How the West Discovered the Buddha Through Literature
What Western travellers and others learnt about the man and the religion he founded from books written in historical times.
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Caste | Culture | Online Blog | Securalism
Roots of Feminist Fervour: Women in Bhakti Movement
Their sheer sense of individualism and power through spirituality made the rise of women’s voices prominent in Bhakti tradition. We can trace the elements of feminism through their songs, poems, and ways of life. On some of the important women saints of the Bhakti tradition who became the primitive voices of the rise of feminism in India.
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Guernica
Despite it being one of the few paintings that may be said to be almost universally known, or perhaps because of it, it is interesting to take a closer look at this iconic painting and discover more about what it says, exactly, and why it has the effect it has on the viewer.
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Bring Back the Mortal Remains of Bahadur Shah Zafar
Memorandum submitted to the President of India in May 2013. The revolt of 1857 broke out on 10 May in Meerut. This year’s 10 May will be the 165th anniversary of the revolt. To mark the occasion, the Memorandum is released again with a hope that this demand will be addressed without further delay.
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‘I Doubt, Therefore I Am’: Revisiting Mirza Ghalib’s Poetry
‘Thinking with Ghalib’ by Anjum Altaf and Amit Basole reinterprets 30 of Ghalib’s couplets. Its essential purpose is to make the reader think with Ghalib. And the very soul of Ghalib’s poetry is doubt.
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In Malerkotla, One Can Find the Vestiges of India’s Forgotten History of Tolerance
The senseless and relentless march of violence has made us forget who we are and how we have lived, worked and prayed together for centuries.
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Experiments in Education: The early years of Visva Bharati and Dacca University
In 1921, Bengal witnessed the foundation of two universities: Visva Bharati and Dacca. The early years of the institutions give us a portrait of two unique models of education, learning, and pedagogy.
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Born 200 years ago, What Is Fyodor Dostoevsky Telling Us Today Through His Novels?
Dostoevsky’s books – with their unique mix of dark comedy and pathos – are notoriously gloomy. Yet they can be oddly uplifting. In them he tested the very limits of human freedom: in prison he bore witness to the darkest sides of human nature; in his later years in freedom he agonised over our natural dogmatism and self-destructiveness.
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Culture | India | Online Blog
G.N. Devy’s ‘Mahabharata’ Is an Act of Moral Courage in These Times
Like the subversiveness of the epic, Devy’s Mahabharata is responding to our contemporary crisis in a schizophrenic India that continues to be fed by Hindutva pride: to offer a corrective text in the times of mass euphoria as to what Bharat has to be.
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What Women’s Suffrage Owes to Indigenous Culture
The author describes how White leaders of the women’s suffrage movement were influenced by Indigenous political structures and culture, and how some of this influence took place around Seneca Falls in upstate New York, site of the first U.S. convention for women’s rights.
