Shoma A. Chatterji

Three decades after its premiere, Rangakarmee’s Mayyat remains a searing theatrical indictment of caste. Rangakarmee is perhaps the only theatre group that has been producing and performing plays in Hindi in Kolkata for 50 years this year. Founded and headed by the late Usha Ganguly, it is still as active and dynamic in presenting Hindi plays mainly new and sometimes recreating for the new audience, old plays that are timeless in their content and their appeal. The amazing feature of Mayyat...

Devastatingly symbolic, the raw egg has become the latest vocabulary of public dissent in West Bengal, reviving a centuries-old tradition of shaming those in power. A 1917 cartoon caricaturing the egg-throwing incident at Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes. The price of the humble egg has suddenly increased in cities and districts of West Bengal. No one ever imagined the use of the egg as a political weapon in the hands of the common man and woman before the tumbling down of the previous...

The Siya Goyal case challenges familiar assumptions about gender, violence and the changing nature of crime in India. Crime anywhere in the world, across time, culture and geography, has two clearly defined segments - the perpetrator and the victim. When women are ‘visible’ in media content, the manner of their representation reflects the biases and assumptions of those who define the public - and, therefore, the media agenda. More than fifty years after the international community formally...