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Speaking Volumes: Emperors, apostates and absences
(Published in the Business Standard, August 14, 2012) The price Raja Rammohan Roy paid in the early 19th century for expressing his views on Hinduism and sati was not minor. His mother ostracized the...
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(Published in the Business Standard, April 30, 2014) In the great city of Varanasi, there lived a weaver of threads and words, who sent out his poems like incendiary drones into the comfortable world...
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From France to India, Charlie Hebdo and the promise of free speech
Wrote this in some sadness for the Huffington Post. It was published on January 10, a few days after the murders of the editorial team and others, including bodyguards and police officers, at Charlie...
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“Please leave him alone”: reading Perumal Murugan
"Perhaps the only free space we have any more, until these times change, is here, in the private compact between writers and their readers that takes place in the wide, broad-bordered lands inside our...
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Speaking Volumes: Unequal Murders
“Those who killed, killed in the open. Thugs committed their thuggery in the public eye, with a spring in their step. .. A dark, frightening cloud of reality had descended, one that no one had...
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Murder, and a revolt in the Akademi
(On the morning of August 30, 2015, the scholar and former Karnataka University vice-chancellor MM Kalburgi was murdered in his home in Dharwad; he had opened the door to his assailants; his family...
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How India’s writers are fighting intolerance
In the BBC, 13th October 2015: “A month-and-a-half later, the murder of this scholar has set off an unusual movement with little precedent. Writers from across the country are standing up in protest...
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Speaking Volumes: Into the abyss
One of the few joys of researching blasphemy, a crime with increasingly bleak consequences for those found guilty of it, is that it’s a fine excuse for watching a Satanist rocker for a Polish death...
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Speaking Volumes: Unfree – what to expect next
This week’s column will absolutely not sound the alarm on free speech and the future of India’s liberal democracy. That would be like standing up at the RK Puram intersection and announcing that the...
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