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Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-1987) wrote both fiction and non-fiction in three languages simultaneously: English, Urdu and Hindi, and liked to describe himself as a communicator. Starting his journalistic career as sub-editor-cum-reporter in Bombay Chronicle in 1935 where he began contributing his 'Last Page' before moving it to the weekly Blitz in 1947 and continuing it till his last days. He has also been hailed as one of the pioneers of Indian parallel or neo-realist cinema. In I Am Not An Island he chronicled his adventurous life, reflecting on personalities and situations, events, travels, encounters, confrontations, moments of bliss and disappointments, ailments and accidents, and his asso...
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas distinguished himself by his ceaseless passion for revolutionary politics, which he expressed through his writings and films. He was a visionary who strongly believed that creative and artistic interventions are indispensable to nation-building. Bread Beauty Revolution, spanning the years 1914 to 1987, encapsulates Abbas's work, ideas, and ideals. It also provides an insight into the beginnings of modern India. The volume encapsulates 74 books, 40 films, 89 short stories and 3,000 pieces of journalistic writing byAbbas. His work flows in three languages - Urdu, Hindi, and English - and he translated his own writings freely from one language to another. The volume is in ten...
Independent India's struggle to overcome famine, hunger, and malnutrition, as told through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens alike.
In 1973, a film shattered box office records all over India. It introduced two young stars who became instant heart-throbs, and ushered in a new genre of Hindi films, the teeny-bopper romance. It also bailed out the legendary RK Films after the disaster that was Raj Kapoor's magnum opus, Mera Naam Joker. The film was Bobby. Even forty years later, Bobby remains the benchmark for teenage romances, widely imitated, but seldom matched in its freshness, spirit and enduring appeal. At the time of the film's release, its writer K.A. Abbas, in an act years ahead of its time, also published the novelized version of the film to great commercial success. Bobby: The Complete Story is that book. Including K.A. Abbas's original preface and a perceptive new foreword by Suresh Kohli, its re-release marks forty glorious years of the film's release, its star Rishi Kapoor's sixtieth birthday and Abbas's centenary. As engaging a read as the film was entertaining, it is also an insight into the creative process through which a story transforms into a film.
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Literary Radicalism in India situates postcolonial Indian literature in relation to the hugely influential radical literary movements initiated by the Progressive Writers Association and the Indian People's Theatre Association. In so doing, it redresses a visible historical gap in studies of postcolonial India. Through readings of major fiction, pamphlets and cinema, this book also shows how gender was of constitutive importance in the struggle to define 'India' during the transition to independence.
This work provides an introduction to the enormously successful world of Bollywood - the biggest film industry on the planet. It includes a selection of writings by some of the most prominent voices in Indian film writing and criticism.
The strength of [his] short stories ... lies in the fact that [he] grasped the weaknesses of his characters and their strengths' - Mulk Raj Anand 'A man of literature, a journalist of distinction, a film-maker who created a genre of his own' - Gulzar - An Evening in Calcutta is a collection of celebrated writer and award-winning film-maker K.A. Abbas's most memorable stories. His characteristically crisp narratives and bold plotlines, informed as deeply by historical detail as they are by contemporary politics, reach into the familiar to draw out startling truths.
In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling that she conceptualizes as the visceral. Khanna focuses on the work of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA)—a Marxist anticolonial literary group active in India between the 1930s and 1950s—to show how anticolonial literature is a staging ground for exploring racialized emotion and revolutionary feeling. Among others, Khanna examines novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, as well as the feminist writing of Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, who each center the somatic life of the body as a fundamental site of colonial subjugation. In this way, decolonial action comes not solely from mental transformation, but from a reconstitution of the sensorial nodes of the body. The visceral, Khanna contends, therefore becomes a critical dimension of Marxist theories of revolutionary consciousness. In tracing the contours of the visceral's role in decolonial literature and politics, Khanna bridges affect and postcolonial theory in new and provocative ways.
The novelized version of the cult film, Mera Naam JokerIt was by all accounts one of the biggest gambles in Hindi cinema of the time: five years in the making, with a running time of over four hours and two intervals, including two of the best-known circus troupes of India and the Soviet Union. Add to that an outstanding musical score. Mera Naam Joker was to be Raj Kapoor's magnum opus. Whetting audience appetite were indications that it would also be the Showman's most autobiographical film. Nothing, it seemed, could come between the film and box-office glory. Shockingly, the film bombed at the box-office - and so badly that RK Films, one of India's foremost studios, was almost wiped out in...