For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Umar Nizar In the wake of the election of Narendra Modi, the sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan made the startling claim that Modi’s OBC credentials were obliterated by the fact of his fair skin, which for working class Indians heralded upper class antecedents. (Shiv Vishwanathan himself was caught in a rather strange double bind, having supported …
Umar Nizar Muslims in India form a significant minority, numbering almost 140 million. These Muslim belong to various denomination including, Sufi, Salafi and Sunni and the Jama’at-e-Islami. The public sphere in India has been caste and class ridden in a way that MN Srinivas (1989) observes in his work on Sanskritization, where people belonging to …
Umar Nizar The Bhakti movement of Ramanuja, Nimbarka, Madhava, Ramananda, Vallabhacharya, Chaitanya, Nam Dev, Kabir, and Guru Nanak had very little impact on Kerala…. The problem of reconciliation between Hinduism and Islam also did not arise seriously in Kerala in that period. Contact with outside ceased to exist in the age of Chola imperialistic …
Umar Nizar The road to hell is paved with good intentions. With the rather misleading moniker `Sufi’, social media celebrity and Arundhati Roy groupie, Mayank Austen Soofi ambles around Delhi, chronicling the lives of the apparently destitute. This has earned him accolades in the form of invitations to the `Serendipity Arts Festival’ in Goa and …
Umar Nizar The Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC) has been at the forefront of the propagation of Marxist ideals in Kerala since its inception. This has taken the form of polemical plays such as Thoppil Bhasi’s `Ningal Enne Communistaakki’ (You Made me into a Communist) which later invited the reposte `Ningal Aare Communistaakki’ (Whom …
Umar Nizar Father Brown, GK Chesterton’s indefatigable clergyman sleuth says in one of his romps, ‘G.O.D spelt backwards becomes D.O.G’. In the recent Iranian movie Kupal (2017, Kazem Mollaie) winner at the Bogota Film Festival, which is about a taxidermist who finds himself locked inside a safe chamber by himself, having to kill and …
Umar Nizar Snuff films: murder on camera for commercial gain. The world’s first conference devoted to the mythology of snuff took place at the University of Bournemouth on a weekend in November 2012, a clear indication of how attitudes have changed in the last two decades: the organizers and a number of the delegates …
Umar Nizar How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called ‘reality’. We can destroy it only as creators.-Nietzche, ‘Gay Science If you are seeking origins of the caste system, then …
Umar Nizar In the mess bill that is religiously brought out every month by JNU’s Jhelum hostel, there is an outstanding amount of Rs.5200 against the name of J.Muthukrishanan. This is the sum that he owes the ‘nation.’ It is a bad education loan, given in kind, and extracted pitilessly. The research scholar’s relationship …