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...

Four semesters have ended.  Again.  Yet this ‘again’ is more than itself; it has an element of the unrepeatable. I have learnt so much and unlearnt so much. All this thanks to you.  Education happens on trust. I trusted you; I could just not doubt your abilities to accompany me on the adventure of learning and thinking, of wondering and suspecting, of discerning and judging. And you never let me down. What many high-minded people thought would be beyond your grasp, you held lightly with your simple courage and lucid curiosity. What appeared opaque to the ‘unbelievers’ became translucent in your sure hands. And you trusted me. I did not, and did not have to, conceal my ignorance from you. I faced you without any mask of the Great and Remote Professor. Still you thought it worthwhile to listen to me and talk to me every day.  I told you to try and understand, instead of seeking to impress through cleverness disguised as intelligenc...

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.        ...

An extract from Sasenarine Persaud's review of South Asian Ensemble : "Stories, excerpts, poems, essays, photography, paintings, reviews and interviews all go into making this eclectic publication. The contributions are not only by, or about, South Asians. The great strength of South Asian Ensemble is the translations from Indian languages." - Sasenarine Persaud's Complete review here: http://poets-and-co.blogspot.in/

By Rajesh Sharma 'Complete Mukti' - Prime Minister Singh's hybrid phrase delivered from the Red Fort today, on 15 August 2013.  Is it a symptom of neoliberal pathologies of exclusive developmentalism transplanted on the Indian soil from abroad?  Does it say, despite 'their' silence, that we must now pick up a redesigned outfit of freedom - of freedom defined in and qualified by Western(ized) corporate terms?  At the same time, the brand new Manmohanism validates the operations of the native religious-corporate complex - by reimagining 'Mukti' in terms of the entertainment and fashion ideology of completism.  Recall Raymond's ad campaign: T he Complete Man.

By Rajesh Sharma Lawlessness is coming to be the destiny of India.  And it goes masked under lawfulness and propriety.  As we fathom greater depths of venality and deceit, experts, specialists, technocrats, managers and ‘intellectuals’ are working overtime to produce effects of oh-so-much happening. A reactive hyperactivity, whose fountainhead is the media, is radiating from tv screens.  Has not the media, whatever the intentions of those who are motivated nobly, come to function as a machine of distraction, consolation, vicarious rage? In short, the Bad Conscience of the Indian people?

-           By  Rajesh Sharma   The Coalgate is getting murkier by the hour.  After what reportedly transpired in the Supreme Court today on 8th May, the media is all aflutter with speculation. Will the Law Minister go? Should he? Will the deities up there ask him to exit? And the Railway Minister? The PM is said to be supporting the continuation of the ministers. Is he doing it on his own or under someone’s directions? It matters little. What matters is what his conduct means for India and its people. And for whatever is still left of democracy here.  This is not a display of amazing political nerve by an I-am-no-politician. This is not a demonstration of loyalty towards party and colleagues. This is not some ascetic indifference to little storms in a tea cup. This is not courage of conviction. This is a systematic destruction of the institutions on whose strength post-independence India ...