Source: The Soul of India, Choudhury and Choudhury, 1911 (These) two fundamental characteristics of our culture, detachment and idealism, have been combined – into an organic whole, in our conception of Dharma, loosely rendered by the English word religion. Strictly speaking, the concept is untranslatable. There is, no doubt, some slight affinity between the radical meaning […]Read More
(Dialogue, Vol. 18, No. 1, July-Sept. 2016 issue) In the lifetime of the older ones among us, freedom of expression in India first became a hot item with the Salman Rushdie affair, when in 1988, his novel The Satanic Verses was banned. This was done by Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government at the request of Muslim leader Syed […]Read More
In his book, Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam, the Belgian orientalist and Indologist Koenraad Elst describe the mainstream interpretation of Indian history as the Indian brand of negationism, which deals with the section of the intelligentsia trying to erase from Hindu memory the history of their persecution by the swordsmen of Islam. […]Read More
The ritualistic theatre traditions of Kerala temples are thousands of years old. It is the oldest, unbroken, and a living tradition. These theatre systems are older than the Natya- shastra. Many conventions followed in the Natya-shastra are broken in the older theatre tradition of Kerala like Koodiyattam. Ramayanam Koothu belongs to the oldest Sanskrit theatre traditions […]Read More
On 30 January 1948, after Mahatma Gandhi’s murder, India’s political landscape changed dramatically. In the preceding year, the Hindu Nationalist movement had received a strong boost due to Congress’s confused stand on Partition. But then, Nathuram Godse’s bullets squandered its newly-gained political capital in one go. It would need decades to recover. Prelude to Partition […]Read More
Abstract The Buddha was not the inventor of a new method in the service of a new philosophical goal. He trod into existing footsteps: seeking the goal of Liberation through the method of Meditation. This ideal was already available before he was born and that was what beckoned him into a spiritual career. Even more […]Read More
When dawn breaks, various temples in south India play the rendition of Venkateswara Suprabhatam by M S Subbulakshmi, the Maestra of Carnatic music. Madurai Shanmukkavadivu Subbulakshmi, born in Madurai on September 16, 1916, into a community of devadasis, soon graced the face of Carnatic vocal music in the 20th century. She was the first musician […]Read More
Source: Chapter XVIII, Memoirs Of My Working Life, M Vishweshvarayya, 1951 ======================== The way to build a better nation is to build better individuals. A successful nation is usually composed of citizens, the majority of whom are efficient, of good character and possess a reasonably high sense of duty. An individual who aspires to be trusted […]Read More
Indians and Westerners who know Buddhism through Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and other modern pamphlet literature, sometimes believe that the Buddha started a movement of social reform, mobilizing against caste and recruiting among low-caste people. As against this, Chinese and Japanese Buddhists who have studied their religion only through its source texts, think that Buddhism was an […]Read More
Some months before he died in February 1980, R.C. Majumdar recalled how the veteran freedom fighter K.M. Munshi “believed that a government sponsored institution can never document history in an honest manner. I realized this truth in the later years. The federal government built an editorial board to document India’s freedom struggle with me as […]Read More