January 22 has been projected as Victory Day. It is, of course, a victory, but not of the vibrant Hindu religious tradition, but of a majoritarian, exclusionist project that is deadly opposed to an inclusive, modern, and dynamic idea of India. The hurried consecration signifies not any vindication of Hinduism, but its appropriation by a… Read More The idea of Ram and the idea of India
मध्यमार्ग का अवसान : दिलीप सिमियन (Translated by Suman Keshari)The Broken Middle 1984 की हिंसात्मक घटनाओं को मुख्य रूप से सहमति की राजनीति और साझा भारतीय राष्ट्रवाद के आदर्श के विघटन के रूप में देखा जाना चाहिए। जब साम्प्रदायिक शत्रुताएँ समाज में व्यापक रूप से फैलती हैं, तो वे (प्रत्यक्षतः अथवा अवचेतन ढंग से) सामाजिक चेतना को छिजाते… Read More मध्यमार्ग का अवसान: दिलीप सिमियन (EPW, November 2014)
Mosque’s Imam said the demolition operation was surreptitiously carried out before sunrise on Tuesday. Pieces of debris were meticulously removed to conceal the demolition from the public eye, he said. This shocking event unfolded amidst a broader demolition drive by the DDA and the Forest Department in the Sanjay Van area. Temples, dargahs, and graveyards… Read More No Notice Served: 600-Year-Old Mosque Razed in South Delhi’s Mehrauli Locality
First posted August 15, 2013 “Yes, I know all that. I should be modern” – begins Ramanujan’s ‘Conventions of Despair’. Others in India have felt this impulse, and it has pulled them in different directions. In politics, it has drawn them towards nationalism, socialism and fascism. In religion, it has had similarly contradictory effects: either… Read More Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council
NB: D. D. Kosambi (1907-1966) was one of India’s most accomplished intellectuals. Hailing from Goa, he was a polyglot familiar with Konkani, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, English, French, Italian and German (I may have missed some languages). He was a mathematician, statistician, geneticist, philologist, physicist, numismatist, archaeologist, historian and public intellectual (find a biography here). He… Read More ‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham
Avay Shukla This last week has established that plumbing the depths of the ridiculous and the bizarre is not only our national pastime, it is also now the leitmotif of our society and ruling regime. The other day I decided I needed a “kurta”, not one of those fancy and expensive Myntra creations, but something… Read More Of Shankaracharyas and Cameracharyas
‘What would (Gandhi) have thought of a serving Chief Justice making public visits to temples and getting himself photographed and giving interviews about it in the process?’ Ramachandra Guha Ramachandra Guha, the well-known biographer of Mahatma Gandhi and one of India’s leading political commentators, discusses his articles criticising Chief Justice Chandrachud both for wrongly understanding… Read More Ramachandra Guha on the Chief Justice, Mahatma Gandhi and Saffron Robes
Titled “Ayodhya: Where Divinity Meets Modernity,” the full-page colour ad that the Uttar Pradesh government put out in newspapers recently made me pause. Beneath the photos of the model Rama temple and of the CM of UP and the PM, the verbose ad claimed that the “double engine government” was “restoring” the “glory” of “the… Read More Chandan Gowda: Two Kinds of Hindus
Fahad Zuberi The New Delhi Municipal Council’s plan to demolish Delhi’s Sunehri Bagh Masjid has triggered an uproar. While the Delhi High Court is hearing another petition challenging the status quo, a section of the media has already begun linking objections – especially those by political leaders such as AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi – to an… Read More Heritage, freedom struggle, practical solutions: What NDMC’s Sunehri Masjid plan has overlooked
“If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country.” — B.R. Ambedkar In a recent talk in Bengaluru, the writer, Parakala Prabhakar, made a perceptive observation about the changing language of political discourse. In the late 1980s, when the Bharatiya Janata Party was first becoming a… Read More Ramachandra Guha: Reign of faith
After the truth-shower 