ek inquilab aur aaya

Screening of Ek Inquilab Aur Aaya and Q&A with Uma Chakravarti

March 16, 2019

Students of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Guwahati Campus) and NEthing organised an

open-for-all film screening of 'Ek Inquilab Aur Aaya' on the evening of March 16 followed by a lively interaction with the director, Uma Chakravarti. We followed this up with a Q&A session with the director which was moderated by Suryasikha Pathak.

About the film 'Ek Inquilab Aur Aaya'

Lucknow 1920-1949: A documentary set in Firanghi Mahal, Lucknow, an institution for rationalist Islamic scholarship founded in the late 17th century. Through two women, Sughra Fatema and her niece Khadija Ansari, it tells the unknown stories of women and their struggles to find their own ways of being in a time of dramatic changes. One wrote poetry to express herself and the other became a student activist who went to jail for being a revolutionary. The film is an ode to humanism and the indomitable spirit of women who refuse to give up the search for a meaningful life.

About the director

Uma Chakravarti is a feminist historian who taught history at Miranda House, Delhi University, where she also curated film screenings of documentary films from the late 70s onwards. She has recently made three films: ‘A Quiet Little Entry’ on women’s history and the small archives of unknown people; a second film on the 1960s and 70s in India, and the way political and social events at that time shaped individual women’s lives titled ‘Fragments of a Past’, and her third film ‘Ek Inquilab Aur Aaya’ which dwells on the multiple histories of Muslim women which we rarely see in documentary cinema.

About the Modreator

Suryasikha Pathak is a historian who was worked in areas of gender, religion, history of marginalised people and tribal conflicts.

For more such events, look through the Curating the Conscious page.