In memory of someone for whom activism, academic pursuits and institution building were not unrelated exercises. Paramita Banerjee pens a tribute to Jasodhara Bagchi. On 9 January this year, Professor Jasodhara Bagchi breathed her last at 8.20 in the morning.
As Qafe proceeds into 2015, Paramita Banerjee stepped into the world of popular culture of the year gone by through advertisements and interrogates the ideas of gender and power relations … So – what’s popular culture? ‘Popular’ as per its
Just as the International Fortnight to protest Violence Against Women winds up this year, Qafe goes back to its historical moorings. By Paramita Banerjee. That time of the year has just ended – International Fortnight to protest Violence against Women:
In this edition of ‘Qafe’ Paramita Banerjee interrogates certain aspects of urban living in India especially its crime density (relating to women and nature of crime) and reveals the discrepancies in the steady growth of urbanisation … The hullabaloo about Clean
In this edition of Qafe, Paramita Banerjee trains her gaze on the dirt that Modi’s brooms will never clean. And no, it’s not just about Gujarat. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Clean India Campaign. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship initiative launched on
This month Paramita Banerjee muddles some notions around sex work. Read on! With the annual festivities of the Durga pujas striking Bengal, I have been thinking about Hindu mythology and the concept of Apsaras – divine courtesans who are gifted
The inefficient applicability of Section 498A has given rise to the well-orchestrated illusion that most of the cases filed under it are false. The Qafeteer interrogates a recent judgment of the Supreme Court and reveals the working fissures between the
Queering the ‘queer’ verdicts of the Supreme Court (11 December, 2013 and 15 April 2014), Paramita Banerjee re(views) the judgments in her new edition of the ‘Qafe and the Qafeteer’. In a patriotic play (Chandragupta, 1931) by the renowned Bengali
Queer. The dictionary defines the term as ‘funny’, ‘surprising’, ‘odd’, ‘perplexing’ and so on. In a nutshell, something that is out of the ordinary and therefore difficult to understand and/or accept. This term has been used with reference to this