The Shared Mirror Publishing House
Coming soon!
‘Cinemascope,’ filmmaker Rupesh Kumar‘s debut novel in Malayalam, was a bestseller that created waves in Kerala. Now, The Shared Mirror is very happy to bring to you the English version, translated by Shyma Pacha. Very, very happy! Watch this space!!
“Poykayyil Appachan’s lines remind one of those presences not visible in literature and history. “No alphabet in sight /About my race/ Can see the history of several other races,” are not lines from a dirge, but reminders of a searing past.
Rupesh Kumar’s novel Cinemascope lays out those unseen alphabets in history. The novel is born in the specific homeland of Kannur that bore the incomparable lives of the struggle of agricultural slaves. Rupesh’s ancestors were those who had withered away under the onslaughts of the canes and whips of slavery, those who had to endure the decay of their bleeding and sore selves. They plowed the fields, the yoke on their shoulders. They got buried under the thick swamp. Rupesh’s novel, refashioned from a script, takes off from his politicized consciousness of the past. The novel is part of that searing consciousness. It is by breaking the conventional tropes in between self-narration and fiction that Rupesh structures the form and politics of his writing.” — Anandan P
~ Rupesh Kumar’s novel Cinemascope comes out at a juncture when a politicized Dalit identity has enabled an increase in the quantitative presence of Dalit dialogues in the everyday public realm. While on the one hand, this assertion of Dalit consciousness has facilitated divergent aesthetics, on the other, there is an escalation of casteist intolerance and violence on the part of a threatened mainstream. Cinemascope is an embodiment of these two trajectories. ~ Shyma Pacha, translator of ‘Cinemascope’.
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