Indian Classical Dance
From the collection of
From the collection of
Philip Garston-Jones meets the famed Indian dancer Indrani Rahman in a slightly awkward interview broadcast in the early years of ITV in the Midlands. Miss Rahman was touring the UK and bringing a culture that was still considered exotic and alien to many tea-time television viewers. The grace of her performance with its complex hand movements shines through the decades.
From local news to feature film, through home movies and TV documentaries, this collection showcases South Asian Britons in front of and behind the camera. The contribution of colonial troops is illuminated through the earliest newsreels, while hardhitting current affairs programmes highlight the struggles faced in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Public information films produced for South Asian audiences feature alongside Hindi-language films made in Britain and interviews with prominent Asian-British figures. A bold wave of British Asian filmmaking in the 1990s is represented through early works by the likes of Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia.