhash Kapoor Introduced and discussed by Sohail Hashmi, who conceptualised, researched for and scripted the film. The film begins with the shift from Sanskrit to popular Apabhransha languages including Shaurseni that had by the 10th Century AD spread from the West Coast of the sub-continent to the East and gave birth to Gujarati, Sindhi, Punjabi, Braj, Avadhi, Maghdi, Maithli, Bangla and Khari Boli, among others. The arrival of the Sufis, Central Asian armies and large number of traders brought in new technologies, new crafts,new languages and scripts from the 11th century and all these began to combine with their South Asian counterparts to create new vocabularies of Music, Attire, Architecture and creative expression. All this took place at the shrines of the Sufis, in army camps, in the bazars and the sarais. The film goes on to trace these many strains through the centuries and across Delhi, Gulbarga, Gujarat, Avadh and Bengal. By the time John Borthwick Gilchrist set up the Fort Williams College in the 1820s at Calcutta, Urdu had grown to become a language that was "spoken and understood from Gujarat to the Bengal" and it was on Gilchrist's recommendation that the East India Company gave up their dependence on Persian and replaced with Urdu. The rest is more familiar but by no means less exciting history of a language gone out of favour in recent decades. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESENTATION @ SARAI Tuesday, March 29, 6:00 pm 'You Are Not Here' Poetry Reading by Jeet Thayil Jeet Thayil will read from his most recent collection, 'English' (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004) and a selection of newer poems. 'English', has been widely received as an important and unprecented signpost in the history of Indian English poetry. Fusing lyric and narrative energy in a drowsy, mongrelized Americanese, alternating between strict and free forms, Thayil fashions a voice and persona that is only indirectly autobiographical, half-fiction: addicted to opium, shapeshifting, drifting across borders and stumbling through rehab, while the surrounding world teeters perpetually on the brink of apocalypse. "Ruined still by syntax", the narrator hangs on the margins of both America and India because English is his only language of love, his truest inheritance- "English fills my right hand, silence my left." Thayil's specialty in these poems is a very finely-tuned emotional precision, played out in an unmistakable register that is not crudely bitter or caustic, never heroic, but always undeniably blue, beset by visions. Jeet Thayil was born in India and educated in Hongkong, New York and Bombay. In 1998 he returned to New York where he received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a 2003 poetry award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in 'Stand', 'Verse', 'Agenda', 'London Magazine', 'The Independent', 'Salt Hill' and 'Kaviya Bharati', among many other journals. He is an editor with 'Rattapallax' and a contributing editor with 'Fulcrum', and is currently based in Bangalore and Delhi. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FILM @ SARAI: Asian Film Cultures Asian Horror Film Festival Curated by Konrad Bayer "Where there are no words, ghosts rule." (Joseph von Eichendorff) Osama Bin Laden is like Sadako in 'Ringu': both can be captured only on video. Popular cinema in general, and horror cinema in particular, reflects the tendencies and moods of its time, it deals with the "Zeitgeist". Given this asumption it is worth investigating the rise in production of films that fall in the "ghost-movie" genre in the last few years. This revival of ghost movies is not restricted to Hollywood mainstream cinema, with films like 'The Others' (2001) or 'The Sixth Sense' (1999), but can also be seen in the regional cinemas of Asia. Most notable among these are Japanese horror films including 'Ringu' (1998), 'Dark Water' (2001) and 'Ju-On' (2001), that became big successes in Asia and Europe and are even being remade for an American audience. But this trend is not restricted to Japan. South-Korea produced 'Gawi' (2001), a teenage angst ghost drama, Hong Kong's Pang brothers produced 'The Eye' (2002), and India had 'Bhoot' (2003), taking the genre a step further on the Subcontinent. To take a closer look at ghost-cinema in Asia, we will screen and discuss the films 'Dark Water', 'The Eye', 'Gawi' and 'Bhoot'. All four films are located in urban space. Unlike in the classic ghost-movie, an isolated surrounding with one lonely, pseudo-gothic building is no longer necessary. The ghosts are among us in the city. The city generates its own ghosts. In the four films recurring images are used to depict urbanity: streets and traffic, multi-storeyed concrete buildings, elevators and stairways, technical gadgets (often surveillance cameras). Are these images are also metaphors for the fear of living in polluted and unhealthy surroundings, for isolation in an anonymous society, domestic violence and social control? Questions about the representation of urbanity, the role of women in these films, traditional and local concepts of ghosts and the aesthetics of threat will also be asked and hopefully answered. Friday, March 11, 4:30 pm The Eye (2002), 98 minutes Directed by Danny and Oxide Pang, Hong Kong This ghost story revolves around a blind woman who regains her sight after a corneal transplant from an unknown donor, albeit with the unexpected side effect of seeing dead people. As her vision slowly becomes better, the ghostly apparitions become more intense and invasive, and it seems that in Hong Kong, a city of seven million people, there is almost a restless spirit lurking around every corner... Friday, March 18, 3:00 pm Bhoot (2003), 113 minutes Directed by Ram Gopal Varma, India 'Bhoot' shows a woman who is possessed by ghosts and how the people around her deal with the situation. By using the theme of possession as a vehicle, the film explores the dark side of contemporary urban India. AND Dark Water (2001), 97 minutes Directed by Hideo Nakata, Japan 'Dark Water' tells the story of a single mother, who lives with her small daughter in a run-down apartment building. Not only are the rooms of their flat wet and unhealthy, but they appear also to be haunted. Although Hideo Nataka doesn't use much effects nor any violent scenes in 'Dark Water', he succeeded in making one of the scariest films ever. Saturday, March 19, 3:00 pm Gawi (2001), 97 minutes Directed by Byeong-ki Ahn, Korea 'Gawi' is the Korean word for scissors and in some senses the film is about cuts. The cuts one gets when growing up. A mix of a 'coming of age' film and a ghost film, 'Gawi' deals with issues of teenage angst - the fear of being rejected and the inability to fit in. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Call For Applications DIGITAL VIDEO IMAGE MASTERCLASS @ Sarai Masterclass Tutor: Kabir Mohanty Kabir Mohanty works in film and in video. In the former as a film director of an ensemble form shooting in 35mm, working with actors in a tradition of filmmakers before him that thought of film as a serious art form. In video he works more as a solo artist, bringing to video the hands-on, performative aspect of music or drawing. For Kabir, the two are related in many ways and not mutually exclusive. His films and videos have been shown at many festivals and art venues in India and abroad. He has received support in the form of a number of international grants and awards. Kabir studied economics at Presidency College, Calcutta and film and video at the University of Iowa in the United States. From September 2002 till June of 2004 he was a visiting artist in UCLA's art department. He is currently working on a number of digital video pieces, installations, single channel works and a feature length video essay towards two solo shows next year. The duration of the workshop is ten weeks commencing from Saturday, April 23, 2005. The participants will meet every Saturday, thereafter for 4 to 5 hours, until June 25, 2005, Those interested may send a short resume with a one-page note on why they want to attend this workshop to iram at sarai.net Last Date for applications: March 20, 2005 Selected participants will be informed on email by April 15, 2005 Masterclass Fee: Rs. 2000/- to be paid after confirmation of selection. The Digital Video Image: Kabir Mohanty The video image is almost instantly generated. You could switch on the camera, take off the lens cap, and press auto exposure. There is an image, press record and you are shooting video. A child when given a pencil and a piece of paper does not hesitate to draw the first lines unless he is being punished. It is this spontaneous, drawing-like gesture, this anybody-can, this there-is-nothing-technical-about-it core of video, this pencil-like beginning that I would like to make with this workshop. From this child-like start, begin to connect the camera to one?s imagination, to composition? Smaller cameras have allowed anybody to make images, the way Godard said ?when film becomes as cheap as paper and pencil, great films will be made?. To my mind, these cameras have allowed the immediacy of drawing to be brought back. A particular kind of immediacy, and a contraction of time, a possible creation here and now. In this ten-week workshop I would like to go back to video?s basic parameters, exposure, focus, its horizontal axes movements, namely panning left and right, its vertical axes movements, namely tilting up and down. If one has a lot of prior experience in video, this workshop does not ask you to leave anything behind. On the contrary, to bring to the basics, all the compositional preparedness that one already has. The workshop assumes that the practitioner is going to handle the camera herself. At times one may become a composer for a particular work and need an instrumentalist like Gary Hill in his beautiful 4-minute video, ?Site Recite?. These weeks are also preparing sight, preparing the self. What will one do if one is never able to raise money. Again, the eye as intuitive knowledge in Stan Brakhage. All the exercises or studies if you will are to be performed mos, with the rider that the camera mic is to be left on. A level should be set for sound for the camera mic and then not tampered with during shooting. When one gives to an exercise it gives back. Hindustani musicians define a practice of the sargam or doing the scales. Then, the most minor deviations from this scale as a bend in the note towards the next note or the meend becomes the beginning of a profound musical expression. It is the beginning of movement. What is the basic scale of your shot? Do you think about it? Am I laying down some essential characteristics of the medium? Is this the only way to think about the medium? The answer to the second question is a definite ?No?. The first question is harder to answer. One would like to address it through the quarter without being reductive. Here are certain ways of thinking about the medium from a practitioner?s point of view. These could be thought of as a series of yoga asanas. They could remain physical or a formal examination only or they can become artistic content, when we simply say yes there is something to this, this speaks, when the yoga asana connects mind and body and becomes simultaneously dance and self-knowledge. This course is about attractions, and provocations, through doing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Programmes are held in the Seminar Room, CSDS, unless otherwise indicated. All programme subject to last minute changes. -- Ranita Chatterjee Programme Coordinator The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net From dak at sarai.net Mon Mar 28 10:34:34 2005 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 10:34:34 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Poetry Reading by Jeet Thayil Message-ID: <200503281034.34917.dak@sarai.net> 'You Are Not Here' Poetry Reading by Jeet Thayil Tuesday, March 29, 6:00 pm Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -54 Jeet Thayil will perform from his most recent collection, 'English' (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004) and a selection of newer poems. 'English', has been widely received as an important and unprecented signpost in the history of Indian English poetry. Fusing lyric and narrative energy in a drowsy, mongrelized Americanese, alternating between strict and free forms, Thayil fashions a voice and persona that is only indirectly autobiographical, half-fiction: addicted to opium, shapeshifting, drifting across borders and stumbling through rehab, while the surrounding world teeters perpetually on the brink of apocalypse. "Ruined still by syntax", the narrator hangs on the margins of both America and India because English is his only language of love, his truest inheritance- "English fills my right hand, silence my left." Thayil's specialty in these poems is a very finely-tuned emotional precision, played out in an unmistakable register that is not crudely bitter or caustic, never heroic, but unconsolably blue, beset by visions. Jeet Thayil was born in India and educated in Hongkong, New York and Bombay. In 1998 he returned to New York where he received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a 2003 poetry award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in 'Stand', 'Verse', 'Agenda', 'London Magazine', 'The Independent', 'Salt Hill' and 'Kaviya Bharati', among many other journals. He is an editor with 'Rattapallax' and a contributing editor with 'Fulcrum', and is currently based in Bangalore and Delhi. TWO RECENT POEMS BY JEET THAYIL: IN THE CITY OF INSOMNIA There's a parade in the white streets of the city. All night the armoured cars trundle past the avenue. Dazed men and women stand making circles with their hands, their smudged eyes wide open. At dawn the silent mayor arrives, climbs the stair to your room, takes a moment to catch his breath and present you with a key you will wear round your neck like a star. SPIDERMAN Leap tall buildings in a single bound? Forget you buddy, I leap years, avenues, financial/fashion/meatpacking districts, 23 MTA buses parked end to end. I leap Broadway, yoyo to traffic light, to bus top, to Chrysler, to jet. You need a mind of sky, of rubber, to understand moi. You need silence, cunning. Exhale! You need to know that everything is metaphor, that poems sprout in my hands like mystic confetti, like neural string theory. My brother, Mycroft, is tiny, but a genius, oh a tiny genius, whose "art is subtle, a precision of hallucinatory brilliance," - that's serious talk, boy - he's 'furthermore' and 'however,' I'm 'know what I'm saying?' and 'whatever.' He is the ghost ant, the one who is not there, unseen until he stops moving. I am companion to owl and peregrine, emperor of air, and I'm loyal to you my loyal subject, whose hard-won pleasure I perform, and though I'm not rich it takes a lot of cash to keep me in the poverty to which I'm accustomed. -- Ranita Chatterjee The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net From dak at sarai.net Tue Mar 29 20:16:46 2005 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 20:16:46 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Screening of Urdu Hai Jiska Naam Message-ID: <200503292016.46207.dak@sarai.net> Wednesday, March 30, 2005, 3:30 pm Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -54 Urdu Hai Jiska Naam, 120 minutes A film on the history of Urdu Directed by Subhash Kapoor Introduced and discussed by Sohail Hashmi, who conceptualised, researched for and scripted the film. The film begins with the shift from Sanskrit to popular Apabhransha languages including Shaurseni that had by the 10th Century AD spread from the West Coast of the sub-continent to the East and gave birth to Gujarati, Sindhi, Punjabi, Braj, Avadhi, Maghdi, Maithli, Bangla and Khari Boli, among others. The arrival of the Sufis, Central Asian armies and large number of traders brought in new technologies, new crafts,new languages and scripts from the 11th century and all these began to combine with their South Asian counterparts to create new vocabularies of Music, Attire, Architecture and creative expression. All this took place at the shrines of the Sufis, in army camps, in the bazars and the sarais. The film goes on to trace these many strains through the centuries and across Delhi, Gulbarga, Gujarat, Avadh and Bengal. By the time John Borthwick Gilchrist set up the Fort Williams College in the 1820s at Calcutta, Urdu had grown to become a language that was "spoken and understood from Gujarat to the Bengal" and it was on Gilchrist's recommendation that the East India Company gave up their dependence on Persian and replaced with Urdu. The rest is more familiar but by no means less exciting history of a language gone out of favour in recent decades. -- Ranita Chatterjee The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net