Between the Lines
Two months and counting, the most historic non-violent resistance to laws against Indian pluralism, against humanity, continues to flower and blossom in the face of unprecedented terror and violence of the nation-state..…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Surveillance today is no longer about being watched by the Orwellian Big Brother but about being recorded. Nothing vanishes: that’s the terror of data surveillance today. Padmaja Challakere reviews two seminal books that outline a dystopic present. .…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In the winter of 2019 the nation witnessed a spring of protest against the abuse of power for communal ends in the form of the CAA. Gandhi must be smiling up there, thinks Sakuntala.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The SC ruling is in its spirit contradictory and even disturbing in fundamental ways. But is it a victory for Hindus? Vinay Lal thinks not because it endorses a growing intolerance not merely, against Muslims and Dalits but also towards adherents of other practices and conceptions of Hinduism.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The subject of Gandhi’s “religion” has never been more important than at present when Hindu nationalism is sharply ascendant and Hindu pride is being championed as a necessary form of the reawakening of a long subjugated people says Vinay Lal.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
A new report blames urban consumption for GHG emissions and the planet’s woes. Hey! Tagore and Gandhi said as much a century ago, says U.R. Sane.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Two postcards describe the way democracy is mauled in the name of its preservation points out Vinay Hameed . …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The conversion of 1956 was not just a rejection of Hinduism but an embrace of Buddhism, ‘reformed’ by B.R. Ambedkar for a moral recovery of Dalits says Hemant Devasthali.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The victory of aggressive macho nationalism taps deep into the Indian male psyche with its bubbling cauldron of anxieties, inadequacies fears and feelings of helplessness Rakesh Shukla about the stunning verdict. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
For B.R. Ambedkar, the personal was embedded in the political, each defining and redefining the other; the real challenge of social change was the self’s inner transformation. This, says Mihir Shah, was his most radical contribution; his “most forgotten legacy” .…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The Vikalp Sangam process is a platform to bring together movements, groups and individuals working on just, equitable and sustainable pathways to human and ecological well-being. It rejects the current model of development and the structures of inequality and injustice underlying it, and searches for alternatives in practice and vision. Over 50 movements and organisations around the country are involved.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Critical issues of domination, discrimination and gender find powerful articulation in the expressionist imagination of dalit artist, Savindra Sawakar . His work traces the dense contradictions and acute sensuousness of social worlds, past and present, says Saurabh Dube. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
What are we running away from? Aseem Srivastava asks this question and reaches out to Tagore’s work “Creative Unity” for illumination. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The recent verdict on Aadhaar sanctions various forms of ‘terror’ on the vulnerable—exclusion, deprivation, all in the name of a digital ‘fundamentalism’, says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Civilization demands that love and pleasure be confined by moral custom and juridico-political law into service of an economic order. But pleasure can transgress that order says Saitya Brata Das . …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Rabindranath Tagore, denounced the “idolatry of Nation” as violence on humanity. We reproduce excerpts from “Nationalism in India” both as mirror to our times and a vision for a moral resurgence that places humanity over “organized power” of the Nation.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
May 7 marked Rabindranath Tagore’s 157th birth anniversary. Celebrations were held not just in India but in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as well, two countries that historically and culturally may have had affinities with India but that also have strong ‘nationalist’ sentiments couching grievances that have erupted time and again or mutely underlined their interactions with ‘big brother’ India in the recent past. So how was it that Tagore, India’s ‘national’ poet was feted in both countries? …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
What makes the human mind susceptible to the lure of fundamentalism? Salman Akhtar addressed this question in his lecture more than a decade ago. His “psychoanalytical perspective” could have been written for the seductive power of right-wing politics sweeping across geographies.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
In our mutual animosities we deliberately ignore the influences of Tughlak, Khalji, Lodi dynasties and the Moghuls on the evolution of our composite culture, or try to reduce it to a monolithic or ‘pure’ one. So wrote Asghar Ali Engineer a decade ago. His words still resonate. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
In “Against the Frame” his first collection of poetry, Azad Ashim Sharma explores the horrors of on-going conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, their blood-soaked histories, arbitrary geographies on those “washed up as human contraband” and quotidian xenophobia in the metropolis. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Our age is so deeply immersed in politics that we no longer have agency in the satisfaction of even our instincts and spiritual desires says Varis Alavi. In such an age what should the artist/writer do? …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
This year TM Krishna received the Indira Gandhi National Integration Award for 2015-16. In his acceptance speech, the Karnatik vocalist pays tribute to his “art’s generosity” for giving him, “a preferred citizen” the gift of empathy and finds India’s pluralism under threat. ……[Read More]……
Between The Lines
Karnatik musician TM Krishna did not do justice to his ethical commitment to diversity by accepting the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration. Suddenly and sadly, the exalted sank into the banal….…[Read More]……
Between The Lines
Fascism can creep into any society where it finds resonance in the individual psyche. In this essay, Rakesh Shukla explores aspects of mainstream Hindu male psyche that makes it vulnerable to the temptations of fascism-fundamentalism. In the process he serves up an implicit critique of the progressive-liberal movement’s inability to meaningfully confront such tendencies as are increasingly evident in India today. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Babasaheb Ambedkar’s life should be viewed as a part of a larger and ‘a correlated but different freedom struggle, one for the liberation of the most oppressed sections of Indian society says Hemant Devasthali . His sense of political freedom was closely affiliated to the emancipation of the Depressed Classes, a process that would go beyond formal political democracy and freedom.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Historians have critiqued the assumed universality of western categories in explaining south Asian history; yet none have applied the notion of “difference” to Gandhi’s discourse of freedom. Mithi Mukherjee finds it differed, radically, from western notions of freedom: and, it had roots in the Indic tradition of renunciation. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Gandhi anguished over his tragic discovery that the freedom struggle had not been as unique a non-violent struggle as perceived; communal riots greeted the dawn of independence: The renouncer had been renounced. But Gandhi says Sudhir Chandra , defying old age and declining health continued his radical attempts to humanise our psychic system. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Both Marx and Gandhi critiqued capitalism. Both advocated “socialism.” But for Marx it was predicated on the seizure of power and enhancement of modernity. For Gandhi it was built upon an ethical need for Swaraj and a non-hierarchical stateless society, says K.P. Shankaran, in which the individual’s freedom imprisoned by consuming modernity is restored. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Pluralism is not a ritual of colourful masks for exhibition behind army tanks at Republic Day parades says K. Satchidanandan; it is as intrinsic and essential to India as its bio-diversity. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The re-assertion of people’s rights over natural resources is the best way to protect the environment and serve the development agenda too, says Madhav Gadgil . Goa’s villages show us how — through cooperative mining. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Naming by a hegemonic force expresses cognitive violence “Harijan” becomes a classifiable category manipulated, managed by bureaucratic-political reason as idolatry. “Dalit”on the other hand expresses the infinitude of bruised existence. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Over the decades the remembered or imagined village as the ‘Other’ has become the forgettable village, the ‘Anti-self’. This rejection will cost narcissistic urban India dear, says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read in Full]…
