“Amitabh suited the role of the ageing theatre actor perfectly. I don’t think anyone would have fitted the bill so well. He is so eccentric, performs so brilliantly and the way he speaks English is so impeccable and clear. I feel he is the crowning glory of the film.”
“The Last Lear”, directed by award-winning filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, highlights the different acting skills required for theatre and cinema.
Based on Utpal Dutt’s play “Aajker Shahjahan”, the film also stars Preity Zinta, Arjun Rampal, Shefali Shah and Divya Dutta. It is slated for a Sep 12 release.
Besides Amitabh, Chaudhuri is also all praise for director Ghosh, who has earlier made critically acclaimed films like “Chokher Bali” and “Raincoat”.
He said: “Rituparno Ghosh creates magic out of relationship based cinema. I don’t think anyone would have treated the script the way he has done it.”
The producer currently has no plans to release this Rs.8.5 million film in Hindi and feels it is meant for a niche audience.
“This film is in English and anyone who understands the language can enjoy it. It imparts undertones of various messages and talks in particular of the conflict between theatre and cinema.
“I love watching a film like ‘Om Shanti Om’, but I know there are better people who are making such masala and romantic films. Now more intelligent and meaningful stories need to be told. Even ‘Mithya’ was such a film,” he said.
The producer says that he intentionally delayed the film’s release in India. “The Last Lear” was ready for release last year and was screened at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI).
“‘The Last Lear’ is a niche film and so it was required to be shown internationally before being brought it to India. It has already travelled to film festivals in Toronto, Rome and London.
“When we thought of releasing the film around the summer vacations this year, the IPL (Indian Premier League) matches were on and there were also a lot of big films packed till now. We wanted to release it at a decent time when there won’t be many commercial films to compete with,” explained Chaudhuri, who is also a management guru.
The theatrical trailers of “The Last Lear” were added to Akshay Kumar-starrer “Singh Is Kinng”, which has created waves at the box office.
” ‘Singh Is Kinng’ has turned out to be a huge success. I think it will also help our film as seeing a trailer in a theatre is very different from seeing it on TV. The theatrical trailer definitely has more impact and also generates more curiosity in the audience,” he said.
“The Last Lear”, shot in Kolkata, Mussoorie and Uttarakhand, will be distributed by PVR across all multiplexes,” Chaudhuri added.
Hot Hindi Stuff Online:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAt a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, Katherine Russell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, where she was seduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language she heard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determined she’d go live and study in the ancient city of Udaipur. That decision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents her experiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-out exhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, about ourselves. 
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAn eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.
Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and NationThis edited volume of translations covers the major political essays of India's first feminist Hindi poet. A devout follower and advocate of Gandhi, Mahadevi Varma is a household name in India and is a major woman of letters in the modern Hindi world. The essays collected in this volume represent some of Mahadevi Varma’s most famous writings on the “woman question” in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems – these latter because Mahadevi Varma made her mark in the world of Hindi literature through her poetry, and a volume of translations would be incomplete without a sampling of them. The introduction to the translated volume sketches Mahadevi Varma's life and work and her significance to both the development of modern standard Hindi as well as to the nascent women's movement underway in the 1920s in India. Little scholarly attention has been given in the academy outside of India to Varma’s numerous contributions to women’s education, to the development of modern standard Hindi, and to political thought during the Independence movement in late-colonial India. This volume of translations engages themes like language and nationalism, women’s roles as artists, the politics of motherhood and marriage—themes that continue to be relevant to women’s lives in contemporary India and to movements for women’s rights outside India as well. This volume of translations of Mahadevi Varma’s feminist political essays is the first of its kind. While some of these essays, especially those from Mahadevi Varma’s Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan collection have been translated by Neera K. Sohoni and published under the title Links in the Chain (Katha, 2003), there is no sustained treatment of Varma’s political thinking in one, accessible volume. While there is ample work on Varma in Hindi, scholars of feminism (and students of Hindi who are in the nascent stages of language acquisition) have nowhere to turn for a comprehensive sampling of her work. Mahadevi Varma is also one of the most difficult writers to access even for trained scholars of Hindi language and literature. Her highly Sanskritized diction and her stylized prose sketches make her work a pleasure to read in the original but daunting to translate into English. This volume has contributions from some of the most highly regarded Hindi experts. In the editor’s introduction to the volume of translations a brief biographical sketch followed by an analysis of the political climate of Northern India has been provided so that the reader unfamiliar with India of the 1920s-1940s will have the necessary historical context to place her work. The introduction to the volume also raises the issue of why she gave up writing poetry and turned solely to writing prose when she became involved with the movements for women’s rights and national independence. Finally, the volume provides feminist cultural historians a rich archive of how Indian women like Mahadevi Varma were actively negotiating their lives as women, activists, artists, teachers, and married women. This work will be of use to scholars of Hindi language and literature in the US/European academy and should be of interest to cultural and feminist historians of modern India. This volume will introduce Mahadevi Varma’s literary scope to an English-speaking audience, and will serve as a reference for feminist historians of the nationalist period in the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and ContextsThis book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.
The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.
This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.
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