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]…
That’s Life!!!
Wall Street and President Trump may chest-thump about the uptick in the economy and jobs but the sense of paradise remains an illusion for many as Philip Alston found on his journeys across America. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
The Gonds in Mendha Lekha reject the ‘economy of violence’ to reclaim ownership of their lives in a community of beings—through collective consent and self-rule.
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Literary Trails
Scholar, translator, essayist multilingual poet Riyaz Latif is too modest when he informs the reader that his poem “Transience” that appeared in the original in Urdu in 1994 and which he translated himself might seem dated with its reference to Glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bosnia. Not for us it isn’t!
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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]…
Visual Spaces
Like Lewis Carroll, dastango Ankit Chadha believed that the imagination was the best weapon against reality. In a tragic twist of fate his life was cut short but his tales will endure because they were of such marvel….…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
The digital world where information instead of knowledge is found at the click of a button may have finally nailed the coffin on critical thinking says Darius Cooper who despairs that today’s students may have run back to Plato’s Cave, content to watch flickering shadows.…[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]…
Personal Notes
The government has failed to perform the most basic of the responsibilities given to it by the people, say ex-civil servants in an open letter to the PM. But they also add, “We, in turn, have failed as a society that took pride in its ethical, spiritual and cultural heritage and which treasured its values of tolerance, compassion and fellow feeling.” …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In Asha Bage’s “Navas” Revati copes with the contending claims of modernity and tradition, memory and the present in this translation by Keerti Ramachandra. …[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]…
Visual Spaces
Capturing Jharia’s inferno with his lens, Ronny Sen reminds us of the devastation that coal mining’s slow violence visits on those condemned to live and work its bowels–and on us all. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Priya Sarukkai Chabria talks with Mrinalini Harchandrai about her obsession with Andal’s poetry that led to a unique translation project with Ravi Shankar. “Sangam poetics” allows her to offer multiple versions of the goddess-poet’s songs of sacred-erotic love.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
“At this inevitable parting, how does one invoke reminiscences of that vivacious vitality that was Varis Alvi (Vāriṡ ʿAlavī)? There is a singular incongruity in referring to him in the past tense, for it would be in keeping with him to persevere unwaveringly in our dimension”, says poet Riyaz Latif in his “requiem for a friend.” …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Manto’s women are a metaphor for the Bombay of the 1940s that welcomed anyone willing to pay for the pleasures it offered them. The place teemed with a vibrant cosmopolitanism. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Laughter has always been treated as a pathological condition when it issues from women and mocks male power. The sound of this “telluric music” Ashoak Upadhyay says is part of the subversive-comedic that can be used to express dissent and self-hood.
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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]…
Literary Trails
A haunting story of gender, memory and longing amidst the trauma of the real and the comfort of imagined echoes; by Joginder Paul in this translation by Keerti Ramachandra.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
With an inquisitive lens, Marion Valladares Smith an India-born New Yorker evokes the festival of art on and above the streets of the Big Apple. Here’s a selection from around the East Village.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In his work on the absence of moral sensibilities in education, Avijit Pathak meditates on its impact on young minds as rampant consumerism and competition turn students into mere commodities themselves. He is not a pessimist though and suggests ways to a moral recovery. The Introduction from the book outlines the universe of the problematic. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Does ‘Mitra’ presage a utopia of programmed, ethnically cleansed humanoids? Could Ms. Trump and PM Modi imagine a world of robots? Can we? Ashoak Upadhyay mashes fact and fiction for a goofy trip down that road.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
A meditation on Kedarnath Singh’s poetic visions by Darius Cooper who explores the blank page’s ancientness in which there is love and emptiness in which one can glimpse freedom.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
A college started in the ‘Widow’s Palace’ altered a whole society’s perspective on women; then, everything fell apart—in the crosshairs of sectarian violence. Neerja Mattoo traces the rise and fall of women empowerment and a syncretic culture in in Kashmir.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A harrowing tale of deprivation, suffering and the search for love among the wretched of an Indian urbanscape. Noted Marathi dalit writer Baburao Bagul captures the entire range of human emotions in this story of one freezing night in the city’s lowest depths…[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]……
Visual Spaces
“A poisonous pollen blown/, And odors rank, unbreathable / From dark corollas thrown!”. ……[Read More]……
Personal Notes
To succumb to slavish complicity with the princes of the world for some crumbs or to stand firm for Truth and Justice–that choice involves the decision of existence with no soft option. And truth,born in tragic thought in the abyss of freedom articulated through poetry, art philosophy must be sought for that infinite contestation with the hegemonic powers in place, says Saitya Brata Das.…[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]…
Literary Trails
: Born into a low-ranked Muslim jati, F.M.Shahajinde’s poetry draws inspiration from his life’s contrariness; a love ofKabir, Phule Gandhi Ambedkar and democratic values and the experience of being labeled ‘Muslim’ from a low jati.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Reflecting on Michelangelo’s “Art” after a visit to Italy KP Shankaran raises questions about the originality of his work. He considers him a skilled craftsman but finds ‘artistic’ merit only in his unfinished works.…[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]…
Bookshelf
In this seminal essay, the late D.R. Nagraj journeys to the intersection of the Gandhi-Ambedkar encounters of the 1930s, investigates their metaphors and meanings and discovers a discourse of Dalit emancipation in “the village-centric vision of Gandhi” whetted by Ambedkar’s distrust of its “romantic excesses.” In their differences, Nagraj finds a “dynamic unity”. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In this poetic dialogue with a marginalized present, Gandhi’s truth of ahimsa gets through to the unborn, holding out the promise of redemption. …[Read More]…
Arthur in the rains
Literary Trails
A young man from Bombay reluctantly takes a job as a storekeeper in a sugar factory in Bahedi, a North Indian town where the past catches up with him in ways he could never have imagined. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In an age of globalization, the project of Swaraj is still incomplete wrote Ananya Vajpeyi in 2009, the centenary year of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Today, more than ever before, Gandhi is appropriate because an Indian sovereignty that encloses its poor, its minorities, its separatist and dissenting constituencies in zones of exception and abandons them to the most egregious forms of violence and deprivation is not consistent with the idea of swaraj. …[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]…
Bookshelf
The state, not the people, is the source of the Constitution. In a fascinating excavation of the political philosophy of the Indian State after 1947, Mithi Mukherjee discovers that its foundations derive from an “imperial discourse of justice-as-equity. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Ashwani Kumar’s “Banaras and the Other” is a series of excursions to that enchanted confluence of fable and reality, the concrete and the ineffable; the outcome is a new poetics of mythic realism. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
What happens when a girl/woman needs an abortion? Madhuri Sastry recounts the story of one such woman and draws a grim picture of women not in control of their own bodies in India–70 years into its ‘freedom’. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Seventy years on, India’s tryst with destiny seems as fanciful as a trip to the moon for many Indians. Anoop Babani tells the story of the Great Divide that rips through the republic.. …[Read More]…