Rajarshi Rammohun Roy–II
Much popular fiction around Rammohun Roy’s personality was invented by those for whom it was useful to portray him as a religious eclectic and a rebel.Continue Reading
The Qur’ān, the Mu’mins, the Ahl-ul-Qitāb and The Kāfirs–I
“Low volume ethnic cleansing” – a trend of non-Muslim families forced to vacate their homes, pull out their children from schools and change neighbourhoods occupied by them.”Continue Reading
‘Krantiveer’ Ganesh Damodar Savarkar
Babarao was of the conviction that successfully achieving the political aims of the Indian people needed hard-headed realism, on the lines of the principle of ‘shatham prati shathyam’ (wily in requital; tit for tat).Continue Reading
‘Haldighati’ The Thermopylae Of Rajasthan – V
If assessed in terms of the competing objectives, the Battle of Haldighati can indeed be regarded as a Mewari triumph, because the Rana had successfully defended his territory, and the Mughal invasion had been a miserable failure.Continue Reading
Rajarshi Rammohun Roy–I
Raja Rammohun Roy with his gigantic intellectual and scholastic prowess, cogent representation of Indian religious, cultural and economic interests prevented the misapprehension and misconstruction of its cultural practices (including polytheism, idolatry, Hindu traditions and even ‘satī’) from being used against Indians. None among the Indians in that period possessed the brilliant faculties of Roy to hold rational and logical discourse in the European public sphere.Continue Reading
Ahalyabai Holkar
“It was, I trow, a joyous sight to see
Their noble Baee her seat of judgement fill.”
(‘Ahalya Baee’, by Mrs. Joanna Baillie)Continue Reading
The God, the Prophet, and the Book
The Indian constitution today stands as a document representing a tyranny of ideas unleashed on a civilisation, which for thousands of years has been a playground of ideas and refused to be defined by a single idea, book or a thinker.
As seekers and rational thinkers, let our sole allegiance be to the truth and not to the leaders, spiritual or temporal, howsoever hallowed, neither any schools of thought, political, philosophical or spiritual, nor any books. We will outlast them all…Continue Reading
‘Haldighati’ The Thermopylae Of Rajasthan – IV
Emerging out of the dust and scrimmage, Man Singh noticed a looming spectre appear before him, and suddenly the towering figure of the Rana astride his trusty steed, Chetak, was upon him…Continue Reading
Sītā and Rāma – The Divine in the Connubial Paradigm
“Great literature rises above the closed semantics of parable. It nuances the themes and forces you to keep pondering. Discursive overdetermination is not what sterling literature seeks to establish. The imponderables of life are examined, and truisms are put to test. Literature seeks to loosen up dogmas and hard-boiled notions about roles and set human responses while demonstrating the power and peril of the choices Man makes.”Continue Reading
A Tribute to the ‘Shivbhushan’
Bedekar advocated genuine history writing based on original sources and evidences without propagandistic motives. He said: “Nothing should be written or said by a history researcher without proper documentary evidence”. His oeuvre is an invaluable contribution in emotive history-writing to awaken a people apart from being definitive reference material for corrective re-writing of our history, available to us through his books and speeches which must be translated into English and other languages and mainstreamed.Continue Reading