In-Between Worlds: Performing [as] Bauls in an Age of Extremism – Book Release
Book Description: This book examines the performance of Bauls, ‘folk’ performers from Bengal, in the context of a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and against the backdrop of extreme nationalistic discourses…
Project Muse – Review of Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings
Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 39, Number 2, Fall 2022, pp. 428-432, Published by University of Hawai’i Press
Dr. Chakrabarti reviews Ananda Lal’s Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings
Excerpt: Ananda Lal’s Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings fills a critical lacuna in the study of Indian theatre history while offering insights into the complexities and challenges of archiving book history in an Indian postcolonial context, as Lal notes the “absence of a culture of methodical library acquisition”…
Simulating the “city of joy”: state choreography and the re-appropriation of public spaces in Kolkata
Taylor & Francis Online, Urban Geography, Volume 43 Issue 1, Routledge. April 2022
Videos of what seems like enforced and orchestrated solidarity, performed by celebrities from the film industry in Kolkata, each scene blending into another, each upper-class urban home-space resembling the other, each envisioning a brighter future, rendering the same song in multiple voices, with metaphors of cities smiling again, circulated through social media are problematic in the erasures of particularities, “of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work”….
Kalikata to Calcutta to Kolkata to London: In Between a Colonial Past and a “Glocal” Present – The Right to the Creative City Colloquy
Stanford Arcade, January 2022
In 2002, Richard Florida, an urban studies scholar then at Carnegie Mellon University, published The Rise of the Creative Class, which became a surprise best-seller. In 2005, he followed that book with what he called a “prequel,” Cities and the Creative Class. Florida’s key insight in both works was that “creative” people were transforming not only the economy, but also cities themselves. His work was taken up by city planners and public policy makers who were attracted to the idea that catering to creative people would lead to an economic enhancement of city life…
“Go back to India if you hate my people so much”: Consequences of Troubling the “Canon” in American Academia
Troubling Traditions – Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US, December 2021
Troubling Traditions takes up a 21st century, field-specific conversation between scholars, educators, and artists from varying generational, geographical, and identity positions that speak to the wide array of debates around dramatic canons.
Unlike Literature and other fields in the humanities, Theatre and Performance Studies has not yet fully grappled with the problems of its canon. Troubling Traditions stages that conversation in relation to the canon in the United States. It investigates the possibilities for multiplying canons, methodologies for challenging canon formation, and the role of adaptation and practice in rethinking the field’s relation to established texts. The conversations put forward by this book on the canon interrogate the field’s fundamental values, and ask how to expand the voices, forms, and bodies that constitute this discipline.
This is a vital text for anyone considering the role, construction, and impact of canons in the US and beyond. Publisher Link
Tagore and Nationalism Review – Project Muse
Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2021
The Plays of Kalidasa: Treading the Line between Constraint and Freedom
ASIATIC, Volume 11, Number 2, December 2017
Mahabarata Performance Review – Ecumenica
The Pennsylvania State University Press. Volume 13, Number 2, 2020
So Near, Yet So Far Review – Project Muse
University of Toronto Press. Modern Drama, Volume 60, Number 3, Fall 2017
Rabindranath Tagore and the Bauls
Indian Theatre Journal. Volume 1, Number 1, 2017
