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.
Despite damage to key Russian oil infrastructure by Ukrainian drone strikes in March, International Energy Agency data shows Russia’s earnings in March were highest for any month since January 2024.
This special edition of Cut The Clutter, straight from the Siliguri corridor, details the strategic importance of the narrow strip of land in West Bengal, and how it’s a vital link connecting the Northeast to the rest of India.
We now live in a world order that will keep shifting. India must use this window. This also means we remain disciplined enough not to be knee-jerked into reacting to what Pakistan sees as its moment in the sun.
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).