The Epistemic Archaeology of Ashish Avikunthak: Cinema and Religiosity of Everyday Life

(Hardback)

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Explores the diverse aspects of Ashish Avikunthaks work, whose films are art as resistance. For more than 25 years, Indian filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak has been making self-financed films that have robustly resisted capital and market logic. Starting from his early 16mm short films Etcetera (1997) and Kalighat Fetish (1999) to longer feature length works that he has made in the past decadeRati Chakrayuh (2013), The Kali of Emergency (2016), Vrindavani Vairagya (2017), and several more projects in various stages of production. His body of work now amounts to seven short films and seven feature length works. These essays rigorously interrogate, contextualize, theorize, and interpret Avikunthaks multi-decade sustained artistic output. The current global assertion of authoritarianism and one-dimensional interpretations of cultural history and practice provide a timely and essential historical moment in which to dialogue with Avikunthaks films because his cinema consciously contests totalizing historical and artistic narratives and constructs frameworks of existential uncertainty and fragmentation that force us to reflect on the increasing political, economic, social, and climate chaos that is infusing and shaping our early 21st century global ontology.

Author Bio

arunas Paunksnis is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology in Kaunas, Lithuania. He is the author of Dark Fear, Eerie Cities: New Hindi Cinema in Neoliberal India (2019) and editor of Dislocating Globality: Deterritorialization, Difference and Resistance (2016). Erin ODonnell is an Associate Professor in the History & Geography Department at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is currently completing a manuscript for Bloomsbury about the cinema of Indian/Bengali filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak.