For some Dalits, Ambedkar is an actual prophet who changed the course of their history and future. But despite his outstanding political career and invaluable contribution to Dalit rights, Ambedkar’s…
Read MoreTHE MEMORY–KEEPERS ‘Write down whatever you know of the doings of (Babur) and (Humayun)’. This ordinary phrase sounded innocuous enough and gave no indication of the seismic rumble it actually…
Read MoreThe House of the Ghoshals The river lay ahead. A blue current. A densely-wooded hill sloped upwards on the left. A boy of thirteen or fourteen lay on the ground,…
Read MoreAs a rule, the last speaker of a language no longer uses it. Ethnographers show up at the door with digital recorders, ready to archive every declension, each instance of…
Read MorePATALIPUTRA I would not have turned to writing if I was able to draw. When I was thirteen or fourteen, and attending school in Patna, I had not yet given…
Read MorePOSTOMONI, THE OPIUM GIRL There was a rishi who lived alone by the Ganga. His only companion was a mouse that he had found in his palm-tree hut and had…
Read MoreBUSINESS AND POLITICS: THE LAY OF THE LAND ‘And that we keep an Extraordinary lookout…’ The eighteenth century, when the nawabs of Bengal and John Company came into their own,…
Read More‘Someone turned on a tap’ Dear Angel Ears, Outside the window, a Marathi manus is asking mournfully if anyone would like to buy salt. Or at least that’s what I…
Read MoreI Angela was killed in front of her children. Her husband was the killer. He thrust the knife deep into her fair-skinned, well-rounded belly again and again. She writhed like…
Read MoreA HORSE AND TWO GOATS R. K. NARAYAN Of the seven hundred thousand villages dotting the map of India, in which the majority of India’s five hundred million live, flourish,…
Read MoreTHE SHROUD by Munshi Premchand Outside the hut, father and son sat in silence in front of the firepit already gone cold. Inside, Budhya, the son’s young wife, kept thrashing…
Read MoreThe Discovery of Telenapota by Premendra Mitra If Saturn and Mars—it must be Mars—are in conjunction, you too, can discover Telenapota some day. In other words, if a day or…
Read MoreTIPU (1750–1799) Shorter than his father, darker in the skin and possessing larger eyes, Tipu wore (Wilks informs us) ‘a plain unencumbered attire, which he equally exacted from those around…
Read MoreONE For months, the front pages had warned of imminent doom. Bombay was reeling under an explosion of ‘pollution, crowds and noise’, noted one pessimist. Predicted another, ‘The urban landscape…
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