/2023

Hindutva as Pop Culture


The Telegraph

In recent years, a stream of books and articles have appeared seeking to analyse the theory and practice of Hindutva. They have sought to alternatively explain, critique, or justify the rising influence of the BJP and the RSS. Some have focused on organizational questions, on the building of social networks on the ground and how they [...]

Caring for the Earth


The Telegraph

The climate crisis has brought human ill-treatment of nature forcibly to our attention, though of course India’s environmental problems are by no means the product of global warming alone. The staggeringly high rates of air pollution in the cities of Northern India, the ongoing devastation of the Himalaya by carelessly planned roads and dams, the depletion [...]

A Godson Remembers: Thammu Achaya and Indian Food History


The Telegraph

My first editor, Rukun Advani, once described himself as ‘a composite hybrid of the Indian and the Anglo-European’, who sought to reconcile ‘within himself those varying cultural influences which chauvinistic nationalists could only see as contradictions.’ This self-characterization I might avow as my own. One mark of the Anglo-European in me is that, unlike members of [...]

Einstein: The Scientist as Moralist


The Telegraph

I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer earlier this week. The main character in the film, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a physicist whose family was Jewish, and who worked for many years at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. In these respects he was akin to Albert Einstein, who makes several appearances in the movie itself. Although [...]

After Sobers


Who? The Telegraph

In one of the first books I read, the writer had posed the question: ‘Who was the greatest all-rounder in the history of cricket?’, before providing this answer: ‘He was a left-arm bowler and a right-hand batsman, who was born in the village of Kirkheaton’. I now forget the title of the book, but remember the [...]

A Couple and Their Country


The Telegraph

I have had a long-standing interest in South Africa, and in 1995 briefly contemplated moving there to work. The country had just had its first multi-racial election, and the great Nelson Mandela had been elected President. I was deeply curious to see, at first-hand, what the land and its people would make of their hard won [...]

Appreciating Ambedkar


The Telegraph

In my personal list of books every Indian must read, four stand paramount. These, in order of their year of first publication, are M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (1917), B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936), and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946). These works are both timely and timeless, speaking [...]

Chipko@50: A Legacy Scorned


The Telegraph

On the 27th of March 1973, a group of peasants in Mandal, a village in the upper Alakananda Valley, stopped a group of commercial loggers from felling a patch of ash trees by threatening them to hug them. These innovatively non-violent methods used in Mandal were emulated by villages in other parts of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, [...]

India Against Gandhi


Financial Times

Born in 1958, a decade after Gandhi’s death, I grew up in an atmosphere of veneration towards the Mahatma. One of my great uncles helped edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another founded a pioneering initiative in community health inspired by Gandhi. These familial influences were consolidated and deepened by the public culture of the time. Gandhi was [...]