India Since the 90s
A running thread is produced by a meme of the figure of Ritwik Ghatak hovering over newspaper reports of major political episodes in late 1980s and 90s India.
[28] The virtualisation of the body into a data subject is discussed by Maya Indira Ganesh's ‘You Auto-Complete Me: Romancing the Bot’ (2019) and Mila Samdub's ‘The Archers and Swordsmen of Digital India’ (2020).
Natasha Ginwala's essay for example is designed alongside images of the Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019, students at Jamia Millia Islamia, a campaign response by the Colombo-based A Collective for Feminist Conversations on the re-imposing of the Sri Lankan ban on women purchasing alcohol in 2018, JNU Student leader Aishe Ghosh shortly after she was attacked on the university campus, and images of Bindu and Kanakadurga, women who entered Kerala's Sabarimala temple in early 2019 before daybreak with a police escort, challenging blockades set up outside the temple by religious groups seeking to prevent their entry.
[37] The media art collective Desire Machine shows how movie theatres turned into military camps in Srinagar (‘Death Becomes Her: Bombay Cinema, Nation and Kashmir’, 2014).
[38] Media artist Jeebesh Bagchi's essay on the Cinematic Object after the 1990s shows how digital versions of cinema leak into a new commerce of the moving image.
[50] In a review of the first volume in Pacific Affairs, Benjamin Siegel called it 'a valuable albeit difficult collection... Its curation is inspired, though its audience is somewhat unclear, with familiar and foundational texts side-by-side with more obscure selections'.
[53] A review in The Hindu March 17, 2022 (‘The Body and Soul Story’) wrote that ‘instead of a typical collection of academic essays and articles, what we have is an interspersion of theatre and documentary scripts, Rohit Vemula’s suicide note, first-person ruminations by performers, as well as theories and analyses… peppered with interesting photomontages’.
[54] In a review in the Critical Collective newsletter, art historian Hemant Sareen said the third volume 'brings together filmmakers, theorists and moving image artists to capture the peripatetic afterlife of celluloid in India'.
[56] In November 2022, four institutions, the dance venue Khuli Khirkee, Mayday Books/Studio Safdar, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) came together to perform events across Delhi that drew from the books.
During which time key political concepts of democracy, freedom and publicness, appear in a ghostly afterlife as a hugely expanded set of Constitutional Rights go alongside an equally massive digital expansion of state infrastructure'.
