The juxtaposition and the parallel reading of poems written by Pandit and Muslim poets is a conscious move to se the shared language and poetry as the “affective glue that binds” them together even as they bear witness to “the destruction of the community”. Kaul does not perceive the suffering of the two communities – of one in the form of exile and its concomitant loss and hurt, and of the other, through militarized repression, systematic humiliation and denial of political agency – as opposed to each other, but as corollaries of the same phenomenon. The extraordinary sensitivity and scrupulousness with which he is able to navigate between the two sets of subjectivity, and not undermine either, despite being personally implicated as a Kashmiri Pandit, who also identifies as an Indian, is remarkable.
Category: Review
KN Panikkar’s History as a Site of Struggle reviewed in Frontline
History as a Site of Struggle encapsulates the righteous indignations of a sensitive activist of a historian who is unhappy with the way politics has been drifting into the narrow alleys of obscurantist jingoism and sectarian hatred. Panikkar has been an eminent academic, but, as the editor rightly puts it, “he has spent as much time teaching outside classrooms as inside; as much labour writing for popular media as in academic journals”. The essays on offer in the anthology may, at times, sound repetitive since they were written at different times in response to different provocations. But the views expressed there have a conviction, which is both consistent and uncompromising. They are politically positioned and they are not expressed with a please-all grin. Panikkar is sure that secularism is good for the country and communalism bad and that a progressive nation cannot be built except on this foundational belief. But there are many in the country who think otherwise, by conviction or for convenience.
By B. Surendra Rao
Full review here
Review roundup: The Indian Ideology
India and Ideology: Why Western Thinkers Struggle With the Subcontinent
By Pankaj Mishra, Council on Foreign Relations
According to Perry Anderson’s new book, The Indian Ideology, India’s democracy — routinely celebrated as the world’s largest — is actually a sham.
An Interview With Perry Anderson on “The Indian Ideology”
Sentimentalizing Gandhi by Praful Bidwai, Conterpunch.org
‘The Indian Ideology’ is another way of describing what is more popularly known as ‘The Idea of India’, which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.
Respect Gandhi If You Will, Don’t Sentimentalise Him
Praful Bidwai interviews Perry Anderson, Outlook India
The principal catastrophe of 1947 lay in the Congress folly of not realising that it was, in composition and outlook, a Hindu party.
London Review of Books
Why then has the sheer pressure of the famished masses, who apparently hold an electoral whip-hand, not exploded in demands for social reparation incompatible with the capitalist framework of this – as of every other – liberal democracy?
Political Economy of Uncaring: A review
C Shambu Prasad reviews A.R. Vasavi’s book Shadow Spaces: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India in EPW.
Why is it that India, which has arguably the largest number of farmers in the world, spends little time discussing its worst agrarian crisis? Why are farmer suicides not considered “newsworthy”? What makes us treat them as “distant strangers”? How do we find ourselves as academics, citizens, policymakers, agricultural researchers as part of this silence and “political economy of uncaring”?
Shadow Spaces by social anthropologist A R Vasavi is not a study focused primarily on farmer suicides but a reflection on this political economy of uncaring, an attempt to see suicides as a window to understand conditions and trends in rural India. The book is a much-needed, even overdue, addition to the existing literature on agrarian studies and farmer distress in India. The book makes important departures from existing works in three ways. First, unlike most studies on farmer suicides that are state- or region-specific, Shadow Spaces offers a narrative that is pan-Indian and thus a frame that allows for greater explanatory power and insights on the ongoing agrarian crisis that actually extends beyond the “suicide hotspots”.
Perry Anderson’s ‘Outlook’ interview on “The Indian Ideology” on Counterpunch
Complete interview on Counterpunch
You could say that, very roughly, it advances five main arguments that run counter to conventional wisdom in India today. Firstly, that the idea of a subcontinental unity stretching back six thousand years is a myth. Secondly, that Gandhi’s injection of religion into the national movement was ultimately a disaster for it. Thirdly, that primary responsibility for Partition lay not with the Raj, but Congress. Fourthly, that Nehru’s legacy to Republic was far more ambiguous than his admirers will admit. Lastly, that Indian democracy is not contradicted by caste inequality, but rather enabled by it. This is a crude summary. Obviously, in each case, much more is said than this.
Perry Anderson’s “After Nehru” on London Review of Books
Read the complete article on LondonReview of Books
This real achievement has, in what by now could be termed the Indian Ideology, been surcharged with claims to a largely imaginary status: the notion that the preservation by the Indian state of the unity of the country is a feat so exceptional as to be little short of a miracle, in the standard phrase. There is no basis for this particular vanity. A glance at the map of the post-colonial world is enough to show that, no matter how heterogeneous or artificial the boundaries of any given European colony may have been, they continue to exist today.
Praful Bidwai interviews Perry Anderson for Outlook India: ‘Respect Gandhi If You Will, Don’t Sentimentalise Him’
The complete interview available here: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?282832
… His latest book, The Indian Ideology, just published by the Three Essays Collective, is a scathing critique of the dominant celebratory discourse of the Idea of India, or the lionising of the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a miracle. His three recent essays on the subject in the London Review of Books have already generated considerable debate. In an e-mail interview with columnist and writer Praful Bidwai, Anderson discusses his book at length.
