Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Art of the Mutiny

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Visitors to The Museum of London will now be treated to two brand new paintings that have been described as two of the most important works of mid-Victorian England. From 24hourmuseum.org:

Painted by Henry Nelson OÂ’Neil, Eastward Ho! (1858), and companion piece, Home Again (1859), show soldiers boarding a ship bound for the Indian Mutiny (1857-1859), and returning to their families again over a year later.

Ahh, yes. That is the same Sepoy Mutiny (or Rebellion depending upon which side you were on) that our blog’s name took inspiration from.

“As well as being exceptional examples of OÂ’NeilÂ’s work,” explained Sue Bowers, Regional Manager for the HLF in London, “these paintings are important for the stories they tell about Victorian London, when the Thames held world status as the gateway to the heart of the Empire. ”

A picture of both paintings can be seen on the Museum’s website.

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Namesake Casting Call

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Mira Nair’s Next venture, the making of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake onto celluloid, is holding a casting call for Bengali/South Asian actors.

Shooting in Calcutta and NYC December/February 2004 – 2005.

Seeking the following roles: GOGOL – 4-7 years old to play 4. Born in the United States, his parents are from Calcutta. Speaks English and Bengali

GOGOL – 16-21 years old to play 17. Born in the United States, his parents are from Calcutta. Speaks English and Bengali.

SONIA – 12-15 years old to play 13. Born in the United States, her parents are from Calcutta. Speaks English.

MOUSHUMI – 15-20 years old to play 16. Plump and intelligent. Has a British accent.

If INTERESTED IN BEING CONSIDERED FOR THIS FILM, please send snapshot and letter (non-returnable) to: Cindy Tolan “The Namesake” Casting Search 145 Sixth Avenue, 7th Fl. New York, NY 10013

Outsource This!

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Jason Alexander must be really really desperate. He acted in a completely unfunny (by any standard) sketch called “Outsource This!” It’s a video clip on the whiny Outsource Outrage website.

It plays to all sorts of nasty, parochial predjudices by saying the names of foreign countries like they’re nasty, just because they’re not in America (at one point a kid asks him where Uzbekistan is, and he points to a map, and says it’s not in “here” gesturing to North America). Another time he gestures to Iran and North Korea, waving his hands over the intervening countries, saying “Axis of Evil,” like all of Asia is inside the Axis.

The only good thing about the clip is that they don’t single out India. Watch it, be prepared to be both bored and repulsed.

The UK crowns a new Queen

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Aishwarya Rai’s star rose over Britannia last weekend as Bride and Prejudice premiered at #1 in the UK (thanks, Ennis). The film, directed by Gurinder Chadha, sold £1.67M ($3M) in tickets and topped Saw, Wimbledon and Resident Evil 2.

Adjusted for population, that’s the equivalent of a $15M U.S. opening, pretty decent since the UK film industry doesn’t produce many blockbusters. The UK’s most successful opening of all time, Bridget Jones’ Diary, did £5.7M ($10.2M) its first weekend, or the equivalent of $51M in population-adjusted dollars.

Rai follows in the illustrious desi footsteps of Queen and curry as the UK’s most popular. The film opens in the U.S. in limited release on Christmas Eve.

Bride and Prejudice

is the first English-language Bollywood musical to succeed in a mainstream market, Lagaan (Rs. 375M in India) and Monsoon Wedding ($30M worldwide) notwithstanding. The UK audience was probably drawn by its affection for Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham. It’s been a year of crossover firsts: the first desi Broadway musical, the first Indian-American Olympic medalist, and now the film.

Previous posts on Bride and Prejudice: 1, 2. Also see newly-released film clips, the reviews, and the trailer.

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‘Mira and the Mahatma’

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A new novel by Goan psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar re-imagines the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Miraben, one of his most committed disciples, a British admiral’s daughter who ‘went native’:

[N]one stood out so vividly as a tall, broad-shouldered and rather imperious-looking Englishwoman named Madeleine Slade… She chopped off her hair, traded her Western clothes for an outfit of homespun cotton and embraced Gandhi’s principles of simplicity and self-denial… He gave Slade the name of Mira, after a mythical Hindu princess, and elevated her to the status of his foremost disciple, sitting with her every evening for an hour of quiet conversation while Slade massaged his feet with oil. Over the next two decades, he would write her nearly 500 letters…

[H]e does suggest that Slade fell passionately in love with Gandhi, who had taken a vow of celibacy… [Gandhi wrote,] “May God remove what I consider is your moha,” a Hindi word for infatuation.

The book’s approach echoes the Freudian analyses of Indian mythology, such as that of Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna, by non-South Asians. These analyses’ obsession with sexuality almost always provokes controversy. In this case, Kakar is adopting a classically Western approach to explore the obvious implications of a retroactively sainted man’s personal relationships. Of course, Gandhi admirers are up in arms:

Kakar’s implication that the deep emotional connection between Gandhi and Slade had something other than a purely spiritual basis has raised eyebrows in a country accustomed to hagiographic portrayals in school textbooks and movies such as “Gandhi”…

Here’s Ennis’ previous post on canonizing Gandhi.

Chadha dreams of ‘Jeannie’ prequel

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Gurinder Chadha is directing a $90M prequel to the TV series I Dream of Jeannie:

This is, after all, the series that made the line ‘Yes, master?’ famous and kept the busty, blond Stepford djinn in a bottle at home. I suppose her omnipotence makes up for it, but Jeannie’s long since been overtaken by the winky, S&M version of magical subservience at costume shops. Can you still parody a parody?

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Nitin Sawhney’s musical

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DJ Nitin Sawhney is all set to debut a musical next month. From BBC News:

The artist has been commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia to write The Classroom, which is about “expanding the imagination and exploring ideas”.

Expanding imagination and exploring ideas? What the heck does that mean? Sify.com translates for us:

an expose about his difficulties as the only Indian pupil at school, which will debut in London along with his earlier works.

Okay, that I can understand.

Half of all films ever are Indian?

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Salon is blogging a conference called Web 2.0, about the future of the Web. Entrepreneur Brewster Kahle (Alexa, Internet Archive, WAIS) just said something interesting. Kahle wants to offer all books and films ever created, online:

Moving images. Isn’t that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It’s a few more bookshelves, but it’s doable.

Take that, Hong Kong and China! You may have some stylish martial arts and crime films, but we’ve got scads of third-rate melodrama under our collective belts, and we ‘make it up in volume.’

The rise of subtle markets

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Wired has a piece on how online businesses roll up niche markets into a larger, virtual whole. Here’s my take:

Netflix claims that, unlike Blockbuster, 99% of its extensive catalog is rented out every single year… people are wired differently from birth and then actively fragment their interests. This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s skimmed the morass of offbeat personal Web sites… [or] readers of Sepia Mutiny or one of its spiritual ancestors, the Usenet group alt.culture.us.asian-indian in its heyday.

But what does surprise new Netflix members is the service’s extensive selection of Bollywood films, which it apparently rents out profitably… Outside Netflix… the situation is grim:

An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India’s film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon’s Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

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Indian censors to suppress ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’

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Anjali from over at to the teeth has utilized the Sepia Mutiny Tip Line and alerted the Mutineers to some interesting information out of India (you can read her take on the site). As reported at CommonDreams.org:

Film activists in the Indian capital have strongly protested the country’s censors holding up release of the award-winning documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11”.

“Fahrenheit 9/11”, vehemently anti-US President George W. Bush, won the Palme Ór best film award at Cannes this year. It can be downloaded off the Net and its pirated copies are available across the country.

“The censor board takes these senseless decisions because as a body it is irrelevant and completely behind times,” said Shuddhabrata Sengupta at Sarai, the media and research foundation.

“The censor board itself should be done away with,” Sengupta, a researcher on issues of censorship, told IANS.

The Michael Moore film, which has become a pillar of the Democratic presidential campaign, was supposed to be released in Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Pune on Oct 15.

But what in the movie could possibly offend Indian censors? India isn’t part of the coalition of the bribed an coerced that Moore makes fun of in the movie. Then what?

Several reasons are being offered on why the censors are worried about the film. One of them is to avoid offending the American authorities.

We wouldn’t want that. I for one think that the censors are simply trying to suppress the film because they found out from the Detroit Free Press that Moore is a criminal.