Books by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Very Short Introductions, 2016
One film out of every five made anywhere comes from India. From its beginnings under colonial rul... more One film out of every five made anywhere comes from India. From its beginnings under colonial rule through to the heights of Bollywood, Indian cinema has challenged social injustices such as caste, the oppression of Indian women, religious intolerance, rural poverty, and the pressures of life in the burgeoning cities. Indian Cinema: A Very Short Introduction delves into the political, social, and economic factors which have shaped Indian cinema into a fascinating counterculture. Covering everything from silent cinema through to the digital era, it examines how the industry reflects the complexity and variety of Indian society through the dramatic changes of the 20th century, and into the beginnings of the 21st.
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Theory on Demand #45, 2022
In February 2015, India’s Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgment on the right to speech. The... more In February 2015, India’s Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgment on the right to speech. The issue was itself, certainly by today’s standards, relatively insignificant – a Facebook post by a young woman in the small town of Palghar, in Maharashtra, that another young woman had ‘liked’ – that blew up when police arrested the two women under something named Section 66A of India’s Information Technology Act, 2000, which redefined India’s hallowed right to free speech into the digital era.
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Tulika Books, 2009
Nowhere has the cinema made more foundational a public intervention than in India, and yet the In... more Nowhere has the cinema made more foundational a public intervention than in India, and yet the Indian cinema is consistently presented as something of an exception to world film history. What if, this book asks, film history was instead written from the Indian experience? Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid reconstructs an era of film that saw an unprecedented public visibility attached to the moving image and to its social usage. The cinema was not invented by celluloid, nor will it die with celluloid's growing obsolescence. But 'celluloid' names a distinct era in cinema's career that coincides with a particular construct of the twentieth-century state. This is not merely a coincidence: the very raison d'etre of celluloid was derived from the use to which the modern state put it, as the authorized technology through which the state spoke and as narrative practices endorsing its authority as producer of the rational subject.
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Edited Compilations by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
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Tulika Books, 2015
The fifty-one essays compiled in this book were written over a forty-year period by India's leadi... more The fifty-one essays compiled in this book were written over a forty-year period by India's leading independent filmmaker. They provide new insights into a turbulent era in modern India's cultural history. Although known primarily as a filmmaker, Kumar Shahani has taught, spoken and written on a variety of subjects over this period, that include the cinema, but also politics, aesthetics, history and psychoanalysis. In these essays Shahani addresses diverse political issues, aesthetic practice, questions of artistic freedom and censorship. There are also personal essays on filmmakers and artists including his teachers and colleagues. Shahani's often polemical positions, as they occur in several previously unpublished essays and presentations, are essential contributions to film and cultural histories of the Indian cinema as well as of the New Cinema worldwide. The book includes a comprehensive introductory essay, "Kumar Shahani Now," by Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
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Ashish RAJADHYAKSHA
P. Radhika
Raghavendra TENKAYALA
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""The Centre for the Study of Culture & Society’s Identity Project was launched in 2010, with the... more ""The Centre for the Study of Culture & Society’s Identity Project was launched in 2010, with the idea of providing a possible framework for a debate on the massive move towards the digitisation of government services launched by the Government of India’s National e-Governance Plan of 2006. Between 2010–12, CSCS conducted field visits in seven Indian states, and now has published in web-downloadable form numerous video-conversations with diverse stakeholders: including people being enrolled into the Aadhaar programme, district-level Panchayat and other officials, State government bureaucrats, private enrollment representatives, representatives of various governmental services, operators and other members of this digital workforce. (for full public archives see: http://cscs.pad.ma).
Emerging from these visits, CSCS conducted several public consultations, focusing on some key issues shortlisted for detailed inquiry: those of migrants, both domestic and across international borders, homelessness in cities and the financially excluded . Each of these areas was discussed in considerable detail at major public consultations held in Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. CSCS also has an extensive text archives of material on the field as a whole, available on http://eprints.cscsarchive.org.
This book comprises an anthology of key interviews, field reports and presentations at different consultations conducted from this project to provide the first comprehensive 360-degree perspective on the impact of India’s e-governance initiatives as a whole.""
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co-edited with Amrit Gangar
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Framework n 30.31, 1986
Six essays by Kumar Shahani, with an Introduction and an Interview
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Journalism by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Outlook India
The portrayal of Ray as Indian cinema's greatest iconic genius has its problems
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Economic & Political Weekly, 2017
Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro went so far beyond ha-ha funny that it became, rather like the p... more Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro went so far beyond ha-ha funny that it became, rather like the pivotal moment in its plot, some kind of instant snapshot of Bombay and the India, of that time. It captured something so
gruesome that laughter became almost a last-resort action.
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India Today, Jan 14, 2013
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Visual Art Texts and Catalogues by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946, 2017
This is a public art event, addressing a political and historical conjuncture in a form that conn... more This is a public art event, addressing a political and historical conjuncture in a form that connects together a diversity of means: of inquiry, of address, of speech. For all its specificity-it was in the end an insurrection led by the sailors of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946the incident resonates with questions that have beset modern history: around how political meaning is created, how symbolic action and historical agency may be named: how history is, in the end, both made and not made.
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Domus India Vol 28, 2014
This detailed essay explores three of the five-episode show celebrating
50 years of an astonishin... more This detailed essay explores three of the five-episode show celebrating
50 years of an astonishing journey in the contemporary art world;
curated by Geeta Kapur, these exhibitions are not nostalgic reiterations
of that existence, but a strategy of both conception and exhibition that
jostles against both, the history of that journey and other histories of
contemporary Indian art. These exhibitions are very much the present,
but the art is set against a memory space.
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Third Text 062 VOLUME 17 ISSUE 1 MARCH 2003, 2003
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Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, New York, Asia …, Jan 1, 2005
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Books by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Edited Compilations by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Emerging from these visits, CSCS conducted several public consultations, focusing on some key issues shortlisted for detailed inquiry: those of migrants, both domestic and across international borders, homelessness in cities and the financially excluded . Each of these areas was discussed in considerable detail at major public consultations held in Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. CSCS also has an extensive text archives of material on the field as a whole, available on http://eprints.cscsarchive.org.
This book comprises an anthology of key interviews, field reports and presentations at different consultations conducted from this project to provide the first comprehensive 360-degree perspective on the impact of India’s e-governance initiatives as a whole.""
Journalism by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
gruesome that laughter became almost a last-resort action.
Visual Art Texts and Catalogues by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
50 years of an astonishing journey in the contemporary art world;
curated by Geeta Kapur, these exhibitions are not nostalgic reiterations
of that existence, but a strategy of both conception and exhibition that
jostles against both, the history of that journey and other histories of
contemporary Indian art. These exhibitions are very much the present,
but the art is set against a memory space.
Emerging from these visits, CSCS conducted several public consultations, focusing on some key issues shortlisted for detailed inquiry: those of migrants, both domestic and across international borders, homelessness in cities and the financially excluded . Each of these areas was discussed in considerable detail at major public consultations held in Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. CSCS also has an extensive text archives of material on the field as a whole, available on http://eprints.cscsarchive.org.
This book comprises an anthology of key interviews, field reports and presentations at different consultations conducted from this project to provide the first comprehensive 360-degree perspective on the impact of India’s e-governance initiatives as a whole.""
gruesome that laughter became almost a last-resort action.
50 years of an astonishing journey in the contemporary art world;
curated by Geeta Kapur, these exhibitions are not nostalgic reiterations
of that existence, but a strategy of both conception and exhibition that
jostles against both, the history of that journey and other histories of
contemporary Indian art. These exhibitions are very much the present,
but the art is set against a memory space.
the purposes of research, education and debate, and that they come within the category of Fair Use for purposes of an art work as specified in Section 52 of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957.
domain. Alongside the dense cultural issues involved, often emanating from the
profound local value of the material being preserved, there is the further problem of
making this material available for research and teaching. It is suggested that a category
distinction be made between the collection - often the by-product of research itself - the
catalogue, and the archive. In arguing for a recognition of the complexity of an archive
in its full sense, the essay locates the problem within the twin processes of providing
researchable data and new pedagogic structures. It argues for a new distinction between
the database, the pedagogic middleware grid, and the 'new classroom' or intelligibility
structure that may well constitute the new location for what used to be called research.
Probably the best way for me to read this most remarkable of anthologies on post-colonial theory is tangentially to its intentions. The book itself has been around for a while now, as has the formally unpublished collection of presentations at the Inter-Asia conference in Taipei, and the entire initiative has now crystallized down to a specific set of projects, which include this journal. It has therefore already been `read’ , and acted upon, in ways that enviably adhere to its propositions, i.e. first, to refigure received cultural studies modes in terms of decolonization politics and, secondly, to emphasize what the book calls the practice of the `activist scholar’. Few books these days receive such focused attention.
This paper argues that Shah’s business model for film financing adapted several practices taken from his other business interests such as the city’s real-estate economy, to make what turned out to be a significant intervention into the very process of valuating a film commodity. Such an economy moved well beyond the conventional ‘box-office’-determined limits of generating revenue. The revaluation was catalyzed primarily around the star, now used to generate a sector of ancillary ‘productions’ available for rental in financial operations that typically occurred through activities that were at best tangential to the conventional film production and exhibition. As several of these processes became visible through the 2000s, they often came together to define a film commodity’s IP (Intellectual Property), even as Shah’s intervention found itself gradually legalized into a new corporate economy around ‘Bollywood’.
Moderated by Arundhati Chauhan, the talk is premised upon Rajadhyaksha’s latest book, John–Ghatak– Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023), published by Tulika Books. Rajadhyaksha situates the 2015 protests at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) as a jumping-off point to examine the new forms that documentary films and filmmakers have envisioned in the aftermath.
This podcast series, commemorates that historic struggle, in these three episodes of John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky
Episode 1, The Cinema’s Expanded Afterlife, tells a longer cinematic history of a technological and political transformation. The age of film was born more or less after the First World War, signalling a new age of mass democracy. Ever since then, filmmakers have been in the line of fire as the cinema, standing in for a new public domain, has seen battles take place on the street, in courtrooms, and of course in movie theatres.
Episode 2, A Satyajit Ray Plastic Bangle, explores the consequences of a cinema that has turned increasingly elusive to regulation. With lightweight equipment for both making and showing films allowing filmmaking an unprecedented mobility, new possibilities emerged along with new challenges for regulatory authority.
The third and final episode, A Hacker Cinema, looks at the recent histories of censorship, alongside the morphing of the moving image into streaming media, emphasising circulation, using memes, encouraging a new interactivity with its spectators, with significant aesthetic consequences on both filmmaking and the self-definition of a filmmaker.