Category: News

The book holds a cross-disciplinary appeal and ­beyond academia, anyone with a keen interest in poetry and music in Indian tradition could find it worth a read.

Vidula Sonagra, EPW

A review that very succinctly tells us what the book contains, achieves and represents. The book is a significant contribution to the social history of music.

Read the full review here: https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/28-29/book-reviews/representing-cultural-evolution-through-song-text.html

There are few, if any, publications on Indian artists that reveal as much about the socio-cultural history of the post-independence era as this unique book does. In exploring the unusual life and oeuvre of the dissenting painter, Anil Karanjai, roads across the earth introduces fresh perspectives not just on modern Indian art or on the artist himself, but on the broad politico-economic substructures which were the foundation of both.

roads across the earth covers more than five vicissitudinous decades, and includes essays and archival pieces by a range of writers from the fields of politics, literature and music as well as art; many of these throw light on neglected aspects of the subject, and on forgotten times that need to be recalled.

In contrast to the tedious, obfuscatory character of most contemporary writing on Indian art, the present writings are informative and lively, distinguished by a no-nonsense approach accessible to the lay reader. Among the many issues laid bare are the skewed origins of the Indian art market and its consequent artificiality; a critique of the leftist intelligentsia and its blinkered views on art runs through the main narrative, as does a brief history of modern Indian art from its inception.

One of the great strengths of the book is the way it brings back to life a decade unparalleled in 20th century Indian and international history: the revolutionary 1960s. Besides the far-left Karanjai, a cast of flamboyant anti-establishment figures takes centre stage here: the poets, writers and artists of the radical Bengali movement Hungry Generation; the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky; the dropouts, hippies and peaceniks who frequented the countercultural haunts of Banaras, Calcutta, Patna and Kathmandu in search of salvation and transcendence. Also brought into focus is the ambience in the Indian capital in the early 1970s, a time of great upheaval and political significance: descriptions of the city’s eateries, frequented by radical intellectuals, speaking many tongues, gives a sense of the era and a wider appeal to this already captivating book.

Roads across the earth, On the Life, Times and Art of Anil Karanjai, Edited by Juliet Reynolds is available for purchase now!

[Authors: Juliet Reynolds, Malay Roychoudhury, Subimal Basak, Mangalesh Dabral, Edward Loring, Ross Beatty, Suneet Chopra, Santo Dutta, Sumanta Banerjee, Pramod Ganapatye and Anil Karanjai]

A conversation with Perry Anderson

A COMPREHENSIVE INTRODUCTION TO THE FAITH AND POLITICS OF ISLAM

Today, 23 percent of the global population is Muslim, but ignorance and misinformation about Islam persist. In this fascinating and useful book, Perry Anderson interviews the noted scholar of Islam Suleiman Mourad about the Quran and the history of the faith.

Mourad elucidates the different stages in Islam’s development: the Quran as scripture and the history of its codification; Muhammad and the significance of his Sunna and Hadith; the Sunni-Shiʿi split and the formation of various sects; the development of jihad; the transition to modernity and the challenges of reform; and the complexities of Islam in the modern world. He also looks at Wahhabism from its inception in the eighteenth century to its present-day position as the movement that galvanized modern Salafism and gave rise to militant Islam or jihadism.

The Mosaic of Islam reveals both the richness and the fissures of the faith. It speaks of the different voices claiming to represent the religion and spans peaceful groups and manifestations as well as the bloody confrontations that disfigure the Middle East, such as the Saudi intervention in the Yemen and the collapse of Syria and Iraq.

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About the authors:

Suleiman Ali Mourad is Professor of Religion at the Smith College, Northampton, USA. He is the author of Early Islam between Myth and History, and is co-author of The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period and co-editor of Jerusalem: Idea and Reality.

Perry Anderson  teaches history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Splintered Justice: Living the Horror of Mass Communal Violence in Bhagalpur and Gujarat captures the anatomy of a communal riot.

Kuldeep Kumar in The Hindu

[…] Based on interviews with victims and witnesses of Bhagalpur and Gujarat riots, what Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha have written goes to reinforce the terrible realisation that criminal justice system in our country has largely failed, and the bureaucracy and the police have been, to a large extent, politicised and communalised. It is the same heart-rending story of how FIRs were either not registered or, if registered, heavily doctored by the police persons themselves, how investigation was conducted that often led nowhere, how witnesses were intimidated or eliminated and how justice was not only delayed but often denied. The governments of the day watched over these manufactured incidents of mass violence without doing much to control the situation. Post-riot relief was often selectively distributed. The two detailed accounts of the Bhagalpur and Gujarat riots also bring out the oft-ignored reality of gender violence being used as a weapon of communal violence.

As Harsh Mander and Navsharan Singh ask in their introduction, “did the governments in Assam in 1983, Delhi in 1984, Mumbai in 1992-93, and Gujarat in 2002 or Kandhamal in 2008, fail to prevent slaughter and arson because they lacked sufficient powers or legal muscle?” The obvious answer is an emphatic ‘No’.

Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha have made a valuable contribution to the growing literature on communal riots in India through their first-hand interviews with those who bore the brunt of these massacres. Reading through these accounts is an eye-opening experience. It is an experience that shakes the very foundations of one’s belief in human goodness but also makes one better prepared to face the grim reality.

Read the full article here

New Delhi World Book Fair 2017.
7 January-15 January, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi.

For Three Essays books, do visit the
IPD Alternatives stall at
Hall No. 11 – Stall No. 528

Romila Thapar‘s new book of essays, Indian Society and the Secular, arrives at a time when India is facing its greatest challenges since Independence in 1947. With ultra right in power and forces of Hindu nationalism out to revise the very idea of a pluralistic, democratic and secular republic and recast it into a Hindu rashtra. She argues that secularism is not alien to Indian society and its intellectual traditions.

“Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas” captures the experience of doing business in a caste-conscious social environment

KULDEEP KUMAR writes in The Hindu, 5 March 2016:

The suicide of Dalit researcher Rohith Vemula, termed “institutionalised murder” by many a commentator, has focused the nation’s attention on the status of the Dalits and other disadvantaged sections of our society as we approach the 70th anniversary of the country’s Independence next year.

Despite the “Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan” (“Clean India Campaign”) launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, not much has changed on the ground and there are an estimated 1.3 million manual scavengers in the country. Manual scavenging is a euphemism for removing faeces from dry toilets and open drains by hand and carrying them to the place of disposal. For centuries, this task has been forcibly thrust upon the members of the untouchable communities – a recent report informs us that of the 1.3 million manual scavengers, nearly 90 per cent are women. Thus, besides being an issue of caste-based discrimination, manual scavenging also involves gender-based discrimination.

Despite this shameful reality, it is also a fact that many Dalits like Rohith Vemula have tried to improve their lot by getting education and gainful employment. However, whenever we discuss the condition of the two most disadvantaged communities – Dalits and tribals – we seldom look at their role in the country’s economy in general and corporate world in particular. The same holds true for the other disadvantaged community – that of the Muslims who constitute the largest minority group in the Indian society.

Three Essays Collective, a one-man publishing house started by well-known Hindi poet Asad Zaidi to make a meaningful intervention, has brought out an excellent book titled “Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas”. It has been written by Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the Oxford University, in collaboration with Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar, Aseem Prakash and Kaushal Vidyarthee.

Ten years ago, Three Essays Collective had also published a pioneering study “Muslims in Indian Economy” written by Omar Khalidi. Reading both these books together, one gets an idea of how dismal the situation really is and, in the absence of corrective measures, how this can lead to fault lines one day erupting with serious consequences for the nation and its polity.

To read rest of the review, please go here

On publication of The Indian Ideology, I was asked by Praful Bidwai if he could interview me about it for Outlook. I was then in France, and our exchange was conducted by email. … [Before this] I had met Praful just once, at a conference in Delhi in 2010, at which I remember him gently reproaching me for being uncritical of India’s intervention in East Bengal in 1971. After the interview, however, he would unfailingly send me his articles on political and social developments in the Subcontinent. From these I formed a great admiration for him as a writer and an activist.

To my knowledge, few journalists anywhere in the world possessed the combination of human and intellectual qualities that was his: clarity of expression, independence of mind, balance of judgment, warmth of feeling, in the service of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, not only in India, but anywhere in the world. He was extraordinarily productive, and completely unsectarian, in both sympathy and outlook. His sudden death in July of this year has deprived India of one of its finest spirits of the contemporary period.

Of Gardens and Graves

“In our world, official stories are repeated ad nauseam by every form of government or corporate media, and most often these stories have more to do with administrative convenience than with people’s lives. One of the most important tasks of writers is to produce accounts of experiences and events that contest official myopia and lies. Now, as you say, there are a number of writers who are doing just that, and doing so convincingly. I also believe that academics have a special responsibility to pay critical attention to such cultural productivity, and thus to make it part of larger conversations across the globe.”

Suvir Kaul in conversation with Majid Maqbool

Full text: http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2015/Apr/27/-we-have-to-repair-trust-and-rebuild-homes–18.asp

Daya Varma died just a week ahead of the release of his second book, Medicine, Healthcare and the Raj: the unacknowledged legacy. He will be remembered for his extraordinary life – a life lived so directly, courageously and honestly. There were many books inside him, waiting to be shaped after he retired from his busy life as a scientist, teacher and progressive-radical activist in Montreal –  Three Essays Collective

Excerpts from the obituary notice released by his family and friends:

Dr. Daya Ram Varma
Passed on: March 22nd, 2015
August 23, 1929 – March 22, 2015

Dr. Daya Ram Varma, died Sunday March 22, 2015, at his home in St John’s surrounded by loving family and friends.

Daya was born in a small village called Narion in India to proud parents, the late Sampati and Matabadal Chowdhary. Starting at a one-room primary school in his village, pursuing his quest for education, he went on to receive MBBS and MD degrees with honours from the prestigious King George Medical College in Lucknow. He came to Canada to study in 1959 and received his PhD in Pharmacology from McGill University in 1961. He rose through the academic ranks, and then continued to work through a post-retirement appointment until 2007. He was made a professor emeritus in 2009.

He leaves behind Shree Mulay, who has been his wife, comrade and companion for twenty-eight years; his three children: Rahul (Dipti Gupta), Roli (Deepak Kapoor), and Rohit Varma (Asma Yasmin); their mother Krishna Varma; his four granddaughters: Ila, Sonia, Sarah, and Aliya, of whom he was very proud; and his step-son Aziz Mulay-Shah. Daya was pre-deceased by his step-son Sanjay Mulay-Shah. He also leaves behind his siblings, nieces, nephews, and other relatives and hundreds of close friends and comrades in India, Canada, and throughout the world.

Daya was a lifelong activist dedicated to equality, justice, and peace. He was a secularist and a socialist who applied his intellect towards social causes. He was featured in many documentary films such as Bhopal: Search for Justice, which chronicled his compelling findings as a way to find justice for victims of the Bhopal disaster (1984). He authored two books on the history of medicine, over 225 scientific papers, and a large number of political articles published in a range of prestigious journals. Never daunted, he compiled the March issue of INSAF bulletin during the last stages of his illness. Daya founded, supported, or influenced many progressive organizations such as the Indian Peoples Association in North America, CERAS, Kabir Cultural Center, the South Asia Women Community Center, Teesri Duniya Theatre, and many others. In particular, he championed the cause of peace and harmony between India and Pakistan.

Daya came from a small village in India and his life ended in a small city in Canada. He appreciated the warmth of people of St. John’s, Newfoundland and was an avid member of Bridge Clubs run by Marilyn Bennett and Joan Fitzgerald. Daya’s family thank Ms Helen Osmond who provided care during his last days.

 

Aneesh Pradhan in conversation with Nalini Taneja about his book Hindustani Music in Colonial Bombay and some key issues in contemporary Hindustani art music.

What in your view are the key problems in historiography of Hindustani music, as well as musicology that derives from it?

Until the last two decades or so, historiography of Hindustani music was largely restricted to hagiographies and the study of one or more treatises.  Hindustani music was almost regarded as an occurrence in a vacuum, without any reference to the socio-cultural, political and economic contexts within which the music was being made.  However, this idea of history has changed greatly, and we have to thank non-Indian scholars and Dr. Ashok Da. Ranade, eminent scholar-musician, for bringing to the subject critical writing and path-breaking analysis.  Today, Hindustani music is being written about not just by ethnomusicologists, but also by anthropologists and historians.  While this has increased critical inquiry into the subject and has thrown up several important questions, I must hasten to add that there is often a lack of dialogue between the scholarly work and the oral tradition.  In other words, the absence of familiarity with the performing tradition and its worldview, often restricts the scholarly work from adopting a multi-layered approach.  Likewise, performers are often not informed about recent research, and are therefore content with the myth and legend that they have been conditioned by.

Two related questions. Can one, basing oneself on the pre-medieval and early medieval sources, at all work out the concrete structure and soundscape of shastriya sangeet? To begin with, is the term shastriya a useful analytical or conceptual tool?

The term shastriya is relatively new and is connected to the efforts made to classicise Hindustani music from the second half of the nineteenth century.  It suggests that the Indian tradition is based on textual sources and is scientific.  These were qualities attributed to Western music by colonial scholars. Attempts were therefore made by sections of the Indian middle class to prove to the Western world and to those Indians influenced by this world, that Indian music was also equally qualified and at par with Western music.  To consider the textual and the oral as diametrically opposed would be hazardous, as the Indian tradition is replete with the co-existence of the two.  Indeed, performance and pedagogy are primarily oral traditions, but that is not to say that textual sources from various periods in history should not be considered.  Until recent, the textual in the Indian context was also largely restricted to Sanskrit sources, but now, we have substantial research on Persian sources too.  More work needs to be done in the realm of regional literature on music.  A combined study of all these sources, an analytical study of recorded material from 78 rpms brought out in the early twentieth century, and of oral histories, biographies, autobiographies, among other sources, would then possibly help us understand the soundscape of Indian art music.  I must mention here that Dr. Ashok Da. Ranade felt that the term shastrokta sangeet was more appropriate than shastriya sangeet.  By shastrokta, he meant that which has a shastra or is governed by rules, but rules that are orally transmitted.

Socially speaking, the world of patrons in the metropolis, which came from the emerging commercial and industrial classes,  was far removed from the world of the performing artists. The encounter was very different from the norms of feudal patronage and dependencies. However, there are similarities with the era of blues and jazz: the memories of slavery, dismal conditions of life in the past and the present, and a kind of cultural negotiation resulting in  recovery of a new self and search for dignity.  How did our musicians, male and female, fare in this respect?

Yes, the worlds of the new patrons and the performers were very different.  But I would not draw parallels with the situation related to blues and jazz.  Those forms did not develop through hereditary musician lineages, whereas Hindustani music did.  I am referring to the lineages specifically because these were the networks and the ethos surrounding the hereditary musicians that musicians depended upon to establish themselves in the new urban situation.  The living and working conditions were far removed from what musicians were accustomed to under feudal patronage, so it was imperative for musicians to first gain a professional foothold in the city before they could even consider a changed presence in the fraternity and in the larger social environment.  Undoubtedly, the urban situation impacted their lives at many levels.  First, it provided them with new avenues of patronage, second, it located them in varying and challenging professional circumstances that rose out of technological changes that the period saw, and third and most importantly, it forced them to reinvent performance practice and pedagogy to cope with new performance contexts and spaces and students belonging to the elite class.  Needless to say, musicians – male and female – emerged successful in their efforts at negotiating these difficult times and shaped performance and pedagogy as we know it now.

The new era did bring about the changes in the hierarchies, social as well as aesthetic, within the musical tradition. How would you sum them up in a few sentences?

For one, with public patronage came the possibility of democratizing the process of learning, performing and listening. This patronage manifested itself in the form of music clubs and music circles, through gramophone recordings and broadcasting. In other words, musicians were now able to reach out to wider audiences through multiple platforms. In a tradition that was largely restricted to hereditary male and women performers, hear platforms offered opportunities to amateurs, some of whom went on to pursue music as a profession later. Scholars have raised questions about appropriation in the context of non-hereditary musicians taking to the profession and about the ostensible marginalisation of Muslim musicians. But these arguments need to be considered carefully as they often tend to look at musicians as a monolithic entity, whereas the reality is otherwise. Women performers, particularly those from the devadasi tradition, learnt and excelled in the khayal form, hitherto primarily a male preserve.  The earlier importance of the vocalists was gradually changing in favour of instrumentalists. This upward social mobility within the musician fraternity did not however favour the accompanying musicians until much later. The equation between the guru and shishya was transformed in cases where the shishya was from a non-hereditary musician family and was from an elite background, but was not wanting to pursue music professionally. However, learning continued to be an arduous process tilted in favour of the guru in cases where the shishya was from a hereditary musician family or was from a non-elite background wishing to pursue music professionally. Thus, earlier hierarchies were challenged, but not entirely so.

You have been concerned with the place of instrument and instrumentalists in the musical hierarchy. What are the changes you notice in the period you studied.

Traditionally, vocal music and vocalists had always enjoyed a position of prime importance in Hindustani music, both in a musical sense as well as in terms of  status in the fraternity. However, technology, craftsmanship displayed by instrument makers, musical charisma of instrumentalists, and a gradual democratizing of the tradition, gave a fillip to instrumental music.  As a result, there was an increase in instrumental solos, including solo recitals featuring instruments like tabla, pakhawaj and harmonium, which were considered primarily accompanying instruments.

Music and nationalism have intersected each other in the pre-Independence era, particularly from late 1920s. But nationalism, a contested terrain with its multiple strains, also injected into musical sphere certain forms of identitarian politics. How did it impact the actually existing parampara? How did musicians themselves negotiate it.

Hagiographers of music educationist Vishnu Digambar Paluskar have written about his association with the nationalist movement and his presence at Congress sessions where he sang Vande Mataram on several occasions.  However, Paluskar’s work through the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya that he founded showed a more layered response to colonial rule.  For instance, he did not find it out of place to invite British officials to convocation ceremonies at his school.  There were some musicians who included nationalist songs in their concert repertoire.  But one does not come across an overt mass-scale political approach among practitioners of Hindustani music that was aligned to the nationalist movement.  On the other hand, nationalism threw up issues of cultural identity that led sections of the Indian elite to utilise and project Hindustani music as a symbol of ancient national culture.  Modern pedagogy continued along this trajectory.  One may be led to believe that hereditary musicians were mute witnesses to this process, but the choices that they made with regard to performance practice and pedagogy tell another story.  Undoubtedly, they were participants in this process and shaped the manner in which we view Hindustani music today.

Coming to the question of music education and music syllabi today. What are the problems you see today. What reform are needed?

I think traditional and institutionalised patterns of music education need to be reviewed seriously in view of the massive transformation we have seen in pedagogic concepts and methods elsewhere and to cope with rapidly changing technology.  Today, students are accustomed to a multi-sensory perception given easy access to multi-media.  Not that such a multi-sensory perception was not present earlier or was not encouraged.  But the new form we are experiencing is catalysed by technology, and our education system and syllabi need to take cognisance of this.  More importantly, teachers and students need to constantly ask themselves why they are learning music.  Is it to enable them to perform, to undertake research, or to be connected with extra-musical activity.  The answers that they come up with will help in shaping systems of teaching and syllabi associated with those.

Gharana system, whatever is meant by it, was declared moribund, in fact DEAD. For almost a century one has been hearing of its death. What is this thing that is dead and yet not quite dead?

The idea that gharanas are dead is more to do with what appears in the public discourse.  I am not sure if musicians wholly subscribe to this idea.  At any rate, I do not feel this is true, if one accepts gharana not merely as a genealogy of teachers and taught but as an aesthetic that underlies performance and pedagogy.  To that extent, we all start or are anchored in one or the other gharana ‘ideology’ and aesthetic, but may choose to branch out, deviate, or radically change.  Eclecticism has existed in the Hindustani music tradition since the late nineteenth century with musicians often learning from more than one guru and these gurus not always belonging to one gharana.  But that is not to say that the gurus and the shishyas gave short shrift to the aesthetic.  In many ways, this process enriched their musical persona as would be expected of any tradition that hopes to remain alive and flourish.  Briefly, therefore, I do not see gharanas and eclecticism as contrary aesthetic approaches.

Aneesh, this book has evolved out of your PhD thesis for the Department of History, University of Bombay.  Tell us briefly something about your apprenticeship as a PhD scholar.

I benefitted greatly as a PhD scholar, as I learnt research methodology and learnt how to problematize concepts and empirical data.  The rigour and discipline involved in my doctoral research enabled me to organize not only my immediate research material, but also helped me in approaching my musical learning differently.  I had already begun performing on the Hindustani music concert stage when I decided to pursue a doctoral degree. Consequently, it was natural for me to be impacted by both streams, at times colliding with each other causing great confusion in my mind, and at other times extending the initial idea that I may have started with in one of the two areas.

(photographs by Raghav Pasricha)

The sudden departure of MSS Pandian, historian, scholar and extraordinary teacher, adds a sense of emptiness to these terrible times. A massive heart attack following a gastro-intestinal complication, of which he wasn’t fully aware, took him away on 10 November 2014 at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. On the way to the hospital in the morning he was worrying about the MA class he was to teach  at 4:00 in the afternoon at the Centre of Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he was a professor. He will be missed by his students, friends and colleagues. A radical,  avant garde scholar with deeply egalitarian moorings, his work will remain an example of a prose that is objective, political and moral.

An excerpt:

“For a man born in 1906 and witnessed the most acute battles around caste — whether it be M K Gandhi’s threat to suicide which robbed by means of the Poona Pact the ‘untouchable’ communities of separate electorate, or the nation-wide movement for temple entry by the untouchables, or the rise of the non-Brahmin politics in the Madras Presidency during the early decades of the twentieth century — R K Narayan’s forgetfulness about caste comes through as a bit surprising. But this feeling of surprise fades away when one does a closer reading of his autobiography. All through the autobiography, caste masquerades as something else and makes its muted modern appearance. For instance, writing about his difficulties in getting a proper house to rent in Mysore, he writes, ‘…our requirements were rather complicated — separate room for three brothers, their families, and a mother; also for Sheba, our huge Great Dane, who had to have a place outside the house to have her meat cooked, without the fumes from the meat pot polluting our strictly vegetarian atmosphere; a place for our old servant too, who was the only one who could go out and get the mutton and cook it.’ It does not need much of an effort to understand what ‘strictly vegetarian atmosphere’ or meat, which is specified as mutton (that is, it is not beef) encodes. It is caste by other means.The subtle act of transcoding caste and caste relations into something else — as though to talk about caste as caste would incarcerate one into a pre-modern realm — is a regular feature one finds in most upper caste autobiographies. Caste always belongs to someone else; it is somewhere else; it is of another time. The act of transcoding is an act of acknowledging and disavowing caste at once. In marked contrast to the upper caste autobiographies, the self-definition of one’s identity, as found in the autobiographies of the lower castes, is located explicitly in caste as a relational identity. The autobiographical renditions of Bhama or Viramma, two Dalit women from the Tamil-speaking region, the poignant autobiographical fragments of Dalits from Maharashtra, put together by Arjun Dangle in his edited volume Corpse in the Well, and Vasant Moon’s Growing up Untouchable in India are all suffused with the language of caste — at times mutinous, at times moving. Most often the very act of writing an autobiography for a person belonging to a lower caste is to talk about and engage with the issue of caste.5 In other words, we have here two competing sets of languages dealing with the issue of caste. One talks of caste by other means; and the other talks of caste on its ‘own terms’ ” MSS Pandian(‘One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere’).

Excerpt from Afthab Ellath’s Wall.

Kafkaland explores the grisly underbelly of counterterrorism, where prejudice and lawlessness are the standard operating codes. From Mumbai to Bangalore, to Delhi to Madhya Pradesh, it examines some of the most prominent terror cases to show that the hallmark of terror investigations is not simply a casual subversion of norms but cynical prejudice and brutal violence inflicted in the knowledge of absolute impunity.  It also examines the disquieting trend of judicial abdication, wherein the courts indulgently ignore signs of torture, lack of evidence and absence of procedural norms, while trying terror cases.

Kafkaland challenges the dominant narratives of counterterrorism and the emerging security-industrial complex.  Kafkaland is where impunity, bias, suspicion are sustained by laws, where erosion of constitutional guarantees is advertised as internal security, where corporate greed masquerades as national interest.  (Available from October 30)

Manisha Sethi is currently Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. She teaches at the Centre for Comparative Religions and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is also Associate Editor at Biblio: A Review of Books. Her book Escaping the World: Women Renouncers among Jains was published in 2012. Sethi is an activist with Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association (www.teacherssolidarity.org).

In her introduction to the annotated critical edition of Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s ‘Annihilation of Caste’ (Navayana, 2014), Arundhati Roy looks at the ways in which caste plays out in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate into the present day.

To mark the launch of the book Arundhati Roy will be in conversation with Asad Zaidi, Hindi poet and publisher, Three Essays Press.

Saturday, March 15, 2014, 7:00 pm
Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre, Lodi Road, New Delhi

Three Essays books at the New Delhi World Book Fair 2014 (15-23 February) at the IPD Alternatives stall (Hall 14, Stall 13)

Gangubai was born to a family of traditional musicians in Dharwad and went on to become one of the greatest vocalists of the Hindustani classical music. ‘A Life in Three Octaves’ is an account of the life and times of this extraordinary musician who forged the highest form of art through the crucible of her circumstances.

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Deepa Ganesh, Gangubai Hangal’s biographer, brings to life the historical moments which shaped Gangubai’s musical persona: the changing landscape of patronage and the arrival of the gramophone in India; the dying phase of the courtesan singing tradition and the creation of a public sphere; the rise of Marathi natyasangeet; the institution of All India Radio; and above all the Indian freedom struggle. She describes in detail Gangubai’s intimate relationships, especially those with her husband, her guru and her daughter Krishna, which were to profoundly influence her musical practice and her personality. To represent Gangubai’s life is to return time and again to her music.

Intimate, endearing and sincere, ‘A Life in Three Octaves’ presents to us the first-ever portrait of Gangubai: poised between the riches of tradition and the promise of modernity. A study of Gangubai’s life and her music can never be two separate things. She was very much a child of her times even as she stood to alter the course of history. During any narration of her life, she recorded how the momentous happenings – in fact a range of them – did have a bearing on her; at times they were a part of her unconscious avowal.

Past was not something dead and gone, but something that was living and that which continued to live in her as did people who shaped her life and the values they represented. Drawing from it constantly, she invigorated her present.

True to the Kirana stamp, Gangubai was also a pursuer of the sur. For her, tradition was of immense value. She would say, “It is the labour of one who teaches and the one who learns.” When the air of change and novelty was blowing across the entire country, it was only Gangubai and Hirabai Badodekar, who stood for convention. They carried a deep reverence for the knowledge that was passed on by the guru, a belief that it was complete. New depths had to be found within the framework of tradition itself, and never outside of it. Faith in guru and her art was above everything else for Gangubai; hence commercialisation of music was something that she never had to battle with.

She never found the need to introduce any frills in her music. She sang the truth, as it appeared to her, and that was Gangubai’s virtuosity.