July 2017
Why This Revival Of Hindu Chauvinism?, Hindustan Times
Some years ago, I was at a literary meeting in Bhubaneshwar. Odia had just been declared the sixth classical language in India, after Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. My scholarly hosts were naturally delighted; [...]
June 2017
The Rise And Fall Of The Term ‘Harijan’, The Telegraph
In his 1984 book The Untouchable as Himself, the anthropologist R. S. Khare speaks of the derision with which Dalits viewed the term ‘Harijan’, popularized by Mahatma Gandhi. Khare quotes a Chamar reformer in Lucknow [...]
April 2017
What Champaran Meant To Gandhi, The Telegraph
A hundred years ago this week, Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in the district of Champaran in north Bihar. He spent several months in the district, studying the problems of the peasantry, who had been forced [...]
March 2017
The Resource That Will Determine Our Future, Hindustan Times
The ecologist Jayanta Bandyopadhyay once wrote that water, not oil, was the resource whose availability and quality would determine India’s future. I recalled that remark when reading a report recently submitted to the Government of [...]
The Political Career Of Sonia Gandhi, The Telegraph
A line often quoted by columnists, and attributed to the British politician and writer Enoch Powell is this: ‘All political lives end in failure’. The full form of the quote reads: ‘All political lives, unless [...]
February 2017
Rediscovering One’s Land, The Telegraph
On the second day of 2017, I drove from the colonial hill station of Coonoor to the great old port city of Kochi. Thus began a month of almost continuous travel, in which I took [...]