Essays

Watching RRR: Film Scholars Monika Mehta and Anupama Prabhala Discuss the Movie’s Many Audiences and Contexts

Monika Mehta is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Binghamton. She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011). She has co-edited Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of Korea and India (2019) and Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media (2021). Anupama Prabhala is Associate Professor of Film, Television and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University,…

Going Vernacular: Naatu Naatu, RRR and the Poetics of the Global Telugu Sphere

By Chris Chekuri. Chris teaches History at San Francisco State University. He is a managing editor at Maidaanam. పొలంగట్టు దుమ్ములోన పోట్లగిత్త దూకినట్టు పోలేరమ్మ జాతరలో పోతరాజు ఊగినట్టు కిర్రు సెప్పులేసుకొని, కర్రసాము సేసినట్టు మర్రిసెట్టు నీడలోన, కుర్రగుంపు కూడినట్టు ఎర్రజొన్న రొట్టెలోన, మిరపతొక్కు కలిపినట్టు Like a raging bull prancing on a dusty farm Like Potaraju quivering in a Poleramma festival Like…

A Conversation with Gita Ramaswamy on Land, Justice, and Friendship

Editor’s Note: In the following essay, A. Suneetha and R.V. Ramanamurthy present an overview of the recently published autobiography, Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary (Navayana, 2022) by Gita Ramaswamy and lead a conversation with the author. An excerpt from this book has been provided to Maidaanam by the publisher and…

Extrajudicial Killings in India, Then and Now: Revisiting the work of K. Balagopal

By Jinee Lokaneeta. Jinee is Professor of Political Science & International Relations at Drew University. She is the author of The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence and Scientific Interrogations in India (University of Michigan Press, 2020). Her research focuses on law and violence, political theory including critical and feminist theory, global human rights, and interdisciplinary legal…

Who is Saibinn Mai for the Bombay Catholics?

By Elroy Pinto. Elroy is an independent filmmaker, researcher, and writer based in Mumbai. His first short film-essay, Kaifiyat (2019) introduces Ustad Nizamuddin Khan’s music and explores the historical and socio-religious contexts of Deccani aesthetics. His writing has appeared in NCPA’s ON Stage, Public Parking, The Satyashodhak, and Shambhashan. The six of us children, with…

A Semiotic Storm: The Afterlife of Sir Arthur Cotton

By Gautam Pemmaraju. Gautam is a Mumbai-based independent filmmaker, writer, and researcher working in the areas of history, literature, and art with a special interest in the Deccan. A Tongue Untied: The Story of Dakhani on the vernacular satire & humour poetry of the region is his first independent feature documentary film. He is a…

Found Objects: From Colonial Libraries to Postcolonial Archives

By Sravanthi Kollu. Sravanthi is a Postdoctoral Associate at Kilachand Honors College, Boston University. She writes on literature, history, and community with a focus on colonial and postcolonial Telugu literature and South India. Behind every historical account of South India lies a story of tattered archives. Artefacts, manuscripts, pamphlets and paraphernalia found serendipitously, lost and…

Fatima Alam Ali’s Intimate Glimpses of Hyderabad’s Mid-century Urdu Writers

By Nazia Akhtar. Nazia is Assistant Professor of Literature at the International Institute of Information Technology, Gachibowli-Hyderabad. Her research interests include the literature and history of Hyderabad, Partition Studies, women’s writing, and comparative literature. Fatima Alam Ali (1923-2020) was a writer of pen portraits (khaake) and humorous essays (tanz-o-mizah) from Hyderabad. Her work offers an untapped…

When Princely Hyderabad Looked to Imperial Tokyo

By Tariq Sheikh. Tariq is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. His research interests include the intellectual history of early modern Japan and the history of India-Japan relations. The first floor of the eastern block of the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad houses the “Japanese gallery.” Inside this…

Deccan Vanguard: Rediscovering the Forgotten Revolutionary Srikishen Balmukund and Anticolonial Nationalism in Princely Hyderabad

By Gautam Pemmaraju. Gautam is a Mumbai-based independent filmmaker, writer, and researcher working in the areas of history, literature, and art with a special interest in the Deccan. A Tongue Untied: The Story of Dakhani on the vernacular satire & humour poetry of the region is his first independent feature documentary film. He is a…

Telugu Film Songbooks: New Sources for Gender and Caste History

By Rumya Putcha. Rumya is an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and the law. Her current book project is entitled, “Mythical Courtesan | Modern Wife: Disembodiment and Anticolonial Praxis in Transnational South Asia” and aims to develop a critical race and feminist approach to South Asian performance cultures.…

Sex, Gossip, and Scandal in 1940s Hyderabad: Aziz Ahmad’s Novel Shabnam

By Shefali Jha. Shefali teaches in Humanities and Social Sciences at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar. She has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently working on publishing her doctoral dissertation on Muslim politics in Hyderabad. Anyone familiar with the zany world of Hyderabadi comedy knows…