India from a lens
My tendency to romantacise mumbai has led me to explore media that captures India in the 90-80s. This is a living archive of pictures, stories, objects that serve as a way to get a glimpse of what it would’ve been like to live in India during a time before me.
A lot of these might contain an increasingly familiar mirages of “magical-realist wonders and colourful terrors in places at once enticingly and reassuringly distant (think of David Davidar’s novel The House of Blue Mangoes or Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, set in a mango pickle factory.)” (Badami, 2022)
1. Gregory David Roberts in the streets of Colaba
AKA the beginging of my obsession
Gregory David Roberts escaped Australian prison and lived a life in hiding. He came to mumbai and lived in Mumbai slums.
The way he writes about Mumbai is beautiful since he feels instantly at home there. Below you see him at a chai stall, in the streets of Colaba shooting heroin and giving first aid treatment to the children in the slums. (A range only aim for)
2. Boatman by Gianfranco Rosi
A 1993 documentary that takes place on the ganga. Rosi is an Italian-American documetary filmmaker and this was his first ever documentary.
This movie is visually stunnning. Profound in a very quintessential way since it talks about life and death which happen occur so closely on the banks of the river. You witness rituals and ceremonies that are carried out after death (which young women like me never get to witness) that occur at one of the most pious places in India and row along a boatman who talks about the inquisitiveness about the abundant tourists.
You inobtrusively view the daily happenings around the river-people washing clothes, Holy ceremonies and bodies of beggars being undignifiedly dumped into the water because it would be too expensive to burn them.
3. Madlib in India
Madlib or Beat Konducta here creates hip hop music but in his 2007 album, he samples bollywood songs, producing fascinating tunes. Love it and you can listen to my favourite tune from the album here
Enjoy <3
4. Disco Jazz album by Rupa Biswas
A disco album that resurfaced 40 years after it was recorded. Rupa Biswas is a legend to me. A house wife in Calcutta who was embarassed and didnt thikn much of her recorded album but after her son uploaded the album online, he found it had been uploaded to YouTube, that original copies of the record were selling for more than £500, and that it was being reissued by the US label Numero Group.
This is a perfect mix between the east and west, with tunes from the sarod and synthesizer intricately weaving around one another!
A disco album that resurfaced 40 years after it was recorded. Rupa Biswas is a legend to me. A house wife in Calcutta who was embarassed and didnt thikn much of her recorded album but after her son uploaded the album online, he found it had been uploaded to YouTube, that original copies of the record were selling for more than £500, and that it was being reissued by the US label Numero Group.
This is a perfect mix between the east and west, with tunes from the sarod and synthesizer intricately weaving around one another!