From this cliff’s brow For wifehood’s glory With spurning feet I dart Down into yon fire’s heart To meet him, ne’er to part Flames reddening o’er me To nestle to his side, In Cora’s bowers a bride! O love, though thou hast died, I’ll not forsake thee. —Euripides, Supplices
The way to assess the patriarchal leanings of a state is to go through its policies towards the so called ‘oldest profession in the world’— prostitution. Ideally, state policy should reflect sensitivity to the socio-economic and historical issues related to prostitution, policies should differentiate between prostitution as a socio-cultural institution that treats women as marketable commodities, encourages women and child trafficking,
Bob Dylan is like an arrow that has never returned to an area it has once traversed. As much as his fans have wanted him to revisit the glory days of the 1960s, Dylan has moved on. Yet, it would be difficult to argue that the 1960s were anything but Dylan’s decade.
As a researcher and participant in an anti-poverty project in eastern UP in which we were trying to come up with suitable livelihood activities for the 40 percent of the population that was totally landless and dependent on agricultural labour, a surprising item would appear in the list of activities that dalit members of the target group expressed an interest in taking up.
Uma Vasudev’s biography of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, the renowned flautist, comes across as a mixed bag. At one level, there is little to distinguish it from most run-of-the-mill hagiographical accounts of musicians and their lives. Other reviewers hold that it reads more like an autobiography.
The book as the title suggests describes the history of the devadasis of India who were regarded for centuries as servants of the Hindu deities. But for one century between 1857 to 1947 they came to be regarded as profane prostitutes by the emerging Indian westernized elite and the British officials.