Desire, Shame, and Hunger: Confronting Primal and Taboo Intimacies in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis (2019)
To love is to feast. To desire is to hunger. Were you born with this hunger, or was it borne of your circumstances? What came before it? What will be left after? These are the many questions that Bhaskar Hazarika’s 2019 Assamese feature film Aamis, alternatively titled Ravening, compels its characters and viewers to reckon […]
Heeramandi: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Vision Of The Tragic Tawaif
In South Asian cinema, the depiction of tawaifs (courtesans) is a powerful mirror reflecting and reshaping societal desires and norms. The tawaif, historically, was a highly skilled and educated courtesan in Indian society, trained in music, dance, literature, politics, social etiquette, and erotic stimulation (Dewan, 2). Despite their agency and the ability to choose their […]
Care, Language, and the Limits of Discipline in Khamoshi (1969)
The notion of care, perhaps one that demands more anthropological elaboration, retains its importance outside the medico-historical questions of health, disease, sickness, and healing to which it has often been limited. Important political considerations and implications are mobilised by our understanding of what care is. What, really, do we know about it? If […]
On Nazar: Legitimising Femininity and the Anxieties of Nationhood
The word ‘nazar’ (‘look’ or ‘glance’), imported from Arabic and Persian… is applied to the eye contact of lovers, especially the first sight that arouses passion. It also connotes, in the context of a culture that idealized (and sometimes practiced) the veiling of respectable women, an illicit glimpse that can give rise to intense ‘love […]
Wayward Birds: Desire and Expression in Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar
Abstract How do we understand desire as something interwoven in the very landscape of Indian civilisation and culture—and not, as many believe, a Western ideal or “foreign conspiracy” (Menon 9) imported to it in the modern era? Scholars like Madhavi Menon and Rohit Dasgupta have written extensively on India’s long history with desire—the ‘third nature’ […]
Changing Ideas of Desire: Female Gaze in Contemporary Bollywood Rom-Coms
Love in Hindi cinema is often intertwined with toxic masculine ideals of self-entitlement, dangerous obsession, and complete annihilation of the object of desire. Whether it is conflating physical violence with affection in Kabir Singh (2019), repeated stalking of the woman in Main Tera Hero (2014), Toilet: A Prem Katha (2017), and Badrinath ki Dulhania (2017) […]
Subcategorization of Caste, Begumpura and Religion (TAARIF)
This following is a reflexive article written by a cohort of CSGS’s TAARIF (The Transformative Arts and Research Initiatives Fellowship). The first cohort of TAARIF brought together two individuals, for a period of four months (April 1 to July 31, 2023). The fellowship serves as platform for emerging trans* scholars from the subcontinent to bring […]
Aesthetics of Funding: A Friendly Look at the Negotiations Between Trans Realities and Cis Expectations in Crowdfunding Campaigns (TAARIF)
This following is a reflexive article written by a cohort of CSGS’s TAARIF (The Transformative Arts and Research Initiatives Fellowship). The first cohort of TAARIF brought together two individuals, for a period of four months (April 1 to July 31, 2023). The fellowship serves as platform for emerging trans* scholars from the subcontinent to bring […]
Decoding Desire and Dining in India: A Hidden History of Food Hierarchy
“Food in India is closely tied to the moral and social status of individuals and groups. Food taboos and prescriptions divide men from women, gods from humans, upper from lower castes, one sect from another” (Appadurai, “How to make a National Cuisine”, 8). Introduction The more we delve into the intricacies of any aspect of […]
Sexual Desires: Buddha, Butler and Bodies
This is a conversation on the histories of desire in the Indian subcontinent, a conversation that is centuries old. We began thinking about subcontinental desires while reading aloud the poems by the therīs¹. We were drawn in by theri Siha’s poem who said that she had “…had no peace of mind” because she was tormented […]
