The irreversible entrapment of religion with terms like violence, brutality, offence, anger, fear, and censure instead with say, inquiry, beauty, prayer or tolerance is a paramount sign of our decayed condition. But resigned acquiescence is also not a mark of the academic enterprise. The very act of thinking and writing challenges admission.
Why is it that every Helen is an enigma? Homer’s, Marlowe’s, Bollywood’s? Does the letter H—drawn like a one-step ladder connecting nothing with nothing, or a bar in a passage between two walls—have something occult to do with it? Neither Menelaus nor Faustus could read his Helen. Both were doomed.
Aloka Parasher Sen’s latest collection brings together seven essays dealing with gender and religion, almost all of which were previously published, and have been revised for inclusion in this volume. Taken collectively, the volume is a three-pronged history of the intersections of gender and religion in local contexts. Parasher Sen’s stated intent is to trace how women subscribed to and broke out of the prescriptive norms that were laid out for them and to generally explore how religious ideas shaped gender relations in early India, while trying to bring in the particularities of local history in all this (p. xviii).
In the vicinity of walled-Delhi, or old Shahjahanabad, stands a school with a long, fraught and yet cherished history. The magnificence of the Anglo-Arabic School is amplified by the Indo-Persian architectural style of the mosque and buildings, and the astoundingly serene and sprawling campus within which it is housed.
In January 2023 the world of Indology lost Alf Hiltebeitel, prolific Mahabharata scholar who hewed new pathways through that thorny thicket to reveal fresh vistas of understanding. Freud’s India explored personal experiences following his father’s death and his own divorce that recalled Freud’s life and Freud’s connection with India through Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose (‘an extraordinary professor who had founded a local psychoanalytic group in Calcutta’—Freud, 1922). Bose sent Freud an icon of Vishnu seated on Ananta which he kept on his desk. This features as the cover.
Creating fiction, poetry and drama based on the Mahabharata, the Ramayana or the Puranas is a well-established tradition in Sanskrit and the Bhashas. Indian English novelists and poets have turned to reinterpretations of Hindu mythology in a big way only in the twenty-first century: the twentieth century had just a few writers, like KR Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo and TP Kailasam who attempted this. Christopher C Doyle has gone a step further; having studied the Mahabharata for fifteen years, he makes good use of incidents in the epic to build up his series of thrillers.