Academic literature on the topic 'Mani Bhavan (Bombay, India)'

In the spring of 1995, I had just begun to work on issues having to do with the global reception of Indian popular film.2 I was particularly interested in the consumption of Bollywood films in South Asian diasporic communities and was doing some preliminary research in Iselin, a small town in central New Jersey, with a large and thriving “Little India” neighborhood. Since I was also interested in the changes taking place in the Indian popular film industry itself, I had been following the case of Mani Ratnam’s film Bombay, which had been released earlier that year, in Tamil and Hindi, to a mix of acclaim and controversy in India. Because the film deals with the communal violence that gave rise to rioting that shook Bombay in 1992 and 1993, some authorities were concerned that screening the film in areas experiencing communal tensions might lead to more violence. Consequently, the film had been temporarily banned in several parts of India, including Hyderabad and Karnataka and, as of April 1995, had not yet been screened in Bombay itself (Niranjana, “Banning Bombayi” 1291–2). But at a party that spring, I found myself discussing the film with a colleague who had come from Bombay to study comparative literature at Rutgers. Bombay was quite an interesting film, she assured me, and I should watch it as part of my research. I must have looked puzzled, for she then added, “We found a copy on video in Iselin last week.”

In 1956, a decade after Independence, India divided its regional states along linguistic lines. This politically-loaded decision opened up fraught histories that went back well over a century. ‘The new cinemas’ describes the impact on the cinema industry. The cinema now found itself radicalized on a number of fronts, becoming the vanguard of a variety of challenges to the Indian state, seceding from the default nationalism of the Bombay-based ‘all-India film’. There were occasionally successful efforts to make peace between the state and the film industry. Key figures in the New Cinema movement were Mani Kaul, Shyam Benegal, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

Abstract This chapter charts M. P. T. Acharya’s first years back in India. Where his time in Berlin and exile were marked by close friendships and associations, his return to Bombay was characterized by isolation. While he still corresponded with anarchists across the world and engaged with the Spanish Civil War from an Indian perspective, he also found time to reflect on his long career as an Indian anticolonial revolutionary and wrote his memoirs as well as several articles on figures such as Chatto, Madame Cama, and Savarkar. In many ways, as the chapter makes clear, these accounted for his turn to and engagement with anarchism and utopianism. In Bombay, as the chapter illuminates, Acharya found new ways to bring anarchism into libertarian, left-wing debates in India through his association with Ranchoddas Bhavan Lotvala and the Indian Institute of Sociology (IIS). The outbreak of the Second World War, however, put a stop to Acharya’s efforts to spread anarchism in India.

Abstract This chapter examines M. P. T. Acharya’s attempts to reconnect with old friends in the anarchist movement, while also building a movement at home and looking eastwards towards Asia for new connections, as well as his involvement with Commission for International Anarchist Relations (CRIA). Now in his late fifties and suffering from health issues, Acharya worked tirelessly to build up an anarchist movement in India and to connect it to a global movement. This involved setting up a library in Bombay, asking friends to send anarchist literature for the reading room, and publishing a new libertarian socialist journal with Ranchoddas Bhavan Lotvala. At the same time, Acharya debated internationalism and the future of anarchist relations within CRIA and with Asian anarchists, as the chapter concludes, thus reorienting global intellectual conversations away from Europe and the Americas.