This voyage will start from the old Fairlie Warehouse that houses an impressive collection of documents chronicling the city’s history. It will include a visit to the Maritime Heritage Center (Port Museum,) that holds detailed records of the passage of indentured labourers through the Calcutta port.
I can read ‘Hindi’; I can speak bad Hindi if I am allowed to disregard all rules of gender; and I can write it if I must (my spelling is better than my grammar). But I somehow can’t do it without feeling that I am participating in some weird imperialist project. This has seriously hampered my engagement with much of North India, somewhat dismissively known now as the ‘cow belt’.
Among the dozens of festivals Indians celebrate every year, Holi stands out as one that has the least quota of
As a spring festival, Holi marks the end of winter and the arrival of spring, the season and symbol of regeneration and new life. The much-awaited spring harvest and the availability of the abundance of food at the time of Holi add newer niceties to the flavours of the festivities every year.
A few years back Fatima came to Kolkata in search of her roots. Her grandfather Mohamed Musa had migrated to the USA from a village on the banks of the river Hooghly, West Bengal.
A slow process of acclimatisation to the realities of Hindutva has been underway for some time now. There have been bandwagon jumpers and opportunists, there have been cruder brutes who seem to enjoy the sense of power associated with killing, maiming or raping for an allegedly higher cause. But there are also sophisticates with an education, and with the requisite RSS training (even if it has hitherto been polite to hide it if you have aspirations to intellectualism) who are willing openly to serve the saffron cause, and have been doing so for some time.
Born in rural Andhra Pradesh, Pingali enrolled into the British Army and went to South Africa to fight in Second Boer War. That is where he first saw Mahatma Gandhi and was drawn to his doctrines and philosophies of ‘ahimsa’ and ‘swaraj’. He later joined the Congress Party and actively participated in the party’s sessions and demonstrations.
In order to understand India, however, it is essential to bear in mind at the outset two important facts. Firstly, the history of India has to be reckoned not in decades or in centuries, but in thousands of years. Secondly, it is only under British rule that India for the first time in her history has begun to feel that she has been conquered.
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