All posts by J Devika

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Culture, Debates, Education, Feminism, Genders, Government, Identities, Law, Media politics, Politics

The Orphaning of ‘Women’s Collective Interests’ in Kerala

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There is considerable outrage in Kerala about how the accused in the murder of the young woman worker Soumya in 2011 has slipped the noose at the Supreme Court. There is considerable doubt remaining on how the murder of the young dalit woman student Jisha was handled by the present government. In both cases, the accused are not men who would earn the sympathy of the Malayali middle-class – in one case, a tamil homeless man, and in the other, a Muslim migrant worker. Not surprisingly, the cry for their blood has been particularly shrill. Outrage at the Supreme Court’s refusal to endorse the lower court’s judgment in the first case is particularly striking – not only because of its loudness, but also because one is unable to forget the Suryanelli case. The difference between the present cases and the Suryanelli case is that in the latter, the victim has been condemned to living death, though she has persistently fought to be heard as a survivor of the most horrific violence. Yet her pleas that the powerful Malayali politician P J Kurien be also tried never roused the kind of outrage was have heard recently. It appears that the Malayali public is kinder to dead violated women than women who survive violation; it also seems harsher towards abjected males than to .powerful males who occupy the pedestal of elite masculinity. Continue reading The Orphaning of ‘Women’s Collective Interests’ in Kerala →

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Self and Other : Indus Chadha

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This is a guest post by INDUS CHADHA

The summer that I was 5-years-old, I took my first flight alone because I wanted to spend my holidays with my grandparents. My parents prepared me well—they even read aloud and recorded my favourite stories on an audio cassette which we put into our Walkman for my long solo journey. But there was one question they neglected to answer. “What should I do if the flight crashes?” I had asked. “It won’t…” they had brushed my question away. So when the flight attendant came out into the aisle and announced that one of our engines had failed and we would have to turn back to our point of origin to make an emergency landing—I wondered what I should do.

A man a few rows ahead of me got up from his seat and started shouting at the flight attendant. He was obviously afraid and seemed to hope oddly that he could frighten some comfort out of her. I remember him saying over and over again that he had a young child with him on the flight and that made me conscious of both the gravity of the situation and the fact that I was so young and all alone. I felt tears start to well up in my throat and took small sips of my orange juice to wash down the urge to cry. And then, out of the blue, the young man sitting beside me started talking to me. He asked me what I was studying at school and when I told him our theme for the last term had been pirates he exclaimed that he was a ‘shippie’ and knew all about them.

Continue reading Self and Other : Indus Chadha →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Genders, Government, Identities, Images, Law, Movements, Politics, Sex

Adventures in Creepland: An Open Letter to the District Collector, Calicut, Kerala

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This letter is jointly written by the signatories.

 

Dear Mr Prasanth Nair

We, the undersigned participants of the 7th Queer Pride March held on 12 August 2016 in Calicut, would like to bring to your attention the unforgivably irresponsible attitude of the Kozhikode police towards the rights of young people who identify themselves as queer, and their allies. In what should have been a completely joyous event, their attitude cast a dark shadow, for sure. Continue reading Adventures in Creepland: An Open Letter to the District Collector, Calicut, Kerala →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Images, Literature

Slow Rendering of an Ache & Mahesh Verma’s Translation : Prasanta Chakravarty

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This is a guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

 

“If the translation of poetry is impossible, then the translation of poetry is a genuine art.”

~Nasos Vayenas, Eight Positions on the Translation of Poetry

 

Translation is an act in the wake of literature. Both the languages – source and target – are variations on literary themes, with neither having priority. But translation depends on an essential paradox: a collision between restlessness and poise, detachment and recreation. In the best translations of poetry this paradox turns into a synthesis that must remain unfinished. Continue reading Slow Rendering of an Ache & Mahesh Verma’s Translation : Prasanta Chakravarty →

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Not Pakistan, but Modi has pushed Kashmir on the Brink : Ashok Swain

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This is a guest post by ASHOK SWAIN

Since the death of a young and charismatic separatist named Burhan Wani, Kashmir has erupted into violence and chaos. Weeks of violent protests in the Valley have resulted in the deaths of at least 50 people and over 5,000 injuries. Kashmir is not new to violent protests and civilian deaths, but this time the intensity of the protest and the passion of the protesters is unprecedented. Continue reading Not Pakistan, but Modi has pushed Kashmir on the Brink : Ashok Swain →

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Black and Blue: A Short Story by Saunvedan Aparanti

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This is a guest post by SAUNVEDAN APARANTI

[Based on Gujarat Dalit flogging. It chronicles the fictionalised life of one of the victims.]

What comes to your mind when you think of India? If you’ve been seduced by films, books, pictures and anglophile Indians over the last century then you will no doubt paint a happy picture. You might romanticise the poor yet happy people, the colours, the cuisine, the attire, the mystics, the music, the dance, the cacophony, the heat and the sensory overload of this one country. The only colour missing in your picture will be any shade of black because black is a colour that India hides.Black is a colour that India detests whether it be the colour of your skin or the colour of the sewer that you’re lowered in. A bottomless pit is where you will find the true colour of India. Continue reading Black and Blue: A Short Story by Saunvedan Aparanti →

Bad ideas, Culture, Feminism, Genders, Government, Law

Where Judges Lead Societies Astray: Bobby Kunhu

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This is a guest post by BOBBY KUNHU

Background

That subjective morality influences judicial interpretation of law is a given. But, this influence has to remain within the paradigm set by the law and cannot operate outside it or breaking it. So there are two moralities that effect the outcome of any case, one the morality of the law itself and second how the morality of the judge works in the interpretation of the law. It is in this context that judicial attitude towards sexuality has to be analyzed. And for this first the entrenched patriarchy of the legal profession has to be acknowledged. The best evidence for this is the representation of women at every level of the profession from the bench to senor advocates to advocates on record to the lowest echelons of the bar and judicial bureaucracy.
Indian law with respect to sexuality is in a Victorian time warp. It continues to criminalize any sexual activity that is not penile-vaginal penetration, so much so that till recently when the definition of rape was amended and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act was enacted this was the paradigm of penalizing non-consensual sexual predation. Add to it the ingredients of individual judges’ patriarchy and accumulated religious and social conditioning.

Continue reading Where Judges Lead Societies Astray: Bobby Kunhu →

Bad ideas, Culture, Everyday Life, Feminism, Genders, Government, Identities, Law, Media politics, Sex, Violence/Conflict

Moral Police-Police!

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The Kerala police has once more revealed how utterly unreconstructed it is since colonial times, in their brutal attack on transgender people in the city of Kochi. Stuck in 19th century Victorian morality on the one hand, and in the unabashed sense of power that only colonial authority can bequeath, these policemen thought it perfectly alright to use violence to correct what they perceive as a ‘moral problem’, sex work and that too, by transgendered persons. Continue reading Moral Police-Police! →

Bad ideas, Culture, Feminism, Genders, Images, Politics

Love in the Time of Public Despair: Remembering Kamala Surayya

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31 May passed like any day in present-day Kerala – filled with the cacophony of mediocrities and expressions of greed, envy, and hate which have become the new normal. No wonder, then, that most people did not remember that this was the poet Kamala Das/Madhavikkutty/ Kamala Surayya’s death anniversary. I cannot help recollecting that I had predicted that this would happen: that people here would celebrate her death, display sickening sentimentality, and then quickly forget. In life and in death, Surayya never received the critical attention that she deserved as a thinker, nor did those interested in progressive left politics take her forays into politics seriously. In these times of despair, one must, however, turn to her …

Read more on:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/seeking-rhyme-in-reason/article8737506.ece

 

 

 

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Government, Identities, Images, Law, Left watch, Media politics, Movements, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Stop Trying to Portray Us as Extremists: Dalit Human Rights Movement

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The police investigation about the bomb blast at the Kollam Collectorate on 15 June 2016 has now turned against us. Neither the organization nor its activists have any involvement in this incident. The accusation against us is just a ploy to use draconian laws such as the UAPA to destroy dalit-adivasi resistance.

The demeaning and enslaving social norms in Kerala have, since centuries, denied dalit people the most basic human rights such as the right to education, the right to decently clothe one’s body, the right to travel on public roads, and express one’s views. But India became a democracy that aimed for social democratisation, and Dr B R Ambedkar raised the possibility of social equality and reservations for the underprivileged groups through the Indian Constitution. Yet, sixty-five years later, the classes fundamental to this society have made no social, economic, or cultural progress and they continue to endure caste slavery and and exploitation in all areas of public life. The mainstream political parties who surfaced as the protectors of these classes have never offered them complete protection at any time. Though they have been faithful followers and workers of these parties, members of the disadvantaged groups have had little economic security; they have lacked social education; they have had to cry out for tiny parcels of land. Continue reading Stop Trying to Portray Us as Extremists: Dalit Human Rights Movement →

Bad ideas, Debates, Government, Identities, Left watch, Media politics, Movements, Violence/Conflict

Crushing Dignity, Force-feeding Honour: The CPM is Back in Form Again!

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The hunt, it seems, is on again. The CPM in power has begun to show its fangs again, and shamefully, they seem to threaten only dalit people who refuse and criticise their disciplinary/welfarist embrace.  In north Kerala, two dalit women were arrested for having allegedly attacked a DYFI leader who abused them in casteist terms. In the south, the persecution of the Buddhist Dalit Human Rights Movement (DHRM)seems to have begun afresh, with the police and the press foisting on them responsibility for the recent bomb blast at the premises of the Kollam Collectorate. The two women mentioned belong to the Congress party; as for the DHRM, the CPM has had a long-standing grouse against them, carried forward now from their last term in power. I am not sure, but the recent ouster of Laha Gopalan, the leader of the Chengara land struggle in the wake of the CPM’s return to power, could be part of this story too. I have no love lost for that man, who evoked the name of Ambedkar but ran the village set up by the landless in Chengara like a crude caste headman. But the timing of his expulsion and the way the village seems to be under the thumb of the police arouses discomfort. Continue reading Crushing Dignity, Force-feeding Honour: The CPM is Back in Form Again! →

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But She was a Law Student …

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In a way that is perhaps unprecedented, today, a very large number of Malayalis feel connected to each other by a veritable tsunami of pain. No wonder perhaps, because the veils of our complacency have been ripped off too thoroughly. The immediate context is the gruesome murder of a young Dalit student in central Kerala, in the tiny, rickety squatter-shack that was her home, in full daylight.

At a single stroke, the incident fully exposed the dimensions of social exclusion in contemporary Kerala. Hers was an all-woman family among families deemed ‘properly gendered’, they were lower caste people trapped and isolated among upper and middle caste families, they were the working-class poor without property in an area full of propertied domestic-oriented bourgeois and petty-bourgeois families. Oppressed in all these ways, they were invisible to the state and the political parties. They possessed no form of capital that would have allowed them upward mobility. Yet, the young woman struggled on and reached the law college.

‘But she went to college’, some ask, ‘how could she have been so helpless?’

Read the rest of the article here 

 

 

 

Bad ideas, Identities, Images, Movements, Politics, Religion, Sex

‘Radical’ Critics and KaBodyscapes

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What does it mean to dissent in a world in which everyone claims to be a dissenter? What does it take to build a critical vantage-point, one that is not merely the easy pastime of fault-finding, when we all seem to already know what will be truly critical? Ever since the oppositional energy generated against Hindutva fascism in and through the Kiss of Love campaigns dissipated into the rival folds of the Human and the Anti-Human in Kerala, these questions have troubled me. The prospect of being sucked into one side of such a binary formation is terrifying enough to scare one away from  engaging with either side; but worse is the pain that follows the realization that the unique moment of hope – the hope that the diverse groups that populate the anti-Hindutva civil society may well be able to form a bond of trust, however tentative and fragile, more than merely strategic connections – is well and truly in the past. Both sides have indulged in belligerent and damaging caricaturing of each other’s positions, as if the annihilation of the other was the very condition of the survival of the one. Continue reading ‘Radical’ Critics and KaBodyscapes →

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Responding to the Challenges of Blue and Red – Reminiscences of a JNU-HCU Alumna: Shipra Nigam

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This is a guest post by SHIPRA NIGAM

That the past few months have been cataclysmic is an understatement. Personal tragedies and political catastrophes have exploded within our most cherished spaces, and brought a churning in them.  What was truly transformative was the experience of both the emergence of broad solidarities against right-wing fascism, and of the reminders of multiple registers and contexts within them. These underline the need for multiple conversations to understand both our common struggles, as well as the contradictions within, and to renew a resolve for introspection through them as we move towards real ‘azaadi’.

There is of course an ongoing debate on this, and here I felt that some binaries being invoked in it are not very convincing, while others brought home stark truths that pose challenges to a patriarchal, majoritarian caste hindu ordering of society, within which we are all located at different levels of hierarchy, complicity, and engagement.

I have been part of both public universities under fire right now, and the present brings home the urgency of the dual task of defending the public university as a space for pushing the boundaries of critical thought, and confronting the very hierarchies and complicities with power that shape it. This is necessary even as processes of democratisation and affirmative action take root in public institutions . So these are some reminiscences from an alumna of both these public universities who has been wrestling with articulations and complexities which lie beyond institutional labels or binaries. Continue reading Responding to the Challenges of Blue and Red – Reminiscences of a JNU-HCU Alumna: Shipra Nigam →

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Culture, Debates, Education, Feminism, Government, Identities, Images, Law, Left watch, Media politics, Movements, Politics, Right watch

Fifty Shades of Grey – Without the Thrills

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[This is a response to Shourajenda Nath Mukherjee’s open letter on Kafila by Prof Makarand Paranjape]

Mr. Shourjendra Nath Mukherjee’s “Open Letter” of April 5, 2016 makes only one substantive point, concerning the agency of students, which needs attention. The rest of it, as the Dormouse said to Alice, is “much of a muchness” – confusion, rigmarole, and thumb-twiddling over precious little, which scarcely need be dignified by serious confutation. Continue reading Fifty Shades of Grey – Without the Thrills →

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An Open Letter to Prof Makarand Paranjape

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Guest post by SHOURJENDRA NATH MUKHERJEE

Please note that this response was first sent to Swarajya Mag, where Prof Paranjpe’s Open letter appeared, but was not published. It was then sent to Kafila.

Dear Prof Paranjape

I am Shourjendra, an MPhil research scholar in the Department of History, DU. I write this letter as a rejoinder to your open letter in response to Maitreyee Shukla. Your open letter was not addressed to me and therefore you can feel free to not reply to my letter.

You sir, seem to reflect a lot of the opinions expressed very strongly by a section of the urban middle classes. Granted, these views are by their very nature not ‘fascist’ but nonetheless they help perpetuate and legitimate the regime in power. You are also one of the most eminent academicians to have sought to engage in these raging debates in the public sphere, and I very strongly appreciate you for this. Your open letter is one such statement and I would like to take this up as an opportunity to critically engage with some of the issues that you have raised. (Since, your statements are mostly uncritical appreciation and endorsement of these ideas, I would regard your statements as statements made by an academician who has paused to think academically.) Continue reading An Open Letter to Prof Makarand Paranjape →

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Apropos Fetishizing Higher Education and University Politics

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This is a guest post by PRATIK ALI.

[This article summarizes quite well the very many criticisms that have been raised from broadly the left of the political spectrum, about the Standwithjnu campaign. We do hope it generates a lively debate that will enlarge our horizons and strengthen the struggle against fascism]

Whether it has been the scrapping or stagnancy of the Non-NET Fellowship, the increased interference of the State in student activity in universities of higher-education, or merely the (routine) introduction of symbols of the ruling party in cultural institutions (of which universities are a part), a dangerous, and even strange trend is seen emerging in the student response: asserting their isolation from other sections of society as valuable uniqueness. Continue reading Apropos Fetishizing Higher Education and University Politics →

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No Time to Rest: A Report from UoH

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[This is again from an email from a friend, a teacher at the UoH, who has been part of the effort to end police raj on campus. From this account, it is clear that the terror continues unabated though the mainstream media seems to think that they can move on.]

… We had applied for bail for faculty and students arrested in the previous week and we had hoped bail will be granted, especially since we heard that if a faculty is in police custody for more than 48 hrs, it is a problem. However, after the case was posted late in the evening, the Public Prosecutor (PP) said she would like to file a counter and posted it to Monday as there were holidays on Friday and Saturday. On Monday, we reached the court early enough with all the necessary sureties and money for bail. The PP did not turn up and the judge was waiting for her. The judge also took an unscheduled break which is never taken around noon I believe. Eventually, the PP turned up and said she has no counter to file. Then, again, the case was posted by the magistrate to post lunch period. It came up and it took a long time before the magistrate announced she is granting bail. By then it was quite late and even though we scrambled to get the paper work done, it could not be done. We had stood the whole day in the court as there is no place to sit and so on. Continue reading No Time to Rest: A Report from UoH →

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Stand With UoH: Statement by Concerned Members of the IIT Bombay Community

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We, the undersigned members of IIT Bombay community, strongly condemn the police repression that has been unleashed on students and faculty of University of Hyderabad who seek justice for Rohith Vemula, with the active connivance of the University administration. The testimonies of the events have been singularly disturbing. We cannot let educational institutions become play fields of state repression. Continue reading Stand With UoH: Statement by Concerned Members of the IIT Bombay Community →

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University of Hyderabad Alumni Teachers Protest the Brutal Police Acts on Campus

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We are deeply pained to see the heinous attack by the state police and paramilitary force on students who are protesting the activities of Appa Rao Podile, the controversial Vice Chancellor of Hyderabad University. As the alumni of one of India’s premier educational institutions, presently teaching in various universities in India, and abroad, we strongly feel that such high handed actions and state sponsored police violence on students – both young men and women – must be condemned. This is crucial in an age of extensive authoritarian silencing. In this open communication with the higher ups in UoH, we would like to reiterate the fact that your dealing with the students has been miscalculated and has provided no reassurance at all. Blinded by a casteist mindset and a resurgent confidence in the wake of a political regime change, the university has failed miserably to instill much needed assurance in the students whose protests have been intensified since the forced suicide of Rohith Vemula.  To our utter dismay, we realise that the failed university administration has begun to work hand in glove with the police in order to silence students’ demands, which should have merited a careful hearing and meaningful resolution. However, the VC and his entourage in the university feel that such sustained efforts have no value in a democracy. The shameful activities of the Police-raj, and the subsequent choreographies of complacency at the university clearly display an abysmal misreading of subaltern issues and concerns about the every day survival of students from marginalised backgrounds. Continue reading University of Hyderabad Alumni Teachers Protest the Brutal Police Acts on Campus →

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Let us not be little Arnolds in these times : Sudha K F

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This is a guest post by SUDHA K F

“His right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot where he likes, threaten who he likes, smash as he likes. All this I think tends to anarchy. (Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 1866)

….It certainly does. Nothing is stranger, in Arnold’s often scrupulous, often self-consciously charming and delicate prose, than the escalation, the coarseness of these Hyde Park verbs…It is a point of view. Certainly it contrives to forget the start of the disorder: the defeat of the reform legislation, the locking of the gates against the reform meeting (for which, as it happens, there were no legal grounds). As so often, it picks up the story at a convenient point: at the point of response, sometimes violent, to repression; not at the repression itself. Even so, it is a point of view and a familiar one.”

 

 

The above excerpt is from an essay by the British Marxist thinker Raymond Williams “One Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy”, which is part of his path-breaking collection of essays Culture and Materialism. The first paragraph is a quotation that Williams makes from Mathew Arnold’s essay Culture and Anarchy written in the 1860s in response to the workers’ demonstration at Hyde Park asking for voting rights for workers. Arnold’s argument and language is all too familiar to us now, as that is the language available to us through mainstream media and in general the middle class public sphere, while talking about the brutal deployment of force and violence on the students at the University of Hyderabad. Many seem to be in the business of picking up stories at convenient points. Continue reading Let us not be little Arnolds in these times : Sudha K F →