Ashoka’s efforts to reshape Vedic society into a Buddhist one brought lasting harm to Indian society, polity, and economy. Manu’s response focused on rebuilding and reclaiming what was lost.
For Hindi writers long disillusioned with opaque royalty statements, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Rs 30 lakh in royalties have become both a beacon and a provocation.
Author Sumitra Mehrol emphasised the need for translators to belong to the same social or cultural space and to deeply understand the subject they are translating.
Salman Rushdie’s allegorical 'Midnight’s Children', Rohinton Mistry’s unflinching 'A Fine Balance', and Nirmal Verma’s haunting 'Raat ka Reporter', emerged as acts of remembrance and resistance.
'A Cultural Poetics of Bhasha Literatures', an Orient BlackSwan publication, explores interrelations between languages, literatures, and cultures in South Asia.
‘Ten Indian Classics’ by Harvard University Press spans 2,000 years of South Asian writing. It has translations of ‘Ramcharitmanas’, Mir Taqi Mir’s works, and Guru Nanak’s poems.
In a city like Liverpool, Salah became something more than a footballer. 'Salah became so popular that most of the babies born in Merseyside were named after him.'
The system was to delivered in March but will now reach the Indian shores by May, or June. The fifth S-400 will be delivered in the last quarter of this year.
Adding Sridhar’s book to my reading list. I have read Sharma’s and can definitely recommend it to others.
It is high time we studied ourselves through our lenses and our perspectives, lest outsiders define who we are and what our traditions are and say, even as they largely lack both an awareness of the cultural context and the reverence for the texts they study, inevitably leading to (unintentionally quoting someone) ‘distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies’.
And this is a problem even when there is no ulterior motive of conversion or racism or prejudice involved; a simple lack of cultural context, appreciation, understanding, or reverence is sufficient to produce lopsided accounts.
And that has what has happened with the Manusmriti, as it has with much else, only in the Manusmriti, ‘The Laws of Manu’ have become a potent stick with which to beat the Sanatana/Dharmic traditions and demonise it through the bogey of ‘casteism’ (not even a Bharatiya category).
Adding Sridhar’s book to my reading list. I have read Sharma’s and can definitely recommend it to others.
It is high time we studied ourselves through our lenses and our perspectives, lest outsiders define who we are and what our traditions are and say, even as they largely lack both an awareness of the cultural context and the reverence for the texts they study, inevitably leading to (unintentionally quoting someone) ‘distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies’.
And this is a problem even when there is no ulterior motive of conversion or racism or prejudice involved; a simple lack of cultural context, appreciation, understanding, or reverence is sufficient to produce lopsided accounts.
And that has what has happened with the Manusmriti, as it has with much else, only in the Manusmriti, ‘The Laws of Manu’ have become a potent stick with which to beat the Sanatana/Dharmic traditions and demonise it through the bogey of ‘casteism’ (not even a Bharatiya category).