The Idea of India
Gujarat’s Faded Testaments: The Shrine Of Data Pir, Junagadh, Gujarat
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 […]

Gujarat’s Faded Testaments: The Ideological Shadows Of Somnath
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 […]

Idea Of India Project Update: May 24th 2010 Gujarat’s Faded Testaments – The Parables Of Bet Dwarka

On any given day hundreds of Hindu pilgrims can be seen standing in the courtyard of Bet Dwarka’s famous Krishna temple. On the day of the annual festival, tens of thousands will congregate here. And on that special day, as on any ordinary day, the pilgrims would have been helped to cross the three kilometer […]

Idea Of India Project Update: May 14th 2010 Gujarat’s Faded Testaments – The Sant Devidas Temple, Parab, Gujarat

We hacked, we burnt, did a lot of that. We believe in setting them [Muslims] on fire because these bastards say they don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it, they say this and that will happen to them. Babu Bajrangi, VHP and Bajrang Dal leader, speaks about events in Naroda, Gujarat in 2002, […]

Idea Of India Project Update: May 11th 2010 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: May 9th 2010: The Ideological Shadows On 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 […]

Gujarat’s Faded Testaments, April 28th 2010
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 […]

The Idea Of India Project Update: Gujarat’s Faded Testaments, 28th April 2009e

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 […]

A Dancer’s Map Of Lucknow
A Dancer's Map Of Lucknow

          Jab chhorh chaley Lakhnau nagari, Kaho haal adam par kya guzeri… (When we left our beloved Lucknow, See what befell us..) Wajid Ali Shah   Its [British colonial education] cumulative effect was to be described…as nothing short of a chasm that…made it impossible for the new generation of the educated […]

Deconstructing Kashmir – Part IV: Through The Gilded Windows Of Emperors
Deconstructing Kashmir - Part IV: Through The Gilded Windows Of Emperors

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of […]

In Defense Of Doubt Or How Intellectual Walls Have A Terrible Way Of Leaking
In Defense Of Doubt Or How Intellectual Walls Have A Terrible Way Of Leaking

Someone threw an egg at historian Wendy Doniger during a lecture in London in November 2003. Seven years later Wendy Doniger threw a book back at them. But more about this scholarly debate in a bit. — Reading Raymond Schwab’s masterpiece The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680 – 1880 one […]

William Dalrymple Attends The Sabarimala Or How I Began To Worry That My Sabarimala Essay Will Not Be Good Enough
William Dalrymple Attends The Sabarimala Or How I Began To Worry That My Sabarimala Essay Will Not Be Good Enough

William Dalrymple has published a piece in The Guardian newspaper on the Sabarimala pilgrimage. This was the very pilgrimage I recently traveled to witness and wrote about in a Project Update post called Where Muslims Warriors Defend & Protest Hindu Gods. His essay arrives a few days ahead of my own. I am however posting […]

Sleepless In Lucknow Or How The Jaipur Literary Festival Became A Nightmare I Want To Wake Up From, February 9th 2010
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, […]

No Words To Describe It Or A Daily Reality That Is Also A Daily Fear, February 6th 2010
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 […]

Towards The City Of Illusion & Past The Mists Of Memory, January 31st 2010
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 […]