3/2/10: The work of Indian painter M.F. Husain exemplifies India’s fusion of diverse cultural influences, said Cogut Center for the Humanities Director Michael Steinberg at last month’s opening reception of M.F. Husain: Early Masterpieces, 1950s-70s. As part of Brown University’s Year of India, the exhibition features 12 early Husain paintings that helped catapult contemporary Indian art into the international spotlight.
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2/16/10: The Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a NASA instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which earlier this year found evidence of water on the moon, has now identified a new lunar rock type.
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2/17/10: World-renowned author Sir Salman Rushdie spoke to a packed audience in Salomon Center yesterday on”Public Events, Private Lives: Literature and Politics in the Modern World.”
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1/7/10: A Year of India online newsletter features developments from the fall semester and the lineup for the spring. Read reports on the fall’s “New Indian Writing” festival; collaborations with Indian researchers on economic development and moon exploration; student research on Indian cities, forests, and markets; and more.
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1/22/10: The Cogut Center for the Humanities, in collaboration with the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, will host an exhibition of work by Maqbool Fida Husain, one of India’s most famous living painters, at the Cogut Center in Pembroke Hall. The exhibit opens with a reception on Friday, February 5 at 5pm, and runs through March 26.
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3/24/10: “He was an odd sight, with his pole-thin legs and a small, flaccid belly, like an otherwise svelte woman who has had a baby and not bothered to tone her abdomen,” read Jhumpa Lahiri at last semester’s New Indian Writing: The Rising Generation literary festival, evoking warm laughter from the packed room.
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1/19/10: The 21st century will be shaped by those repressed in the 20th, said novelist Rana Dasgupta at last semester’s “New Indian Writing: The Rising Generation” literary festival. In his talk, Dasgupta intertwined readings from his new novel, Solo (Fourth Estate Limited, 2009), with fragments of his own experience of migration, displacement, and discovery. Resonance between Dasgupta’s fiction and non-fiction cast a portrait of 21st century life at once hopeful and haunting.
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12/21/09: “The centrality of the human form sets the art of India quite distinctly apart from other Asian traditions,” said Vidya Dehejia, professor of Indian and South Asian art at Columbia University. As part of the Art and Bodily Display Lecture Series, Dehejia discussed the dominance of the voluptuous human figure in classical Indian art and argued that a harmony exists between the sacred spheres of Indian society and the sensuous imagery of its art.
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12/11/09: Mumbai (formerly Bombay), an island of hope, is deeply schizophrenic like all great cities, said Suketu Mehta at a reading on December 2. Mehta, the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, came to Brown as part of the “New Indian Writing: The Rising Generation” literary festival, which also featured Jhumpa Lahiri and Rana Dasgupta.
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12/8/09: One might label Bollywood films–with their song and dance routines, melodramatic relationship sagas, and frequent happy endings–overly forumlaic. Yet a number of classic Bollywood movies present an alternative narrative when the protagonist dies, fails to find love, or is reunited with his paramour in late middle age. Rachel Dwyer, a professor of Indian culture and cinema at the School of African and Oriental Studies (University of London) addressed these filmic aberrations in a recent lecture at the Joukowsky Forum. The event marked the first day of South Asian Identity Week.
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