Poem: ‘We Have Witnessed’: A Tribute to ‘Hum Dekhenge’
A poet’s appropriation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous poem for the current times.
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Raja Dhale: A Renaissance Figure in Dalit Literature and Art
Yogesh Maitreya If there is one man who deserves to be called a renaissance figure in dalit literature and art, it is Raja Dhale. Many may have heard of him only recently, when he passed away in July, 2019. Dhale was a remarkable poet; an occasional but refined translator; a fiery yet incisive critic…
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Police Brutally Attack JNU Students
Courtesy: Countercurrents Collective Thousands of students from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, India, who were marching to parliament to protest the massive hike in hostel fees were detained and baton-charged, leaving some of them grievously injured yesterday. The students continued their march but were stopped at many places. The protesters said they would…
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‘Deshgaan’
Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena (We give below the English translation of Hindi poet Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena’s celebrated poem, Deshgaan (An Ode to the Nation), to commemorate his 36th death anniversary. Deshgaan was part of a poetry collection written between 1976 (when the Emergency was still on) and 1981. The political and moral concerns voiced in this…
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‘The Criticism of Religion is the Premise of All Criticism’
[When Raosaheb Kasbe’s Zot was published in Marathi in 1978, RSS cadres made a public bonfire of it at the Janata Party convention in Pune that year. The book presented an incisive critique of M.S. Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts, the main ideological treatise of the RSS. Kasbe traced the historical roots of cultural nationalism as…
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The Five Best Books on Gandhi
Ramachandra Guha interviewed by Sophie Roell [This is an edited version of the interview. The full interview can be read on Janata blog. The five books recommended by Guha are: 1. Nirmal Kumar Bose, “My Days With Gandhi”; 2. Louis Fischer, “A Week with Gandhi”; 3. Dennis Dalton, “Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action”; 4….
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Pash: Life and Works of a Revolutionary Poet
Avtar Singh Sandhu, popularly known by his nom de plume, Pash, was arguably the most influential political Punjabi poet of the 20th century. His works include Loh-Katha (Iron Tale, 1970), Uddian Bazan Magar (Following the Flying Hawks, 1973), Saade Samiyan Vich (In Our Times, 1978), and the posthumously published collection Khilre Hoye Varkey (Scattered Pages,…
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Remembering M.M. Kalburgi
Translated by Aniruddha Nagaraj & Ali Ahsan [Four years ago, academic and activist M.M. Kalburgi was gunned down at his residence in Dharwad by two people linked to Sanatan Sanstha, a Hindutva outfit. Kalburgi was a vocal critic of idol worship and superstition, which often got him locking horns with Hindutva groups like the Vishwa…
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A Hundred Years of Amrita Pritam
A drop of your love had blended in So I drank the entire bitterness of life … Born in pre-partition Punjab and schooled in Punjabi, Amrita Pritam’s words stand witness to the upheavals of the 20th century wherein she was born. Destined to be a poet, the main concerns of her writing were love, freedom,…
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Touch
[Recently, the Undergraduate Curriculum Revision Committee of Delhi University asked the English Department of the University to remove poet Meena Kandasamy from the syllabus. The English Department has refused to accept this. We are publishing a poem by her below.] Have you ever tried meditation? Struggling hard to concentrate, and keeping your mind as blank…
