For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Kshirod Nag To engage with the ‘three responses’ by Nivedita Menon, Partha Chatterjee and Sudipto Kaviraj to Perry Anderson’s Indian Ideology (Verso, 2013) is quite an interesting exercise. Not exactly for any rich content or explanations by these ‘acclaimed’ intellectuals of our times, but more for the kind of approaches they have adopted to …
Trevor Jeyaraj While there is no dearth of critique of the religious Majoritarianism, the view that comes harsh on the sacred for intruding into the public sphere, there is really a lacuna in terms of the dissent from the religious and even the few attempts to do the same is forestalled. This piece is …
Nikhil Walde After its electoral victory, BJP’s entire politics revolves around the Hindu religion which has brought about a dismal political scenario in India. The state seems to be departing from constitutional democracy- from the modern function of a state to the traditional monocratic form of state. All this is quite evident, for instance, …
Yogesh Maitreya I had started to read texts on Buddhism during my four years at one of the Buddhist orders. It was first conceptualised in a western country, i.e., England, and then started its operation in India in the late 1980s. I read several texts. I found the classical ones to be unclear but …
Ajith Kumar A S & K Ashraf Certain debates are constructed around the deceptive dialectics of progressive versus retrograde. The scheme of either/or motivates us to fall in line on the point of saying either an unequivocal yes or a categorical no. Fissures in the society and politics are sometimes rendered invisible through such …
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 …
Abul Kalam Azad (I would like to thank Nidhin whose brilliant article has prodded me to thread my thoughts into this piece) “An untouchable to a hindu is an untouchable to a muslim”, Dr.B.R Ambedkar. Throughout my life, I have always been enticed and engulfed by silence- the silence of unrequited love, the silence …
Kancha Ilaiah When a religion treats the labouring castes as impure, naturally the indignity of labour becomes the essence of the nation. Does not this situation need to change? The Modi government seems to believe that a change should be brought in school curriculum by re-working the text books that NCERT brings out. To …
Nidhin Shobhana This essay is an outcome of a conversation I had with myself. The slaughter of Mohsin Shaikh, a Muslim technology professional was my point of departure. It was a reminder of a potent threat and a safe illusion – the threat of being a minority in an Organized Brahmanic Majoritarian Order and …