A Bid For Bengal

February 3 14:00-16:00 CET/18:30-20:30 IST
(Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu, 2021, 70 min)

How did Hindu nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all
these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family
history, 'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits the
workings of frontal organizations in the RSS network responsible for the
recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two
consecutive elections trails, from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, ⁣
one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of
hope.

Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu in conversation with Dwaipayan
Bhattacharyya (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) and Shuddhabrata
Sengupta (Artist and Writer, Raqs Media Collective, Delhi)
DB




Dwaipayan Banerjee is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, researcher and based in Kolkata. He is an alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University, and presently researching on labour movement as a doctoral student at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Kasturi and Dwaipayan are co-founder-members of several independent, volunteer-led collectives; namely, the People’s Film Collective, Humans of Patuli etc. Both of them have been active organizers of the 'No Vote to BJP' campaign as co-conveners of the citizens' platform, Bengal Against Fascist RSS-BJP. They had co-edited the book, 'Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India' (2018). Recently they have finished a feature-length film on the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in Bengal, titled 'A Bid for Bengal' (2021).
KB Kasturi Basu is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer, and editor based in Kolkata. By training, she is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey. Her debut feature-length documentary, 'S.D. : Saroj Dutta and His Times' won the 12th John Abraham award for the Best Documentary at the SiGNS Film Festival, Kerala, in 2018, and got screened at several prestigious national and international festivals. She is a founder-member of a community radio station, ‘Radio Quarantine Kolkata'.
Dwaipayan_Photo_Crossings








Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya teaches Indian politics, issues of democracy and development, and methods in social sciences at the Centre for Political Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has written on the Indian Left, politics in contemporary West Bengal, local democracy, electoral politics, and social policies. His work seeks to generate explanatory frameworks for political processes based on extensive field-studies. He has earlier been a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and held visiting positions at various universities abroad. He has co-edited a book on social capital and his book Government as Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of governance from below in India’s multi-layered democracy seen through the prism of West Bengal’s long Left Front rule. He is member of the M. S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advance Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP).
Shuddhabrata--1 Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective and is an occasional writer and commentator on social and political questions in India.