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A man devoted to digging out the glory of India and showing it to the world on film, the founder of Krishnaswamy Associates boasts an oeuvre whose scope and depth can educate as well as boggle the inquisitive mind.
In 1931, K. Subramaniam, albeit trained professionally as a lawyer, took to the immensely powerful medium cinema to experiment with and used it as a tool to spread social awareness.
Seva Sadanam, a picture produced by him as soon he entered the field, was to be the vehicle to carry the message about the state of women and their dismal position in society. Based on a novel by Munshi Premchand, it highlighted the plight of a young girl married to an gentleman old enough to be her father. Scenes and dialogues unprecedented in this medium were posited in the film, and it propelled Subramaniam into the arena as a champion of social causes. When the freedom movement started by Gandhiji gained momentum, Subramaniam jumped into the fray and released his much
Gobindram Watumull and his wife Ellen. | A clipping from St Louis Post Dispatch, October 19, 1947.
In 1865, German botanist William Hillebrand travelled to India with the intention of finding “East Indian” labour for the sugar plantations of Hawaii, where he lived and worked. Instead, he returned with plants and birds of breath-taking variety: crows, finches, the Chinese quail, Mongolian pheasants, the Indian sparrow and common mynah. By 1879, the mynah was a familiar species in Honolulu and soon in the other south-eastern islands of Hawaii.
For the first South Asians who set foot on the Hawaiian Islands around the early 1880s, the birds must have been a comforting sight. They had sailed over 11,000 km from Calcutta to Honolulu, a stopover that was still thousands of kilometres from their destination of mainland US and Canada, where the west coast offered attractive work opportunities. If nothing else, the soundscape in Hawaii must have been resonant to the