Category: Essays
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The Trappings of Identity
Nationalism in South Asia The rise of religious and ethnic nationalisms in South Asia was inevitable. Discuss. The Uttar Pradesh government recently passed an ordinance prohibiting coerced religious conversion through marriage. Forceful conversion was already illegal – Love jihad, as these interfaith marriages are called, is just the most recent manifestation of the violent, Islamophobic…
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Is The Law Moral?
In Defence of The Internal Morality of Law: Fuller and His Critics At this present political moment, vociferous debates rage about the experience of being governed in democratic countries charged with creating disorder, oppression and injustice. Amongst the many competing and interrelated ideals of political morality, the rule of law has been the object of…
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How Meta is Too Meta?: Poetry, Discourse and Ideology
Reading ‘Stillborn’ by Sylvia Plath and ‘The Thought Fox’ by Ted Hughes with Michael Foucault and Louis Althusser Metapoetry, or poetry about the art of writing a poem, is an idea widely explored by poets but sparsely analysed by critics. ‘Stillborn’ by Sylvia Plath and ‘The Thought Fox’ by her husband Ted Hughes are two…
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The Myth of Empowerment?
Women’s Welfare in Kerala “Kerala women have a sense of self-worth,” declares a UNICEF worker in the Indian Express (2007). In 2018, Praveen Kumar notes, “In God’s Own Country, women are being empowered not just economically, but psychologically.” Scholars frequently rank Kerala near or at the top of all Indian states in terms of GDI,…
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Stay Woke, Corporations Creepin’
Deconstructing “Wokeness” and its Significance – A Semiotic Analysis of H&M’s 2015 Advertisement Being ‘woke’ is cool. There is specific value invested in subscribing to certain aesthetics and ideologies that constitute the ever-changing, all-important state of “wokeness.” I seek to explore how this strand of political correctness has been elevated to omniscient dimensions wherein it…
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Wait, This Isn’t Like That Julia Roberts Movie
Vijaydan Detha’s Dohri Zindagi and Michael Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 on Agency in Sex Work Contemporary debates about sex work are often heavily rooted in the cultures of their operation and are subject to the legislation and mechanics of that community. In other words, with respect to sexuality, superstructures, institutions and patterns of…
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Plato: There’s Nothing Liberal About This Education
Plato describes “a ladder of love” in The Symposium. What effect does this suggestion have in the larger context of definitions of sexuality? How does the setting of the play contribute to these ideas about sex and knowledge? How have these ideas changed? The intersection of knowledge and sexuality that is explored in The Symposium…
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Fake Art: Ross, Lessing and Bowden on Forgeries
“Determining a forgery is not an aesthetic exercise, rather it is a practice of legitimation.” Lessing opens his argument surrounding forgery with an acknowledgement that ascertaining whether a work of an art is a forgery is a “normative” judgement passed because the artwork is lacking in “value” (Lessing, 1965). The discourse under review largely works…
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Essay Review – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Eliot on Truth and its Poets
Poetry is an unflinching, enduring process that contends with the world within and without. It has seen many revolutions of form, critique and intent. This review traces how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Eliot have answered two questions regarding the poetic process: first, does poetry lay claim to truth?; and second, what is the role of…
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Indian Civilisations: The Past in the Present
India is an outlier. Nowhere else is there a country teeming with such intricate and rich culture, millennia of priceless history, and a correspondingly unshakeable connection with its past. It is my contention that any understanding of Indian civilisations begins with its dynamic nature; Indian civilisations are not a discrete, closed book, but a fiercely…
sanjana sheth 