kriticulture

By Nonica Datta New Delhi: Oxford, 2009 Pages xv+235; Price Rs 695 BOOK REVIEW By Rajesh Kumar Sharma (From the forthcoming issue of South Asian Ensemble ) With enviable patience and sophistication, Nonica Datta teases out history’s secrets by ‘developing’ – like a photo-artist – its narratives. These narratives are the deposits, in the manner of a great riverbed, of event, memory and invention. Datta is an extraordinary historian because she is more than a mere historian: she is also an archaeologist of Walter Benjamin’s description, she reads ‘stories’ like Marx reading Balzac, she is not afraid to fictionalize if it helps to historicize, and she suggests but does not judge. You rarely come across a book which you relish so thoroughly – even in its preface, glossary, map, endnotes and ‘supplement’ (for that is what chapter 3, A Letter to Subhashini, may best be called, recalling Derrida).             Violence, Martyrdom and P...

The Intellectual’s Vocation in the Postcolony  Rajesh Kumar Sharma (Originally published in Countercurrents )   Link to the article in Spanish: Arundhati Roy sein oder nicht sein Link to the article in German: Ser o no ser Arundhati Roy Link to the article in French: Etre ou ne pas être Arundhati Roy Following the mainstream media’s ‘reproductions’ of her remarks in a seminar on Kashmir in October 2010 [1] , Arundhati Roy appeared to have been promptly disowned by a majority of the surfing-texting Indian middle class. She had transgressed, it seemed, the farthest limits of discursive protocol of the permissive Indian democracy.                 She had not actually said anything not stated before. It had been her declared position on Kashmir for almost a decade. “I said what I as well as other commentators have written and said for years,” she promptly reminded those baying for h...