|
India was the romantic literary muse of the famous 19th century English writer Rudyard Kipling. Out of this romance came his most famous book, Kim, a novel about an English boy disguised as an Indian who spies for his British masters against Russian designs to conquer India. This was a tale of imperialism, knowledge and power that gave universal recognition to the term Great Game and also endowed the British Raj's intelligence service and its mapmakers with an adventurous mystique in their shadowy game of domination with the Russian empire in 19th century Central Asia. This was the playing field of the Great Game, a vast swathe of land that stretched from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet in the East to Ashkabad, the capital of what was then Russian Turkistan in the West. This distance of several thousand kilometers, following ancient caravan trails, encompassed the great mountain ranges of the Pamirs and the Himalayas, great rivers like the Indus and the Oxus, the world's highest passes, grassy and sandy steppes and salt marshes, great lakes, remote cities and fierce and indestructible people. In this film, Iqbal Malhotra follows in the footsteps of Kipling's Great Gamers' and tries to juxtapose the lessons of the past with the reality of the present. The result is an unusual travelogue about Central Asia set against a backdrop of history and politics. The film captures unusual images of this region that are interconnected and transcends the boundaries of time.
|
2009 DVD Releases
Africa
Cambodia
