Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities

The video with the killing of Mohammad Afrazul by Shambhunath Raigar in cold blood, without any immediate motivation or excuse, is a watershed moment in the new-age social-media-driven communal crime in India. Where all such hate crime shared on social media, especially lynchings, builds an ever-present sense of fear for the Muslim, this video does away with all padding, any semblance of rationale, the use of passion as motivator, and mob as executive. This is a radical break from the past where the Hindu right felt a need to justify itself even to the rest of the country.

This paper reads The Longest Journey to glean the instructive and to discuss the relevance of E. M. Forster for contemporary India, especially in its impact on the university. As it explicates the implications of Forster's writing for the Indian university, many of these instructive foresights from Forster are applicable to the state of the university globally too, as funding cuts and hiked fees affect universities in the USA, Britain, Japan, and elsewhere. Forster is prescient with his views on the university, and we can learn from his writings to assess the damage being done to academia by conservative policies.

A critical reading of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex with a focus on the protagonist as a ruler overseeing a city under a plague, is illuminating for our times. The role and responsibility displayed by Oedipus can be compared and contrasted with the performance of the major political leaders of our own contemporary world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Civic duty and the sovereign’s responsibility towards their people during the crisis
are examined.

The fact that the main protagonist of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s latest fictive offering is the historical figure of the polymath scholar, Zakariya Qazwini, indicates many of Farooqi’s predilections and concerns for The Merman and the Book of Power. The novel is written in the form of a qissa, or an epic-like fabulist tale.

Scholarship on Indian theatre has focused on colonial theatrical culture, theatre's allegiance to the national project, forms of institutionalization and, most crucially, critiquing the urban relationship to folk and traditional performance. There has been some investigation of avantgarde practices of women theatre-makers since the 1990s that deviate from modernist para

This essay is a reflection on three theatre productions
staged at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2017: Quality Street, performed and directed by Maya Krishna Rao, Faezeh Jalali’s Shikhandi: The story of the In-Betweens, and Harold Pinter’s Dumb Wait-err, directed by Tushar Pandey. The essay segues from one performance to the next, paying attention to what each work makes intelligible and sensible and how that affects the spectator, calling upon her to think and act in particular ways. These performances offer a provocation to the senses. What is seen, heard, and felt forms the basis of the theatrical experience affected through the theatrical material—body/ movement, space/stage, sound/voice. There is little in common between them in terms of aesthetics, organisation of space, processes of production, and specificities of reception. But from a curatorial perspective, reflecting on these performances collectively might alter the experience of these works and enable a conceptualisation of citizenship through performance that can be broached in the festival context.

Everyday acts of resilience of ordinary women do not necessarily aim to overthrow existing hierarchies and gendered oppressions. The article proposes a renewed understanding of resistance and in doing so, attempts to recover and recast notions of vulnerability and resilience as useful variables that we, in fact, inherit from existing feminist epistemological groundings. How does feminist scholarship engage with narratives that overlie vulnerabilities and contextual specificities, unable to be accommodated easily within the “sights” and “sites” of feminist resistance?

Our paper lays out an experiential account of walking the city, an otherwise mundane everyday act, as a performative action. The specific act of walking that this paper examines is part of a series of performance actions titled ‘Women Walk at Midnight’ (Delhi, 2016- present) where women col- lectively walk the streets of the city at night. Breaking from the conventional article format, our paper draws on reflex- ive feminist research and performance analysis to narrate the performative dimensions of walking that foreground how women collectively negotiate fear and vulnerability in/ of the city.

Our article focuses on the farmers’ protests, one of the longest sets of protests in independent India (September 2020 - December 2021). Indian farmers carried out an arduous protest movement on the borders of the nation’s capital, New Delhi, against the three farm laws passed by the Parliament under the ruling right-wing government of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP). These laws, which claimed to liberalize India’s agricultural markets and encourage contract farming, were perceived by farmers and farmer organizations as an attempt to corporatize Indian agriculture, threatening the farmers’ livelihoods and autonomy. We examine three animative scenarios staged as part of their demands to repeal the farm laws- first, farmers’ demonstrating in bitter cold - living in temporary tenements, sharing food and stories; second, the violent clashes that unfolded on January 26, 2021 eroding support for the movement; and finally, farm leader Tikait’s emotional breakdown on national television, which infused fresh calls for solidarity and strength into the movement. We cite these events to draw attention to the embedded structures of inequality that pervade contemporary protests, rehearsing historical communitarian and democratic ethics in the present moment. We see these scenarios as offering an expansive vocabulary of dissent that must be accounted for in any contextual analysis of contemporary protests. We engage with questions of ‘perceived’ legitimacy to ask if there is an acceptable way of protesting. What motivates people to extend their support and solidarity? What determines the grounds of a movement’s legitimacy: claims made, or the manner in which they are performed or perceived? We argue that legitimacy is not determined or shaped in or for perpetuity; it is constantly shifting, and its coordinates need analytical attentiveness and reinterpretation.

Co-opting our cities for short-term ends can leave them brutalized and breathless. Theatre practitioner and performance-studies scholar Gargi Bharadwaj considers
New Delhi’s key events from 2023 and the redemptive power of live performance to revive us.

Animal Farm by George Orwell has inspired many ideas, incorporating many Sociological and Political Themes that cover large time periods (of the past). An analysis of how society revolves on its system of hierarchy, considering Animal Farm is presented in this paper.