BY SUDHANVA DESHPANDE-Frontline

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Habib Tanvir in his Bhopal home in 2007. By the mid-1970s he had evolved his distinctive idiom of modern theatre.-SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

Habib Tanvir: Citizen of the world

Habib Tanvir shaped the contours of modern Indian theatre.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

Moloyashree Hashmi at a performance of 'Halla Bol' on January 4, 1989, three days after the attack on Safdar at the same spot on the outskirts of Delhi.-COURTESY: JAMAM

Voice of the streets

Safdar Hashmi was a multifaceted artist and was constantly soaking up new influences and trying out new technologies.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

Superstar Dhasal

Dilip Chitre packages Namdeo Dhasal for the globalised reader, properly glossed and sanitised.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

Text and drama

There is a vibrant theatre culture in India, but strangely there is relatively little critical reflection on it.

BY SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

The world was his village

Kuntagodu Vibhuti Subbanna, 1932 - 2005

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

The children of 1984

The horrors of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 are revisited in two recent feature films with pertinent questions about identities and memories.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

A road half-travelled

Swades, despite some outstanding sequences and good acting, disappoints because of its failure to confront politically the serious issues it touches u

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

A scene from Lagaan, a success story with a secular theme.-

Secular surge

Some recent movies produced by the Mumbai film industry project secular values, in a welcome change from the formula movies made earlier.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

Images of Hindi cinema

Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film by Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel; Oxford University Press, New Delhi; pages 240, Rs.650.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

Breeding little fascists

What `The Men in the Tree, a documentary, reveals about the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

The unbearable opulence of Devdas

In our globalised times, the tragedy of Devdas has been turned into a garish and thoroughly hollow spectacle of pure consumption.

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

A tale of two Bhagat Singhs

Two recent films on the legendary revolutionary draw attention - one for its inaccurate rendering of history and another for its largely objective nar

SUDHANVA DESHPANDE

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