Rahul Gaikwad Every now and then one comes across some or the other celebrated so-called progressive leader/writer/activist who turns out to be absolutely shallow, superfluous and even hypocritical upon closer examination. This has been the case with Vijay Tendulkar and his Kanyadaan drama; or Pandit Anand Patwardhan’s Jai Bhim Comrade where he portrayed Ambedkarite assertion …
Serious Men – Not so Serious about Dalit Realities
Neeraj Bunkar The recently released ‘Serious Men’ is an Indian Hindi language comedy drama film directed by Sudhir Mishra. The film is based on a book of the same name by Manu Joseph. This movie revolves around the issue of child genius scams. Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Ayyan Mani) plays a migrant Tamil Dalit man who lives …
Manu Joseph’s Serious Men: A tale of two brahmins
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 …
The Quantum Journalism of Manu Joseph
Umar Nizar ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible’. -Janet Malcolm In the surveillance police state of the globalized contemporary world, Manu Joseph has somewhat achieved the acme of the savarna journalist and has assumed …
The Colonial Lens of an Ethnographic Research: A Note on Nandini Krishnan’s Invisible Men
Arpita Jaya Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Network, and its author Nandini Krishnan’s remorseless responses to the serious objections raised by quite a few transmen and transwomen activists, is yet another page in the genre of ‘sweet-tempered liberal’ transphobia.These volumes of academic and non-fiction literature produced in India, which while claiming to depict the …