Indian Circus

"Mary Ellen Mark fell in love with the Indian circus in 1969, during her first trip to India. As she watched a huge hippopotamus walk around the ring with its mouth wide open, wearing a pink tutu, she was struck by the beauty and innocence of the show. She returned to India many times, and in 1989 and 1990 she devoted six months to photographing eighteen circuses, following them around the continent by train, plane, van, and auto-rickshaw. Secretive, highly competitive, and each a closed, self-sufficient society, the circuses embody what Mark calls "a poetry and a craziness that are still uncorrupted, and honest, and pure."" "Beautifully printed in tritone, this remarkable collection of photographs captures the texture of circus life outside of the ring - exhausting, humorous, poignant, and often bizarre - as well as the affection and devotion that the performers have for each other and their animals." "Indian Circus is documentary photography at its finest. The photographs are not only compelling portraits of the performers, but also eloquent and poetic narratives about life in the Indian circus."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is a pioneering exploration of the social history of circus in India over the last 150 years. It presents a wide variety of amazing tales ranging from the blooming and evolution of circus acrobatics in early twentieth-century Malabar to the sensational legal battles following the ban of wild animals and children from the circus ring in the twenty-first century. Alongside extensive fieldwork and interviews, the author has used memorabilia including photographs, notices, posters, letters, diaries, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, and recollections of the circus community to chronicle the hitherto untold story of the Indian circus. The book paves the way for a new sociocultural analysis of performance genres and popular culture in the subcontinent against several overlapping contexts. These include the remaking of caste and gender identities, transformation of physical cultures and bodies, interventions of the colonial and postcolonial states, and emergence of new transregional and transnational spaces.

Articles previously published in various journals.

An Album of Indian Big Tops, chronicling the circus industry in India from 1880 to 2010, was written by Sreedharan Champad, a flying trapeze artist, journalist, story writer, novelist, film script writer, and circus historian. His book reveals the history of Indian circus life and art, as well as details about the industry. He directly contacted the most prominent people in the Indian circus from the 1950s onward and has researched all available records, making this a lifetime achievement. It took him more than fifty years to complete this history about a "dying art," and no one before has attempted such a book. The book was inspired because, "I had spent my school vacations in circus tents in my boyhood, because some of my close relatives were circus artists living in circus tents."

"Mary Ellen Mark fell in love with the Indian circus in 1969, during her first trip to India. As she watched a huge hippopotamus walk around the ring with its mouth wide open, wearing a pink tutu, she was struck by the beauty and innocence of the show. She returned to India many times, and in 1989 and 1990 she devoted six months to photographing eighteen circuses, following them around the continent by train, plane, van, and auto-rickshaw. Secretive, highly competitive, and each a closed, self-sufficient society, the circuses embody what Mark calls "a poetry and a craziness that are still uncorrupted, and honest, and pure."" "Beautifully printed in tritone, this remarkable collection of photographs captures the texture of circus life outside of the ring - exhausting, humorous, poignant, and often bizarre - as well as the affection and devotion that the performers have for each other and their animals." "Indian Circus is documentary photography at its finest. The photographs are not only compelling portraits of the performers, but also eloquent and poetic narratives about life in the Indian circus."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Hindi film star and an American missionary are twins separated at birth; a dwarf — a former circus clown — mistakes the missionary for the movie star. And stalking one of them is a serial killer...

Khushwant Singh, India S Most Widely-Read Columnist, Has Been A Keen Observer Of Life In India Its Politics, Economics, Religion, Habits, Customs, Events And Personalities. Notes On The Great Indian Circus Is A Chronicle Of The State Of The Nation As It Was And As It Is, And The Way It Is Going To Be. It Also Reflects The Indian Psyche The Way We Are. This Selection Brings Together The Best Of Khushwant Singh S Articles From A Wide Variety Of Magazines And Newspapers, And Documents His Inimitable Perceptions On Parliament, Filmstar Mps, Censorship And Communalism. Containing Pieces On Subjects Ranging From Kentucky Fried Chicken To The Kumbh Mela, The Golden Temple To The Assassination Of Rajiv Gandhi, Osho To Bhindranwale, And Pornography To Family Planning, This Is An Insightful, Candid And Provocative Collection.

This volume explores how the Cultural Cold War played out in Africa and Asia in the context of decolonization. Both the United States and the Soviet Union as well as East European states undertook significant efforts to influence cultural life in the newly independent, postcolonial world. The different forms of influence are the subject of this book. The contributions are grouped around four topic headings. "Networks and Institutions" looks at the various ways Western-style theatre became institutionalized in the decolonial world, especially Africa. "Cultural Diplomacy" focuses on the activities of the Soviet Union in India in the late 1950s and 1960s in the very different arenas of book publishing and the circus. "Artists and Agency" explores how West African filmmakers (Ousmane Sembène and Abderrahmane Sissako) and European authors (Brecht and Ibsen) were harnessed for different kinds of Cold War strategies. Finally, "Cultures of Things" investigates how everyday objects such as books and iconic theatre buildings became suffused with affect, nostalgia, and ideology. This book will be of interest for students of the Cold War, postcolonial studies, theatre, film, and literature. Chapters 1, 4, 8, and 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by the European Research Council Project "Developing Theatre".

Children have been exploited as performers and wooed energetically as consumers throughout history. These essays offer scholarly investigations into the employment and participation of children in the entertainment industry with examples drawn from historical and contemporary contexts.

The Cambridge Companion to the Circus provides a complete guide for students, scholars, teachers, researchers, and practitioners who are seeking perspectives on the foundations and evolution of the modern circus, the contemporary extent of circus studies, and the specialised literature available to support further enquiries. The volume brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars working across the multi-disciplinary domain of circus studies to present a clear overview of the specialised histories, aesthetics and distinctive performances of the modern circus. In sixteen commissioned essays, it covers the origins in commercial equestrian performance during the late-eighteenth century to contemporary inflections of circus arts in major international festivals, educational environments, and social justice settings.