Varis Alvi Archives | The Beacon Webzine

As If He Wanders Out of Rembrandt’s Painting for a Promenade

August 5, 2020 The Beacon 0

Personal Notes

Gujarati poet Yagnesh Dave recalls meeting with the late Varis Alvi at his home and an epiphanous moment when his host puts him in mind of a Rembrandt figure.…[Read More]…

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The Beacon is a web-based only feature magazine of writing and reading (long-form essays, fiction and poetry) that believes in confluences more than in consensus. The Beacon searches for the intersections at which political/economic analyses meet literature, the personal weaves into the social, the real is imagined and unity spells diversity. Confluences make conversations meaningful and possible; intersections are the locations for cultures—of diversity, differences, pluralism, hybridity.

The Beacon eschews the prioritisation of the real over the imagined, of the social over the personal, of political/economic analyses over literature, of matter over mind and of the material over the ethical. The Beacon will endeavour to become the site for a new language and poetry of resistance–to oppression, to banality and the ghettoization of the mind.

The Greatest Malayalam Storiess Ever Told. Selected and Edited by A.J. Thomas Aleph Book Company. November 2023. 464 pages

The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told is a collection of fifty brilliant short stories translated from the Malayalam. Selected and translated by poet, editor, and translator A. J. Thomas, this collection includes established masters such as Karoor Neelakanta Pillai, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Lalithambika Antharjanam, Ponkunnam Varkey, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, S. K. Pottekkatt, Uroob, O. V. Vijayan, M. T. Vasudevan Nair, and Paul Zacharia, as well as accomplished new voices such as N. Prabhakaran, C. V. Balakrishnan, Aymanam John, Chandramathi, and others….

The stoies in this volume portray with brilliance and nuance the complex tapestry of the Malayali experience down the ages.

I Belong to Nowhere: Poems of Hope and Resistance. Kalyani Thakur Charal. Trans. from Bengali by Mrinmoy Pramanick and Sipra Mukherjee. Iltd Axis March 2023 112 pages
Militant, satirical, and biting, Kalyani Charal pulls no punches in eviscerating paternalistic – and patriarchal – bourgeois socialists who speak on behalf of others. Writing from lived experience, Charal delineates the values that fuel the social machinery of caste oppression, while drawing parallels with social and racial marginalisation around the world. Thus, in her poetry, the specificity of Dalit lives in Bengal, a region which prides itself on its Leftist history and enlightened culture, and whose partition into India and Bangladesh has left a legacy of communal tension, refugees, and statelessness, is at the same time the universality of precarity, marginality and dispossession. Finally, there is space for love – wistful and full-throated, with an attentiveness to the natural world that speaks to her claim that “all Dalit woman writers are eco feminists”

Of Prayers and Tears: Essays On Political Theology Saitya Brata Das. Pickwick Publications October 2023. 156 pages

This work intervenes in contemporary debates on “postsecularism” and “the return to religion.” By introducing the question of eschatology anew, this book reintroduces the problem of transcendence that effectively calls into question the logic of sovereign power and rethinks the place of ”religion” as an affirmation of what lies beyond, which does not function as the legitimizing principle of sovereignty in today’s world of mass consumption.
“Every book by Saitya Brata Das not only demands we think in new ways, but in his articulation of political theology as poetics, facilitates us to do so. Via his rare command of both deep thought and emancipatory language, in this latest offering we are confronted by what transformation can and does mean–if we are prepared to be accept it. This is a tremendous tour de force of thought and depth and insight.”
–Mike Grimshaw, associate professor of sociology, University of Canterbury

The Political Theology of Life. Saitya Brata Das. Pickwick Publications. February 2023. 200 pages (Hardcover)

Taking up the work of Meister Eckhart, F. W. J. von Schelling, and Soren Kierkegaard, Political Theology of Life formulates the task of an unconditional affirmation of life….

The work thereby argues that in today’s neoliberal-secular world of narcissistic mass-consumption in the age of extreme capitalism, such an affirmation of life–released from the grasp of sovereign power–is the highest ethico-religious task of our time. The work shows that each of these thinkers–Meister Eckhart at the epochal closure of the medieval world, and Schelling and Kierkegaard from the heart of the epochal condition of modernity–has exposed open a dimension of infinitude and manifestation that can be truly inspiring for us; that is to say, in the abandonment of all worldly attributes lies a receptivity to the highest gift of beatitude, an opening to the infinitude that sanctifies our worldly existence…

Dust on the Throne . The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Douglas Ober. Navayana March 2023 392 pages

Received wisdom has it that Buddhism disappeared from India, the land of its birth, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, long forgotten until British colonial scholars re-discovered it in the early 1800s. Its full-fledged revival, so the story goes, only occurred in 1956, when Dr. B.R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with half a million of his Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) followers. This, however, is only part of the story. Dust on the Throne reframes discussions about the place of Buddhism in the subcontinent from the early nineteenth century onwards, uncovering the integral, yet unacknowledged, role that Indians played in the making of modern global Buddhism in the century prior to Ambedkar’s conversion, and the numerous ways that Buddhism gave powerful shape to modern Indian history.

Through an extensive examination of disparate materials held at archives and temples across South Asia, Douglas Ober explores Buddhist religious dynamics in an age of expanding colonial empires, intra-Asian connectivity, and the histories of Buddhism produced by nineteenth and twentieth century Indian thinkers…

Sakina’s Kiss Vivek Shanbag. (Trans.) Srinath Perur. Vintage Books. October 2023 194 pages

Venkat answers urgent knocks on the door to his flat one evening to find two insolent young men claiming to have business with his daughter Rekha. He deals with them shortly, only to find his quiet, middle-class life upended by a bewildering set of events over the next few days.

Even as Venkat is hurled into a world of street gangs and murky journalism, we see a parallel narrative unfold of a betrayal and disappearance from long ago. Could there be a connection? Set over four mostly sleepless days, we see Venkat lose grasp of the narrative even as he loses grasp of his wife and daughter.

Exquisitely translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Sakina’s Kiss is a delicate, precise meditation on the persistence of old biases―and a rattled masculinity―in India’s changing social and political landscape. Ingeniously crafted, Vivek Shanbhag interrogates the space between truth and perception in this unforgettable foray into the minefield of family life.

What a book! Quietly unsettling… [Vivek Shanbhag is] unique and subtle in his storytelling. — Geetanjali Shree, author of the International Booker Prize-winning ‘Tomb of Sand’

Fire on the Ganges : Life Among the Dead in Banaras. Radhika Iyengar Fourth Estate India. September 2023 352 pages

The Doms are a Dalit sub-caste in Banaras designated by tradition to perform the Hindu rite of cremation. They have ownership of the sacred fire without which, it is believed, the Hindu soul will not achieve liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. Despite this, the community is condemned to the lowest order in caste hierarchy, and its members continue to be treated as ‘untouchables’.

Fire on the Ganges is the first attempt to chronicle the everyday realities of the Doms. It plunges into Banaras’s historical past, while narrowing its lens to a few spirited characters from the Dom community. Through their tales of struggle and survival, loss and ambition, betrayal and love, it tells the at-times-heartbreaking, at-times-exhilarating story of a community struggling to find a place beyond that accorded to it by ancient tradition.

—‘With admirable elegance and empathy, Radhika Iyengar tells stories of a community that has not been spared caste prejudice despite its traditional “prerogative” of cremating Hindus at the most auspicious ghats along the Ganga.’ MANOJ MITTA

Heavy Metal: How a Global Corporation Poisoned Kdaikanal. Ameer Shahul. Macmillan India. February 2023 416 pages

A terrifying investigative account of a global corporation’s role in perpetrating India’s greatest mercury poisoning catastrophe. In 2001, a Hindustan Unilever-owned thermometer factory in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, made national headlines when a massive dump of broken mercury thermometers was discovered at a local scrapyard. As the multinational corporation conducted one hasty internal assessment after another to save face, state authorities discovered that the company had violated all acceptable guidelines for toxic waste disposal measures, causing grievous harm to its workers’ health and the region’s fragile ecosystem. As evidence of mercury poisoning among workers mounted, the local community – aided by environmental watchdog Greenpeace and various public-interest organizations – launched a battle against the multibillion-dollar conglomerate that would last fifteen years, culminating in an undisclosed settlement paid to 600 of its ex-employees. And despite the factory’s closure, scientific reports would reveal mercury levels to be 1,000 times higher than the safe limit, raising serious concerns about HUL’s toxic legacy in the hill station. For years, Ameer Shahul, a former investigative reporter and Greenpeace campaigner, closely tracked the Kodaikanal mercury poisoning case. The result is Heavy Metal, a blistering account of a colossal industrial tragedy precipitated by corporate negligence and acts of omission and commission at the highest levels.

The End of August. Yu Miri. Translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles. Tilted Axis June 2023 710 pages

In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-Cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag. Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. With the help of powerful Korean shamans, she summons the spirit of Lee Woo-Cheol only to be immersed in the memories of her grandfather, his brother, Lee Woo-Gun, and their neighbour, a young teen who was tricked into becoming a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers. A meditative dance of generations, The End of August is a semi-autobiographical investigation into nationhood and family – what you are born into and what is imposed.

Language Diversity and the Making of India Ganesh Devy