“One becomes a beast of burden, a puppet in the hands of the inherited history.” 25-year-old Dalit artist Keerthana Chandragiri discusses how experiences of self-image, discrimination, and trauma shaped the intimacies of her art. By Preeti Nangal

What’s The Chakkar? Episode 11: We’re listening to Tinctures; watching The Disciple; and reading books by Suchitra Vijayan and Kiley Reid. Featuring Anurag Tagat, Jamie Alter, and Shaista Vaishnav. Hosted by Karan Madhok.

Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors visits the forgotten history of six women who persisted to become pioneering practitioners in the field. With continuing roadblocks for women in medicine, their story remains prescient in our contemporary times. By Sohel Sarkar

Poetry by Nayanjyoti Baruah: ‘Yellow plants cover the paddy field, / As if a new sky had fallen from above. / They touch it with pleasure, set their boxes, / Cropping plants half asleep & half awake.’

“There will be laughter every minute.” From Kalaivanar to Improv, theatre to film, satire to stand-up, Padmaja Jayaraman reveals a brief history of comedy in Chennai.

Golchakkar Series - The September panel of our virtual literary talk features Akshat Gupta and Kiriti Sengupta: The Evolving Pathways of Publishing.

Through a tight focus in the sphere of the Indian classical music subculture, Chaitanya Tamhane’s 2020 film The Disciple asks larger questions about the relentless pursuit of art and excellence in the face of existential crisis. By Karan Madhok

The Tirukkural is a Tamil masterpiece of poetry and practical philosophy, with timeless verses on ethics, wealth, power, love, and more. Presented here are excerpts from a forthcoming translation of The Kural (Beacon Press 2021) by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma.

Written of a time under armed occupation in the Kashmir valley, Farah Bashir’s memoir Rumours of Spring (2021) entwines the geographical and corporeal, the social and psychological, where the violence of the world remains painfully connected to the violence within. By Paromita Patranobish

‘I celebrate the ways in which queer people in the country have found ways of living with a law that hasn’t been particularly kind to their existence.’ Chintan Girish Modi interviews playwright/activist Danish Sheikh on his writing and the intersection of law, theatre, and queer sexuality.

Excerpts from Aruni Kashyap’s critically-acclaimed poetry collection, There Is No Good Time For Bad News (2021): ‘Women couldn’t melt you, shape you, stud you with gems / to hang from their soft earlobes; men / couldn’t wrap you in strips of newsprint, / like tobacco, light one end, take a drag,’

Poetry by Anna Lynn: ‘The young one eats only the fried fish. Her own stomach does not prefer fins swimming against the currents of life.’