Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. A version of this review essay appears in the May issue of the Caravan. My first formal encounter with the idea of citizenship was through an eighth-standard Civics textbook in India. In the Indian educational system, Civics had the [...]
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Rohit Chopra reviews Ramachandra Guha’s Patriots & Partisans (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2012). A shorter, slightly different version of this review appeared earlier in The Sunday Guardian. In a footnote to an article written for the Economic and Political Weekly, Ramachandra Guha recalls a saying of the renowned Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivas: “Media attention is [...]
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Barkha Dutt has expressed incredulity on Twitter at being included in my essay “Bal Thackeray’s Poisonous Legacies” as an example of those in the worlds of media, celebrity, and politics who were soft-pedaling Bal Thackeray’s legacy. Dutt’s argument, expressed here and here, is that (a) it was sloppy and careless to include her in this [...]
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The Indian elite’s reaction to Bal Thackeray’s death raises profoundly disturbing question, argues Rohit Chopra. With news breaking earlier this evening of Bal Thackeray’s death, the movers and shakers of Indian society have been in overdrive as have been their lesser-known followers, minions, and acolytes on Twitter. The event is being milked for all it [...]
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Rohit Chopra continues the series on South Asia with a reflection on the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Close to three decades after the pogroms, most of those responsible for the violence have not been brought to justice. In 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by [...]
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CM announces a series of writings on political life and public culture in South Asia, guest curated, gathered, and edited by Sanyasi. The idea is to present here a range of perspectives –by writers, journalists, academics, artists, and others–on the entanglements of culture, public life, and the political in and about the vast swath of [...]
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[This is a guest post from Rohit Chopra -eds] 16 excursuses in despair 0. Sepoy and Lapata have very kindly given me the opportunity to share some thoughts about the Rushdie affair (the new one, at the Jaipur literature festival this year, which, of course, is connected to the old Rushdie affair, 23 years to [...]
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