NEW BOOK OFFERS FIRST IN-DEPTH LOOK AT THE FILMS OF GIRISH KASARAVALLI, A MASTER OF INDIAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA Although he’s won dozens of prestigious film awards in his native India, Girish Kasaravalli is still “one of the most underestimated filmmakers of our time.” In Discovering Indian Independent Cinema: The Films of Girish Kasaravalli, Sakti Sengupta gives Kasaravalli his due as a major artist working outside the massive – and yet entirely restrictive – sphere of Bollywood. This book introduces movie lovers to the diverse, singular worlds of eight of Kasaravalli’s most important films, and tracks the strong, consistent vision that unites them. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, Kasaravalli won the Golden Lotus for Best Film in 1977 with his debut feature, Ghatashraddha (The Ritual). This haunting film about the tender relationship between a young boy studying to become a Brahmin priest and a young widow who has transgressed Brahmin law was later honored as the only Indian film chosen by the Cinémathèque Française as one of 100 important films to be included in its national archive. Over the next four decades, Kasaravalli’s art has continued to take as its subject the “dynamic living cultural traditions” of people from all walks of life – Brahmins and peasants, upwardly mobile city-dwellers and low-level bureaucrats, Hindus and Muslims – as well as the ways people negotiate new historical and economic threats to those traditions. A pioneer of the Indian New Wave, which evolved from the Parallel Cinema of Satyajit Ray and other avant-garde filmmakers, Kasaravalli has been able to straddle different worlds. He has regarded the culture of his Brahmin upbringing with both a critical and compassionate eye, exploring its complex rituals and manners while depicting the injustices and outrages spawned by the caste system. For Kasaravalli, cinema should raise important questions and not seek to provide definitive answers to them. Although his films take on enormous, and enormously important, subjects such as inequality, patriarchy, corruption, religious strife, and globalization, each offers a nuanced, probing treatment of them. As Kasaravalli has said, “the power of cinema is to make thought visible.” It is up to the viewer, then, to “discover values for himself by watching the movie.” In Discovering Indian Independent Cinema: The Films of Girish Kasaravalli, Sengupta offers detailed summaries and readings of eight of Kasaravalli’s films. The book, as he writes in the Preface, is not meant to be “academic.” Rather, Sengupta’s aim is to introduce the powerful art of this gifted filmmaker to a broader audience, both in India and abroad. Although Kasaravalli might be said to be a “filmmaker’s filmmaker,” and has been honored with many awards and critical praise, he has been too long screened from view by the culture and expectations produced by Bollywood’s mass-market productions. Sengupta’s book, therefore, is a much-needed, accessible guide to Kasaravalli’s body of work, as well as to the exciting worlds of cinema being created outside the monolithic one of Bollywood.