Azad Maidan this afternoon was a festival of our democracy: Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, atheists, agnostics, believers, students, activists, women, men, fluid people, speakers of many languages. There was hope, anger, humour, anxiety. Everywhere, our tricolour.
"I want [my ashes] to be carried high up into the air in an aeroplane and scattered... over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India."
- Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)
Note to self: Keep quiet when relatives give their children exotic 'Sanskrit' names drawn from the Brihat-Googlesvara-Samhita. Recently, I was told that 'Kiyan' was a name of Krishna's, meaning 'royal'. My gentle hint that this is a Persian royal title was met with chill silence.
The BHU students protesting against the appointment of a Sanskrit scholar, who happens to be Muslim, as their teacher should recall the fine Mahabharata story of Kausika, an arrogant brahmin who is sent off to learn true dharma from a butcher, Dharmavyadha, who lives his values.
Akbar, one of India's most intellectually curious and acute rulers, was almost certainly dyslexic. This did not stop him from being a man of liberal, inclusive attitudes. Deeply interested in diverse religions, philosophies and literatures, he had books read to him every evening.
"Gandhiji, I have no homeland... How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own, wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?"
- Dr B R Ambedkar to Mahatma Gandhi (in conversation, Mani Bhavan, Bombay: 14 August 1931)
“I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Truth, which is far greater than country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.”
- Nikhilesh, in Rabindranath Tagore, *Ghare Bhaire*/ The Home and the World (1916)
The Mauryan lion capital, excavated at Sarnath in the early years of the 20th century, was adopted as India's state emblem on 30 December 1947. In this c. 1905 photograph by Madho Prasad, the royal photographer of Benares, it stands proud on the
@ASIGoI
Sarnath excavation site.
Today, 1.5 lakh citizens of Bombay/ Mumbai surged into the historic August Kranti Maidan - where Mahatma Gandhi flagged off the 'Quit India' phase of anti-colonial resistance - to uphold the inclusive, non-sectarian model of citizenship that our Republic's founders guaranteed us.
In 1605, the 50th year of his reign and the last year of his life, Akbar issued the now rare 'Ram-Siya' coins. Each bore on the obverse an image of Rama & Sita with the Nagari legend 'Ram-Siya', and on the reverse, the month & year of Akbar's regnal calendar, 'Amardad Ilahi 50'.
We bid farewell to postcolonial India's greatest engineer: Mahendra Raj (Lahore, 1924-Delhi, 2022). His original solutions to structural problems rendered possible such architectural marvels as Corbusier's Chandigarh High Court and Secretariat, and Raj Rewal's Hall of Nations.
In case some people hadn't noticed, a healthy democracy is healthy precisely because it has an opposition. Now if you're going to equate opposition with treason, that form of government has a very different name.
The activists Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita, and Asif Iqbal Tanha have been granted bail by the Delhi High Court. God bless Justices Siddharth Mridul and Anup J. Bhambhani - brave, good souls in an age eclipsed by dark forces. >
Tom would have turned 70 today. Gone far, far too early. We miss him - in life, on stage and screen. It was a privilege to have him play Alamgir and Ghalib in two of my plays, now receding in time: eleven years ago. Tom Beach Alter (22 June 1950 - 29 Sept 2017).
I am deeply sorry to learn of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan's passing. He was an early contributor to the column on philosophy & spirituality that I started for the Times of India in 1996, The Speaking Tree. A man of faith who never decried reason, he cherished harmony and dialogue. 🙏
We claim Ashoka for our own, but India had forgotten him completely for two millennia, until James Prinsep deciphered his edicts and rediscovered him. It was in Sri Lanka that Ashoka was remembered, through the Mahavamsa chronicle, composed in Anuradhapura in the 5th century CE.
In time to come - if we live to tell the tale - we will remember this brazenly cynical regime as the Covidocracy. We will recall how it exploited a pandemic to divide communities, curtail civil freedoms, entrench economic asymmetry, and bring back the traumas of a scarcity ethos.
For no good reason - other than that I'm sitting amid some of my Persian/ Urdu/ Hindi dictionaries - I think of my irritation when some of our metropolitan compatriots flap about, claiming there's no Indian equivalent to 'Bon appétit' or 'Guten Appetit'. Try 'Nosh farmaaiye.'
My mother, in a photograph my father took in the early 1960s. Amma passed away six years ago. Not a day passes that I don't think of her laughter and her lively, multilingual wit; her love of animals, birds, music; and all that I owe her, beyond what words could say.
#MothersDay
I am very happy - and a little nervous: always, with a new book - to announce that my new book of poems, *Hunchprose*, published by
@PenguinIndia
Hamish Hamilton, will be in print, in bookstores, and available online, early March.
The real enemies of India are easy to identify. They are those who have made toxic hatred the basis of normality; instilled a victim complex in the majority; infused the minorities with chronic fear; and polarised our country with their manipulative tactics of "divide and fool".
I'm assuming I'm not the only one who has noticed that 'webinar' is an anagram of 'wine bar'. Which ties up elegantly with 'symposium' - a word that originally meant a drinking party (from the Greek 'sumpotēs', 'fellow drinker', via Latin).
In 1973, Marlon Brando was frontrunner for Best Actor for 'The Godfather'. He was also a campaigner for Native American rights. He asked Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache actress and Native American activist, to represent him at the Oscars ceremony that year, declining the award.
Can we imagine even ONE Indian actor doing this for the stereotyping of minorities, Dalits and women in the Indian film industry? That’s the difference.
"The major portion of my ashes should [be] carried high up into the air... and scattered... over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India." -
#Nehru
, Last Will & Testament
We're threatened by a pandemic, a humanitarian crisis arising from official bungling, climate-change catastrophe, and military sabre-rattling. This is the worst time for India to be under the sway of an ideology utterly lacking in empathy, compassion, humility and self-criticism.
I say this as someone whose close relatives have served with distinction in the Indian Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Commando Force (now MARCOS): War is an option to be considered with caution and gravity, not one to be embarked upon in a spirit of reckless folly.
I am honoured to receive the prestigious 7th Mahakavi Kanhaiya Lal Sethia Poetry Award - an award previously conferred on distinguished colleagues including Jayanta Mahapatra, Rituraj, Rajathi Salma, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Anamika.
@JaipurLitFest
@SanSip
And let us remember the architects who designed these buildings, soon to be sacrificed at the altar of megalomania. Edwin Lutyens (National Archives). G B Deolalikar (National Museum). Ralph Lerner (IGNCA).
@amykaufman84
@bombil_fry
Dear God! I was shaken to the core of my being to read this - such monstrous hatred of women expressing themselves and fulfilling their dreams. These brilliant, beautiful lives so cruelly extinguished. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
My dear old friend, Gieve Patel, has passed away. I was 18 when I first met him, at our guru Nissim Ezekiel's fabled office at Theosophy Hall. We represented two generations of Nissim's acolytes: the Rabbi, as I used to call him, only half in jest, had published Gieve's first
In the context of the drummed-up controversy over Fabindia's Diwali ad, it might be salutary to recall that the Farsi word 'jashn' comes from the Avestan 'yasna' or 'worship', itself akin to the Sanskrit 'yajna' or 'propitiation'.
@Tanazhm
@kaiwan_mehta
@MeherM
@ShernaKhambatta
The original English text of my letter of resignation from the Documenta 16 finding committee has just been published on
@e_flux
. Several English-language publications seem to be using back-translations from the German version released by Documenta. Please use this text:
Today, we miss this unpredictable and abrasive, but also immensely tough custodian of India's election process. As Chief Election Commissioner, TN Seshan (now 86 and in retirement from public life) laid down and enforced a strict code of conduct for politicians during elections.
My mother brought this shrub with her to Bombay from Hubli-Dharwad, in 1956, when my parents got married. It has been with us 67 years: two of its avatars flank our front door.
I've always thought of it as "Amma's shrub" - well, so were they all: the yellow- and red-stippled
As if these times were not clouded enough, today opens with the sad, sad news that Professor B N Goswamy has passed into the ages. BNG, as he signed his letters, was an incomparable scholar, at home in Sanskrit, Farsi, Urdu, German and English. His deep probe into the social
They tell you who to marry, who to set alight.
What strange things will happen in India tonight?
A million wrongs now to set the past right.
What strange things will happen in India tonight?
Blood's the harvest, peace a blight.
What strange things will happen in India tonight?
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us.
- Mark Antony, in William Shakespeare, 'Julius Caesar' (Act 3, Scene 2)
What the Finance Minister carried today is more like a pothi [at left]. The bahi khaata [at right] is quite different in design. The advisor who praised this as a departure from "slavery to Western thought" is unfamiliar with actual Indian culture. Or perhaps it's Pothiwards ho!
Just heard the sad news of Satish Gujral's passing. Unlike many of his peers, who went to Paris or London in the early 1950s, Gujral went to Mexico City to study with Diego Rivera and Siqueiros. Gujral's was a versatile practice spanning painting, sculpture and architecture. RIP.
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always.”
- Mahatma Gandhi, *My Experiments with Truth*
I'm thrilled to share that my new book of poems, ICELIGHT, published by Wesleyan University Press
@weslpress
, will be launched at
#AWP23
@awp
in Seattle on 11th March. I'll read from the book there, and then on 15th March at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago
@SeminaryCoop
.
These protests are not 'riots'. They are not 'incited' by a catatonic opposition. This is India challenging the oppressive fear and hatred that threaten to choke it. We had become a confident, assertive people in the first decade of the 21st century. Let us recover that spirit.
Call me old-fashioned, but to me, BARC will always stand for Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Not having followed the current media scandal closely, I wondered how a scientist had got mixed up in TRP games of snakes-and-ladders. Now I get it: Broadcast Audience Research Council.
One of the earliest references in India to what would be mapped as America appears in the 1590s, in Abu'l Fazl's *Akbarnama* - in a comparative account of Arabic, Greek and Indian cosmologies and geographies, he notes that the Faranghis have discovered a new island, aalam-i nau.
Thus have I heard, of a faraway land. It shall be unlawful for the public to assemble in a public space. It shall be unlawful for the public to voice itself in public, or to claim a role in the public sphere. It shall be unlawful for the public to be a public.
"De mortuis nil nisi bonum" is a vexed doctrine. So far, I have declined five invitations to write an obituary for VS Nightfall (in Derek Walcott's accurate phrase). I am appalled by the rivers of praise flowing for a man who was in equal parts narcissist, bigot, racist, and cad.
With deep, overwhelming grief, I record the passing of Maria Aurora Couto - superb writer, memoirist and critic, deeply committed to Goa's confluential and transcultural traditions, a liberal at home in many worlds; to me, the last link to my mother's youth in Hubli and Dharwad.
Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.
- B R Ambedkar
On our 75th Independence Day, let us re-dedicate ourselves to the Republic's values: liberty; equality; dignity and diversity of being; a healing solidarity across differences.
Deeply grieved to learn that Rashid Irani is no more. The lockdown took a toll on his equanimity; his friends rallied wonderfully to his help. A quintessential Bombay figure, he was a gentle, gracious soul yet exacting in his film criticism. We will miss him. [Photo:
@soonitara
]
To a patriarchal, caste-ridden, feudal society that has no concept of the individual except as an actor performing a preordained script, it comes as a shock to learn that a young woman might actually have formed her own conclusions about the state of the country and the planet.
Many congratulations to Arunava Sinha
@arunava
on being honoured with the
@Vani_Foundation
Distinguished Translator Award 2022! It will be conferred on him tomorrow at
@JaipurLitFest
. The award acknowledges the vital role that translators play in expanding our literary universe.
Another renaming frenzy in Bombay. What's the point of renaming Charni Road? It isn't named for some imaginary British administrator called Churney. It comes from charani, Marathi for grazing ground.
As readers in the former colonies, we recognised and read past the colonial/ racist aspects of Enid Blyton's books. Her books were part of our childhood, and I will always remember them with delight. In fact, just to be a contrarian, I'm going to re-read the Adventure Series. >
Meanwhile, a dispatch on Airport Sanskrit. Why on God's green earth do the announcements in Indian airports use 'Dvaar sankhyaa' for 'gate number'? 'Sankhyaa' refers typically to quantity; if you insist on such an elevated register, try 'Dvaar kramaank'. It's closer to bullseye.
Thinking of Shahid. He would have turned 72 today.
*
Below me is a world without footprints
I am alone I'm still alone
and there's no trace anywhere of the drowned
The sun is setting over
what was once an ocean
- Agha Shahid Ali, 'I Dream I Return to Tucson in the Monsoons'
A lost world of childhood and youth: the Soviet books that so many of us, in my generation, used to read. This is a scientific selection, but we also had folklore, fairy tales, social sciences, and literature - published, variously, by imprints like Mir, Progress, and Raduga.
"When a language dies, a total vision of life, of reality, of consciousness dies with it. When a language is swept away, an irreparable diminution occurs in the fabric of human creativity, of the ways in which we can experience the verb 'to hope'."
- George Steiner
A grand figure leaves us: Girish Karnad. Another link to the gentle old Dharwad culture gone. It was always a delight to meet him, and once, to have spent a week in Berlin in his company; I'm privileged to have worked, with Vanraj Bhatia, on an opera based on his 'Agnivarsha'.
As large numbers of taxi drivers, members of its artisanal classes and daily-wage workers in Bombay's informal sector leave the city in panic, we will come to appreciate their key role in keeping us going: the same people who some Bombay-folk denounce as immigrants and outsiders.
On Hindi Divas, remember the languages - with their rich literatures - which have been derided as 'dialects' or stigmatised as foreign, in the interests of promoting an official Khadi Boli-meets-Sanskrit: among them Brajbhasha, Awadhi, Magahi, Bhojpuri, Bundeli - and Urdu.
hazāroñ ḳhvāhisheñ aisī kih har ḳhvāhish pah dam nikle
bahut nikle mire armān lekin phir bhī kam nikle
Thousands of desires, each one could have emptied my breath.
So many of my wishes came through, but in the end, so few.
- Ghalib: Divan 219:1
Heartbroken to record Vanraj Bhatia's passing. Vanraj (1927-2021) deserved far more acknowledgement as a pathbreaking composer who straddled Western and Indian music. In 2005-06, we worked together on an opera based on Girish Karnad's play, 'Agnivarsha'. From my draft libretto:
In the midst of the Corona pandemic and the tragic humanitarian crisis it has set off, let us remember Li Wenliang (1986-2020), the doctor who first alerted China's authorities to the crisis, was reprimanded, and died at the medical frontlines, infected by a patient. He was 33.
When I translated the Ishopanishad last year, I never foresaw how terribly true this verse would ring:
This air we breathe will never die
Now it ends in ashes
this body
Mind remember what was done remember
Mind remember what was done remember
We mourn the passing of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935-2020), poet, scholar, translator. A magisterial literary presence, Faruqi-sahab's work has enriched - and will long continue to enrich - many of us. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un.
[Photograph: Shahid Tantray/ Caravan]
Sharing the first of a monthly column, 'Lost and Found Histories', that I'm delighted to be writing for
@Openthemag
- here, I reflect on
#Burzahom
in
#Kashmir
, and reflect on how the tedious Aryan/Harappan macromyth has led us to ignore our Neolithic past.
On Ashadhi Ekadashi, I think of Dilip Chitre: poet, translator, editor, essayist - it was a privilege to have known Dilip, to have learned from him and travelled with him. Here, his translation of Tukaram's abhang, 'Sundara te dhyana ubhe vithevari', invoking Vithoba's presence.
Probably not the right moment to say this but - pivotal as his contribution was - Sunderlal Bahuguna's saliency as the Chipko Andolan's best-known face eclipsed Chandi Prasad Bhatt's seminal role and also the formative agency of women organisers like Gaura Devi and Bachni Devi.
The horror! The horror! "Not a single person who had witnessed the men falling unconscious had come forward to help, not even to give them some water. Caste seemed to have been a barrier even for offering water to the dying men."
For my money, this novel is still one of the finest guides to India's complex political life - and an enduring classic, with its memorable characters, Vaidyaji, Ruppan Babu, Chhote, Sanichar, and Ranganath, whose arc of Bildung it traces - Shrilal Shukla, *Raag Darbari* (1968)
It fills me with rage and grief to think that, in a country where children of privilege cut online classes to catch up on their gaming, a young woman from an economically vulnerable background has killed herself because her family couldn't afford a laptop.
>>
A celibate tried to hump a donkey.
The donkey kicked him in the balls and fled.
Lost the donkey, lost his celibacy.
Blackened his face in front of the world.
This went south, that went south,
it all went south for him, says Tuka.
Sant Tukaram (no, he wasn't a goody-two-shoes)
Another icon of my teenage years and early politicisation passes into the ages: Sunderlal Bahuguna (1927-2021). Bahuguna, Chandi Prasad Bhatt (born 1934) and Gaura Devi (1925-1991) were among the founders of the pioneering environmentalist Chipko Andolan in Uttarakhand.
Digging has begun on Rajpath for the Central Vista folly, but officials at the National Archives "are yet to receive any plan of action for the safe transfer of records to a place that fulfils the pre-requisite environmental conditions for safe storage".
uske faroġh-e-husn se jhamke hai sab meñ nur
sham-e-haram ho yā ho diyā somnāt kā
Its splendid beauty sets all things shimmering with light,
whether it's the lamp of the Kaaba or the lamp of Somnath.
- Mir Taqi Mir (Divan-e Duvvum: II.664.7)
Why is Otto Königsberger (1908-1999) called a "German architect"? From 1950, more than half his life, he was an Indian citizen. He drew up the initial plans for TIFR, Mumbai; designed Victory Hall/ Bal Bhavan and part of IISc, Bangalore; planned Jamshedpur and modern Bhubaneswar.
One of my favourite images from the glorious repertoire of Nathdwara painting - the 'Kamalan ki pichhvai' (Coll. Amit Ambalal, Ahmedabad), displayed during the summer months to suggest the coolness of the Yamuna's pools, the scenes of Krishna's childhood in Vrindavan.
Ashoka Vijaya Dashami: On this day in 1956 (14 October/ Gregorian) in Nagpur, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar formally embraced the Dhamma, inaugurated the Navayana, and led nearly 400,000 of his people out of millennia of caste oppression, and into an era of hope and social justice 🙏🙏🙏
I am honoured to curate 'Horses of the Sun', a large-scale exhibition of MF Husain - the first since his passing in 2011 - at the Mathaf Museum, Doha
@MathafModern
. We present his six-decade career through 100+ works: painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film. Opening 20 March.
Those who truly embodied the values of Indian civilisation are passing into the ages. Kapila Vatsyayan celebrated the interweaving of the arts and everyday life, the sacred and the worldly, in India. Sahridaya, dancer, scholar, institution-builder, she was an inspiring presence🙏
Sharing a beautiful Persian proverb, which I found during a reading detour: "Filesh yâde hendustân kardeh" - "His/ her elephant misses India." To be overcome by nostalgia for a place of origin or remembered happiness. [Image: Akbarnama, La'l & Sanwla, c. 1590-95. Coll.
@V_and_A
)
We just finished watching Season 1 of 'Panchayat' (Amazon Prime). Delightfully, it's *Raag Darbari* meets *English, August*. So reassuring that this comic, tender, witty series - alert to social and cultural shifts - can hold its own against more frenzied visions of the Badlands.
I'm hugely excited that
@AllenLaneBooks
India will publish my first non-fiction book, LOST AND FOUND HISTORIES! I was deeply moved by the engaged response of so many publisher colleagues to the book, at auction. Many many thanks to
@kan_writersside
& my publishers
@PenguinIndia
😊