What We're Reading
1
Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar and Maya Varma, "What Do We Allow Dalit Women to Do?" post, January 21, 2026.
In this conversation with Maya Varma, Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar speaks about her portrait series Educate, her Ambedkarite upbringing in Mumbai and what it means to make art that tries to capture both the long history of caste violence and the urgent, unfinished question of what Dalit women are allowed to feel. Shridhar argues that rest, pleasure and bliss for Dalit women are not departures from political struggle but its most radical articulation, challenging the respectability politics within anti-caste movements that burden Dalit women's bodies with collective endurance while denying them their full humanity.
2
Vidyarthy Chatterjee, "When John Died, Ritwik Died a Second Time," Frontline, 2025.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee reflects on Ritwik Ghatak's birth centenary by examining his profound influence on filmmaker John Abraham. Among his students at the Film and Television Institute of India in the 1960s, Ghatak had identified Abraham as possessing a rare capacity for creativity rooted in protest. Chatterjee argues that Abraham, who died at 49, became the most tenacious keeper of the "Ritwik vision"—sharing Ghatak's commitment to chronicling displacement and political resistance while developing an entirely distinct aesthetic language.
3
Rama Kant Agnihotri, "We, the People: In Memoriam," Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 61, No. 4, January 24, 2026.
Rama Kant Agnihotri writes about the late filmmaker Kumar Shahani (1940–2024), whose synesthetic cinema raised the mundane to the sublime while insisting on democracy, dignity and social togetherness. Agnihotri reflects on Shahani's unrealised film on the Indian Constitution as a civilisational document—a project left unfinished as India itself abandons the constitutional promises it claims to celebrate, leaving minorities and the underprivileged to bear the consequences of that betrayal.
4
Barrah Kunaan, "After 28 Years, 'Indus Echoes' Spotlights Sindhi Cinema in Pakistan," Himal Southasian, November 14, 2025.
Barrah Kunaan writes about Sindhu Ji Goonj (Indus Echoes), the first Sindhi-language film released in Pakistani cinemas in twenty-eight years. Kunaan reflects on how Rahul Aijaz's slow, patient film mirrors the seemingly stagnant yet ever-moving waters of the Indus River, offering a rare departure from Pakistan's Urdu and Punjabi-dominated commercial cinema. The film's sparse opening-night audience of just twenty-five viewers in a 150-seat Karachi theatre reveals the stark reality of Sindhi cultural marginalisation, where even a landmark co-production struggles to secure visibility.
5
Nijjor Manush, "Militant Centrism in Bangladesh after the Uprisings," Jamhoor, August 26, 2025.
In this excerpt from the book Inquilab Zindabad? A Socialist Analysis of Bangladesh after the Uprisings, Nijjor Manush examines the National Citizen Party (NCP), which emerged from the student-led platform that toppled Sheikh Hasina in 2024. Calling the NCP's politics "militant centrism"—revolutionary aesthetics paired with liberal, democratic capitalism—Manush argues that rather than advancing working-class aspirations, the party has positioned itself as "post-ideological," resulting in its alliances with Islamist groups while embracing neoliberal orthodoxy and creating space for right-wing forces to reassert themselves.
6
Lotte Hoek, "Contemporary Art and the Living Film Archive in Bangladesh," Third Text, May 19, 2023.
In this essay published in Third Text, Lotte Hoek examines how film societies in Bangladesh function as "living archives"—informal collections of art cinema and social practices continually activated through screenings, study circles and film appreciation courses designed to transform viewers' ways of seeing. Hoek argues that these archives are not repositories for safekeeping but arsenals whose aesthetic materials are inhabited and activated by contemporary artists like Sadya Mizan, Molla Sagar and Dilara Begum Jolly through modes of collective viewing that have dispersed across galleries, residencies and public spaces in Bangladesh's contemporary art landscape.
7
Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam and Simon-Pierre Coftier, "National Museum of Eelam: The Diasporic (Hi)Stories of Everyday Tamil Objects," The Funambulist, Issue 36, June 21, 2021.
Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam and Simon-Pierre Coftier present the National Museum of Eelam, which embraces the banal and the ordinary, presenting collective identity through the prism of the individual project. Rather than war-centered representations or archaeological treasures, the museum collects everyday Tamil objects from the diaspora—a plastic statuette, a handful of soil, geometry instruments—which are paired with narratives that refuse to reduce the multiplicity of Tamil experiences to the homogenising categories of "community" or "migrants."
8
Mythri Jegathesan, "Passing Blood, Consuming Memories: Making Fish Cutlets with Amma," e-flux Journal, Issue 128, June 2022.
Mythri Jegathesan writes about making fish cutlets with her mother, wrapped in newspaper whose ink and wood-pulp fibers bled into the food alongside the background noise of mourning and uncertainty, hushed tones and loud cries on telephone calls with loved ones back home in Sri Lanka. Jegathesan reflects on how food carries diasporic memory and displacement, where consuming newspaper-wrapped cutlets becomes a way of ingesting not just sustenance but the violence, loss and longing folded into Tamil diasporic life, generating an embodied realisation of generational trauma and memories across borders.
9
Mariam Elnozahy, "The Harvest of Evelyn Ashamallah," post, December 3, 2025.
In this essay, Mariam Elnozahy writes about Egyptian artist Evelyn Ashamallah (born 1948), whose seven decades of painting and drawing navigate the contradictions of postcolonial Egypt—its wars, exiles, uprisings and rural imaginaries—without ever submitting to a single political or aesthetic programme.
10
Laura al-Tibi, "Bride at the Refugee Camp: Notes on Martyrdom and the Palestinian Wedding-Funeral," Parapraxis, Issue 07, December 7, 2025.
Laura al-Tibi reads Abed Abdi's 1979 painting “Bride at the Refugee Camp” alongside Muhammad al-Qaisi's poem “A Vessel for Sara's Flowers, Thyme for Her Orphans” (1979) to examine the Palestinian wedding-funeral. Al-Tibi argues that while martyrs are elevated to national allegory, the widowed bride's personalised grief is rarely canonised. Refusing liberal frameworks that separate love from militancy or the personal from the political, Abdi's painting centres her mourning as a site of collective resistance.
11
poupeh missaghi, "When Bombs Fall," Parapraxis, January 11, 2026.
poupeh missaghi writes about experiencing Israel's attack on Iran in June 2025 from Denver, Colorado. She woke up with bombs exploding inside her body as she reconciled with survivor's guilt. Drawing on mushroom visions from April that eerily prefigured the war—ruins, ashes, bodies giving birth to dismembered limbs—missaghi reflects on a call for a "politics of saying yes to life," arguing that the strongest form of resistance against annihilation is the art of living itself.
12
"Arundhati Roy and Wim Wenders Clash at the 2026 Berlinale," ArtReview, February 16, 2026.
This news report published in ArtReview covers the controversy at the 2026 Berlinale following jury president Wim Wenders'claim that filmmakers "have to stay out of politics" and jury member Ewa Puszczyńska's refusal to take a position on German support for Israel's war on Gaza. Author Arundhati Roy withdrew from presenting her film, condemning the comments as "a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time," exposing the violent apoliticism of liberal institutions that depoliticise art while remaining complicit with state violence.
