Literature
Revisiting Meera and Raidas: Who was Girdhar Nagar?
Meera shedding social inhibitions was not about quitting royal life and embracing a spartan existence; it was about a widow being drawn to a man, loving him, and wanting to marry him, writes Kanwal Bharti
Virendra Yadav’s struggles in the ‘progressive’ camp
Virendra Yadav’s heart was riddled with barbs hurled by his ‘own’ people. But he kept fighting for secular-progressive ideas. He could have easily immersed himself in writing, ensconced in his living room. But he relentlessly...
Virendra Yadav was an incisive intellectual with a vision for social justice
Virendra Yadav’s biggest contribution is the inculcation of a sense of moral-social accountability in Hindi criticism. Through his writings, he tried to establish that criticism is also a tool that uses literature to understand the...
Seminal role of Dalit-OBCs in development of language and literature
Scripts were invented by painters and sculptors, and not scholars. Not only in India but in civilizations the world over, paintings and sculptures predated the emergence of scripts. And who were these painters and sculptors?...
‘Sahitya Akademi has brought itself honour by honouring Sanjeev’
In his more than a dozen novels, Sanjeev has depicted the reality of the post-Independence Indian society. The...
In his ‘Ambedkar: A Life’, Shashi Tharoor betrays his privileged-caste naivete
After coming out with ‘Why I Am A Hindu’, Tharoor has predictably set out to look for Ambedkar’s...
Phanishwar Nath Renu – who gave centrality to the toilers of ‘the provinces’
Renu took the genre of reportage to new heights in Hindi literature. No one has been able to...
Rajesh Paswan: Criticism within Dalit Literature is still in its infancy
Our Dalit writers don’t take criticism well. They begin enquiring about the caste and ideology of the critic....
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