Everyday Life, Metropolis

सार्वजनिक जगहों पर सामूहिक कब्ज़े की संस्कृति : किशोर

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Guest post by Kishore

दिल्ली के उत्तर-पश्चिम में स्थित रोहिणी का इलाका लाखों मध्यम और निम्न मध्यम वर्ग परिवारों का बसेरा है. कुछ समय पहले यहाँ मेहनतकश मज़दूर वर्ग के नुमाइंदे भी झुग्गी-झोपडियों में रहा करते थे जिन्होने  रोहिणी  नाम के इस उपनगर को बसाया था. पर पिछले कुछ सालों में इन झुग्गियों को उजाड़ कर दिल्ली के बाहरी हिस्सों में पुनर्वासित किया गया है. ठीक गोरख पाण्डेय की कविता “स्वर्ग से  विदाई” की तरह.

रोहिणी एक नियोजित उपनगर है जिसे दिल्ली विकास प्राधिकरण ने बसाया है. एक शहरी बस्ती की जरूरतों के हिसाब से हर एक चीज़ का ध्यान रखा गया है. थोड़ी थोड़ी दूर पर “सार्वजनिक” पार्कों की व्यवस्था की गयी है और हर एक-दो किलोमीटर पर एक बड़े “सार्वजनिक” पार्क की भी व्यवस्था है जिसे डिस्ट्रिक्ट पार्क कहते हैं. Continue reading सार्वजनिक जगहों पर सामूहिक कब्ज़े की संस्कृति : किशोर →

Bad ideas

Modi’s ‘Singur’ : The Other Independence Day

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It was also an Independence Day celebration albeit of a different kind.

Far away from the 24 7 media and far away from the usual rhetoric one witnesses on any such date it was effectively people’s celebration which was resisted by the state at every level. Held at a non descript village called Dalod around 150 kilometers from Ahmedabad the state capital, it was attended by around 15,000 men and women, old and young, according to conservative estimates, .

There was unprecedented police patrolling and barricades on all roads leading to village Dalod and people coming to the flag hoisting were being stopped. One can easily guess that if the state would not have gone out of the way to thwart the programme, and had not cancelled the initial permission to hold it in Hansalpur, – where the Maruti Suzuki plant is supposed to come up – more than 50,000 people could have easily reached there. The celebration was attended by delegations from other groups waging a struggle against land acquisition in their areas, such as from Mahua (against the Nirma cement plant led by politician-activist Kanubhai Kalsaria), from Mithi Virdi in Bhavnagar (against the nuclear power project), the Junagadh by-pass road etc. who came there to show their solidarity. Continue reading Modi’s ‘Singur’ : The Other Independence Day →

Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Images, Law, Sex, Technology

The Public Secret of Savita Bhabhi: Jyoti Singh

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This is a  guest post by JYOTI SINGH

In May 2013, makers of the erotic comic strip came out with the Savita Bhabhi movie, where apart from Savita Bhabhi doing what she is best at, she also helps the two nerds, who mistakenly teleport her into their Orwellian India of 2070, take their revenge upon the notorious I&B Minister who bans all online porn but engages in all offline porn. With this, Savita Bhabhi was back in our ever-so-fickle public memory after 4 years of ban, but yet not quite. Her resurfacing was not as resounding as her going away. One could ascribe this to the spoken language of the movie being Hindi instead of English, which is the original language of the strip and also the official language of all modern day revolutions of the middle class on social media. Perhaps they misjudged the ‘maximum reach’ bit, which rendered her an orphan. Nevertheless, that aside, why isn’t Savita Bhabhi missed enough anyway?

Continue reading The Public Secret of Savita Bhabhi: Jyoti Singh →

Capitalism, Debates, Government, Politics, Theory

Decolonization of the Mind

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Our modernity is incomplete, our secularism impure, our democracy immature, our development  arrested and our capitalism retarded: ask anyone trained in the social sciences, economics in particular, about what ails India today and you can be sure of getting one or all of these answers. And you can go on adding to the list of more and more things ‘we’ lack. We did not have ‘history’, we do not have social sciences – and of course, we do not have theory/ philosophy.

Everything, in other words, is about our ‘backwardness’ and our need to catch up with the West. And seen through the lens of social science, most of the world looks like this – living ‘inauthentic’ lives, always ever in the ‘waiting room of history’, to steal historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s suggestive phrase.

In the world view of our state elites, this is actually a form of what one could call, paraphrasing Sigmund Freud, ‘Capital-Envy’. The ‘realization’ that ‘we do not have it’ can be a source of serious anxieties. That is what lies behind the current frenzied desire to ‘catch up’ with the West. And generations of feminist scholarship has challenged this unquestioned Freudian  assumption that the penis is the norm and not to have it, is Lack. Perhaps women do not want it? Freud never conceived of this as possible. Indeed in today’s world, there are many men who claim that they feel they are women trapped inside male bodies. Generations of scholarship has made us realize that the aura of that grand universal theory actually rested on the fact that it did not just describe the sexes; it produced the sexual norm itself.

The vision that propels our political elites and their parallel numbers who write in the media today, is something like that fantasy of Freud. The anxiety produced by this awareness of the ‘primordial Lack’, is what drives them today towards what has been the most violent phase of development in our entire history. Violent uprooting of populations from their land, often at gunpoint, coupled with the most ruthless plunder of our common resources by unscrupulous corporations – all this and more has been going on with the state elites looking on ‘benignly’. For they seem to know something ordinary mortals do not – that all this is but the necessary price to pay for becoming ‘modern’ like them. Continue reading Decolonization of the Mind →

Bad ideas, Debates, Empire/ Imperialism, Excavation, Frontiers, Identities, Mirror Worlds, Movements

Nationalism in India: Rabindranath Tagore

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From RABINDRANATH TAGORE‘s lectures on Nationalism, 1917

tagore-gandhi

Our real problem in India is not political. It is social. This is a condition not only prevailing in India, but among all nations. I do not believe in an exclusive political interest. Politics in the West have dominated Western ideals, and we in India are trying to imitate you. We have to remember that in Europe, where peoples had their racial unity from the beginning, and where natural resources were insufficient for the inhabitants, the civilization has naturally taken the character of political and commercial aggressiveness. For on the one hand they had no internal complications, and on the other they had to deal with neighbours who were strong and rapacious. To have perfect combination among themselves and a watchful attitude of animosity against others was taken as the solution of their problems. In former days they organized and plundered, in the present age the same spirit continues—and they organize and exploit the whole world. Continue reading Nationalism in India: Rabindranath Tagore →

Empire/ Imperialism, Excavation, Frontiers, Identities, Movements, Politics

The Sunset of the Century: Rabindranath Tagore

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rabindranath-tagoreThe eve of India’s 66th Independence Day is a time as good as any to read this poem by RABINDRANATH TAGORE, even as India gets ready to sing to martial tune another Tagore poem, Jana Gana Mana. This English translation was published at the end of Tagore’s 1918 book, Nationalism.

THE SUNSET OF THE CENTURY

(Written in the Bengali on the last day of last century)

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The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.
The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance. Continue reading The Sunset of the Century: Rabindranath Tagore →

Bad ideas, Frontiers, Genders, Identities, Mirror Worlds, Violence/Conflict

The Curious Case of Hamid Ansari

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You may think he is a spy or a saboteur. If he is one, would he have spent months trying to reach Kohat from Mumbai and then get caught in just two days?

Sitting in Mumbai, Hamid Ansari fell in love with a Pakistani Pashtun girl over Facebook. He was a 26 year old management teacher, she was a B.Ed. student. After over a year of obsessing about each other over the internet, phone and phone messengers, she called him one day, crying. She had confided in her sister about this online affair, but the sister told the parents, who decided it was time to find her a husband. It was the last phone call. She soon disappeared from Facebook too. Continue reading The Curious Case of Hamid Ansari →

Capitalism, Debates, Government, Law, Media politics

Reporting Hunger from the Margins: Agrima Bhasin and Ashwin Parulkar

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Guest post by AGRIMA BHASIN and ASHWIN PARULKAR.

The watchdog metaphor obliges the media to step up their role, that of an opinion maker, and stir public opinion on hunger and food security in India

A priest turned beggar, his body starved thin; a family of destitute potters picking up grains soiled in mud; emaciated women forced into sex work; and a man scavenged by dogs and vultures. These were just a few of the scores of starving people journalist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya drew in black and white sketches in his travels through Bengal’s Midnapore district during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, the last of a spate of famines that plagued colonial India during British rule. Bhattacharya’s portraits of the destitute ’showed’ stories of mass starvation, making visible through withering human flesh a nearly immeasurable tragedy of more than 3 million hunger deaths. Brutal yet compassionate, his graphic chronicles provoked the ire of colonial administrators, prompting officials to burn every copy of his book, Hungry Bengal (1943).

Women turned 'prostitutes
Drawing by Chittaprosad on the 1943 Bengal famine

Despite the censorship of his book, Bhattacharya continued to report on the famine for the Communist Party of India’s weekly newspaper, The People’s War. His sustained efforts to bring the realities of mass hunger to bear on the public conscience in colonial, famine-struck Bengal set a precedent for journalists to use the press as a watchdog that can impel the government to act. Today, his reportage is instructive for those in the profession who particularly cover hunger, poverty and inequality.

In today’s India, home to over 200 million chronically hungry and malnourished people, a significant but small number of dedicated editors, publishers, journalists, photographers and broadcasters are taking strides to highlight the complex nature of inequality in this country. A sporadic renewal of interest on the part of the media to report on hunger and starvation often only occurs in moments of crisis: starvation deaths, children’s deaths, or spoilage of grains in warehouses. Continue reading Reporting Hunger from the Margins: Agrima Bhasin and Ashwin Parulkar →

Capitalism, Countryside, Ecology/Environment, Government, Law, Movements

A Fight till Death, A Fight for the Commons – The Story of Kathikudam, Kerala: Parvathy Binoy

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This is a guest post by PARVATHY BINOY

“There is a lot of polluted rivers and lands in India…but this is not a big issue in Kerala”, Kerala Pollution Control Board Chairman (KPCB), 2011

“We have no one with us now, neither the party in power nor its opposition, we only have the people with us” – Daisy Francis, Kadukutty Panchayat President, June 2013 Continue reading A Fight till Death, A Fight for the Commons – The Story of Kathikudam, Kerala: Parvathy Binoy →

Bad ideas

परिसर, प्रेम और हिंसा : अपूर्वानंद

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जवाहरलाल नेहरू विश्वविद्यालय – जे. एन.यू. में एक छात्र द्वारा अपनी सहपाठिनी पर प्राणघातक हमले और आत्महत्या की घटना ने विश्वविद्यालय के अलावा बाहरी दुनिया  को भी  हिला दिया है.जे.एन.यू. के शिक्षक और छात्र आत्मनिरीक्षण कर रहे हैं.आखिर जे.एन.यू. में, जो उदारवादी, ‘कॉस्मोपौलिटन’मूल्यों का परिसर माना जाता है, ऐसी घटना हो ही कैसे सकती थी! अनेक लोगों को बरसों पहले लिखी उदय प्रकाश की कहानी ‘ रामसजीवन की प्रेम कथा’ की याद हो आई. कहानी की पृष्ठभूमि में जे.ने.यू. के परिसर का जीवन ही है. गाँव से आया और दिल्ली से चौंधियाया हुआ रामसजीवन एक अंग्रेज़ी माध्यम के परिवेश से आई छात्रा के इर्द-गिर्द प्रेम की एक फंतासी बुन लेता है और उसे सच मानने लगता है. कहानी के विस्तार में जाने की ज़रूरत यहाँ नहीं है, लेकिन उसमें एक चेतावनी तो थी जिसे ठीक से सुना नहीं गया. उसे कुछ इस तरह समझा जा सकता है: परिसर को अपने आप में उदार, आधुनिक मूल्यों का वाहक मानना भ्रामक स्थितियों को जन्म दे सकता है. जे. एन.यू. में ही अनेक प्रकार के सामाजिक स्तर  हैं और ऐसा नहीं कि वहाँ की शिक्षा इन्हें कमज़ोर ही करती हो. वे और सख्त भी होते जा सकते हैं. ये स्तर आर्थिक कारणों से लेकर भाषाई सम्पन्नता तक से जुड़े हुए हो सकते हैं. मसलन अंग्रेज़ी माध्यम के छात्रों का एक अलग वर्ग-स्वभाव अपने आप ही बन जाता है. उससे बाहर रह गए छात्रों में वंचित रह जाने की भावना हिंसा को जन्म दे सकती है. दूसरी स्थिति यह हो सकती है कि अपनी भाषाई और वर्गपृष्ठभूमि का अतिक्रमण करने की सम्भावना यहाँ दिखलाई पड़ने लगती है और इसलिए उससे मुक्त होने की आकांक्षा उसी पृष्ठभूमि के छात्र मित्रों से अलगाव भी पैदा कर सकती है. इसके कारण भी हिंसा जन्म ले सकती है. हमेशा वह व्यक्त ही हो, आवश्यक नहीं. अव्यक्त रूप में रह कर भी वह व्यक्तित्व को विकृत कर सकती है. Continue reading परिसर, प्रेम और हिंसा : अपूर्वानंद →

Frontiers, Identities, Mirror Worlds, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Manmohan Singh must visit Pakistan

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Dr Manmohan Singh with wife Gursharan Kaur at the Golden Temple in Amritsar on 1 January 2012
Dr Manmohan Singh with wife Gursharan Kaur at the Golden Temple in Amritsar on 1 January 2012

By SHIVAM VIJ: Which Indian or Pakistani premier has not desperately wanted to be the one to clinch peace between the two countries? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has reportedly been keen, for years now, to go on a state visit to Pakistan.

Before the political climate could be conducive to Manmohan’s visit to Islamabad, 26/11 took place. Pakistan’s refusal to give Dr Singh even breathing space on the 26/11 investigations, followed by the LoC tensions in January and August this year, means that in his 10 years of prime ministership, Manmohan Singh will never have visited the country of his birth. Continue reading Manmohan Singh must visit Pakistan →

Bad ideas

Where Are The Emile Zolas of Our Times !

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On Minority Rights and State Violence

Each one has his reasons: for one, art is a flight; for another, a means of conquering. But one can flee into a hermitage, into madness, into death. One can conquer by arms. Why does it have to be writing, why does one have to manage his escapes and conquests by writing? Because, behind the various aims of authors, there is a deeper and more immediate choice which is common to all of us.

What is Literature? Jean Paul Sartre

It is difficult to start when you are among an august gathering of masters and students of a subject you are not much aware of and are asked to say something to them. Today I find myself in that unenviable situation.

Let me admit here that when I received the information of the seminar I was really very excited to learn that scholars of literature would be focusing themselves on human rights, an issue which demands urgent attention from every thinking and concerned human being. But when the question of joining the debate arose, I was really in two minds. In fact, I was bit reluctant to come here for two simple reasons.

Firstly, being a left activist for larger part of my social life, I have been more accustomed to address public meetings on specific issues or share my ideas on a particular theme among activist circles. There have not been very many occasions when I had the opportunity to come to such gatherings. Continue reading Where Are The Emile Zolas of Our Times ! →

Capitalism, Everyday Life, Government, Law, Metropolis, Movements, Scams

Deceit at the Hospital of Truth: Surendra Panchal

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Guest Post by Surendra Panchal

Sanitation Hospital Workers Strike at a Delhi Hospital over Non-Payment of Minimum Wages

Sanitation workers of the Satyavadi Raja Harishchandra Hospital (The Truthful King Harishchandra Hospital), Narela in Outer Delhi have started an indefinite dharna today, to protest their unjust dismissal when they asked to be paid the statutory minimum wage for unskilled work declared by the Delhi Government, Rs 7254 per month.

Continue reading Deceit at the Hospital of Truth: Surendra Panchal →

Identities, Images, Language, Law, Media politics, Violence/Conflict

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim – A Response to Ashish Khetan on the ‘IM’: Warisha Farasat

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Guest Post by Warisha Farasat

The recent opinion piece by Ashish Khetan in the Hindu has yet again reiterated the false and malicious stereotype: that Muslims somehow have something or the other to do with terror, either when they are directly involved or when they are silent about others of the community being involved. It is disappointing that the debate is framed in the stereotypical, “good Muslim”, “bad Muslim” tenor rather than a real engagement with issues of shoddy investigation and communal bias that marks terror investigations in the country. Perhaps the greatest disservice that has been done to idea of justice has been linking an entire community to terrorism.

Continue reading Good Muslim, Bad Muslim – A Response to Ashish Khetan on the ‘IM’: Warisha Farasat →

Bad ideas

A Guantanamo of the Intellect

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Close on the heels of the axing by Calicut Uniersity of a poem from an English textbook, for the alleged ‘terrorist links’ of the poet, comes the news of cancellation of a scheduled lecture of Dr. Amina Wadud , a US based Islamic scholar by the authorities of the Madras University.

Calicut University succumbed  to the demand of the ‘Shiksha Bachao Andolan’ , one of the many outfits of the RSS pariva,r that the poem ‘ Ode to the Sea’ be removed from the textbook ‘ Literature and Contemporary Issues’ as its author Ibrahim al- Rubaish was a ‘terrorist’. It was also demanded that the persons responsible for the selection of the poem be identified to ‘uncover’ the network of the ‘sympathizers’ of terrorists in the board of studies and academic council of the university. Continue reading A Guantanamo of the Intellect →

Debates, Everyday Life, Movements, Politics

Can Happiness and Resistance Go Together? Gowhar Fazili

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Guest Post by Gowhar Fazili

Does resistance necessarily have a direct relationship with suffering and inverse relationship with pleasure and happiness? This is a question that is particularly significant for long drawn resistance movements facing a formidable enemy insensitive to and largely unruffled by the exertions of resistance.  The engagement with occupation often involves violent and non-violent struggle.  Both demand sacrifices that warrant shunning of such mundane pleasures and opportunities taken for granted by the populations reconciled with power.  If the struggle extends over multiple decades, it is bound to generate fatigue and disillusionment especially among those who have not voluntarily committed themselves to the life of endless self abnegation even while they may desire freedom from occupation.   While all people want to be free from the indignity of living under occupation and dominance, human nature puts limits on how far individuals and populations may be willing to stretch themselves in their denial of bodily desires and material pleasures that life has to offer.

Continue reading Can Happiness and Resistance Go Together? Gowhar Fazili →

Countryside, Ecology/Environment, Government

Interim report of the Kathikudam Fact Finding Commission THRISSUR, 30 and 31 July 2013

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The news of police action against those agitating against the Nitta Gelatine India Ltd.,(NGIL) formally known as Kerala Chemicals and Proteins Ltd.)plant on 21 July 2013 in Kathikudam,Kerala, shocked the members of the civil society of the country. Various organizations across the country have come together in the form of this Commission to look into the matter. The team visited the site of the agitation of the NGIL Action Committee and some of the spots which are affected by the pollution of NGIL. The team also interacted with the affected residents and the members of Kadukutty Gram Panchayat to get a better insight into the pollution that the villagers have been alleging and the event that transpired on 21 July 2013. Continue reading Interim report of the Kathikudam Fact Finding Commission THRISSUR, 30 and 31 July 2013 →

Bad ideas, Debates, Excavation, Law, Media politics, Violence/Conflict

Terror and the Indian Mujahideen – A Response to Ashish Khetan: Sharib Ali

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Guest Post by Sharib Ali

There is something disquieting in what Ashish Khetan has written and said recently on terror in India (in The Hindu and on Tehelka.tv), and centrally within it, the Indian Mujahideen. More so, because it comes from one of the most credible journalist’s today, who has done some commendable work over the years. A journalist I personally respect. But there are several reasons which compel this response. And yet, this is not just a response, but also an attempt to elucidate the many complex processes within which ‘terror’ is located today, and the way the discourse has transformed, and has implications for a people’s negotiated relationship with their state.

Continue reading Terror and the Indian Mujahideen – A Response to Ashish Khetan: Sharib Ali →

Bad ideas, Identities, Images, Law, Media politics

Minority Report – Deaths followed by Executions : Ramray Bhat

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This is a guest post by RAMRAY BHAT

The collective conscience of our prominent democracies works in very strange ways. India is yet to come to terms with the killing of a nineteen-year-old Mumbaiite student Ishrat Jahan in an encounter by officers of the Gujarat Police in collaboration with the Intelligence Bureau. Along with three other individuals, Javed Sheikh (for whom Ishrat worked as a secretary), Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar, Ishrat was first announced to have died in police firing and the alleged plan hatched by these four individuals to assassinate prominent politicians of India, thereby thwarted. Inquiries at the level of the Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate court as well as by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as directed by the Gujarat High Court confirmed what had been suspected all along, that Ishrat had been murdered in cold blood while she was in police custody. Continue reading Minority Report – Deaths followed by Executions : Ramray Bhat →

Culture, Everyday Life, Genders, Images, Language, Mirror Worlds, Sex, Violence/Conflict

Gendered Violence and the Hall of Mirrors: Parnal Chirmuley

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Guest Post by Parnal Chirmuley

A very young man, who should have been cheerfully devouring the world of ideas over samosas and tea from the canteen, tries instead to hack an equally young woman, his classmate, to death. With an axe, some say. Tries to shoot her too, but the pistol is too stubborn, they say. Then turns the blade and the poison on himself. There he sees success. Succumbs to both.

This leaves behind rivers of blood in the classroom and gashes in the minds of those who witnessed this, bravely intervened, or ran away from it. It leaves everybody entangled in a sea of Gordian knots that are just questions.

Continue reading Gendered Violence and the Hall of Mirrors: Parnal Chirmuley →

Everyday Life, Genders, Identities, Language, Sex, Violence/Conflict

The Affective Claims of Violence – Reflections on the JNU Campus Tragedy: Pratiksha Baxi

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Guest Post by Pratiksha Baxi

Many competing frameworks have given expression to shock, disbelief, rage, grief, guilt and fear after the violence witnessed as the new semester kicked in, with a monumental tragedy, on the JNU campus. Everyone is stunned by the tragic turn of events that has resulted in a young woman battling for her life in a neuro–ICU in Safadarjung hospital. Confusion gripped the campus as the classroom became a scene of crime, a classmate became a bloodied body and the familiar transformed into the incomprehensible. It was devastating that the assailant, who succeeded in extinguishing his own life, aimed to unite in death the object of his obsession through a planned and highly performative act of violence in the routine setting of a classroom.

Continue reading The Affective Claims of Violence – Reflections on the JNU Campus Tragedy: Pratiksha Baxi →

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