For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Chanchal Kumar The entire intellectual development of Rahul Roushan, the author of the memoir Sanghi who never went to a Shakha, who is a Bihari bhumihar and presently, CEO of the BJP/RSS news portal ‘OpIndia.com”, can be summed up in the following sentences: His father, an English literature teacher and a liberal Hindu, tried …
Chanchal Kumar What makes great literature? Or, to be more precise, great poetry? Mark Yakich, the American poet believes, “Reading a good poem doesnt give you something to talk about. It silences you. Reading a great poem pushes further. It prepares you for the silence that perplexes us all: death.” I share this idea. …
Chanchal Kumar Manu Joseph’s award-winning debut novel has been lauded for breaking away from the norm in its depiction of the dalit male character as an intelligent but cunning person. In the words of the author, Ayyan Mani is an “exceptional” individual who is “a freak, in a way” (Joseph 2010). While historically, dalits …
Chanchal Kumar “We lived happily during the war”, the first poem in Ilya Kaminsky’s book Deaf Republic begins. It continues, And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protestedbut not enough, we opposed them but not enough. To better fit this poem to the India of 2019 (the results of general elections announced, with …
Chanchal Kumar The critic Walter Benjamin, talking about a piece of literature, says that the truth content of the work becomes more relevant only if it is bound up with its subject matter “inconspicuously and intimately”. If we go by this explanation then Loknath Yashwant’s volume places a mirror to us, in order that …
Chanchal Kumar Yogesh Maitreya is an assured new voice in dalit English literature. His debut poetry collection “The Bridge of Migration” was published in 2017 by Panther’s Paw Publication. This essay is first in a series I intend to write about his poems from the above mentioned volume. The poem I begin with is …
Chanchal Kumar Chandramohan Sathyanathan’s poems are “plus-sized”, his poetry comes “without introduction or foreword from veterans”. By thus asserting their uniqueness and difference from the writing of his peers, he claims the historical tradition that harks back to the culture of writing of which Namdeo Dhasal is a major name, and for him personally, …
Chanchal Kumar I will start with an anecdote: I used to share a flat with a Brahmin and other savarnas when I first moved to Delhi from my home in Jharkhand. And I remember them poking fun at the surnames of those from adivasi backgrounds. I used to join in the activity, not knowing …
Chanchal Kumar This essay shows with examples that incidents of caste discrimination have only proliferated instead of stopping in any way in modern towns and even in the national capital Delhi. I have been personally affected by it in my adult life. The only people for whom caste does not exist is savarnas, who …