Sitaare Zameen Par

Sitaare Zameen Par is an exhibition of the Portrait Photographs of Bombay Cinestars from the Golden Era by photographer JH Thakker. Curated by Roobina Karode, the exhibition presents the charm and opulence of the magical and sparkling fifties and sixties which has widely been registered as the “Golden Age of Hindi Cinema”.

Musical melodies with evergreen lyrics that lingered, melodrama peppered with unforgettable dialogues, and the grandeur of a royal past or modern city serving to be the mise-en-scène of a romance: these were some of the major leitmotifs that the post-Independence Bombay cinema was known for. The exhibition will revisit the ‘golden era’ of the Bombay film industry and the faces behind them with a sense of nostalgia as well as fascination, since the world that they evoke is both timeless as well as transient.

These figures from the past are like those distant and disappeared heavenly bodies which now exist only in their silver shadows, cast on the retinas of earthly beings.

The ‘first day first show’ will present the charm and opulence of the magical and sparkling fifties and sixties of Hindi cinema. This exhibition of the portrait photographs of Bombay cinestars by the eminent J H Thakker, offers a snippet of a particular chapter from the long history of celluloid in the subcontinent: the crucial decades roughly between 1947 and 1968.

This interregnum coincides with what has widely been registered as the “Golden Age of Hindi Cinema”, when the post-Partition India became the second largest film-producing country in the world after Hollywood, partly due to the influx of migrants to Bombay (Mumbai) specifically from Lahore film industry in Pakistan.

Thakker, also a Partition refugee, set up his “India Photo Studio” at Dadar.

When: February 6 – April 30
Where: KNMA, HCL, sector 126, Noida