Anglophone Literature from the borderland region of Northeast India has a relatively short history with the major works comprising the oeuvre published in the last four decades or so. One of the most visible trajectories in Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature (NIAL) [1] is the reworking of myths and origin stories, especially by writers from indigenous communities. [2] NIAL writers weave myths to explore both deep pasts and contemporary conundrums about community and political identity...

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press This appears as an afterword to a special issue of the print journal Modernism/modernity (Volume 32, Number 3, September 2025): The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia, gueste edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow In the work I’ve been doing over the past ten years, I have discussed the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual literature, culture, and entertainment and called for new ways of counting, organizing, and...

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press In 1946, the arts and culture journal Marg was founded under the editorial leadership of writer, arts patron, and cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004). Dedicated to the promotion and analysis of the arts, Marg featured modernist practices and heritage forms from around the world and from a diverse range of periods in illustrative displays, scholarly essays, and editorial content. Multiple discourses were brought into conversation with each other...

The success of his film Calcutta 71 (1972), remarked director Mrinal Sen, was not due to “cinematic excellence,” but “more because of the time in which it was made and released.” [1] Sen was right. Calcutta 71 did not reap profits in the box office. In this it was much like the two other films that were part of Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, Interview (1971) and Padatik [The guerilla fighter] (1973). Calcutta 71 became a phenomenon in its time for the slew of serious discussions and controversies it...

“Venice,” writes Adrian Durham Stokes at the opening of his 1945 study of the city, “excels in blackness and whiteness; water brings commerce between them.” [1] This is a confident blasé opening gambit characteristic of the period and of this Faber and Faber contracted writer earlier heralded by Ezra Pound as one of the “only important writers” living. [2] Venice bothered Stokes throughout his writing and viewing life, yet Venice’s, and other, problematic whitenesses disappear in his writing...

This summer, as I was wrapping up my dissertation and packing my boxes in upstate New York, I started watching Satyajit Ray’s Jai Baba Felunath ( The Elephant God, 1979) after what felt like a lifetime. The film is based on a novel from Ray’s own children’s detective series featuring the celebrated Bengali private investigator Prodosh C. Mitter, aka Felu-da (“da” being an affectionate honorific for elder brother). In a 1980 review, Gene Moscowitz calls it “Ray’s bow to that Yank hardboiled...