Showing posts with label Karnad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karnad. Show all posts

January 30, 2013

Gandhian ideals are plain stupid; Bankim and Sri Aurobindo are superior mentors

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should show intellectual and moral courage to denounce Savarkar as the Hindutva ideologue and look for superior mentors if they can reach out to any. Perhaps, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Sri Aurobindo, though it will not be easy to reduce these two literary giants to the vulgar and crude formulations of Hindutva ideology. The sensitive Maharashtrians who take pride in Savarkar are insulting themselves and the Maharashtra tradition. They should look to Mahadev Govind Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak was a conservative but he was a great leader.
He respected Gandhi even when he dismissed Gandhi's moralism as quixotic. But in the 1919 Amritsar Congress session he fought a losing battle with Gandhi and saw Motilal Nehru and Chitta Ranjan Das supporting Gandhi. Apparently, he told the senior Nehru and Das that they will move away from Gandhi's populist politics. And this from the man who was a populist leader in his own time, and that was his battle with the liberal Gokhale…
Gandhi was an anti-intellectual and he was in his own way a very unreconstructed Hindu traditionalist. One of the best critics of Gandhi was Bhim Rao Ambedkar and his lecture on Gandhi, Jinnah and Ranade is a classic piece showing the stupidity and egotism of Gandhi and Jinnah as leaders. So there are ways of debunking the Gandhi myth, but Savarkar did not have the intellectual sophistication to do that. That is why he resorted to the morally despicable manner of getting ridding of Gandhi…Gandhian ideals are plain stupid in political and historical senses. What was good for Gandhi could not be good for India. So, we can and we must differ with Gandhi… Posted by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr at 9:18 AM  

One of Philpott’s goals in *Just and Unjust Peace* is to challenge both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” more »

Before embarking upon our journey into Meditations on the Tarot (which seems to have gone out of print again), I'd like to begin with a discussion of the meaning and purpose of esoterism more generally, since so much of it can appear a little dodgy, as if we're just deepaking the chopra rather than engaging in the Eternal Science (or the science of eternity).
However, it has always been understood that, for example, scripture is susceptible to multiple levels of meaning: the literal or plain meaning; the allegorical, or implied meaning; the conceptual meaning; the moral meaning; the more abstract and esoteric meaning; etc. more »

I take Spinoza’s insistence on necessity, over against contingency, as an antagonism toward standard Christianity, with its themes of exemplarity and incarnation. Nothing can be an example of anything else because everything is equivocal; nothing can be prior to anything else because everything is univocal. The univocity of every different thing thus stems not from a muting of difference’s equivocity, but from an affirmation of the necessity of everything in its difference. In other words, univocity has to do with necessity; the refusal of analogy, with its contingency, is inseparable from the affirmation of necessity. In fact, we might think of this insistence on necessity as forming its own kind of reading practice: one must read whatever happens as necessary; if one reads what happens as contingent, then one has failed to understand what happens.

A three-day UGC Sponsored National Seminar on Myth, History, Tradition and Modernity in Indian English Drama 4-6 Feb., 2013 Department of English, Govt. Autonomous Post Graduate College, Chidwara, Madhya Pradesh Contact: Dr. More
Indian English Drama: Thematic Reflections - Galaxy PDF - Quick View Indian English drama got some innovative thematic concerns which were able to ... Karnad's wide handling of history, myth and folklore to tackle contemporary issues has been widely appreciated by .... tradition with modernity. That is why the ...
Myth and Puranas: Decolonisation of Indian English Drama PDF - Quick View Mar 1, 2012 – The Criterion. Myth and Puranas: Decolonisation of Indian English Drama ... grounded in the tradition of the past and it is of real life presented in a fictitious manner. This has led ... It is a history told in a story. According to ... Although modernity has invaded, Indians have not left their culture and tradition.
Aurangzeb New Delhi Theatre Workshop presents Indira Parthasarathy's AURANGZEB directed by KS Rajendran on 1st February 2013 at 6:30 pm at LTG Auditorium. Tickets: 9811232072
Shahjahan lives in the past, Dara in the future, and Aurangzeb in the present. Aurangzeb’s success is the triumph of pragmatism but he has to pay dearly as we find him in the last scene sitting not on his Peacock throne but beside it on the floor. His loneliness becomes his tragedy. The play ends with him asking himself he question: ‘Am I a devout Muslim or a fanatic?’ He is left awaiting the judgement of history.

November 04, 2012

How literature shapes history

[BACK TO KOSAMBI from permanent black UNSETTLING THE PAST Unknown Aspects and Scholarly Assessments of D.D. Kosambi - This is a collection of obscure and unknown writings by D.D. Kosambi 
NAYANJOT LAHIRI ON D.D. KOSAMBI
With Kosambi one is sometimes left with the impression of a litterateur lost in his own world, so immersed in crafting his own work of art—a Marxist grid—that he was blinkered against integrating the enormous range of archaeological discoveries which had, by then, changed the face of the Indian past. Flowing from this I would, in fact, be inclined to offer my own proposition about what lies at the core of the Kosambi corpus: namely, that literature was the larger encompassing grid which framed even his Marxism.
ROBERT P. GOLDMAN ON D.D. KOSAMBI
The reason for the neglect of Kosambi’s Sanskrit scholarship as contrasted with the celebration of his work in many other fields is, I believe, not difficult to find… By the same token, theorists and activists involved in Marxist critique and social activism have directed scant regard and even (as with the Maoists in Nepal) violent hostility for the Sanskrit establishment, which they see as aligned with archaic traditional systems of social inequality and which in the contemporary era they denounce as ‘Manuvad’.]

One of the biggest frauds perpetrated by the Marxist school of “discourse” happens to be the fact that there’s nothing like the truth but merely interpretation. This simple but evilly ingenious device has yielded a rich harvest to the Marxists. Thus, the thousands of temples destroyed merely become a matter of how history is interpreted: the truth, i.e. the act of destruction is itself ignored.
And here lies an oft-repeated theme in the annals of Marxist “history” writing: glorify the Islamic period as one of benevolence, tolerance, and secularism and vilify truly glorious Hindu empires as oppressive, regressive, and intolerant. Where the sheer weight of historical record doesn’t allow this, adopt Plan B: minimize or whitewash Islamic barbarities and ignore or explain away Hindu glory. We see these vile principles applied to the Mauraya (except Ashoka), the Gupta, the Chalukya, the Rashtrakuta, the Vijayanagar and the Maratha periods…
On the other side, Naipaul too has been consistent in being honest. His India a Wounded Civilization was a shoddy work by his standards but his explorations have been honest and that has shown up in all his subsequent works including the prophetic books that emerged as a result of his travels into Muslim lands. As far as India is concerned, Naipaul’s books are marked by one feature: they demonstrate and reflect the yearning of millions of Indian people who are rediscovering and questioning every received wisdom about their own land and culture with a confidence and zeal and in numbers that was absent even 20 years ago.]

Sahitya Akademi cordially invites you to Birth Centenery Seminar on Ramvilas Sharma (October 10, 1912–May 30,2000) 2-3 November 2012 Sahitya Akademi Auditorium, First Floor Rabindra Bhavan, 35 Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi 110 001 PROGRAMME Saturday, 3 November 2012 5:00 p.m. Documentary Film Show on Ramvilas Sharma titled ‘Kaljayee Manisha’ Directed by Uday Prakash and produced by Hindi Academy, Delhi]

['Tughlaq' is dream role for any actor: Yashpal Times of India-Oct 29, 2012
As the historic ruins of Firoz Kotla came alive again with the revival of the landmark play Tughlaq after forty years, no one is happier than actor ... Yashpal cut himself from everyone to live Tughlaq Times of India-Nov 2, 2012
India has been ruled by several kings with varied personalities, but Mohammad Bin Tughlaq's traits were so unique and whimsical that his story ...]

Jihad or Ijtihad: Religious Orthodoxy and Modern Science in Contemporary Islam By: S. Irfan Habib ISBN: 9789350293751 Cover Price: Rs. 299.00 Extent: 200 pages Category: Non-fiction Publisher: HarperCollins India See interview with S Irfan Habib in The Times of India (2 Nov 2012)]

[Building a Freedom Team for India - Freedom Team of India Comment by v.c. Krishnan March 3, 2008
After being educated in a catholic institution, the history that was fed to me, reflected that nothing was great about the writings of great Indians Like AUROBINDO, Swami VIVEKANANDA, and I was condemned to think that the of the way of life, “Sanatana Dharma” as a shameful existence, BUT THANKS, it was corrected when I came in touch with the old avatar of the BJP, the Jan Sangh. Regards, vck]

Rebirth, if restricted to the physical mechanism, adds little meaning to our lives, as it becomes an endless repetition of births with no goal other than pure ...]

Sri Aurobindo Devotees: pushpanjali, Sasi balika Vidya Mandir, R.S. Puram, 9.30 a.m.; Sri Annai Meditation Centre, Kovaipudur, 4 p.m.]