Month: January 2025

What is it that ‘Varanasi’ veils? Depth?

Varanasi – the modern cocktail of religion and capital!

What is it that the Monotheism of Varanasi veils? Multiplicity?

Does it veil the maternal polytheism, the pagan pluralism of faith? Running through the lanes and bylanes? Running through the bylanes of bylanes? What is it that the capitalism of religion and the religion of capitalism veil? The spirituality of the older inhabitants of Benaras? The spirituality of the yet older inhabitants of Kashi? The spirituality of the adi-vasi – the original inhabitant – of Kashi, of Benaras? The spirituality of the even older ones who lived here before the widow from Bengal arrived.

Continue reading “The Death of Depth”

What is it to paint the planet?

And not pass a dagger through the body of the planet?

Not mine – with a long spear.

Not make her mine. Mine and ‘make mine’. In a possessive masculine territoriality.

Hitherto, we have done agriculture – largely stemming from the enlightened human’s scientific relationship with soil and seed.

Continue reading “Painting the Planet with Chinhari”

Tagore distinguishes between the ‘desire for tea’ which the British have engendered in the Indian and the ‘need for water’ that the Indian pallisomaj has felt all along and has struggled to make (un)available over a thousand years (while Tagore sees the pallisomaj as a republic of communion, Ambedkar sees it as a republic of humiliation; the truth is perhaps somewhere in-between, uneasily in-between).

Continue reading “স্বদেশী সমাজ (swadeshi somaj)”