Transports of Delight: The Ricksha Arts of Bangladesh 2003
Distributed by Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404-379; 1-800-842-67967
Produced by Joanna Kirkpatrick
Directed by Joanna Kirkpatrick
CD-ROM , color, Windows 98 or higher; Intel Pentium II or higher; 6x CD-ROM drive; 800 x 600 screen resolution; 16-bit color display; 32 MB RAM; Apple QuickTime 4.0 or higher; Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher; sound card
College - Adult
Art, Asian Studies
Date Entered: 08/20/2010
Reviewed by Jessica Schomberg, Minnesota State University, MankatoThis CD-ROM provides a fascinating examination of the culture of Bangladesh through the art that appears on rickshas. Kirkpatrick shot the photographs and videos that appear on this CD-ROM between 1962 and 2000. Through the images and corresponding explanations, she provides a look at urban life, folk art, popular culture, and gender relations in Bangladesh.
As Kirkpatrick says in the introduction:
Ricksha arts, made to be seen "at a glance," are about male desire in its major forms: for sex, competitive power and wealth, for one's village home, for the blessings of religious devotion, for new things, and occasionally—as at the very beginnings of Bangladesh in 1971—for solidarity and identity with one's Sonar Bangladesh (golden Bangladesh), the new nation with its Bengali language and traditions. Ricksha art images also suggest frustrated desire, expressed as irony in some pictures in which animals, behaving like people, satirize the foibles of men or, perhaps, "say the unsayable" politically.In addition to the photographs and videos, there are also articles by Kirkpatrick about fieldwork, metaphor in art and a comparison of popular images in the USA, Pakistan, and Thailand, along with other articles about transport art and suggestions for further reading.
The CD-ROM is easy to navigate. It loads through an Internet browser and displays like a website. (It works best in Internet Explorer and to a certain extent in Mozilla Firefox, but did not work in Google Chrome. I did not try other browsers.)