Both a love song and a political statement, the “Manjanathi Puranam” refuses to choose between artistic beauty and political resistance, insisting they’re inseparable.
Love, Not Trauma: How Tamil Cinema Reclaims Dalit Art Through Sound Read More »
Tone Bleie offers a thoughtful engagement with Debabrata Rej’s Roots and Ruts (Shuddhashar FreeVoice), exploring its wide-ranging themes, compelling arguments, narrative strategy, and Rej’s extraordinary life as a “free-thinking social philosopher.”
Reflections on an extraordinary life: Debabrata Rej (1917-1986) Read More »
Claiming Citizenship focuses on Indian American civic and political activism in the U.S. public sphere around U.S.-based and India-based issues.
How Identity Shapes the Civic and Political Engagement of Indian Americans Read More »
Caste capitalism is a way of understanding how caste-based violence and marginalization are concomitant with the reification of endogamy and a rule of dispossession. The rise of authoritarianism around the world is producing myriad intersecting crises, the most overt at this point in time being crises of territorial expansion. We have all been watching
The Uses of Caste Capitalism: A Frame for Dispossession in Authoritarian Times Read More »
The historically marginalised sanitation workers in India are subject to new layers of exploitation and control through technological surveillance. Addressing this will require challenging deeper issues of caste-based exploitation and capitalist dehumanisation.
Resistance efforts often do not extend beyond certain boundaries. Because it’s more convenient to form solidarities selectively and to position oneself on the right side of history when it is so far away from home.
Ancient India was known as the birthplace of several important scientific discoveries. Modern India is, however, riddled with superstitions and unsurprisingly lags behind in inculcating in its citizens a scientific outlook.
Why Scientific Outlook Could not Take Root in India Read More »
“No fats, no femmes, no Blacks, no Asians.” “Keep it White or Latin.” “No rice, no curry and no blacks.” Phrases like these have become a usual phenomenon in gay dating apps so much so that many gay men see these as a casual ‘preferences’ and would outright deny the racist connotation attached to them.
Sexual Racism: The Rainbow is Whiter than It Appears Read More »
In the last decade, the Western film industry has justly received a lot of criticism for its severe lack of racial diversity, both on-screen and behind the camera. Initiatives like diversity quotas in awards governing bodies and popular movements like #OscarsSoWhite have not only resonated in North America and Europe but have become popularised in
Racism on South Asian Celluloid Read More »
“Please, I can’t breathe,” said 46-year-old George Floyd before becoming unconscious. Floyd died of asphyxiation during an arrest in Minneapolis in May. His family ordered two independent autopsy reports. They did not trust the report from the authorities, which stated that he did not die from asphyxiation but a combination of pre-existing health conditions and
Black Lives and Experiences – From USA to Norway Read More »
When studying abroad in Rwanda, learning about reconciliation and transformative justice following the Genocide Against the Tutsis, I found the memorials we visited most moving. They are honest, graphic, and jarring acts of remembrance and reckoning with history. No matter how painful the truth, the memorials and country itself maintains a commitment to honesty, responsibility,
We Cannot Live in Two Separate Americas Forever. There is History to be Reckoned with Read More »
