Vaibhav Kharat The first installment of a trilogy directed by Arun Matheswaran, ‘Captain Miller’, features Dhanush, Shiva Rajkumar, Nassar, Sundeep Kishan, and Nivedhithaa Sathish in key roles. Initially released in theaters, the film later became available on Amazon Prime Video. Penned by Arunraja Kamaraj and Madhan Karky, it was produced by Sathya Jyothi Films. As …
Reading Kanthapura: The Curious Case of the Cat’s Asceticism
Ankit Ramteke Raja Rao wrote Kanthapura in the 1930s when he was a twenty-one-year-old, living “in a 13th-century old castle in the French Alps belonging to the Dauphins of France” (Naik 60). It was first published in 1938, and since then, starting from E.M. Forster’s famous remark — that it was one of the finest …
Typing Out on the Keyboard: A Colonial Spectre or Failure of the Indian Nation-State
Vinod Kumar I was writing something down, jotting down my thoughts about a certain incident, or perhaps, it was merely a random idea; it was a feeling I wanted to note down soon after having my breakfast. In the middle of recording my thoughts in English, I felt the urgent need to write a few …
Ideology of English
Kuffir Nalgundwar It isn’t about the English language. It is about what the votaries of English medium education, primarily in government schools in India [want]. It is already there in private schools. There are very few private regional language schools left. Just looking at the stats also, now there are nearly 1.5 million schools …
Archiving the Complex Genealogies of Caste and Sexuality: An Interview with Dr. Anjali Arondekar
Anjali Arondekar This interview emerged as a series of email exchanges between Rohan Arthur and Dr. Anjali Arondekar who works on the Gomantak Maratha Samaj archives, following Rohan’s tribute essay on Kishori Amonkar titled Kishori Amonkar: Assertion, Erasure, Reclamation. The interview was conducted with inputs from James Michael and Akshay Pathak. Can you describe the historical origins …
Neobrahmanism, human rights and social democracy
Braj Ranjan Mani (First published in 2009) The image of India is that of a democratic, multicultural, inclusive society. But more often than not, appearances are not reality. India is a republic—a secular, socialist, democratic republic—where millions of children, women and men remain demoralised, enslaved to the powerful, crying out for fundamentals of life. Fragmented …
Feet of Clay: Amitav Ghosh and the Imperial Indian Gaze
— Jason Keith Fernandes A couple of days ago, an interview, of the part-time Goa resident author Amitav Ghosh, with Lila Azam Zanganeh for the magazine Guernica created something of a storm of outrage. Ghosh had suggested in the course of conversation, that ‘one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; [is that] it lets …
Elite Responses: Constructing ‘Hinduism’
by Gail Omvedt ( An excerpt from the chapter ‘Colonial Challenges, Indian Responses and Buddhist Revival‘ from the book ‘Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste‘) The response of the Brahmanic elite to colonial challenges was to emphasise the question of foreign rule and regain independence. The challenge of industrialisation and India’s material backwardness was …
First feminist war of the new century
by Chandra Bhan Prasad British imperialism did help serve the Dalits’ cause. The sciences, modern institutions and democracy were attendant features of colonialism which, in turn, shook the very foundations of the Varna order. The British, however, had no such intent when Queen Elizabeth granted a charter to a few London businessmen on December 31, …