Between The Lines
To homogenise the hijab into one single idea is to homogenise the entire population of Muslim women and to betray and deny their lived experiences as both hijabi and non-hijabi Muslim women, argues Izza Ahsan…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
If we are to call out Russia’s actions as pre-emptive war, how should we view the West’s invasions of Iraq, Syria Afghanistan and other sovereign states? What role does language and hubris play in justifying such wars of terror asks Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Krishna Sobti had a lot to say about the tangled interweave of religion, politics, Partition in the lives of the communities they affected and still do. Alok Bhalla offers a critical preview of her vison followed by extracts of his conversation with her that is remarkable for its relevance today.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Alok Bhalla looks back at Partition as “borders of sorrow” created by violence bred by intolerant religious identities. Partition literature however comes across differently: not as dossiers of hatreds but as chronicles of yearning for that “good civilization” that once was and could be. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Intizar Husain (21 December 1925-2 February 2016) was a writer whose sensibilities were formed in the fires of the 1947 Partition but equally in the myths and memories of a ‘good’ life, Uprooted, he remained a rooted cosmopolitan feels Ashoak Upadhyay…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Vijay Tendulkar’s oeuvre portrays women in myriad roles across the social spectrum–housewife, teacher, mistress, daughter, film extra, servant—and their complex emotions that reveal truths in slant. Balwant Bhaneja unpacks some of the plays for us…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Digital platforms have been used by common people to create gender-inequality narratives that fuse the personal into the political, fact and feeling, to create “intimate publics” of solidarity avers Shweta Khilnani…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
What led Gandhi that “incorrigible optimist” to lose the will to live, crave death so soon into country’s independence? Based on his public confessions, Sudhir Chandra asks disturbing questions of us who celebrate his anniversaries, unmindful of his agonies.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
He died with the name of Ram on his lips. Who was this Ram he invoked all his life? The historical Ram? What did the name siignify for Gandhi? Tridip Suhrud offers some clues into a moral vision Ramanama held for him.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Indulging in a flight of fantasy, Tridip Suhrud hones in on remembrances of Gandhi that reflect our desires to do away with him, not with bulllets but with statues and spectacle. And yet he lives……[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Reading the memoirs of Dalits can help free the upper caste liberal of the pious but needless moral burden of defining them. Just listen to the internality of a Dalit life instead, urges Ratnakar Tripathy …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Stepping back from the popular perception of Taliban ‘terror’ Padmaja Challakere traces the causes of Afghanistan’s blighted condition to America’s hegemonic war and its tyrannical legacies…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Interrogating notions such as “national identity” through the lens of creative writers can be rewarding feels Nicola Pozza as he delves into texts of S. H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ (1911-1987), who had regarded essentialist categories–“Hinduism”, “Indianness” or “Hindutva” — with much suspicion. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Mridula Garg looks back at our violence on nature that has caused endemic catastrophes in which the poor suffer the most as India shows. She draws on writings she considers fables for our futures.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Rooted in his faith and classical langauges, Abul Kalam Azad, should also be remembered for his love of Indic culture and his contribution to the institutional safeguard of its diverse expressions, says S. Irfan Habib …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Curated by Alok Bhalla, for The Beacon, ‘Asians in Africa’ offers glimpses of a diasporic existence as seen by various writers; experiences that carried the promise of belonging and the prospect of loss and flight. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
M.G.Vassanji runs us through a turbulent period of Asian –African history that birthed new literary and political initiatives of confluences, yet failed its promises. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
A tribute to Makhan Singh, leftist thinker, who fought for Kenyan freedom, The Red Prophet, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s words, “ is epic in scope and conception, and Brechtian in its unfolding.”…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Political lies and falsehoods work their malevolent magic when they are transmitted as images of manufactured reality, illusions that create the complicit subject says Ashoak Upadhyay…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Recent moves by the administrator of Lakshadweep will have severe ecological, social and cultural impact on the inhabitants not to mention on the fragile ecosystem around the islands says Vikalp Sangam…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
A tribal matriarch nurtures forests like her own children. A rooted conservationist for fifty years, Tulsi Gowda was awarded the Padma Shri but her head is still turned towards her saplings.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Time was when we stood in long lines in order to live: that was bad enough, but today we have to wait in longer lines in order to die… we also have to wait in line to be cremated or buried, three to a pyre or grave. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
A comprehensive response to the COVID crisis involves prioritising human and environmental concerns. Those should be the lesson rom the first wave, urges Vikalp Sangam Core Group. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
In a classic case of cognitive injustice, farmers are being blamed for falling groundwater tables in Punjab. Research Unit for Political Economy, a think tank, dissects that fake “toolkit” and points to the underlying causes of a policy-driven environmental disaster and more…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Dharampal examines the idea that Indians have been docile towards power as children towards their parents; if they have stood up to it, as the non-cooperation movement showed, European ideas of disaffection and/or Gandhi are responsible. Through meticulous research, he documents a home-grown tradition of civil disobedience. Some extracts…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Women writers have to become sensitive to the new terror of fundamentalism and the oppression of the lower castes, landless labourers, dalits and the starving millions, if we are not to be party to this crime, warns Ajeet Cour .…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The insurrection by Trump’s supporters January 6th at the US Capitol building was viewed as an attack on the most ‘sacred’ site in USA. Laurie L. Patton deconstructs this idea to ask: who belongs in these buildings? …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Unfettered by and unmindful of warnings and petitions by locals against development projects, governments have repeatedly chased dreams of modernity. We are now paying the price of a ravaged ecosystem says Sarosh Bana. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The farmers’ agitation is taking a new turn, away from New Delhi and its barricades towards the rest of India. Avay Shukla considers what this means for the power elites of the capital.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Awakening from the illusions of imaginary utopias promised by ‘historical Time’ Ashoak Upadhyay avers can help us discover the book of an expansive Present with no beginning or end.
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Between the Lines
(First published March 10 2020)
In this shape-shifting prose-poem of imagined conversations with Gandhi’s heteronyms, Ashwani Kumar riffs on Ashis Nandy’s essay on the four ‘Gandhis’ after Gandhi to meditate on life in this darkling plain…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Those who arrange languages into structures of hierarchy obscure the distinction between words and daggers, making us, rues Alok Bhalla, “hard-bristled, sharp-fanged, knife-clawed creatures with merciless fires in our eyes.” …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Popular understanding has it that ethnic exclusion is incompatible with democracy. Kanchan Chandra argues it isn’t. Silences built into our understanding of democracy legitimize such exclusion through manipulation of citizenship laws.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Anwar Moazzam invokes a theoretical framework to address the duality expressed in Islam’s universal ethical values and the forms these values take in different cultural zones of the world.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In the history of humanity, the Buddha will likely stand out, as perhaps, the only thinker who found a non-religious solution for the human existential angst in ethical practices avers K.P. Shankaran…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Almost two decades ago, Ruth Vanita looked around for a ‘Hindu left’ as a foil to the Hindu Right. She did not find it; its absence led to questions that are relevant even more so today and need to be discussed.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In response to the issues raised by Ruth Vanita about the absence of a Hindu left, Ashoak Upadhyay asks if the question should not be reframed: Whatever made the Left dismiss Hinduism as an impediment to modernity? …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Like it was for the ancient philosophers in India, China and Greece, philosophy for Gandhi was a way of life not just the construction of theories, says K.P. Shankaran …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Gandhi may have failed but does not the Gandhian idea of a threefold revolution for sanity against “dark and demonic” forces still count, asked A.K. Saran fifty years ago. His question is still relevant …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Gandhi is the last representative of the sant traditions of India. Vinay Lal explores this proposition particularly with reference to his unequivocal admiration for the bhajan, “Vaishnavajana to” (“Call Only That One a Vaishnava”) …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Lokmanya Tilak’s death centenary (August 01) and the end of the annual celebratory Ganesh Chaturthi procession he launched prompts Mayank Bhatt to re-visit that leader’s shifting stances and his role as ‘nationalist’ leader. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Stepping back from the drum beating of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya as history-in-the-making (for better or worse), Aditya Sudarshan peers into the cracks between the dichotomies defining national discourse for an alternative reading.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
With midnight’s broken toll clanging in our ears, time we revisited ‘national’ poet to get a handle on our stifling visions of nationhood. Mohammad A. Quayum digs into Tagore’s ambiguities and finds a clear message of love for humanity above all else. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
More than a hundred defense services veterans issue a statement critiquing their greater deployment in policing domestic streets rather than in protecting the nation’s borders.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
A true fiction of an Unknown Indian mortgaging his soul to his master’s words that turn him into an impassioned mimic man till he hears sub-terrain voices. Ashoak Upadhyay on the lives we lead. Third of the four-part series…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
If wretchedness has scarred their lives and hasten their death, it’s only the poor who are to be blamed. That’s what we in our hall of mirrors have been led to believe, says Ashoak Upadhyay in this second of a four part series. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
In this first of a four part series on the lives we lead, Ashoak Upadhyay untangles the web of illusion obscuring the pivot on which mainstream media turns: a neo-liberal nationalist-statist iniquitous order. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The pandemic is telling us that globalization and its transmission of injustices and exploitation of the weak and Nature’s bounty have screwed our earthly home. Band-aids won’t work. Ashish Kothari on what could.…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
For writer Annie Zaidi the “lockdown felt like a physical enactment of my inner world—a sense of siege, of caution and confusion. ”Then she hears of the migrants fleeing; of Muslims demonized She feels the need to bear witness to the fires of a hate campaign that the pandemic will fuel. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
A wide spectrum of opinion admits the coronavirus pandemic is exposing inequality and poverty in stark terms. But its management (or lack of it) will do more says Ashoak Upadhyay.…[Read More]…