Frontline Coverage on Arts, Culture & Entertainment - Frontline

This year’s Phool Walon Ki Sair featured cultural performances from Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

Cultural heritage

Delhi’s Phool Walon Ki Sair: A people’s festival dimmed by bureaucracy

It has transformed from a vibrant grassroots celebration into a state-managed affair. Local artisans, flower sellers are mere bystanders now.

Vitasta Kaul,Vedaant Lakhera

Safdar Hashmi in “Aya Chunav”, Janam’s first political play performed in Hissar, Haryana, in 1981.

Safdar Hashmi’s transformative approach to theatre as a democratic force

Through plays like Hatyare and Aurat, Hashmi tackled communalism and gender issues while building an inclusive, collaborative artistic practice.

Love in the time of ‘love jehad’: The complex lives of Hindu-Muslim couples in India

Ashis Roy explores the everyday challenges of urban middle-class Hindu-Muslim couples even as it deftly challenges toxic generalisations.

Chintan Girish Modi

A photograph captured ten novelists who transformed Indian writing forever—and marked the end of an era

Revisiting The New Yorker’s iconic 1997 photograph of 10 “original gangsters” of the Indian English novel.

Shivendra Singh

Installation view, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Exhibition: “Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj”, from the Omar Khan Collection and the Alkazi Collection of Photography, August 19-October 1, 2018.

Reimagining the past: Inside India’s archive revolution

How India’s private foundations transform historical collections into interactive experiences, bridging past and present through technology.

Janhavi Acharekar

What defines ‘Odia literature’?

Is it the language, the land, or the cultural identity that makes literature truly Odia?

Stories that are close to the bone

From menstrual taboos to interfaith marriage: Shahina K. Rafiq’s unabashed collection reveals intimate truths of Indian women’s lives.

Chittajit Mitra

More stories from Arts & Culture

Watching a documentary film about a wrongly incercerated man caused participants in a study to be more supportive of reforms to the US criminal justice system.

Could watching a movie change your political views?

Watching a docufilm about a wrongly convicted man boosted empathy towards incarcerated people, according to a new scientific study.

An artist in Florence, Italy, made a chalk drawing of the Mona Lisa using a sidewalk as a canvas.

ChatGPT novels and CG Mona Lisas: The digital deluge of mediocre art threatens to drown out quality work

Is the “unmitigated glut” of instant art erasing our cultural memory? Or are we witnessing the death of the starving artist?

For over 100 years Charlie Chaplin has been a cultural icon. Though often imitated, there is only one Chaplin and his family wants to keep it that way.

Charlie Chaplin: Keeping a comedy genius in business

The Chaplin Office in Paris is the guardian of the film icon’s legacy. Decades after his death it is busier than ever.

Dharavi, Mumbai, 2010.

Death at a discount

In Baburao Bagul’s collection of gut-wrenching stories, Mumbai’s graveyards, brothels, and slums form the backdrop to a theatre of desperate poverty.

Janhavi Acharekar

Mir Taqi Mir in 1786.

Mir in Americanese

Ranjit Hoskote’s translations of Mir’s poetry feel hurried and stiff and do not cohere as a collection.

Amitabha Bagchi

New books on the shelves

A genre-bending novel translated from Malayalam, a first-hand account of Kashmir’s geopolitics translated from Hindi, and much more.

The restless traveller was still following the tune of the entrance-flute, overflowing from the land of freedom.

The restless traveller: A vignette

Translated from Bengali by Dhrubajyoti Sarkar

Kazi Nazrul Islam

Exotic Landscape (1910), oil on canvas by Henri Rousseau.

Tragedy and folklore write a star-crossed love in The Distaste of the Earth

Longlisted for the 2024 JCB Prize for Literature, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s novel, is epic in scope but suffers from a lack of editorial care.

In this photograph taken in July 2013, then Congress leader Baba Siddique is flanked by actors Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan at an Iftar party in Mumbai.

Baba, Bollywood, Bishnoi: A Mumbai murder mystery

As the Assembly election approaches, a powerful ex-minister is gunned down for his “closeness” to a Bollywood superstar. Or was it a real estate feud?

Indira Gandhi in Delhi on April 20, 1982. Documentary film Indi(r)a’s Emergency covers events from the 1942 Quit India Movement through to the Emergency period.

Can a film be progressive if it is too subtle?

Circumventing censorship with minor tricks doesn’t make a film progressive; it merely turns the capacity to evoke pity into an artistic virtue.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Han Kang giving a speech in Gwangju, South Korea, in 2023.

Why has literature Nobel winner Han Kang turned down celebratory events?

Han’s refusal stems from her conviction that writers must bear witness to global suffering, prioritising collective anguish over personal achievement.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

Prime Minister Morarji Desai presenting the National UNESCO Award for 1977 to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in New Delhi on December 18, 1977.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The rebel who saw tomorrow

Nico Slate highlights how much of today’s feminist dialogue echoes feminist freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s ideas from decades ago.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta

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