For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Kangsa Manlong There’s a pain that doesn’t just live inside your bones—it lives in your tongue, in your name, in the way you look at your land and no longer recognize it. I write this with the full weight of that pain. Not just mine, but of so many who have been silenced, mocked, erased—not …
Kangsa Manlong After an Assam grass-roots language revival effort known as ‘Learn Ahom’ gained attention, digital commentator Aboyob Bhuyan and his platform The Truth India launched a furious counter-attack. In his usual third-person bombastic style, Bhuyan has repeatedly named Learn Ahom as “anti-Assamese” or even “pro-Pakistan,” accusing the project of fomenting communal division. In reality, …
Milind X There is a tiny essay authored by the French critical theorist Jacques Derrida, the title of which is, The Dangerous Supplement. Derrida proposed in the essay that words or signifiers do not lead to concrete things. Language is a slippery slope where words lead to more words, or more supplements, and the actual …
The ‘as though’ folks In India, we have the oppressor caste folks Whose language is a bit hard to understand Let us configure this language In a way that makes sense. This is the language of the ‘As though’ Oppressor caste folks act as though they care As though they understand vulnerabilities very …
Durga Hole Recently, I was reading an academic paper ‘The Culture Industry Enlightenment as a Mass Deception’ by Adorno Theodor Horkheimer. The words were familiar to me but I was not able to understand the meaning of the sentences. I could not follow the flow of the language because I was stuck on individual words. …
Vinod Kumar I was writing something down, jotting down my thoughts about a certain incident, or perhaps, it was merely a random idea; it was a feeling I wanted to note down soon after having my breakfast. In the middle of recording my thoughts in English, I felt the urgent need to write a few …
Pranav Jeevan P Why is the assertion of Bahujans branded as identity politics based on caste, but the savarna assertions are termed as “culture”, “tradition” and “merit”? The dominance of rituals and performance of savarna hegemony is the sign of cultural penetration of caste hierarchies in all sections of society. It is the institutions which …
N Sukumar and Shailaja Menon The NEP 2020 has been rolled out amidst the Corona pandemic with the grandiose dreams of unleashing India’s potential as a world teacher (Vishwaguru). Ironically, a few months back police stormed the library of Jamia Millia Islamia, thrashed students and vandalized the reading space. No one knows when the culprits …
Mudasir Ali Lone This is in continuation of the Part 1 published here. Whenever someone tells me that there’s no caste in Kashmir (and I’m told that a lot), I can’t help but think of the terms that are part of our daily language, for example, Kaaluh Waatul (literal translation: black chamaar). It’s a …