In any combat for the soul of a nation, tradition is a battleground. In India too, as Hindutva makes an attempt to obliterate secular, Nehruvian beliefs, it has set off seismic waves which have crashed by the worlds of theatre, music, meals, literature, cinema and the world of concepts.
The Journal part of Scroll has tried to mirror this battle, generally instantly, generally not directly. We wrote, for example, in regards to the psychological scars of the kids residing in Gujarat’s riot rehabilitation camps in addition to the trauma of being non-vegetarian in Ahmedabad. We wrote in regards to the fierce resistance within the verses of Dalit shahirs in addition to the dowry dying that gave start to feminist road theatre in India. We wrote in regards to the reformed poachers in an Odisha reserve who had been threatening to return to killing animals in addition to the generations of migrants from Rajasthan who’ve offered tea in Mumbai.
In our archives, you will discover tales of struggles not solely political but additionally social and private. The exasperation of a girl in a society that expects her to have kids. The fury of a girl with vitiligo in a nation obsessive about white pores and skin. The frustration of a mom as faculty WhatsApp teams crush her little one’s independence.
We urge you to trawl by our sprawling archives to learn the tales that resonate most with you. Within the meantime, listed here are ten articles we predict you might get pleasure from.
Kamayani Sharma walked right into a forgotten room of the Ghalib Academy in Delhi and found probably the most important corpuses of mid-century South Asian trendy artwork gathering mud. What was this assortment doing in an establishment dedicated to a nineteenth century poet? And what relationship did it must the Indian nation? Sharma answered these and different questions on this fascinating article.
Director Sudhanva Deshpande remembered the martyred cultural icon Safdar Hashmi and the only most necessary road theatre efficiency within the historical past of India.
With the tenacity of a historic investigator, Sujaan Mukherjee went in quest of the person who took dehumanising images of the Madras famine within the nineteenth century and discovered a narrative of heartless indifference.
Virtually each married lady in her 30s is predicted by society to need infants with fervour, to pine to be a mom, to adapt to the perfect of a “regular” lady. Virtually each one in every of them is requested impolite questions by even full strangers and subjected to offensive feedback. What these inquisitors don’t realise is that it’s all about selection, Chinmayee Manjunath argued on this essay.
G Venkatasubbiah was a towering determine on this planet of Kannada letters. A distinguished instructor, editor and translator, his greatest achievement although was the stewardship of a 54-year-long venture that gave us an eight-volume, 9,000-page monolingual dictionary – Kannada Sahitya Parishat’s Nighanṭu. Srinath Perur met the person whose title is synonymous with Kannada lexicography.
Not like in Ramayana, the Shurpanakha of the classical theatre arts and historic texts of Kerala shouldn’t be a cardboard vamp. She is a full-blooded being who dares to query the established order, wrote Malini Nair – her grief, bereavement, envy, need and anger are raucous.
Architect Smita Dalvi weighed in with an incisive article after the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh requested the director of the blockbuster Bahubali for recommendation on the attainable structure of the executive complicated of the brand new state capital Amaravati.
After roughly 100 girls agitated exterior the Gurgaon workplace of City Firm, in what was maybe India’s first women-led gig staff’ strike, Karishma Mehrotra met the agitators to listen to how their desires of stability and prosperity had became a nightmare.
Sanjukta Sharma revisited Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, which celebrated the textual content as not only a monolithic good-versus-evil morality story, however as a narrative about ambivalent, mortal issues. Brook “strips down the godly and lays naked the skeletal humanity of the textual content,” Sharma wrote.
For half a century, KC Paul has been tirelessly making an attempt to persuade the world that it’s the Solar that revolves across the Earth, not the Earth across the Solar. A self-proclaimed scientist, he’s well-known for portray distinctive graffiti throughout Kolkata together with his astronomical declarations and the angst-filled query: “Are journalists and scientists blind?”. Devarsi Ghosh met the person to search out out what makes him singular.