Essays
The Limin
The forest, in our epics, is not the peaceful site of vanaprastha or even merely the dark and dangerous unknown. It is not otherworldly, but a place of transition—and transgression, writes Arshia Sattar
View Article
Très Noir
The personal life of the Expressionist master, Fritz Lang, was as tortured and ambivalent as his films. Rashmi Sawhney explores the dense greyness behind the scenes
View Article
Are We Dead?
Shoili Kanungo's graphic piece on the looming—or are they present?—perils of consumerism
View Article
The Art of Remembering
Affected by the work of an artist on a quest to memorialise individual victims of the Nazis, Sohini Chattopadhyay wonders why India prefers to brush its traumas into the dustpan of history
View Article
The Free Radical
Bengali revolutionary MN Roy fled to Mexico in 1917, where he founded the first Communist Party outside Russia. A century later, Michael Snyder finds Roy’s spirit lives on in a nightclub that bears his name
View Article
A Sensuous Geometry
A chance encounter leads a poet to an epiphany. Arundhathi Subramaniam on how she rediscovered Bharatanatyam, a lost childhood love
View Article
Dargahs
A neglected tomb in Delhi holds within it a story of extraordinary passion between two men. Madhavi Menon examines Indian Sufism's ecstatic homoeroticism
View Article
The Reader
A schoolgirl of fierce intelligence, determined to forge her own stubborn path through the world, Gautam Bhatia remembers his singular sister
View Article
How the Body Remembers
Memories of love are physical. It is our skin, writes Arshia Sattar, that recalls what it was to be touched, our hands that recall what it was to touch, and so we revive the corporeality of lost lovers
View Article
