Clik here to view.
Lines of control
Photo: Routledge India Borders and boundaries, hitherto confined as categories of analysis to the study of political geography, are now objects of interest within several academic disciplines,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading the nation in war
Sunny Deol from the movie Gadar (2001).Photo: Flickr / Michael Langhans Gita Viswanath, in her recent book The “Nation” in War: A Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema, states at the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The poetics of a holy death
Varanasi, 1979.Photo: Flickr / nicksarebi His death in BenaresWon’t save the assassinFrom certain hell,Any more than a dipIn the Ganges will sendFrogs – or you – to paradise.My home, says Kabir,Is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Judging the judiciary
Photo: The Supreme Court of India The Supreme Court of India deals with a variety of matters ranging from the death penalty to promotion in services. Public Interest Litigation (PIL) constitutes a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The security metaphysic
Illustration: Marcin Bondarowicz (This is an edited extract from Manisha Sethi’s book Kafkaland: Prejudice, Law and Counterterrorism in India, published by Three Essays Press in October 2014.) “If it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
No saints or miracles
Nehru and Gandhi. (This article was first published in our quarterly issue Are We Sure About India? (Vol 26 No 1), January 2013.) “Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,” wrote Marxist...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The 13 men from Subalpur
The tree the couple were tied to on 20 January.Photo: Madhusree Mukerjee The night she was gang raped in a Delhi bus and thrown onto a street to die, the young woman, whom the Indian media would name...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Myanmar connection
Photo: Flickr/K.Aksoy Until 2011, Burma was among the few countries still veiled in secrecy. In 1962, Chief of Army Staff General Ne Win staged a coup against the elected government of U Nu, and became...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reframing the city
Circulation Plan for the Old City of Delhi, Ford Foundation Team—Delhi (1960).Image: Delhi State Archives. Awadhendra Sharan’s In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Surrealist Pakistan
Photo: Flickr / Brent Weichsel Considering Pakistan’s sociopolitical atmosphere – torn between Enlightenment values of liberalism and a vicious interpretation of Islam – and the restrictive demand on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unravelling realities
‘Old grief’ Illustration: Nabila Horakhsh From ancient epics to contemporary short fiction, land has figured as a symbol, a trope, a function, an extension and an obsession in the individual and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Love in the time of development
Jarawa youth on a visit to the outside world, 1998. Photo courtesy: Madhusree Mukerjee The Last Wave is a love story, or rather, two. One is a fairly conventional tale of growing attraction between a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shangri-la, continued
Kalki Koechlin at the 2015 Mountain Echoes Literary festival. Photo Credit: Mountain Echoes Facebook page/ Phub Tshering On a grey day last August, the sixth edition of the Mountain Echoes literary...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Killing for the state
Rioters on the streets during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Photo Courtesy Gujaratplus.com Growing up in Kashmir in the early 1990s, I was conscious of the state-sponsored rapes, disappearances and killing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Borrowed Vocabularies
This ubiquitous citrus fruit was first imported from the eastern territory in Africa to India and was therefore called the ‘Mozambique orange’. This mutated to ‘Mosambi’ or ‘Mosumi’ in common parlance....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Food for train journeys
A drawing by Nandalall Bose illustrating Tagore’s short story “The Hero”. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/eldritchpress.org In his compelling introduction to this collection of translated Bengali short...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Purchasing power
The red light area in Reeperbahn in Hamburg-St. Pauli, Germany. Photo: Dannyone/ Wikimedia Commons The 21 Indian short stories in the anthology River of Flesh and Other Stories: The prostituted woman...
View ArticleClik here to view.
CIA in Mustang, MIA in Dharamsala
Pilgrims in the Jokang Monastery in Lhasa, TibetPicture: Flickr/Jason Mooy Tales of Tibet and Tibetans continue to sell well to an English-speaking readership. Home to the mysterious, the demonic, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Remembering our own
Detail of Reproduction of the Blood Telegram from 1971 Genocide – Liberation War Museum – Dhaka – BangladeshFlickr/Adam Jones The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Something rotten
Mumbai skyscrapersSource: Wikimedia Commons Most journalists reporting from the corridors of power in Southasia are often repositories of stories that never get told. Josy Joseph, award-winning...
View Article
