Personal Notes
Critiquing mainstream education as the legacy of the dismissal of colonized people as incapable of culture and epistemic pursuits, Sayan Dey casts around for alternatives he calls Pedagogy of the Stupid. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Dharampal examines the idea that Indians have been docile towards power as children towards their parents; if they have stood up to it, as the non-cooperation movement showed, European ideas of disaffection and/or Gandhi are responsible. Through meticulous research, he documents a home-grown tradition of civil disobedience. Some extracts…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Vinay Lal introduces the reader to Beethoven’s little-known familiarity with texts like the Bhagavad Gita and “Indian ideas of the sensorium” that helped the composer create what he calls “the music of advaita” …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In conversation with Sukrita Paul Kumar, Urdu and Hindi writers discuss their art, modernity/tradition, the critic and much more. Extracts of her conversations with Qurratulain Hyder and Nirmal Verma. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Ignored in his lifetime by mainstream Urdu poetry movements, Majeed Amjad pointed Urdu lyric in new directions, to nature as threatened life, to Time in the here-and-now. Riyaz Latif translates the poet’s exquisite yet earthy visions. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Awakening from the illusions of imaginary utopias promised by ‘historical Time’ Ashoak Upadhyay avers can help us discover the book of an expansive Present with no beginning or end.
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Personal Notes
Amidst recurrent communal riots and Hindu-Muslim tensions in colonial Bengal, Tagore and Begum Rokeya, with vastly different backgrounds, religious identities, upbringing and creative sensibilities, stepped out of their cultural and gendered borders to embrace the ‘other’ says Mohammad A. Quayum …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Almost two decades ago, Ruth Vanita looked around for a ‘Hindu left’ as a foil to the Hindu Right. She did not find it; its absence led to questions that are relevant even more so today and need to be discussed.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
How to explain the spiritual homelessness of the rooted, of one who has never left his home? Nirmal Verma on the consequent ‘loss of self’ and the place of literature in describing it. Translated by Alok Bhalla.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Like it was for the ancient philosophers in India, China and Greece, philosophy for Gandhi was a way of life not just the construction of theories, says K.P. Shankaran …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Gandhi is the last representative of the sant traditions of India. Vinay Lal explores this proposition particularly with reference to his unequivocal admiration for the bhajan, “Vaishnavajana to” (“Call Only That One a Vaishnava”) …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this concluding part of his journey through Hindi cinema’s Nehruvian tryst, Darius Cooper finds an era of vanishing illusions, nostalgia and incipient despair
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Between the Lines
Lokmanya Tilak’s death centenary (August 01) and the end of the annual celebratory Ganesh Chaturthi procession he launched prompts Mayank Bhatt to re-visit that leader’s shifting stances and his role as ‘nationalist’ leader. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Born in Kerala, poet and translator A.J. Thomas evokes a bond with the heart of Bengal in this poetic memoir, fusing the personal and the physical, seeking amidst its squalor and hopelessness “a familiar wag of humanity’s tail”.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
If wretchedness has scarred their lives and hasten their death, it’s only the poor who are to be blamed. That’s what we in our hall of mirrors have been led to believe, says Ashoak Upadhyay in this second of a four part series. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Urdu polymath Shamsur Rahman Faruqi deconstructs our inherited ideas on culture, nation and history; points to a rich tradition of Indian or Indo-Muslim identity evolving against a colonial ethos. And it is still intact. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Geetha Sukumaran, poet and translator blurs boundaries in her poems to negotiate multiple identities; diasporic Indo-Canadian, career woman and diverse inheritances of Western and a glorious Tamil women-poets’ tradition. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Fifty years after Gandhi’s death, Ashis Nandy identified four personae of Mohandas Gandhi that survived; perhaps there are more in this haunted, frightened republic. But those four are worth recalling.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
She wasn’t just a pioneer of handicrafts but of women’s rights in India, an activist of the anti-colonial struggles and a visionary of the ‘Global South’ as a dialogic third space in world politics unmediated by the West, says Vinay Lal.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Two texts, two visions of the evolving self and poetic futures. Murali Sivaramakrishnan looks for parallels and differences in the radical gaze of a mystic and a Marxist.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
An invaluable eye witness indictment of police brutality on students and faculty at the Aligarh Muslim University in December by a team of civil society members.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The narratives about the Indian economy have flattened out to a plot about a number, a statistic, a means that has become an end erasing the people that count, or should, says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[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]…
Visual Spaces
In a world of over-representation, is it possible to experience reality without the intermediation of our conditioned existence? Murali Sivaramakrishnan thinks so; his visual expressions he contends, “are coloured by my experience of earth and by my inner feelings.” …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a tribute to Miraji on his 70th death anniversary Geeta Patel reflects on his poetic queerness and its gift to readers of the ecstasies of incomplete meanings.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, authors of novels about dystopic futures penned thoughts on Gandhi that reflect their own visions of possible freedoms from the worlds they had created. …[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]…
Personal Notes
In a unique portrayal of his struggle to come to terms with Gandhi’s experiments in truth, Nirmal Kumar Bose introduces a new aesthetic of a multilayered memoir. Relevant with the release of Manuben’s diary. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
After all that book-learning, what do you get? Massive shots of macho-nationalist adrenalin to help ease into unstable jobs that nurture helplessness and hatreds says Aneel Simran.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Meta-narratives that merge the folk, the tribal and the mainstream in people’s memories rephrase binaries of good and evil, high and low, godly and demoniac says Murali Sivaramakrishnan.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Diving into the imaginary of poetry, the “interiors of alphabets” Ashwani Kumar searches for the character that could have written those mythic-realist poems about Banaras and the Other and discovers they are his heteronyms. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The ‘iron cage’ of rationality, utility and control has stripped learning of creativity, Ananda and the play of imagination says Ashoak Upadhyay. And yet, in this ‘nullity’ you can hear voices of resistance and recovery as wisdoms of alternative futures.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In the two films, Darius Cooper locates the markers of spirituality to which the technology of cinema surrenders.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Each of us has multiple Ramayanas circulating in our imagination. Some are befriended in childhood, others come to us through the arts, few through political associations and yet others we create.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Each passing day provides us appalling and tragic evidence of shackled humanity and incurable traumas. Does the future mean more of the same? In this collection of essays editors Kothari and Joy bring together themes of alternative futures, traces of which were and are, already upon us. Their Introduction maps out the visions of possible futures and redemptive choices.…[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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
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]…
