In the first half of the 1990s India found itself at a crossroads: severe economic crisis; high level of political violence; threats to the integrity of the nation; the international context thoroughly changed. Nevertheless, by 1996 India had achieved significant economic liberalisation, new improved relations, and separatist threats had been defused. All these critical achievements […]
Read More… from Narasimha Rao government and the Mandal-Mandir issue (1991-1996) (tentative title)
Previous research in the field of diasporic language attrition and maintenance have suggested that home languages are replaced by host-land languages. They have also shown that home languages survive with phrases and vocabulary related to mainly food, kinship terms, and religious and social rituals and ceremonies. However, most of these studies focused on what has […]
Read More… from Attrition and Maintenance of the South Asian Languages in the Indian Diaspora
Contemporary Indian politics is witnessing a change, where the Modi government has started an outreach to the Muslims not as a monolithic community but recognising the socio- economic hierarchy existent in the Indian Muslims. The Modi government also claims of a large number of Pasmanda (backward Muslims, who constitute a majority of Muslims in India) […]
This paper aims to examine some of the debates that accompanied the articulation of a radical Marxist poetics in Urdu in late colonial, early postcolonial South Asia. Building on the Urdu poet Iftikhar Jalib’s notion of poetry as “intimacy with the labyrinth,” I intend to cast a revisionist look at the efforts to fashion a […]
Resistance poetry which resists conformity or compliance with so called mainstream tradition generally emerges on two counts—– either contents of the poetry would be so radically different that it may not get any sanctions from the traditional poetics of its time or on the other level, its style and form will be unconventional to such […]
Read More… from Tradition of Resistance Poetry in Khari Boli Hindi
Female ritual specialists, maharis were introduced in Odishan temples in the 11th century. Their dance is acknowledged as an important ancestor of contemporary Odissi, but they were never consulted during the reconstruction process due to alleged ties to prostitution circulated by local and colonial stake holders in the twentieth century. Songs authored by the maharis […]
What are the multiple temporalities that shape the lives of the pavement dwellers of Mumbai? Examining memories of migration that bind together different times in painful and unexpected ways, the violent dialectic of encroachment and eviction that plays out in and through space and time, the invisibilised histories, the precarity of the present, and the […]
Read More… from Does time heal all injuries? A critical examination of resilience
Over the last decade, majoritarian violence and religious divisiveness in India has been brought about through citizenship policy. This has been brought about by mob justice, incendiary speeches by members of the government, police violence, and importantly through legislation. A curious facet of such phenomena is justification through law, including constitutional language. In this paper, […]
Read More… from Hindu Zion: The Politics of Constitutional Accommodation
The controversy surrounding the English translation of Madhurobaagan (2010) by Tamil author Perumal Murugan as One Part Woman (2013) gained international attention. It brought to light the issues of censorship and freedom of expression in India. The author and his book faced widespread criticism for portraying Hindu women. In contrast, the translation of the Urdu […]
On 8 October 2020, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) – namely the agency which deals with terror related crime – took into custody Jesuit social activist Father Stan Lourduswamy for his alleged links with Maoists and banned organizations. Father Stan Swamy – as was generally called for brief – in spite of being octogenarian and […]
