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Indian Express
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
When Kishore Kumar's Songs were Banned
When Sanjay Gandhi, the unelected son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, wanted to promote his 20-point programme — a list he put down as socio-economic development initiatives — during the Emergency, he decided to commission members of the film industry to further his reform agenda. He organised 'Geeto Bhari Shaam', the state-sponsored charity event under the aegis of the Indian Youth Congress, in Delhi's Ambedkar Stadium on April 11, 1976. Even as brute force was used for a mass sterilisation drive under the guise of family planning all over the country (11 million were eventually sterilised), the programme went on. This was the time actor Dilip Kumar spoke about population outbreak and need for family planning from the stage. He even used a couplet to highlight his point besides compering a chunk of the programme. Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Mukesh and Mahendra Kapoor crooned under RD Burman's baton. Amjad Khan took on the Gabbar avatar to tell Burman, 'Bahut jaan hai iske sangeet mein,' as the audience went into splits. Amitabh Bachchan recited Sahir Ludhianvi's 'Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayal aata hai' just before actors Rakhee and Shashi Kapoor announced the song from the film 'Kabhie Kabhie' (1976). Shabana Azmi and Zeenat Aman shook a leg as Bhosle sang 'Hare rama, hare krishna', the eponymous song from the 1971 film, starring Dev Anand and Aman. While some of the most sought-after names were present in the gathering, Kishore Kumar, a fixture in Burman's numerous songs, such as 'Ye shaam mastani' and 'Ek main aur ek tu', including the recent hit 'Sholay', was missing from the event. He was also that year's Filmfare winner for the title song in the Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore-starrer 'Amaanush' (1974). The Emergency took place at the peak of his popularity. Kumar had refused to be part of the event and said 'no' to singing jingles for the government, even though the directive had come straight from the top. Gandhi was also looking at alleviating despair from people's lives and Kumar's presence seemed necessary for that. According to 'Kishore Kumar, the Ultimate Biography' (Harper Collins, 2022) by Aniruddh Bhattacharjee and Parthiv Dhar, SMH Burney — the then secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting headed by VC Shukla — had approached Kumar in January 1976 to be part of the show. The singer refused, mainly because it felt like an order and not an invitation. Also read – Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography pieces together the many ups and downs of the actor-singer's life Burney was swiftly directed to arrange a meeting with a few government officials and industry representatives in Mumbai. The meeting took place on April 29, 1976, days after 'Geeto Bhari Shaam' in the Capital. It was attended by GP Sippy, the then head of the All-India Film Producers' Council, director Shriram Bohra, BR Chopra, Subodh Mukerji and Nasir Hussain, among others. It is also reported that Sippy tried to persuade Kumar, who wouldn't budge. He also refused to meet Joint Secretary CB Jain regarding the same. Kumar is quoted from one of his interviews in the book: 'I did what I thought best. Singing at private functions is definitely not an anathema. With genuine love and respect, I am only too eager to bend. However, if someone decides to rest his foot in my head, he will not have the good fortune to witness the best of my courtesies.' Years later, he told Pritish Nandy in an interview, 'No one can make me do what I don't want to do. I don't sing at anyone's will or command.' Kumar's refusal was taken as rebellion and defiance. A sweeping ban on all his songs was imposed on May 4. They were removed from AIR and Doordarshan broadcasts, including on Ameen Sayani's 'Binaca Geetmala'. The sale and distribution of his records were halted. Jain also wanted the BBC to stop the broadcast. According to the book, the note from Burney — approved by Shukla a week after the order came into effect — read: 'All the songs of Sri Kishore Kumar should be banned from AIR and DD and that all films in which he was the playback singer should be listed out so that suitable action can be taken against these films. Besides, the representative of HMV and Gramophone recording companies should be sent for and, in consultation with the Ministry of Education, the sale of Sri Kishore Kumar's records and discs should be frozen.' Eventually, former Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray stepped in and held a meeting with Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Vijay Anand, Dev Anand (who was a vociferous protester of the Emergency) and Shukla. Kumar finally agreed to be part of another show at the Sanjay Gandhi Flying Club. The ban was lifted on June 16, 1976, two days after the meeting.
Winnipeg Free Press
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Curling legend Jones' memoir coming this fall
One of Canada's most decorated and beloved curlers will tell her life's story in a memoir slated to be released this fall. Winnipeg-born, Ontario-based Jennifer Jones, who has won two world championships, an Olympic gold medal and many more accolades (and whose face adorns the wall of the St. Vital Curling Club), will release Rock Star: My Life On and Off the Ice, on Aug. 26 via HarperCollins. The book, co-written with curling writer Bob Weeks, chronicles juggling a law career with throwing rocks, the strains that emerged between teammates and the challenges of balancing her curling schedule and motherhood. Behind You Buy on ● ● ● B.C.-born, Winnipeg-based Art Miki has won the $10,000 Canada-Japan Literary Award for his book Gaman — Perseverance: Japanese Canadians' Journey to Justice, published by Talonbooks. Buy on Released in December 2023, in Gaman the former president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians details the path to reconciliation and resolution taken by Japanese-Canadians around and after the Second World War, when many were interned. The prize was awarded to Miki by the Canada Council for the Arts. ● ● ● Award-winning Ontario author Catherine Hernandez has been named the fall 2025 Jake MacDonald writer-in-residence by the University of Winnipeg. Hernandez is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian descent and the author of four novels for adults, including 2017's Scarboorugh, a Canada Reads finalist, as well as Crosshairs and The Story of Us. Her latest, Behind You, was published in 2024 by HarperCollins. Buy on Hernandez will be available for manuscript consultations and to answer questions from Sept. 8-Dec. 8. She'll also be participating in a number of other activities while serving in the position, including readings, lectures, Q&As, masterclasses and more. For more information, see ● ● ● I Hope This Finds You Well Last week it was noted in this space that Winnipeg Cree author Rosanna Deerchild had received two honorary doctorates in a month. This week it was announced she has won the Indigenous Voices Award for poetry published in English — and the accompanying $5,000 prize. Deerchild won the prize for her collection She Falls Again, published by Coach House Press. Buy on In the published prose category, Kanien'kehá:ka author Wayne K. Spear and Dene politician and advocate Georges Erasmus won for Hòt'a! Enough!: Georges Erasmus's Fifty-Year Battle for Indigenous Rights, published by Dundurn Press. Buy on Every Second Friday The latest on food and drink in Winnipeg and beyond from arts writers Ben Sigurdson and Eva Wasney. ● ● ● Natalie Sue has won the 2025 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for her novel I Hope This Finds You Well, published by HarperCollins. Buy on The Calgary-based author edged out former Winnipegger Greg Kearney's An Evening With Birdy O'Day (published by Arsenal Pulp Press) and Patricia Parsons' We Came From Away (published by Moonlight Press) for the top award, which comes with a $25,000 prize. Each of the runners up receive $5,000. books@ Ben SigurdsonLiterary editor, drinks writer Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press's literary editor and drinks writer. He graduated with a master of arts degree in English from the University of Manitoba in 2005, the same year he began writing Uncorked, the weekly Free Press drinks column. He joined the Free Press full time in 2013 as a copy editor before being appointed literary editor in 2014. Read more about Ben. In addition to providing opinions and analysis on wine and drinks, Ben oversees a team of freelance book reviewers and produces content for the arts and life section, all of which is reviewed by the Free Press's editing team before being posted online or published in print. It's part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Hindustan Times
a day ago
- General
- Hindustan Times
Review: Loal Kashmir by Mehak Jamal
There's a common saying, 'In Kashmir, the news can be wrong, but the rumours are always right,' writes Mehak Jamal in Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land, her debut collection of 16 real-life love stories set in the Valley against the backdrop of the unrelenting conflict. In this case, she is referring to a sense of foreboding in Kashmir in July 2019. By the end of the month, locals had begun hoarding food, medicines and fuel, preparing for the suspension of phone and internet services, and generally sensed that something was afoot. But no one was prepared, after the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, for the total communication blackout imposed — certainly not young people in love. Lōal is the Kashmiri word for love and longing. Like rumours, love here often exists in whispers and moves in the shadows. And Jamal's book is a collection of the sweet, bittersweet, or even bitter — and often inventive — ways in which Kashmiris must navigate romantic relationships, with patience and restraint. Under the chinar trees at the Nishat Mughal garden in Srinagar. (Waseem Andrabi/ Hindustan Times) 364pp, Rs599; HarperCollins The people in this book have lived through the significant political events of the last three decades, and Jamal has neatly divided their accounts into three chronological sections: Otru (day before yesterday) from the 90s, Rath (yesterday) from the 2000s and Az (today) from 2019. Altogether, this book is perhaps the most perspicuous account of Kashmir and the conflict. The most complex and powerful — and suddenly, unanticipatedly topical — story is about Pakistani wives of former Kashmiri militants. Months after the publication of Lōal Kashmir, these women were among the Pakistani nationals across the country deported in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack in April. What's little known outside of Kashmir is the years of protest by dozens of these women — Pakistani wives of former Kashmiri militants — to either get Indian citizenship or be allowed to return. Bushra, a young woman in the Bagh district of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, marries Burhan, a member of the Hizbul Mujahideen from Baramulla who had crossed over for arms training in the 1990s. When they married, he left militancy. They were madly in love, they ran a fruit and vegetable shop together, had children. A few years later, in 2010, chief minister Omar Abdullah started a rehabilitation programme for ex-militant youth stuck in PoK, giving them a chance to return and be reintegrated into Kashmiri society. Bushra accompanied her husband to the home he hadn't seen in over a decade since he was a boy, promising her mother that she would be back soon. But Burhan had thrown away their passports. And Bushra, along with about 350 other wives, was now stuck in limbo, neither being granted Indian nationality nor allowed to return to their home towns. Over the course of the story, Bushra and Burhan's marriage, soured beyond repair by his betrayal, ended and she joined Pakistani women like her who were protesting their precarious situations. This is a story about the inheritance of displacement. Bushra's grandfather too had been from Pattan, Burhan's home town, in Baramulla. During the 1965 war, he had crossed the ceasefire line and married a woman from Bagh and then had been unable to return or visit his family. But Jamal doesn't analyse the labyrinths of borders and identity and ideas of nationhood and belonging — she simply lays them out for readers to make their own connections. The early stories, more so because of the benefit of the passing of time, are more compelling. There's the love story of the Kashmiri woman who lived in Gaza (and was evacuated in 2023) with her Palestinian husband she had met when they were students at the Aligarh Muslim University in the 1980s. There's a man from a village in Anantnag who still carries around a love letter in his pocket because when he was 17, in the 1990s, he was saved from what could have been a terrible encounter with soldiers, by one written in poetic Urdu from his girlfriend. There's the unlikely relationship of a young Pandit boy and Muslim girl in the early 2000s — spending time together talking in a PCO booth or empty Matador buses or a giftshop called Dreams whose sympathetic owner let them wander around — and the story unfolds over the years starting from his family decision's to return to the Valley after temporarily relocating to Jammu during the exodus of the Pandits in the 1990s to what their lives looked like in the Kashmiri crossfire between the army and militants. There's a woman whose Indian-American husband — his knowledge of the Valley was limited to the 2000 Bollywood movie Mission Kashmir — was aghast at the realities of life in a conflict area. Most stories, though, are from around the 2019 blackout — and couples somehow found ways to correspond. An engaged doctor couple, working in different hospitals and unable to meet, exchanged love letters passed through a chain of medical staff. Couples would handwrite letters, take photos of them and share via Bluetooth. They were using Bluetooth-enabled messaging apps — 'many a boyfriend visited his girlfriend's neighbourhood, and once in the area range, messaged her while standing in the lane right outside her house, hoping she checked her phone and his journey would not prove futile.' A young trans man who flew to Amritsar to be able to stay uninterruptedly on the phone with his girlfriend who had moved to study medicine in Islamabad. Lōal Kashmir started as a memory project in 2020. Jamal, a filmmaker, grew up in Srinagar 'struggling with language, religion and belonging'. Her father is Kashmiri Muslim and mother Maharashtrian Hindu, and she writes in the introduction to the book, 'I always felt I belonged to Kashmir, but I wasn't sure Kashmir belonged to me.' This is a reclamation, her own love letter. She put out a call online asking Kashmiris willing to share their stories to fill up a Google form and then conducted detailed interviews. Author Mehak Jamal (Courtesy A Suitable Agency) The idea is deceptively simple — its execution more so. Jamal is a thrifty writer. She prefaces the stories with brush strokes of the history of Kashmir — from Yusuf Shah Chak, the last indigenous Kashmiri king in the sixteenth century to the assembly elections in 2024 — in four pages. And in 16 stories (although some could have been skipped), she covers the most significant events of the last three decades. This is a very accessible book, which is not to say that it's simplistic. Far from it. The writing is plain but succeeds through its clarity. Its only real flaw is the inability to capture any kind of sentimentality. The material is dramatic, the characters are intriguing, and the landscape is stunning. But there's little here in terms of emotions or insight associated with love and strife. There isn't, really, any passage or sense of feeling worth quoting but all the stories are easy to remember and to read. Saudamini Jain is an independent jouralist. She lives in New Delhi.
The Wire
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Wire
On Love, Loss and Living in Kashmir
Loal Kashmir - Love and Longing in A Torn Land (2025), written by Kashmiri filmmaker and writer Mehak Jamal, is a poignant account of human suffering in the region. The book explores the inner lives of lovers and offers an emotional lens into how personal relationships are strained by a brutal conflict. Jamal's work highlights the resilience that ordinary people can exhibit in the face of repression and deception. As India and Pakistan stood on the brink of a full-blown war last month and Kashmir once again drew national and international attention, academic Bilal Gani spoke to Jamal about her book and the heavy physical and psychological toll the conflict is taking. This is an edited excerpt from their conversation, where Mehak talks about conflict in Kashmir, the vilification of Kashmiri lives under the rubric of hyper-nationalism and why Kashmir deserves an everlasting peace and dignified existence. Bilal Gani: The title uses the word 'Lōal,' a tender expression in Kashmiri. How important was it for you to root this book linguistically and emotionally in the Kashmiri experience? Mehak Jamal: It was certainly imperative since the book is about Kashmir and Kashmiris. Lōal in Kashmiri means love, affection and longing. The name Lōal Kashmir came to me much before I even started interviewing people, and I am glad I wasn't asked to change it later by my publishers for ease of understanding etc. A simple subtitle in the book's name does that job. I have used Kashmiri words, phrases and dialogues wherever possible in the book and they flow seamlessly into the prose. The book touches many facets of regular life in Kashmir, that roots it firmly in the place and culture. For a Kashmiri reader, I hope the book is an emotional and immersive read, and for someone not from the valley, I hope that they learn something new about the place and its people. Mehak Jamal, Loal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land, Harper Collins (2025) Bilal Gani: Many of the lovers in your stories live under the constant threat of curfews, raids and surveillance. How did you manage to portray such vulnerability without losing the dignity and agency of your characters? Mehak Jamal: The credit for the vulnerability exhibited by the characters lies solely with the contributors who were willing to open up their hearts and lives to me. They were authentic and unabashed in the telling of their own stories, and that's what creates these layers and nuance that you see in the book. For most of the contributors, as for most Kashmiris, living under these constant threats has become a part of life – with a mixture of uneasiness and indifference. They have learnt to act and adapt to the most volatile of circumstances. This is nothing to be proud of. But in these stories, you discover the kind of agency that the characters exhibit in the most dire of times. This need and urgency to reach out to a loved one, to know that they are okay, is an understandable and universal emotion. But in Kashmir, where there may be an elevated anxiety attached to the same, there's all the more reason for these lovers to out seek each other – to search for 'their constant' in uncertain times. Bilal Gani: You explore how love in Kashmir is shaped, and often stifled, by the long shadow of conflict. In what ways do you think love becomes a form of resistance in such environments? Mehak Jamal: The Kashmir conflict is a long enduring one and Kashmiris have been living through it and feeling its repercussions for decades. In a place like this, almost every facet of life is affected by the conflict in some way or other, and love is no different. That people love and want to be loved is a given, in any place. Kashmir is no different. But when the conflict takes precedence in the documentation of the place, as it should, what falls through the cracks are the lived experiences of the conflict. Lōal Kashmir chooses to look at a small part of these experiences, those of love and longing. In these 16 stories, ranging from the 1990s to the 2020s, we see a myriad of different narratives about lōal in Kashmir. Though these stories span decades, the ways in which people carry out their love – equal parts cautious and equal parts unfettered – is an intriguing thing to observe. In times of turmoil, loving someone is no less than a form of revolt, a form of resistance. Because what you are saying is that – you can silence our voices, but not our love. Bilal Gani: Edward Said says that an intellectual in exile is often best positioned to understand the complexity of conflict at home. You are a Kashmiri but live in Mumbai. How did you reconcile the two and which identity weighed most heavy on you while writing this book. Mehak Jamal: I'm not sure if the statement pertains to me entirely, since I do divide my time between Kashmir and Mumbai. But I can attempt to explore this for myself. I had not been home in Kashmir in 2019 during [reading down of Article 370] the communication blockade. Like many Kashmiris outside, I was scrambling for bits of information from home and feeling helpless and alone. Kashmir was in the news but the voices from Kashmir were choked. I was immediately struck by how important it was to document that time, to understand the ground reality and how the inner lives of the people were affected. Maybe for someone living through that time on the ground, this may have felt unimportant. But I felt that collective public memory was the key to make that period undeniable, especially when most narratives pertaining to it were skewed. Mahak Jamal. Photo: Author provided. Thus, Lōal Kashmir came to me a year after the abrogation. It was in 2020, when I was home in Kashmir during the pandemic, when I decided to start this project and began interviewing people. Maybe, through the process, I was trying to document the time that I had myself spent in Kashmir, as well as exploring those parts of history and the recent events that I knew little about or had not found accounts of. The two parts of my identity – the one at home and the one way from it – came together in crafting this book Bilal Gani: For decades, the Kashmiri identity has been eclipsed by the clashing tides of Indian and Pakistani nationalisms. Your book attempts to restore a human lens by making love – a delicate and deeply human emotion – its central theme. How important is it to humanise this conflict? Mehak Jamal: There is a human cost to any conflict and we are reminded of this in Kashmir time and again. So many different wars and skirmishes have been fought between the two warring nations, and the people of the J&K face the brunt of it. Though both the nations lay claim on the territory and it is the basis of the conflict between them, how regular Kashmiris live and survive is not explored or questioned by them. The representation of Kashmir and Kashmiris in popular news and media is enough to make this point. When authentic narratives from a place are missing, they create further dissonance in a region that is already misunderstood. Lōal Kashmir is the tip of the iceberg to understand how Kashmiris live, love and go on. There is much more to document, explore and learn to understand the human side of the Kashmir conflict. Bilal Gani: During the recent military confrontation between India and Pakistan, people in the volatile border areas have faced death and been forced into displacement. Are their lives as precarious as those of the characters in your book? Mehak Jamal: The recent skirmishes between the nations shows that the people from this region are seen as dispensable. Many people living in Uri, Poonch and other areas around the Line of Control and the international border lost their loved ones as well as faced damage or loss of their property. This is deemed as 'collateral damage' and there has barely been any public outcry or outrage about it. I would say that the lives of these people are more precarious than many of the characters in my book. Though there are characters in the book who find themselves in difficult circumstances and are sometimes saved from a volatile situation by a whisker, I think it would be insensitive to compare them. Bilal Gani is an academic and freelance writer, based in Kashmir. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
‘A tragic completeness': Ukrainian novelist awarded Orwell prize posthumously for unfinished final book
Two years after she was killed in a Russian missile strike, Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian novelist who became a war crimes researcher after Russia's full-scale invasion of her country, was posthumously awarded the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her unfinished work, Looking at Women, Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary from Ukraine. The book, released by HarperCollins with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, was described by prize judges as 'technically unfinished but with a tragic completeness.' Atwood, writing in the introduction, calls the war 'Russia's appalling and brutal campaign to annihilate Ukraine,' and reflects that 'in the middle of a war, there is little past or future … there is only the white heat of the moment.' It is in this white heat that Amelina's final book lives, between being witness of the violence, preserving fragments of memory, and brief moments of calm and camaraderie . Born in Lviv in 1986, Amelina trained as a computer scientist before turning to literature. Her debut novel The Fall Syndrome was published in 2014, and her follow-up, Dom's Dream Kingdom (2017), established her as one of Ukraine's leading young literary voices. She also wrote children's books, ran literary festivals, and was raising her young son when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. At the time, Amelina was at work on a novel. Within weeks, she had set it aside. 'The quest for justice has turned me from a novelist and mother to a war crimes reporter,' she would later write. She joined Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian human rights organisation, and began documenting war crimes: interviewing witnesses, photographing the ruins of cultural sites, and writing. The book she eventually began was part memoir and part chronicle and traced the lives of Ukrainian women who fell prey to wartime brutality. Among them were Evgenia, a lawyer-turned-soldier; Oleksandra Matviichuk, who helped document war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022; and Yulia, a librarian who helped expose the abduction and murder of a children's book author. The manuscript Amelina left behind — roughly 60 percent complete — included essays, field notes, and fragments, some with no more than a title. The first chapter, titled The Shell Hole in the Fairy Tale, opens with the author preparing for a vacation to Egypt. Her newly purchased handgun looks out of place lying near colourful dresses and swimsuits. 'A full-scale Russian invasion has been postponed for the last eight years since 2014,' she writes, still half-believing that war might be avoided. 'Amelina is setting off for a holiday with her young son as the war comes chasing after her and everyone else in Ukraine,' the Orwell Foundation noted in its citation. 'She is finishing a funding application for a literary festival while standing in the airport security line, checking the news and thinking about her new gun.' On the night of June 27, 2023, Amelina was dining with a group of international writers in Kramatorsk, a city in the embattled Donetsk region, when a Russian cruise missile struck the restaurant. She suffered critical head injuries and died four days later. She was 37. Her husband, Alex Amelin, accepted the £3,000 award at a ceremony in London this week, held on George Orwell's birthday. The prize money will support the New York Literary Festival in Donetsk, which Amelina founded. The town, ironically named after the American city, now lies close to the front lines. The Orwell Prize, awarded annually by the Orwell Foundation, honours work that exemplifies George Orwell's values of integrity, decency, and truth-telling in political writing. It seeks to fulfill Orwell's enduring ambition 'to make political writing into an art.'
