Project Progress Updates
Idea Of India Project Update: Gujarat’s Faded Testaments: The Shrine Of Data Pir, Junagadh, Gujarat
I don’t remember the names of those Muslims… but the ones who were there… they were handpicked and killed one by one. There was one Katki in Madhopura… whenever a riot took place, he was the first to come out… That day we targeted him and killed him. There were two advantages to that… it [...]
The Idea Of India Project Update: Gujarat’s Faded Testaments: The Ideological Shadows Of Somnath
Mahmud of Ghazni, a legendary looter, descended on Somnath from his Afghan kingdom and, after a two-day battle, took the town and the temple. Having stripped its fabulous wealth, he destroyed it. So began a pattern of Muslim desecration and Hindu rebuilding that continued for centuries. The temple was again razed in 1297, 1394, and [...]
Project Updates: Gujarat’s Faded Testaments, April 28th 2010
They were the seven minutes that changed India's future. At 7:43AM on February 27th, 2002, the Sabaramati Express, on its way from the city of Ayodhya, arrived at Godhra railway station. The train was packed with Hindu pilgrims on their way back from Ayodhya. During its standard four-minute stop a series of confrontations broke out [...]
Project Updates; Sleepless In Lucknow Or How The Jaipur Literary Festival Became A Nightmare I Want To Wake Up From, February 9th 2010
Lets begin by celebrating overt and rabid racism – Ayaan Hirsi Ali was at the Jaipur Literary Festival and I was left bereft with incredulity at the decision of the event organizers. Rather than create a genuinely interesting and intellectually serious environment around writers, thinkers, activists and intellectuals, the festival seems to prefer polemicist, celebrities, [...]
Project Updates: No Words To Describe It Or A Daily Reality That Is Also A Daily Fear, February 6th 2010
There are words to describe an inability to find words. Speechless, dumbstruck, dumbfounded, silent, bereft of speech, tongue-tied, inarticulate, mute, dumb, voiceless, and probably others. But what words describe when you can’t find images? And what words describe when you keep missing them? There are no words really to describe this state of being, and [...]
Project Updates: Towards The City Of Illusion & Past The Mists Of Memory, January 31st 2010
It is one of my most vivid childhood memories and it now returns to me with the clarity of a stereopticon as I sit here on cold winter’s dawn on a Delhi railway platform waiting to take the 6:00 am Shatabdi Express to Lucknow. It is the winter of 1972 and my scout troop, returning [...]
Project Updates: On The Graves Of History, 28th January 2010
I buy a postcard. It shows a black and white picture of a large group of local Keralan villagers standing around two tall, confident looking men who clearly do not belong to the local community. The two men, in shirts and pants, look back at the camera with confidence. The villagers however look at the [...]
Project Updates: On The Milky Way To A Mosque, January 22nd 2010
The words are beginning to dance in my head, and I can’t stop them from doing so. I am standing at the site of what is purported to be the first mosque built on Indian soil – the Cheraman mosque in the city of Kodungallur, but all that is running through my head is this [...]
Project Updates: The Omnipresent Baba, January 22nd 2010
Baba Farid’s reputation and influence spreads from the regions of Punjab all the way down to the Southern tips of Tamil Nadu. I visited his main shrine in Pakpattan in what is now Pakistan while pursuing the story of one of the Mumbai attackers Ajmal Kasab Kasab ironically comes from the land of the people [...]
Project Updates: The Trinity Of The Gods, January 14th 2010
The Chandanakudam festival will not begin until December of this year, but I am heading to the small town of Changanacherry because it is site of this unique event. The festival is the only known event where Hindus, Muslims and Christians celebrate and perform the festival rituals together, and explicitly take offerings to and receiving [...]
Project Updates: Where Muslim Warriors Defend & Protect Hindu Gods, January 10th 2010
It is perhaps one of the more unique Hindu pilgrimages in India. Its circuit takes the pilgrims through the domains of two Muslim men – a saint and a warrior, who are considered companions and protectors of the deity Ayyappa. The shrine to Ayyappa lies at the top of a mountain in Sabarimala, but the [...]
Project Update: The Search For The Bent Cross, January 7th 2010
I am searching for the Chapel of the Bent Cross in Cochin’s Matancherry district. The story goes that in 1635 the Syrian Christians who had forcibly been converted to Roman Catholicism declared their return to their original faith. The Kunan Kurisu Revolt as this is known marked the final divide between the Jacobites and the [...]