Bollywood
राज कपूर की सत्यम शिवम् सुन्दरम में आकांक्षाएँ और समझौते
सयद साद अहमद द्वारा लिखित “हम क्या वास्तव में सच जानना चाहते हैं? सत्य की क्या आवश्यकता है? उसके बदले…
By Syed Saad Ahmad
January 16, 2017
Interview: Shohini Ghosh
Both fiction and non-fiction are capable of great complexity if the making is in the hands of someone capable and complex. I have always held that good films – fiction, non-fiction or hybrid– emerge not from a familiarity with the subject, though that’s essential – but an understanding of the language of cinema.
By Radhika Chandiramani
September 1, 2017
The Editorial: Fiction and Sexuality
For many of us, it was fiction that fed our souls as children, and now as adults who are still ‘growing up’, it feeds us still. Fiction makes, remakes and unmakes us who walk in worlds of the imagination. It liberates us to dream various versions of ourselves and others into being as the articles in this month’s In Plainspeak eloquently reveal.
By TARSHI
September 15, 2017
The Love Laws: Lessons from Shah Rukh Khan and Others
“Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how…
By Shweta Krishnan
February 1, 2018
Editorial: Friendship and Sexuality
The statement “We are just friends”, does it make you wonder? Just friends? As in – merely friends? As in…
By TARSHI
February 15, 2018
Review: Risk-averse Bollywood Tackles Taboo Issues
Several recent mainstream Hindi films have dealt with issues of sexuality and gender not usually discussed in the intended audience’s drawing rooms.
By Shaifali Agrawal
Some Contemporary Hindi Films that Changed the Way We Perceive Sexuality
When representing sexuality, these stories went beyond dramatic and one-dimensional representations of sex and sexual orientation.
By Breakthrough Media Team
Growing Up With Bollywood
While pop culture will continue to exist in the mainstream, it also provides us the scope to create alternative narratives and/ or counter-narratives that question, challenge and unpack the existing stereotypes and norms.
By Pauline Gomes
December 3, 2018
Issue in Focus: The Script of Love
The discursive power vested in audio-visual media can prove to be emancipatory if it seeks to re-write the scripts of love, to expand it to include various subjectivities, disturb the patriarchal gendered dynamics that it is based on by introducing a story that allows the audience to imagine it in various different ways.
By Anannya Chatterjee
December 3, 2018
Editorial: Popular Culture and Sexuality
And so, in the mid-month issue we have Shweta Krishnan examining the place of political incorrectness in stand-up comedy, Rohini Banerjee talking about how fanfiction allowed her to delve into alternative worlds, and…
By TARSHI
December 15, 2018
PDA: Slippery Slope from Law to Moral Policing
Sexuality is taboo in our context, and expressions of it publicly or even in the home setting outside the bedroom, especially by those who are not in ‘legitimate’ relationships ‘alarm the modesty’ and are generally considered anti-culture or simply categorised as Western concepts.
By Yoshita Srivastava
September 1, 2020
Review: What Does Clothing Have to do with Sexuality in the Media?
Attire and sexuality in the common imagination and approach as represented (and also as received) by the mainstream media tell us a lot about prevailing attitudes to both. Advertisements bombard us with all kinds of representations, negative and positive, of human sexuality, sexual expression and desire. In the creation and marketing of attire and fashion, there is a great awareness of sexual buy-in or rejection by the market – that’s us.
By Shikha Aleya
The Queerness of Fandom in Bollywood
People looking for queer plots in Bollywood are sometimes disappointed, as the focus on marriage in many films seems to suggest that Bollywood is a conservative genre invested in sanctifying reproductive heteronormativity.
By Ulka Anjaria
November 1, 2021
Editorial: Fandom and Sexuality
Members of a fandom are not just passive consumers but active co-creators who imagine and build new worlds around their objects of adoration. Fandom communities offer fans the freedom of being able to imagine, create and share all sorts of scenarios, including romantic, erotic and sexual ones.
By TARSHI
November 15, 2021
Friendships, or, That in which we decouple coupledom from the economies of marriage
I was not simply stuck within the binaries of “same-sex” or “opposite sex,” assuming that any reference to “same-sex” is in itself already revolutionary. But the call to recognise friendship, is a call to recognise so many forms of community that are made invisible by the emphasis within a liberal or conservative framework on “marriage” as the only path to family making.
By Shweta Krishnan