Art & Culture

“Terms like ‘holy war’ should not be tossed around”

Hartosh Singh Bal

When Roy writes, ‘The youth, in preparation to an attack, marked each venue by reading from their prayer books in an act most of us are familiar with as a precursor to a holy war or fight’, he comes close to demonising a community.

“Seniormost maulana threatened jihad at Jaipur”

Sanjoy K Roy

Jaipur Literature Festival’s producer Sanjoy K Roy takes exception to a piece we ran on the litfest and Salman Rushdie affair

Caught in the Act

Kalpish Ratna

A dispassionate history of sex and the powerful mythologies that have surrounded it down the ages

How They Do It in Venezuela

Aastha Atray Banan

As Miss India auditions begin, it is a good time to ask why this little South American country wins so many world titles

Sax and the City

Akshay Sawai

Bombay in the Jazz age

Study of an Archive Photographer

Janice Pariat

Pablo Bartholomew seeks to recover a forgotten way of seeing by revisiting his work on Bombay done 25 years ago

Goons as Critics

Shruti Ravindran

Another ‘provocative’ art show, another right-wing attack. And the themes that draw their ire only seem to widen every year

Conversations in the Nude

Mihir Srivastava

Open’s staff writer Mihir Srivastava likes to sketch nude portraits of regular people—men and women, strangers and friends, thin and fat. Some are disgusted when he asks them if they would pose for him. But, surprisingly, many agree. Why?

The Cult of C-Grade Movies

Shaikh Ayaz

This is cinema that can make a masochist wince. So how come it is acquiring fans who know—or ought to know—good cinema from bad?

In Search of Modern Art

Shaikh Ayaz

From Raza to Husain to the leader of the Bombay Progressives, FN Souza, nobody really knew what modern art or modernity was. It was Paris and its influences that gave their amorphous ideas a sense of form and identity