For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Akshay Pathak Continued from here. #70yearson, a global campaign to remember the tragedy of 1947, might soon be trending on social media. Meanwhile, if you Google ‘partition of India’, the search engine blasts you with image after image of hordes of human bodies – living, dead, half-dead, in caravans, walking through ruins, hanging from …
Akshay Pathak ‘Aman ki Asha’, one of the many trendy Indo-Pak peace initiatives, could as well have been the title of a blockbuster from the Chopra brothers. Partition and Reunion as nostalgic themes in the savarna imagination seem tied in an inseparable bond, a sacred thread, to use a metaphor closer home. The piecing …
Sardar Ajmer Singh This article is an excerpt from S. Ajmer Singh’s book “Biswi Sadi Ki Sikh Rajneeti: Ek Ghulami Se Dusri Ghulami Tak” (The Sikh Politics of the 20th Century: From One Slavery to Another) On the circumstances emerging after the partition of Punjab, and the creation of a Self-ruled Sikh state After …
Jay Prakash Faqir Historian Aditya Mukherjee in one of his essays has accused western historians like Eric Hobsbawm of being Eurocentric. He finds Hobsbawm’s characterization of the 20th century as an Age of Extremes to be an ill-informed opinion as far as Asia and the Asian perspective are concerned. And no doubt, his opinion …
Akshay Pathak Advancing the most penetrative and succinct theory of caste, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar had this to say in 1916 when he first presented his paper ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’: This sub-division of a society is quite natural. But the unnatural thing about these sub-divisions is that they have …
Akshay Pathak The deeply uneven relationship between the oppressors who forcefully define, speak on behalf of and claim to represent and those they oppress, is a function of power. Art can pose a major challenge to such power, but often in the hands of the oppressor, art serves as a tool for the perpetuation …
We have put together, for our readers’ convenience, this compilation of all the articles which have appeared on Round Table India so far (some more are yet to be published) on the Roy-Navayana project of appropriation of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. The articles have been listed in chronological order, with short excerpts from each article. …
James Michael and Akshay Pathak “His statues—dressed in garish blue, holding a copy of the Constitution—have been put up in city after city” ~ Arun Shourie, Worshipping False Gods “All the same, Ambedkar’s followers have kept his legacy alive in creative ways. One of those ways is to turn him into a million mass-produced …
Akshay Pathak बड़ा हुआ तो क्या हुआ जैसे पेड़ खजूरपंथी को छाया नहीं फल लागे अति दूर ~ कबीर Of what use is stature, much like a date tree,Offers no shade for travellers, its fruit beyond reach. ~ Kabir May in Bikaner is a very hot and dry month. But regular gusts of dust-laden …