For An Informed Ambedkar Age
James Martin, Salvation Army Community Welfare Association (SACWA) Protest Dharna by Salvation Army Community Welfare Association (SACWA), Kowdiar, Trivandrum (Kerala) The Salvation Army is an evangelical church which is both a religious and a charitable organization. The church members are mostly Dalits and other economically backward people. But the recent activities of this church-cum-charity organisation …
Abdullah Rahman, Rahul Meenakshi & Sanjana Krishnan ‘Kiss of Love’ and the Islamophobic Undercurrent of the Movement The famous case of Downtown restaurant in Calicut that was vandalised by Bharatiya Janta Yuva Morcha (BJYM) on 24th October, 2014 for allegedly promoting immoral activities is now a nationwide furore. The goons of the BJP’s youth wing …
Ajith Kumar A S (Published originally in the website Azhimukham; translated from Malayalam by Deepti Sreeram) K.J. Yesudas has two kinds of voice that differ from each other. The first being his singing voice and the other being the one that we hear when he speaks. This difference is not merely one that confine to …
James Michael History of a prejudice Yesudas’s recent remark against women wearing jeans is not an exceptional phenomenon. My parents and aunts are similarly prejudiced against jeans as much as some of your aunts and parents are. But that does not quite make my father or mother or scores of my other relatives misogynist. Neither …
Kancha Ilaiah Ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come to power, issues related to Muslims in India are zooming into focus. Though during the election campaign Narendra Modi indirectly talked about “appeasement”, “votebank” politics and the preferential treatment meted out to Muslims by the Congress Party, he did not make their identity …
Joby Mathew [Today marks the 150th birth anniversary of Ayyankali. On 18th June this year, which marks his 73rd death anniversary, Kerala University instituted a chair in his name and invited Arundhati Roy to deliver the keynote address in which she reduced the ‘Ambedkar-Gandhi debate into a Gandhi-Arundhati debate’ and ‘deliberately ignored’ Ayyankali] The …
Gee Imaan Semmalar In Kerala, a new political and cultural assertion is happening amongst Dalit communities, filmmakers and intellectuals that radically questions the deafening mainstream silence and denial of caste. In the field of filmmaking, Rupesh Kumar and Ajith Kumar A.S have emerged as voices who bring power to a certain kind of representational …
Chandramohan.S Dr. Ajay Sekher, writer, translator, artist and Assistant Professor of English at S S University of Sanskrit (Tirur Centre) received the ‘Aadiyar Deepam’ award recently. In this conversation with the young poet Chandramohan.S, he talks about the award, his writing, research and translations. Chandramohan: Please enlighten us about this award. Ajay Sekher: …
Pallavi Muraleedharan As I was perusing the newspaper the other day, the photo of a teenager caught my attention. It wasn’t a very unusual thing to see a beautiful fair-skinned young girl winning the Bharatanatyam or Kuchipudi competitions in the school youth festivals. After all, those are perhaps the only competitions that satiate the …