The Golden Girls of Kerala

God’s own country: Kerala. The state owes this title to several reasons, the primary one being its timeless traditions. People like Meenakshi Amma have been the torchbearers for keeping the ancient tradition of Kalaripayattu, an Indian version of the martial arts, alive. There have been many Meenakshi Ammas across generations who have played a pivotal role in keeping dance forms, sports, ayurveda, herbal spas and many more timeless traditions alive. Gradually, one more tradition with huge potential has started building up—a pantheon of athletics goddesses in God’s own country. Angel Mary John won the silver for India at the Bangkok Asian Games in 1978. Subsequently, M D Valsamma, P T Usha, Shiny Wilson, Mercy Kuttan, Rosa Kutty, Padmini Thomas, Philomina Thomas, Saramma, Tessymol, K M Beenamol, Anju Bobby George, Chitra Soman, Sinimol Paulose and Preeja Sreedharan came one after another, further strengthening and enriching the tradition. This low-cost assembly-line of raw talent has saved the face of the country many a time at the highest of the global sporting platforms. If we see the list of Arjuna awardees from the state, this becomes all the more striking.

M D Valsamma came into the spotlight after the inter-state meet at Bangalore in 1981 by winning five gold medals. This catapulted her into the railway and national teams. In the year 1982, she became the national champion in the 400 m hurdles, with a new record. This record of hers was considered better than the Asian record. In the same year, she won the gold medal in the 400 m hurdles in what was a record time in both Indian and Asian hurdles—58.47 sec in front of a home crowd at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in the Asian Games. Two years later, for the first time in history, the Indian women’s team entered the finals in the Los Angeles Olympics and finished in the seventh position. The moment and its significance in the given circumstances could best be understood by the article published in the name of M D Valsamma in The Hindu. The article reads:

I was not in the best frame of mind when I went to Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics. I was the Asian Games champion in the 400 m hurdles which came with an Asian record in 1982 but I did not get any international exposure before the Olympics.

Book Extract, Books, Sports

By Abhishek Dubey and Sanjeeb Mukherjea

December 2, 2019

Islam flourished in India long before Babur arrived

Long before ‘alternative facts’ and fake news gained currency, right-wing Hindu nationalists were already peddling an alternative history of Indian Islam, distorting well-documented facts about its origins and presenting it as a malign and illiberal influence on ethnic Indian culture. In that narrative, Muslims came to India as invaders and today’s Indian Muslims are Babur ki Aulad (descendants of Babur) who must collectively pay for his sins. This ‘alternative’ version of history also invokes visions of successive Muslim rulers as cultural vandals with a mission to Islamize Hindu culture.

No sensible debate on Indian Muslims or Islam is possible unless we first clear the fog of fake history that is fast creeping into mainstream scholarship with textbooks being rewritten to formalize it. So, let us first get our history right: how Islam arrived in India and developed—assimilating, as much as influencing, the local cultural landscape as it spread gradually across the country.

The historical fact is that Babur, who founded the Mughal Empire in India and whose name and actions are routinely invoked to damn Indian Muslims, came to India nearly 800 years after Islam had already set down roots here and assumed a distinctively multicultural character by assimilating local cultural practices. The Mughal Empire was established in 1526 with Babur’s accession to the throne, and lasted more than 300 years—ending with the defeat of Bahadur Shah Zafar at the hands of the British in 1857, though its decline had started right after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. But, to come back to the origins of Indian Islam, the first Muslims came to India as early as the seventh century CE—and they came as traders, not as invaders.

Book Extract, Books, Non-Fiction

By Hasan Suroor

November 7, 2019

Indian Media lacks sensitivity while reporting Rape cases

If on the basis of the testimony of the survivor, the perpetrators of the crime are caught, then the other part of the trauma begins. An illustration of this is what has come to be known as the Shakti Mills rape case. On 22 August 2013, less than a year after the furore that followed the gang rape in Delhi, and after the Verma Committee report led to a change in the rape law, a twenty-two-year-old photojournalist and her colleague were accosted by a group of men when they went to take pictures of an abandoned textile mill in Central Mumbai, a stone’s throw away from a busy railway station. The woman was gang-raped while her colleague was beaten up.

Luckily for her, even though traumatized—the rapists filmed the act—she had her wits about her. After the rapists walked with her and her colleague to the nearby Mahalakshmi railway station, where they issued dire threats that if they were to report the incident to the police, the videos of the rape would be released on social media, the woman decided to go immediately to the nearest hospital to get a medical examination. Changes in the law after 2013 established that any hospital, private or public, would have to attend to a rape survivor, report to the police and conduct a medical examination. Earlier, only public hospitals could do this.

The fact that she was a journalist, that her seniors came immediately to her aid as did other journalists, helped ensure that the police did not delay in moving on the case. The five men were soon arrested and charged. The case was heard in a fast track court and judgment delivered within six months.

Book Extract, Books, Non-Fiction

By Kalpana Sharma

November 4, 2019

Ezhuthachan award for Anand: A Fitting Choice

From the ruby and coral of Manipravalam poetry to the pastoral romances of Changampuzha Krishna Pillai, Malayalis have always been dyed-in-the-wool romantics. But somewhere down the line in modernity, the sickly sweet syrup of love metamorphosed into the pungent vinegar of despair and hate. None of our contemporary Malayalam writers have succeeded in breaking the romantic mould and charting out this transformation, as much as Anand, winner of this year’s Ezhuthachan Award.

Much before the emergence of intersectional activism, Anand in his novel Vyasa and Vighneswara threaded together the subaltern and feminine points of view in a stupendous feat of epistemological synthesis. This official recognition, accorded now with the bestowal of the state-sponsored Ezhuthachan Award instituted in the name of the founder of the Malayalam language, has been long overdue in his case.

Even more than O V Vijayan, Paul Zachariah and M Mukundan, his fellow compatriots from their glamorous exile in Delhi, Anand succeeded in tapping into the mother lode of India’s historical past. In Govardhan’s Travels he brilliantly channelized the medieval energies of the Hindi writer Bharatendu Harishchandra’s Andher Nagari, Chaupat Raja into an extraordinary narrative of historiographic metafiction.

Books, Kerala, Literature

By Umar N

October 8, 2019

The Princess of Travancore and The English Tongue

Three thousand kilometres southwest of Dalhousie Hilltop School, at the opposite end of the country, I discovered that in some families in India, the English language had been taught for over 200 years, for political reasons, almost as a matter of necessity. Inside the old royal family of Travancore, Her Highness Princess Pooyam Thirunal Gouri Parvathi Bayi had grown up hearing English spoken around her all the time. Consequently, when she began to learn it formally, it was almost effortless, as natural as paying obeisance to Lord Padmanabha, a representation of the supreme deity Vishnu.

Every member of the royal family of the erstwhile Travancore kingdom was a dasa, a slave, to the god with the rare ‘right-turning’ conch. Even when Princess Gouri Parvathi Bayi travelled to other parts of the world, reminders of home popped up, in the most unexpected places. On a visit to the Isle of Wight, she had just entered the Durbar Room in the Osborne House where Queen Victoria had breathed her last when the princess felt that something in that place was calling out to her. Sure enough, among the displays was a gift to the queen from her family—an ivory carving of Lord Padmanabha.

Likewise, on another visit to the Windsor Castle, she noticed a throne among the exhibits, and told her friend that there was something about it that spoke to her. They walked around to the back of the chair and, there, engraved on it was the emblem of the Travancore royal family, Lord Padmanabha’s conch. When she went back to her palace in the old city of Thiruvananthapuram, the princess discovered that in 1851 the throne had in fact been gifted by her ancestor, the Travancore maharaja, to his pen pal Queen Victoria, for the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park.

Book Extract, Books

By Kalpana Mohan

October 3, 2019

Kashmiris In the Hindu Rashtra

Anticipating BJP’s design for Kashmir, Mridu Rai writes about the events in the run up to the Abrogation of Article 370 in the book Majoritarian State which was published in early 2019. Stating that it is perilous for historians to turn soothsayers, she stops short of predicting that this is bound to happen. However, broadly hinting at it she concludes: “In national elections, J & K counts for very little: it sends up only six members to the Indian Parliament. However, by providing the powerful symbols of Islamic terror within the nation that the BJP alone can defeat, Kashmiris will continue to be useful in corralling many of the 540-odd members of the Lok Sabha.”

Kashmir is isolated through various discursive strategies to make it serve both as a dangerous exception threatening the Indian/Hindu body politic but also as a containable menace. A specialty of the Hindu Right—shared in different degrees by other parties—has been the construct of religious differences mapped onto the three sub-regional segments of the state. This becomes the basis for a three-way perspectival division of the state. In this view, Jammu is Hindu, Ladakh Buddhist and Kashmir Muslim.

The BJP has reinterpreted the outcome of the 2014 elections to confirm this understanding. Its majority win there made Hindu Jammu a reality—and ‘the backbone of the nation in the state’—and its routing in the Valley reinforced the paradigm that Kashmir is Muslim and anti-national. But the BJP won no seats in Ladakh either: the Congress won three out of four, an independent Shia candidate taking the last. Yet a supposedly Buddhist Ladakh—Hindutva claims Buddhists as ‘their own’ on the erroneous premise that their religion is merely an offshoot of Hinduism—is automatically assimilable in the rashtra.

Book Extract, Books

By Mridu Rai

September 30, 2019

A Rohingya Speaks: First, They Erased Our Name

We move to New Thatkaybyin, close to where Mum was born. It is on the outskirts of Sittwe, where nearly all the city’s Muslim neighbourhoods, except Minghala, are located. On arrival, I discover that Granny’s so-called abundant ponds in her backyard are actually really small, with just a few fish swimming around, which she sells at the market or occasionally fries up to eat. I soon find out that the house where Mum used to live in Thatkaybyin is now part of Military Training Camp 313, where Rohingya and other prisoners are interrogated and tortured.

The population of Thatkaybyin has been relocated eight miles away to New Thatkaybyin, which is where Granny now lives. The original village was ransacked during Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation, in which every house was searched, and hundreds of villagers, including some of my uncles, cousins, and mother’s friends, were interrogated and arrested, while others were forced to surrender their property or pay fines. Some disappeared, always for the same crime of simply existing.

The authorities make families submit an official list of family members that allows them to monitor the movements of every person in every household as they patrol our neighbourhoods. If a family member fails to return home before curfew, he or she is arrested. If someone disappears, the whole family suffers. We are now registered on Granny’s family list and, every evening, we have to be back in her hut before sunset. They are keeping a close watch on us.

Book Extract, Books, Features, International, Non-Fiction, People, Religion

By Sophie Ansel

September 17, 2019

The Many Incarnations of Kuriyedathu Thatri

More than a century after the sensational excommunication of Kuriyedathu Thatri and a very large number of men whom she allegedly reported to be her paramours shook the aristocracy of the Hindu kingdom of Kochi, the story continues to haunt the imagination of Malayalis. Her story of revenge has invited many interpretations. These interpretations take place in both high literary forums as well as in popular culture.

Lalithambika Antharjanam, one of the earliest women to gain recognition in the field of Malayalam literature, retold Thatri’s story, hailing her as the Goddess of Retribution who struck at the roots of the rot that had beset traditional Malayali Brahmin life. There have been prurient retellings that exploited the pornographic possibilities of the tale, turning it into a series of sexcapades of a cloistered, high-caste woman.

Modernist retellings, which include Madambu Kunhukuttan’s Outcaste, have cast Thatri as the embodiment of cosmic female energy sweeping away the decadence of the Brahmins and preparing the ground for new beginnings, or as the embodiment of aesthetic refinement whose lust was for art, not the male body.

Books, Culture, Features, History, Kerala, Literature, Society

By J Devika

September 11, 2019

The Quest for Truth

There is an old Puranic story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth.

So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountain tops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth.

Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth.

Book Extract, Books, Non-Fiction, Religion

By Shashi Tharoor

August 26, 2019

The Ivory Throne: The book that I had been waiting to read

What would it have been like if, in 1947, the princely state of Travancore, located in present day Kerala, had chosen to remain independent, and Government of India had approved that decision?

The first insignificant thing that comes to my mind is that today many, including myself, would be living in India as expats. But who knows how many of us would have remained Travancoreans, and what such an act of staying outside would have entailed?

In the final months of the British Raj, when most princely states joined the Indian Union, the powerful kingdoms of Travancore, Jammu & Kashmir and Hyderabad were reluctant to follow suit and had to be coerced into joining, just days before the declaration of Independence.

Book Review, Books, Non-Fiction

By Jeena R Papaadi

August 11, 2019

The Flood

Vellapokkathil by Thakazhi Sivsankara Pillai; translated by Santhosh Alex & Edited By Minu Ittyipe

The temple sits in the highest part of the town. There too, the God is immersed in neck-deep water. Water, water everywhere! All the people of the village have gone searching for the shore. If they had a boat, one person would stay back to guard the house. The temple has three rooms on top, where there are 67 children, 356 people and domestic animals like dog, cat, goat, hen et al. All of them are harmoniously together. No quarreling at all.

Chenaparayan had been standing in water a whole day and a whole night as he did not have a boat. It has been three days since his master had fled for his life to a safer place. In the evening, as the water started to enter the hut, he made a platform with coconut-frond and splints. He sat there expecting the water level to recede in a couple of days. If he abandoned the place someone would surely steal the things there.

Books, Fiction, Literature

By Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai