Shaheed-E-Aazam Bhagat Singh was called Terrorist by British Raj, but to Indians he was, is and always will be a Freedom Fighter

Indian socialist revolutionary Bhagat Singh and his comrades, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru, were executed by India’s British colonial rulers.

During Singh’s short life, he became one of the most influential revolutionaries in India’s independence movement.

Although he respected Mahatma Gandhi’s role in organizing people to resist British rule, he also developed a critique of Gandhi’s methods and vision for a post-independence India.

Despite his atheism and Marxism, he’s still revered today by all sections of the country and is referred to as Shaheed-e-Azam (the Great Martyr) in Punjabi.

On March 23, 1931, Bhagat Singh and his two fellow revolutionaries were hanged.

As they marched towards the gallows, they reportedly chanted, “Down with British Imperialism” and “Down with capitalism!”.

Their actions and subsequent execution by the colonial regime inspired many and made them revered figures in the Indian struggle for freedom against the British Empire.

Just like Palestinians Resistance is called a terrorist group by the Western Nations simply because they refuse to give up their land for European and North American White People. Palestinians are indigenous to the land of Palestine. Becky from Brooklyn is not. This is not a war about religion, this is a struggle for their motherland of Palestine, this is a struggle for equal rights, this is a struggle for Palestinians for the Right of Return to their homelands from which they were and are being driven out by Terrorist militias in 1948 and by Europeans and North Americans with the help of Terrorist Organization IDF. Israel has made this struggle an excuse to commit GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING of Palestinians. This is about BRUTAL & TERRORIST COLONIZER State Israel (like the British Raj in India where they STARVED & KILLED MILLIONS of Indians) and OPPRESSED & DISPLACED People of Palestine (Something that former colonies like India know)

I feel like not enough people talk about how Subhash Chandra Bose basically had wartime alliances with Nazi Germany. So yes, not even Indian freedom fighters who opposed British colonization are beyond criticism, when it comes to the methods they chose. Freedom fighters can also be incredibly problematic and it is not wrong for people to say that they don't support them. And it is not wrong to criticize them. It is okay to condemn them. One can understand that it was their oppression that had a role to play in leading them to this path, and still not support it.

Saw the trailer for HBO Clone High and...yeah this is exactly why I didn't want a second season this far after the original aired lol

The new animation isn't bad, but it's definitely of this era of adult Western animation and it pisses off my brain the way modern Fox animated sitcoms like Family Guy do. Something about the framerate maybe?

Confucius seems like a ripoff of Ghandi that was made solely because the reaction to Ghandi's character in India was largely why it got canceled in the first place. He and Harriet Tubman's designs also look kind of meh to me, tho I liked Frida's alright.

I have no problems with JFK sounding a little different because it's been 20 FUCKING YEARS since Clone High first aired, it's like being pissed that Tom Kenny sounds a little different voicing SpongeBob now vs. In the mid-2000s. That said does anyone know why Cleo's original VA changed? I've heard it was due to union issues but couldn't verify it

Ghandi's one of the best characters from the original and I get why they didn't want to bring him back, I really do, but it's stupid that they seem to have just transferred his personality to Confucius. I think it's kind of funny that the excuse in-show for not bringing him back is they legit forgot to unfreeze him, but I've always found it stupid they got so many complaints about this fictionalized CLONE of a historical figure that it influenced the show's cancelation.

Don’t you guys just hate working for people 🤦🏾‍♀️

Follow me on ig @ayanasheree

Steam my music and blow me up!

“Gandhi’s Friend Given Civic Welcome To Gotham,” Toronto Star. September 26, 1932. Page 17. ---- The Hon. Vithalbhai J. Patel, Indian statesman and friend of Mahatma Gandhi, who arrived in New York aboard the S.S. Europa, for a tour of the country, was received at the city hall by Mayor Joseph V. McKee. Mr. Patel was formerly president of the Indian legislative assembly and was at one time lord mayor of Bombay. He is looked upon as India’s greatest modern statesman. The photograph shows a general view of the reception at city hall as Mayor McKee greeted the Indian statesman.

know the struggle people went through to give you this freedom.

the vision they had for us and the future generations.

what are our efforts to achieve them?

are we using it to get better or adding to the struggles we already have?

freedom starts from within and spreads

it should not interfere with others space

Celebrating Indian Independence: Stories, Achievements, and Reflections

celebrating-indian-independence-stories_-achievements_-and-reflections On the 15th of August each year, the nation of India comes alive with a spirited celebration that marks its hard-earned freedom from colonial rule. Indian Independence Day is a day of immense pride, unity, and remembrance of the sacrifices made by countless individuals in the pursuit of liberty. This blog delves into the…

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Rising Against the Odds: The Revolutionary Spirit of Mangal Pandey

Introduction:In the annals of India’s freedom struggle, there are heroes whose resilience and courage continue to inspire generations. One such trailblazer was Mangal Pandey, a name that resonates with the spirit of determination and rebellion. His unwavering commitment to fighting against oppression and injustice marks him as an iconic figure in India’s struggle for independence. This article…

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“It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.”

-Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. (Miller, A.V.). Oxford University Press.

KASHMIR MASTERLIST

Background

History of Kashmir from 250 BC to 1947 [to understand Kashmir's multi religious history and how we got to 1947]

Broad timeline of events from 1947 to the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution in 2019 (BBC) [yes, BBC. hang on just this once]

Human Rights Watch report based on a visit to Indian controlled Kashmir in 1998 [has a summary, background, human rights abuses and recommendations]

Another concise summary of the issue

Sites to check out

Kashmir Action - news and readings

The Kashmiriyat - independent news site about ongoings in Kashmir

FreePressKashmir - same thing as previous

Kashmir Law and Justice Project - analysis of international law as it applies to Kashmir

Stand with Kashmir - awareness, run by diaspora Kashmiris (both Pandit and Muslim)

These two for more readings and resources on Kashmir: note that the petitions and donation links are from 2019 and also has explainers on the background (x) (x)

To read

Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? - about women in the Kashmiri resistance movement and the 1991 mass rape of Kashmiri women in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora by Indian armed forces

Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir - a compliation of writings about the lives of Kashmiris under Indian domination

Colonizing Kashmir: State Building under Indian Occupation - how Kashmir was made "integral" to the Indian state and examines state-building policies (excerpt)

Resisting Occupation in Kashmir - about the social and legal dimensions of India's occupation

On India's scapegoating of Kashmiri Pandits, both by Kashmiri Pandits (x) (x)

Of Gardens and Graves - translations of Kashmiri poems

Social media

kashiirkoor

museumofkashmir

kashmirpopart

posh_baahar

readingkashmir

standwithkashmir and their backup account standwithkashmir2 (main account is banned in India wonder why)

kashmirlawjustice

kashmirawareness

jammugenocide (awareness about the 1947 genocide abetted by Maharaja Hari Singh and the RSS)

To watch

Jashn-e-Azadi: How We Celebrate Freedom parts 1 and 2 - a documentary about the Kashmiri freedom struggle (filmed by a Kashmiri Pandit)

Paradise Lost - BBC documentary about how India and Pakistan's dispute over the valley has affected the people

Kashmir - Valley of Tears - the exhaustion with the conflict in the post nineties

In the Shade of Fallen Chinar - art as a form of Kashmiri resistance

Human rights violations (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)

Land theft and dispossession (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)

A note: I know annoying Desis are going to see this and go "Oh but Kashmir is Pakistan's because-" and "Kashmir is an integral part of India because-". I must make my stance clear: Kashmir belongs to the Kashmiris, the natives, no matter what religion they belong to. Neither Pakistan nor India get to decide the matter of Kashmiri sovereignty. The reasons given by both parties as to why Kashmir should be a part of either nation are bullshit. The United Nations itself recognises Kashmir as a disputed region, so I will not entertain dumbfuckery. I highly encourage fellow Indians especially to take the time to go through and properly understand the violence the government enacts on Kashmiris. I've also included links to learn more about Kashmiri culture because really, what do the rest of us know about it? Culturally and linguistically Kashmir differs so much from the rest of India and Pakistan (also the amount of fetishization of Kashmiri women...yikes). This is not just a bilateral issue between these two nations over land, this actually affects the people of Kashmir. And if you're still here, thank you for reading

if u wanna learn more about kashmir + it's resistance against indian occupation + kashmiri struggles for an independent state, might i recommend @ kashmirarchive on instagram

+ @ kashmirawareness for news updates on kashmir

In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People's Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India's past.

Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the dominant culture language of precolonial southern Asia outside the Persianate order. Hindutva propagandists have sought to show, for example, that Sanskrit was indigenous to India, and they purport to decipher Indus Valley seals to prove its presence two millennia before it actually came into existence. In a farcical repetition of Romanic myths of primevality, Sanskrit is considered—according to the characteristic hyperbole of the VHP—the source and sole preserver of world culture.

This anxiety has a longer and rather melancholy history in independent India, far antedating the rise of the BJP. [...] Some might argue that as a learned language of intellectual discourse and belles lettres, Sanskrit had never been exactly alive in the first place [...] the assumption that Sanskrit was never alive has discouraged the attempt to grasp its later history; after all, what is born dead has no later history. As a result, there exist no good accounts or theorizations of the end of the cultural order that for two millennia exerted a transregional influence across Asia-South, Southeast, Inner, and even East Asia that was unparalleled until the rise of Americanism and global English. We have no clear understanding of whether, and if so, when, Sanskrit culture ceased to make history; whether, and if so, why, it proved incapable of preserving into the present the creative vitality it displayed in earlier epochs, and what this loss of effectivity might reveal about those factors within the wider world of society and polity that had kept it vital.

[...] What follows here is a first attempt to understand something of the death of Sanskrit literary culture as a historical process. Four cases are especially instructive: The disappearance of Sanskrit literature in Kashmir, a premier center of literary creativity, after the thirteenth century; its diminished power in sixteenth century Vijayanagara, the last great imperial formation of southern India; its short-lived moment of modernity at the Mughal court in mid-seventeenth century Delhi; and its ghostly existence in Bengal on the eve of colonialism. Each case raises a different question: first, about the kind of political institutions and civic ethos required to sustain Sanskrit literary culture; second, whether and to what degree competition with vernacular cultures eventually affected it; third, what factors besides newness of style or even subjectivity would have been necessary for consolidating a Sanskrit modernity, and last, whether the social and spiritual nutrients that once gave life to this literary culture could have mutated into the toxins that killed it. [...]

One causal account, however, for all the currency it enjoys in the contemporary climate, can be dismissed at once: that which traces the decline of Sanskrit culture to the coming of Muslim power. The evidence adduced here shows this to be historically untenable. It was not "alien rule un sympathetic to kavya" and a "desperate struggle with barbarous invaders" that sapped the strength of Sanskrit literature. In fact, it was often the barbarous invader who sought to revive Sanskrit. [...]

One of these was the internal debilitation of the political institutions that had previously underwritten Sanskrit, pre-eminently the court. Another was heightened competition among a new range of languages seeking literary-cultural dignity. These factors did not work everywhere with the same force. A precipitous decline in Sanskrit creativity occurred in Kashmir, where vernacular literary production in Kashmiri-the popularity of mystical poets like Lalladevi (fl. 1400) notwithstanding-never produced the intense competition with the literary vernacular that Sanskrit encountered elsewhere (in Kannada country, for instance, and later, in the Hindi heartland). Instead, what had eroded dramatically was what I called the civic ethos embodied in the court. This ethos, while periodically assaulted in earlier periods (with concomitant interruptions in literary production), had more or less fully succumbed by the thirteenth century, long before the consolidation of Turkish power in the Valley. In Vijayanagara, by contrast, while the courtly structure of Sanskrit literary culture remained fully intact, its content became increasingly subservient to imperial projects, and so predictable and hollow. Those at court who had anything literarily important to say said it in Telugu or (outside the court) in Kannada or Tamil; those who did not, continued to write in Sanskrit, and remain unread. In the north, too, where political change had been most pronounced, competence in Sanskrit remained undiminished during the late-medieval/early modern period. There, scholarly families reproduced themselves without discontinuity-until, that is, writers made the decision to abandon Sanskrit in favor of the increasingly attractive vernacular. Among the latter were writers such as Kesavdas, who, unlike his father and brother, self-consciously chose to become a vernacular poet. And it is Kesavdas, Biharilal, and others like them whom we recall from this place and time, and not a single Sanskrit writer. [...]

The project and significance of the self-described "new intellectuals" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [...] what these scholars produced was a newness of style without a newness of substance. The former is not meaningless and needs careful assessment and appreciation. But, remarkably, the new and widespread sense of discontinuity never stimulated its own self-analysis. No idiom was developed in which to articulate a new relationship to the past, let alone a critique; no new forms of knowledge-no new theory of religious identity, for example, let alone of the political-were produced in which the changed conditions of political and religious life could be conceptualized. And with very few exceptions (which suggest what was in fact possible), there was no sustained creation of new literature-no Sanskrit novels, personal poetry, essays-giving voice to the new subjectivity. Instead, what the data from early nineteenth-century Bengal-which are paralleled every where-demonstrate is that the mental and social spheres of Sanskrit literary production grew ever more constricted, and the personal and this-worldly, and eventually even the presentist-political, evaporated, until only the dry sediment of religious hymnology remained. [...]

In terms of both the subjects considered acceptable and the audience it was prepared to address, Sanskrit had chosen to make itself irrelevant to the new world. This was true even in the extra-literary domain. The struggles against Christian missionizing, for example, that preoccupied pamphleteers in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, took place almost exclusively in Bengali. Sanskrit intellectuals seemed able to respond, or were interested in responding, only to a challenge made on their own terrain-that is, in Sanskrit. The case of the professor of Sanskrit at the recently-founded Calcutta Sanskrit College (1825), Ishwarachandra Vidyasagar, is emblematic: When he had something satirical, con temporary, critical to say, as in his anti-colonial pamphlets, he said it, not in Sanskrit, but in Bengali. [...]

No doubt, additional factors conditioned this profound transformation, something more difficult to characterize having to do with the peculiar status of Sanskrit intellectuals in a world growing increasingly unfamiliar to them. As I have argued elsewhere, they may have been led to reaffirm the old cosmopolitanism, by way of ever more sophisticated refinements in ever smaller domains of knowledge, in a much-changed cultural order where no other option made sense: neither that of the vernacular intellectual, which was a possible choice (as Kabir and others had earlier shown), nor that of the national intellectual, which as of yet was not. At all events, the fact remains that well before the consolidation of colonialism, before even the establishment of the Islamicate political order, the mastery of tradition had become an end in itself for Sanskrit literary culture, and reproduction, rather than revitalization, the overriding concern. As the realm of the literary narrowed to the smallest compass of life-concerns, so Sanskrit literature seemed to seek the smallest possible audience. However complex the social processes at work may have been, the field of Sanskrit literary production increasingly seemed to belong to those who had an "interest in disinterestedness," as Bourdieu might put it; the moves they made seem the familiar moves in the game of elite distinction that inverts the normal principles of cultural economies and social orders: the game where to lose is to win. In the field of power of the time, the production of Sanskrit literature had become a paradoxical form of life where prestige and exclusivity were both vital and terminal.

The Death of Sanskrit, Sheldon Pollock, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 392-426 (35 pages)

i know people talk a lot about the us and UK special relationship but it kind of fell after the Suez and France kind of sneakily stole it didn't he? I mean did the same before the wars

thanks for the ask! ngl, as a londoner, i've always personally felt the representation of the "Special Relationship" as this mega-close and affectionate dynamic is kind of...an un-holistic understanding of the UK or England, as well as of the United States. don't get me wrong, it's one of their most important relationships and there's a lot of deep history there—my issue is mostly with rose-tinted interpretations underpinning it and what biases they showcase. these were heavily biased by Churchill's (imperialist) gaze of envisioning Anglo-American affinity and leadership on the world stage. this interpretation quite significantly downplayed the rivalry, power struggles, conflicts and differences that historians existed between the US and the British Empire, or how US presidents tended to see it in far less majestic terms. like, Churchill rather downplays FDR's vehement disagreements with him over the issue of Indian independence lol or decolonisation (because the US was eyeing the world as a chessboard, re: new markets and also whether or not support for the old colonial power would be a bulwark against or risk soviet or other communist influence).

so, while you're right that Suez was a pretty low moment in US-Britain relations due to the US being pissed at Britain and France jeopardising its ostensible goal of swaying Egypt away from the Soviet sphere of influence (sidenote: Egypt itself was trying to navigate the mess of the Cold War rivalry to secure its interests), i don't really see it as "falling" after Suez or stolen by France simply because that dynamic Churchill painted a picture of never really existed in that way. plus, Europe (France included) and the ex-colonies of the British Empire (like the dominions and India) weighed heavily on British foreign policy/its national outlook too; i tend to find an overemphasis on a rose-tinted view of the "Special Relationship" leads to a lot of US-centrism that shuts out this understanding. to me, Arthur and Alfred's relationship is most interesting when we situate them properly amidst all these other imperial and geopolitical cross-currents. of which Francis is an important one, from the time he helped Alfred during the Revolutionary War, to the Entente Cordial, WWI and the post-WWII world of NATO, the EU and so on.

in hetalia-verse, it's one of the reasons I personally headcanon Arthur and Alfred as father and son. their bond is lasting, forged by the blood, steel and saltwater of empire, and all the familial, deep and troubling implications that implies. they are "stuck" with each other in some ways, because post 1945, it's a familial dynamic of the old king and the young, ambitious crown prince who thinks his father is out of time—and out of line. francis never really "steals" anything because he and arthur's relationship is on a very different axes: francis is the neighbour who has been by arthur's side as his enemy, friend, lover, rival in imperial douchebaggery, ally (for better and also for worse, like in suez...)—and everything in between. whereas arthur and alfred have some real patricidal/regicidal, titanomachy-level father-son power struggles going on, mixed in with this dysfunctional level of understanding and them also colluding together shadily (you are different from him in many ways, there are many things he'll never understand about you—but you are your father's son, alfred; to be powerful is to be tainted).

so in conclusion, i see alfred-arthur and arthur-francis as both very important foundational dynamics crucial to arthur's character, but conceptualised differently from that understanding of the "special relationship" because they're two different kinds of relationships, even if there is the overlapping dynamic of power, rivalry and empire. ✌🏼

“Mahatma Gandhi, wizened idol of India’s masses, believed to be more of a threat to Great Britain in prison than he did free. From behind the bars, Gandhi is still leader of the revolt against British rule. Pictures within this outline map of India shows Gandhi at his spinning wheel, reading and reclining on a hard pallet on the floor. His campaign has been slowed up greatly by government measures.”

- from the North Bay Nugget. January 9, 1932. Page 1