Understanding Husain
I FIRST MET MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN IN 1967, when a retrospective of his work was organised by Pundole Art Gallery on the premises of Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, then called Bombay. Husain, who first...
View ArticleAbsolute Khushwant
The following chapters are excerpted from Absolute Khushwant: The Low-Down on Life, Death & Most Things In-Between by KHUSHWANT SINGH (with Humra Quraishi) Penguin Books India, August, 2010 I...
View ArticleMaster of Centuries
ABOUT A DECADE AGO, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam launched a blistering polemic against Ashis Nandy, the celebrated and contrarian social theorist. Nandy had published a short essay in the...
View ArticleInfinite Inquilab
JUST SOUTH OF BAGH-I-JINNAH, in the heart of Lahore’s Shadman Colony, a fountain stands at the centre of an otherwise unremarkable chowk. No water flows from this dusty structure, though markings on...
View ArticleTo the Lighthouse
MANY YEARS AGO, I heard some buzz around Mukul Kesavan’s first book—a novel titled Looking Through Glass (1995)—and hastened towards a copy, only to throw it aside and retreat in bewilderment not long...
View ArticleTurkey | Mosque and State
ON A CHILLY MORNING IN LATE JANUARY, in Istanbul’s bustling Sultanahmet area, Selahattin Akgul, a heavily moustached shoeshine man who works just outside the Hagia Sophia, contemplated the fate of the...
View ArticleRSS 3.0
|ONE| IN EARLY AUGUST LAST YEAR, a cohort of journalists gathered in Kolkata for a two-day seminar on Islamic fundamentalism convened by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the world’s largest...
View ArticleLajja
ABOUT THE STORY In 1993, the writer Taslima Nasrin created a sensation in her native Bangladesh with Lajja, her novel about the travails of a Hindu family in Dhaka in the wake of the demolition of the...
View ArticleFood Fight
On 17 March, about two months after the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Gilles Platret, the mayor of the town of Chalon-sur-Saône in France’s Burgundy region, wrote a letter to...
View ArticleMy Seditious Heart
ON A BALMY FEBRUARY NIGHT, aware that things were not going well, I did what I rarely do. I put in earplugs and switched on the television. Even though I had said nothing about the spate of recent...
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“Sovereignty is Always Limited”: The Constituent Assembly Discusses the...
On 22 August, three judges of a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court held that the Islamic practice of instant triple talaq, or talaq-i-biddat, was legally invalid. The judgment comprised three...
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Not Ensuring Freedom, but Toleration: The Constituent Assembly Discusses the...
On 12 August, the Jharkhand legislative assembly passed the Religious Freedom Bill, 2017, amid demands from the opposition parties to send the bill to a select committee. The bill, which was brought by...
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