Palestinian violence is not unprovoked. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is amongst the longest-standing occupations of modern times. It is an occupation that has continuously expanded. The land earmarked for a Palestinian State has been deliberately sown with Jewish settlements to ensure that no contiguous territory exists on which a Palestinian State might be built. The theft of land destroys Palestinian livelihoods. Their disenfranchisement reduces them to helots. Their claim to East Jerusalem is continuously eroded through evictions. Hard Right governments, settlers and orthodox fanatics relentlessly challenge the status quo at Jerusalem's sacred sites. The nature of the occupation produces a routine of provocation which the Palestinian subject of Israel's raj must endure daily, to merely survive.

Mukul Kesavan, ‘Philistines and Pharisees’, Telegraph

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi fulfilled a long-standing dream on Monday by presiding over the opening of the Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple in Ayodhya. He described it as the 'beginning of a new era' during the temple's inaugural ceremony. The temple's construction marks a decisive break with secularism in India, as it was built on the site where a four-hundred-year-old mosque, Babri Masjid, once stood before being destroyed by a mob in 1992.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization, were aligned with the mob that destroyed the mosque. Both the BJP and RSS envision India as a Hindu nation, despite its large Muslim population. In 2019, after a legal dispute, the Supreme Court of India allowed for the construction of the Hindu temple on the disputed site.

Modi's involvement in the temple goes back several decades when he was a young Hindu activist raising funds for its construction. Now, as the Prime Minister in his second consecutive term, the completion of the temple is likely to be a centerpiece of his future election campaigns.

In an interview with essayist and historian Mukul Kesavan, they discussed Modi's popularity, the violent history of the Ayodhya dispute, and what sets India apart from other countries experiencing right-wing political movements.

In 1925, the R.S.S. was founded as a nationalist organization with a Hindu majoritarianism focus. It aimed to create a unifying ideology for the diverse subcontinent of India. The R.S.S. felt alienated from the Congress Party and its anti-colonial nationalism. The Congress Party viewed India as a human jungle with diverse communities, while the R.S.S. and Hindu-majoritarian movements wanted a more homogenous nationalism. The Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple, played a significant role in the rise of the B.J.P. and the political mobilization of Indians. The R.S.S. has always had the ambition to reconstitute the Indian Republic and believes that the soul of India was suppressed between 1947 and 1950 when the constitution was written. The Ram-temple movement, which began in the 1980s, was led by organizations affiliated with the R.S.S. and the B.J.P. The movement argued for the right of Hindus to worship at the site believed to be the birthplace of Ram. The state often ignored provocations related to the temple, either considering them too sensitive or too troublesome to address.

In 1992, the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya shocked the country. The building was brought down by hand with crude tools, causing massive communal violence. The leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) claimed they didn't want this criminal act to happen, but the shock it caused was intense. Decades later, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of building a temple on the site. This ruling, while acknowledging the mosque's destruction as a criminal act, ultimately gave the land to the Hindu party. It is seen as a capitulation to Prime Minister Modi and the Hindu nationalist movement.

Source Link: How the Hindu Right Triumphed in India

To describe the bilingual, often multilingual, contexts in which anglophone writers live and work in India, it might be useful to change metaphors, to replace the swimming bath with the bucket “bath” so we can escape the idea of immersion. Indians don’t immerse themselves in baths; they sluice themselves with muffins of water. The moral, I suppose, is that the anglophone Indian doesn’t need immersion to sustain language: small quantities of running English- spoken, written, sung and heard - will do.

The Anglophone

from Homeless on Google Earth by Mukul Kesavan

hello, could you suggest some books/essays on photography? I feel like you already answered this ask but I can't seem to find it anywhere :(

here you go —

books

on photography by susan sontag — essays on photography, transparency, ethics, voyeurism

camera lucida by roland barthes — on photographers and photography as a medium and as art; particularly on how photography or the photograph is related to loss, the body and mind

between the eyes: essays on photography and politics by john berger, david levi strauss — a much more recent collection; about photography and politics and society; on reality, what photographs convey, what they end up doing etc

another way of telling by john berger — on developing a theory of photography; so it covers a bunch of questions about what the nature of a photograph is, if photography is more of an art form or a medium to document 'reality'

bystander: a history of street photography by colin westernbeck — this is a fun one; about how photography on the street took place in urban chaos

towards a philosophy of photography by vilém flusser (trans. anthony mathews) — pretty much like berger or sontag; on the tension between aesthetics, politics, and morality implicit in photography and the possibility of developing a philosophy and a theory that takes into account all of these tensions

essays

'looking at war' — susan sontag

'daydreams and fragments' — maël renouard

'what it was like when peter hujar took your photograph' — linda rosenkrantz

're-framing photography: some thoughts' — stefanie michels

'raghu rai' — mukul kesavan

happy reading!

Democratic societies are based on the presumption that their residents are citizens except for those who explicitly aren’t, like diplomats or tourists or people on work visas. If the State has doubts about an individual’s citizenship status, it has to substantiate its suspicions. With a National Register of Citizens, the burden of proof is abruptly shifted: the citizen has to prove his/her claim to citizenship. It’s like the abrupt withdrawal of the presumption of innocence. Once the NRC’s wheels begin to grind, you aren’t a citizen till you prove you are; you’re guilty till you prove yourself innocent.

- Mukul Kesavan

Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel

Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel by ESPN Cricinfo

Rahul Dravid was probably one of the last classical Test match batsmen. The lynchpin of India’s Test match side through the 2000s, he combined technical virtuosity with a legendary work ethic and near-yogic powers of concentration, and epitomised an old-school guts-before-glory approach in an age increasingly defined by flashy strokeplay and low attention spans. A collection of 30 pieces – new and previously published on ESPNcricinfo and its sister publications – this book features contributions from Dravid’s team-mates and peers, some of the finest cricket writers around, and interviews over the years with Dravid himself. It attempts to paint a picture of a cricketer who embodied the best traditions and values of the game, and a man who impressed the many people who came in contact with him. Greg Chappell remembers the India captain he worked alongside. Ed Smith, who shared a dressing room with Dravid at Kent, writes of a thorough gentleman. Sanjay Bangar relives the splendour of Headingley 2002. Jarrod Kimber tells of how Dravid became the reason for him getting married. Mukul Kesavan analyses how his technique allows for more style than one might assume. Sidharth Monga puts Dravid’s captaincy under the spotlight. Rohit Brijnath looks back at the twin peaks of Adelaide 2003. Vijeeta Dravid gives us a look at her husband the perfectionist. Those and other articles make Timeless Steel as much a celebration of a colossal cricketer as of an exceptional human being.

Download : Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel More Book at: Zaqist Book

Like many Western commentators, Gray acknowledges that China and East Asia have had a good ‘war’. He suggests that East Asian societies have succeeded in containing the virus because their traditional cultures prioritize collective well-being over personal autonomy. He then predicts that Western societies like Britain’s will learn to do the same, that Britain’s citizens will, in the foreseeable future, be willing to sacrifice some part of their privacy and personal freedom and to open themselves to forms of State intrusion like the bio-surveillance that helped East Asian nations to control the pandemic.

Mukul Kesavan, here.

Will the Covid 19 change the world? 

Ode to a Cow

Ode to a Cow

When life seems one too many for you,  Go and look at a Cow.  When the futures black and the outlooks blue,  Go and look at a Cow.  For she does nothing but eat her food,  and sleep in the meadows entirely nood,  Refusing to fret or worry or brood,  Because she doesn’t know how. Whenever you’re feeling bothered or sore,  Go and look at a Cow,  When everything else is a fearful bore,  Go and look…

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If Palestinians were to begin uploading pictures of exploded Gazan babies on TikTok, it is unlikely that Biden would share them. Nor would Blinken consent to an atrocity tour of a Gazan neighbourhood levelled by Israel. Killing civilians remotely or from a great height is not as wicked as killing them at close quarters. Western leaders and Western newspapers have taken to calling the Hamas massacre Israel's 9/11. This makes Israel's pulverisation of Gaza Palestine's Dresden. The difference is that every Western state endorses this bloody bombardment: give them this day their daily Dresden.

Mukul Kesavan, ‘Philistines and Pharisees’, Telegraph

What will happen to Sairat when it is appropriated by Bollywood?

What will happen to Sairat when it is appropriated by Bollywood?

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Around this time two years ago, Indian audiences were spellbound by Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat — its likeable young lovers, brash heroine, quiet hero, symphonic music, the resoundingly silent finale, and the infectious beats of ‘Zingaat’ that refused to fade.

But there was one person who expressed deep disappointment with the Marathi blockbuster. And as I watch the heated debates on social…

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"Popular wisdom has it that it is the film industry that has kept Hindustani alive. This perception exists despite the gradual “purification” of Hindi in postcolonial India, the historical origin of which can be traced to the Hindi movement of the nineteenth century.

The film industry’s use of Hindustani, in an official climate in which the national state language was gradually becoming Sanskritized, has been a remarkable achievement. The cinema’s contribution toward ensuring the survival of Hindustani in the backdrop of an increasing linguistic warfare enabled the cinema to create space for other forms of experimentation.

The location of the film industry in a non-Hindi-speaking region allowed the industry to both preserve and experiment with its spoken language. This, in turn, resulted in new kinds of performances through figures who embodied the specificity of the “Bombay experience.”

The Bombay film industry was born in the shadow of linguistic conflict that carried on well into the twentieth century. The silent era did not have to deal with the language issue. It was only with the birth of the talkies in 1931 that language became central to the imagination of the Bombay film industry.

While catering to large sections of the population in North India, the industry was located in the capital city (Bombay) of a non-Hindi-speaking region (the state of Maharashtra). What is interesting is the decision of the film industry to use Urdu/Hindustani as the language of Bombay cinema. This is all the more remarkable in the face of the entrenched position taken by Hindi-language elites, who advocated a Sanskritized rendering in opposition to Urdu.

Alok Rai suggests a rural-urban division in the language debate. The Persian stream was represented by urban Muslims, professionals, and Kayasths. The Nagari stream was more rural, but it represented a significant proportion of upper-caste Hindus, including Brahmins, Banias, and Thakurs.

This rural-urban split may have been decisive in the industry’s decision to favor Urdu. Urdu was the language favored by urban poets and writers, many of whom joined the film industry. The predominance of Urdu/Hindustani in the industry is now an undisputed and acknowledged fact and can be traced to a number of reasons aside from the rural-urban split.

In an interesting foray into the linguistic roots of Hindi cinema, Mukul Kesavan suggests that the melodramatic nature of the Hindi film form could best be captured through “Urdu’s ability to find sonorous words for inflated emotion”. Javed Akhtar traces the connection between Urdu and the film industry to the precinematic urban cultural form of Urdu Parsi Theater."

- from Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City by Ranjani Majumdar

Jamia Millia Islamia Personalities

JMI Faculty

Akhtar Wasey

Farhat Basir Khan

Farida Abdulla Khan

Furqan Qamar

Imran Ali

Mohammad Mujeeb

Mohammad Zahid Ashraf

Mukul Kesavan

Nuzhat Parveen Khan

Shohini Ghosh

Zafar Ahmad Nizami

Zayn al-Abidin Sajjad Meerthi

JMI Faculty education

Professor Emeritus Islamic Studies, former Head of the departmentof Islamic Studies and former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Languages.

Professor of Photography

Former Dean of the Education faculty of Jamia.

Professor of Management, Former Vice-chancellor of Central University of Himachal Pradesh, and Adviser to Planning Commission (Education)

Professor of Chemistry, adjudged number one scientist in India in the field of Analytical Chemistry by Stanford University.

Former VC of the Jamia.

Professor, Department of Biotechnology

Professor, Department of History, Jamia Millia Islamia

Professor, Faculty of Law, Jamia Millia Islamia

Director, AJK Mass Communication Research Centre

The former head of the Department of Political Science.

Professor of History and former head of the department of Islamic Studies.

Founders of Jamia Millia Islamia

Mahmud Hasan Deobandi

Mohammad Ali Jauhar

Hakim Ajmal Khan

Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari

Abdul Majeed Khwaja

Zakir Hussain

While India is desperate for oxygen, its politicians deny there’s even a problem | Mukul Kesavan

While India is desperate for oxygen, its politicians deny there’s even a problem | Mukul Kesavan

Join Hafta-Ichi to Research the article “While India is desperate for oxygen, its politicians deny there’s even a problem | Mukul Kesavan” In India’s capital city, citizens are dying in their hospital beds because they can’t breathe. Their lungs, clotted with Covid-induced pneumonia, need oxygen to function. Overwhelmed by India’s tsunami-like second wave and undermined by the smug inertia of…

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From namaste to corona drugs, West is looking to East for survival tips

Once we brought back Camay soaps. Now we bring back the virus. “Foreign-returned” has acquired a patina of suspicion rather than pride. The foreign-returned are sent to quarantine much like Americans once did to all immigrants during the cholera US President Donald Trump called Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ask him to release shipments of Hydroxychloroquine tablets hoping they might be a “game-changer” in the fight against Covid-19. Whether they work or not, that call underscored how the pandemic has turned the world order upside down. As a new immigrant in America in the 90s, I was used to thinking of the US as the safe zone and India as the dangerous outback swarming with exotic diseases. I remember pots of water being boiled at my home every time I returned to Kolkata. Indian water was deemed unsafe for my Americanised digestive system. It seems an ironic twist that now an American president is looking to India for help in keeping Americans safe, that too with a drug used to fight malaria. America-returned or London-returned used to be badges of pride in middle-class India. Your stock went up in the neighbourhood with that visa stamp. I always brought back extra Camay soaps and Kitkat chocolates to distribute among the neighbours, cheap treats in America that still carried foreignreturned cachet in India. Once we brought back Camay soaps. Now we bring back the virus. “Foreign-returned” has acquired a patina of suspicion rather than pride. The foreign-returned are sent to quarantine much like Americans once did to all immigrants during the cholera epidemic of 1892. Parents in India worry more about their children in America than in some other corner of India. Countries like Italy are regarded with trepidation the way the West traditionally regarded yellow fever zones in Africa. Foreigners in India, usually on the top of high society’s guest list, are objects of suspicion these days. When my friends Milena Chilla-Markhoff and her mother, who live in Kolkata about half the year, opted for repatriation back to Germany after commercial flights ceased in India, their biggest hurdle was getting someone to take them to the hotel from where the evacuees would leave for the airport. The cab services that would have once clamoured to take foreigners were reluctant to ferry anyone who looked foreign. To go or not to go has become a difficult question. A US consular official said while some 7,000 people had registered for repatriation to the US, when their staff cold-called 800 people for one of the evacuation flights, they got only 10 positive responses. I hear stories of Americans choosing to go back to the States because they are worried about aging parents back in America, but unsure whether it’s the safest thing to do, the old immigrant story turned on its head. It’s not that India is a safe haven from the virus. While the death toll has crossed into three figures, the low levels of testing make it unclear what kind of infection rates India is grappling with or where hotspots will erupt next. The point is that for the first time America feels no safer than India. Even more disorienting, the West is having to look to the East for survival tips from namaste to antimalaria drugs. Until recently leaders like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump had downplayed Covid-19, Trump calling it a hoax that would disappear like magic. The West was open for business as usual unlike Asia with its heavy-handed lockdowns, thermal scans and flight bans. Now as the toll spirals in America and Boris Johnson emerges from the ICU, Indian academic Mukul Kesavan writes “There is a First World defined by pandemic readiness; its capital is Seoul.” Addressing his party, Modi claimed the “speed with which India took decisions in a comprehensive and holistic manner is not only being talked about in the world but has been praised by the World Health Organisation.” Brazil’s president flatters India by evoking images of Hanuman bringing lifesaver herbs from the Himalayas. The fact is countries like India have long sought America’s favour. They are not used to America seeking favors from it. But this is not the time for schadenfreude. Rather it is about shared suffering. One just hopes that when we emerge from this pandemic, we will remember these lessons with humility. My friend Milena has reached Berlin with her mother. After undergoing ten days of India’s stringent lockdown, she felt compelled to hand out sanitisers to young people sitting too close together on the train in Germany. She has also figured out what gifts she could bring back from India that her friends in Germany might truly value the way Camay soaps once raised my stock in Kolkata. She is gifting them something the West covets in these days of Corona panic but is of little value in India — rolls of toilet paper. Read the full article