IFA@Bangalore | Mehfil-e Filmiyana: Kathak and Qawwali in Bombay Cinema by Yousuf Saeed and Siddhi Goel | March 14, 2024 | The Park
Join us at our next From the Stacks of the IFA Archive event, where Yousuf Saeed and Siddhi Goel will speak about their projects on Bombay cinema - one that looks at Qawwali and the other, at Kathak. Both the projects were grants given out under our Arts Research programme, and engage with these art forms popularised by Hindi cinema. They ask: how have Kathak and Qawwali been portrayed in Hindi cinema? How does popular culture transform and interact with the traditional and classical elements in these art forms?
Yousuf created the Cinema Qawwali Archive, a repository of over 800 qawwali songs from Hindi cinema, to analyse how the film industry used the traditional Qawwali to tell stories as well as entertain the masses, and make it the unique ‘Cinema Qawwali’. Siddhi looked at Kathak in Hindi cinema to reveal not just the histories of the dance form, but also the ecology–starting with the entry of courtesans, the dance gurus as choreographers and trainers, dance directors, background dancers and dancing stars, extras and dance assistants–all of who contributed to the shaping of the form in the Hindi film industry. The projects bring together archive materials in the form of videos, audios, texts, and oral histories to trace and enrich their research.
Date and Time: Thursday, March 14, 2024 | 07:30 PM IST onwards. Please be seated by 07:20 PM.
Venue: The Park, Bangalore
Click here to RSVP.
The event is free, open to all and has Indian Sign Language interpretation. People requiring the interpretation are requested to be seated in the front row.
Yousuf Saeed is an independent filmmaker, scholar and archivist based in Delhi, producing documentary films and writings on shared art and cultural traditions of South Asia since 1990.
Siddhi Goel is a Kathak dance teacher and choreographer based in Pune. She is a disciple of Pt Jai Kishan Maharaj of the Lucknow Gharana and alumna of Kathak Kendra, Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Yousuf and Siddhi received grants under the Arts Research programme at IFA. Yousuf’s grant was made possible with support from Titan Company Limited.
Images: Still from Muqaddar Ka Sikandar and album cover of Qawwalis from Films Vol 1
Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from over 550 projects online at theifaarchive.org
From the Stacks is a series of conversations with artists and scholars around the materials deposited at the IFA Archive at the end of their projects.
The IFA Archive is built with support from the Indorama Charitable Trust.