Articles by Avinash Kumar

The film Kai Po Che has come in for some criticism for eliding over the role of Narendra Modi in the Gujarat killings of 2002. This review argues that by faithfully recreating the social and political contexts of those times in the language of mainstream cinema, it helps remind people how dangerous is the politics that Modi represents.

This paper explores some of the debates and trends around the emergence of modern authorship in Hindi in the late colonial period. The attempt is to explore the twin processes of translation and the writing of "original works" which were seen to be constitutive in the making of the Hindi intellectual. The attempt is to also look at some of these debates through the apparent binaries of translation versus original, national versus individual, poetry versus prose and political versus literary. This often contradictory process was an outcome of a period where the idea of the "individual genius", borrowed from the west, was still taking shape.

The massacre on 2 October of 16 villagers in Khagaria in Bihar is just the latest of many such incidents of caste-based violence that have plagued the state for decades. The lack of commitment to land reform and towards ending caste exploitation is responsible for such violence, in which the dalit landless are invariably the victims. Caste configurations have changed, some "upper" backward castes have become more powerful but the dalit landless continue to suffer. Land is at the heart of all the struggles, which are sometimes incorrectly and lazily attributed to Naxalite action by the state administration.