kriticulture

  Editor’s Note A lot of good South Asian writing is taking place outside the dominant circuits of recognition. It was our assumption when we started SAE . Five years down the road, it is a conclusion. Leafing through pages from the past, we see many installed stereotypes crumbling. Yet much survives that seems to identify us.             What is still awaited is a radical mobilization of the elements of the ensemble that is us and our experience, a mobilization that dislocates, disassembles and creates afresh beyond merely reproducing. This would require infusion of energies from outside the ensemble’s boundaries. But haven’t cultures always outsourced? Isn’t imagination the great outsourcing machine? Isn’t literature always in another place, always already elsewhere?             South Asia is a horizon that must be transcended. Only when it begins to...

Sunday 16th February 2014     1. How How did you get to write these essays? What motivated you? I believe I am also responsible for the world in which we find ourselves. I have tried to respond to this world from time to time. As a person who teaches – and who can read and write – I think I have an obligation to make some sense of it and to share the resulting attempts with others, and so contribute to the dialogues that are the motors of civilization. 2. Rajesh, why in/disciplines for a title? Though the title is explained in the Introduction towards the end, let me add (and repeat) that education, culture and politics are ‘in/disciplines’. That they nevertheless require a disciplined effort to study them. That they demand that the disciplinary boundaries between them be challenged in order to reveal how none of them is self-constituted and self-limited/limiting. The ...

Summer and Fall 2013 Vol 5 No. 3 & 4 Editorial The unprofitable work of literature Rajesh Sharma     The oldest memories with me include a balding and bespectacled old head reading a book held up by a hairy hand with cracked brown skin. A reflective grin spreads or shrinks, prompted by mysterious proceedings in the magic mirror in front. Memory’s selection tool functions strangely.             Sood Uncle. He ran a shop that never had more than… ten books? A banyan had grown in the shop’s forehead, hanging down like hair from aging eyebrows. Seven steps into the shop you faced darkness that tasted damp with the odor of rats’ droppings. I bought my first books, on credit to be paid by my mother’s brother, from Sood Uncle. My mother’s mother once confided to me that this Sood Uncle was a legendary kanjoos . Unlimitedly kanjoos , she said.        ...

Mainstream, VOL LI, No 1, December 22, 2012 [Annual 2012] Critical History of Our Times Rajesh Kumar Sharma BOOK REVIEW The Underside of Things: India and the World: A Citizen’s Miscellany, 2006-2011  by Badri Raina;  Three Essays Collective; 2012;  Pages: xxii+758;  Paperback Rs 850.   Badri Raina is like an all-season fruit-bearing tree. And the more he ages the mellower gets the fruit he bears. The 134 essays gathered between the covers of this book and written for Z-net over six years between 2006 and 2011 are ample testimony to his engaged critical productivity. Each essay is a timely, more than instantaneous, response to some pressing issue—be it embodied in an event, a pronouncement, a person, a law, a policy, a report, or a possibility crying imperatively to be cast into action. But beyond this, the essays also transcend the contingency of their moment under the force and lucidity of Raina’s reason which, aided by a rea...

 By Rajesh Sharma Less than a week to go – and it will be a month since Shruti Sachdeva was abducted on September 24. The probe is on. The police is being blamed and ridiculed by turns. The opposition has taken out the whip to thrash the government right and left. True, it is the wretched state of law and order which a minor girl’s abduction by a spoilt brat with ‘criminal’ record has highlighted. But is that all? Is not the crime also a symptom of some deeper, more insidious malaise? To put it briefly but not sweetly, the girl’s abduction is the ripe fruit of a poisonous tree that has been cultivated over the years by all sorts of people among us. The brand of politics that has established itself as the only viable kind, with its deadly blend of wealth, force and an extremely uncouth disrespect for law, comes first to mind. Next, one thinks of the new economy which treats the spectacle as the only reality. Phrases like ‘reforms with a human face’, ‘the feel-good fa...

‘Porn Creation’ by Fauzia Rafiq (Shaheed Bibi Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow (13) was stoned to death in Somalia in October 2008) 1 stadium A truckload of (Somali) stones 50 armed erections (limp) A mass of 1,000 (Samuyeun) spectators 1 adulteress (bound) The ‘adulterous’ Gang-rape victim Aisha (13) Shaheed Bibi Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow Stoned to death To hide the aggression of three men of arms I digress She was expected to not object ... ... ... Read the complete text here:   ‘Porn Creation’ by Fauzia Rafiq « Uddari Weblog

Rajesh Sharma Politics is a game of calculated risks. It is at its best when the risks involve putting everything at stake. This is possible only when the future is grasped in a flash, and the way opens for the paradoxical unity of calculation and risk to be realised.             Something of the kind seems to have happened in the political theatre of Punjab. Thanks to this the year 2012 may go down in history as a watershed year when the complexion of politics in the state underwent an extremely significant change. If the change is consolidated – let's hope it will be – Punjab might lead the country to a new politics to which the future belongs.             In a sense, Punjab has proclaimed the triumph of politics over economics. Whatever the sophisticated and well-meaning advocates of the preponderance of economics over politics might have argued over the last two decades,...