https://mrqe.com Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:09:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 https://mrqe.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/MRQE-favicon-1.png https://mrqe.com 32 32 https://mrqe.com/movie/nani-ma-m100142651/ Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:00:00 +0000 https://mrqe.com/movie/nani-ma-m100142651/ Musamoni Panigrahi (1920s2017), fondly called Nani Ma by her neighbours, appears in the centre of this first film in the Baleswari dialect of India’s Odia language. The story revolves around folklore and folk songs narrated by Nani Ma. Born in the 1920s in pre-independent rural India in a coastal village in the Balasore district of Odisha, she never got to go beyond the first few days of school. The film is an alternate history of a society broken through colonization, Brahminical patriarchy and a post-famine (Orissa famine of 1866, killing nearly 5 million people, one-third of the population), and the dominance of formal writing over spoken tongues. Three academics — Damayanti Beshra, PhD (recipient of Indias fourth civilian award, Padma Shri), Panchanan Mohanty, PhD (noted linguist), and Laxmikanta Tripathy, PhD, DLitt (anthropologist and author) — also appear in the film to provide contextual commentary on patriarchy, oral history and the sociolinguistic diversity.

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