Old Words, New Worlds: Revisiting the Modernity of Tradition
Old Words, New Worlds: Revisiting the Modernity of Tradition Ananya Vajpeyi n the Hindi film Raincoat (2004), review article we begin to look, Kalidasa and Krishna, Rituparno Ghosh presents a short story Vyasa and Valmiki are everywhere in the Iby O Henry in an Indian milieu. The The Modernity of Sanskrit by Simona Sawhney art and literature of modern India, as are place is contemporary middle class Kolkata; (Ranikhet: Permanent Black; co-published by University of many other authors, characters, tropes the main actors, drawn from Bollywood, Minnesota Press), 2009; pp 226, Rs 495 (HB). and narratives that invariably appear to us are at home in the present. Most of the as familiar, yet differently relevant in dif- conversation between various characters his updating and Indianising O Henry’s ferent contexts. They require no introduc- revolves around cell phones, TV channels, tale, but in his simultaneous reference to tion for any given audience, yet at each soap operas, air-conditioning and auto- post-colonial, colonial and pre-colonial new site where they turn up, as it were, mated teller machines, leaving us in no Bengali culture, and thus to a dense under- there is the interpretive space to figure out doubt as to the setting. But given that the belly of significance that gives weight to what exactly makes them pertinent on story is somewhat slow, and the acting by an otherwise trivial story. Calcutta’s status this occasion. Thus the work of writing the female lead, Aishwarya Rai indifferent as a big city, its urban decrepitude, its faded and reading is always ongoing, always at best, what gives the film its shadowed imperial grandeur and grinding poverty, inter-textual, always citational, and unfolds mood is its beautiful music, and the direc- these we already compute; so too the within a framework that blurs rather than tor’s obvious love for Kolkata.
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