Language of the Dissent (original) (raw)

History of Protest Literature in India: Trails from the Bhakti Literature

Better is to live one day virtuous and meditative than to live a hundred years immoral and uncontrolled‖ (The Buddha) Bhakti movement in India has been a path-breaking phenomenon that provided a solid shape and an identifiable face to the abstractions with the help of vernacular language. As a religious movement, it emphasized a strong personal and emotional bond between devotees and a personal God. It has come from the Sanskrit word Bhaj-‗to share'. It began as a tradition of devotional songs, hagiographical or philosophical-religious texts which have generated a common ground for people of all the sects in the society to come together. As counterculture, it embraced into its fold all sections of people breaking the barriers of caste, class, community, and gender. It added an inclusive dimension to the hitherto privileged, exclusivist, Upanishadic tradition. It has provided a very critical outlook on contemporary Brahminical orthodoxy and played a crucial role in the emergence of modern poetry in India.

Class Caste Politics Hierarchy and Hindutva in Indian Cinema and Protest Theatre

Wasafiri, 2023

Caste-based atrocities and discrimination have been an unfortunate reality in India for centuries. Although the administrative and structural implementation of an affirmative action system in the mid and later part of the twentieth century helped in the process of upward mobilisation of the lower castes and Dalits in India, the socio-cultural aspect of caste and thus the exclusionary politics that is associated with it has long been imbibed within the fabric of social memory of the subcontinent. Upper caste monopoly over intellectual and academic space have furthered the epidemic of marginalisation of lower caste communities for centuries. Simultaneously, the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in neo-liberal India has resulted in brutal segregation of the Dalits as well as the religious minorities. The origins of such alternative movements and methods of cultural resistance have often been rooted in social movements led by students, activist and leftist intellectuals. This paper is an attempt to explore the portrayal of caste and religious identity based violence, the idea of ‘Hindutva’ and the socio-cultural resistance against such forces through the lens of alternative/parallel cinema and protest theatre in India.

Bhim Geet and the Ambedkarite Movement The Genesis of a Cultural Field of Protest

This paper sketches the history of a cultural and artistic music category called Bhim Geet (or Bheem Geet), songs to Bhimrao Ambedkar, principal redactor of the Indian Constitution and political hero of the Dalits. By examining this aesthetic construct and its social milieu, we trace back and uncover through the lens of music and artistic performances some of the tensions and stakes the Dalits were up against in Maharashtra from a cultural point of view. What does it entail to sing caste struggles in contemporary India? What does emancipation mean for Dalits, both culturally and aesthetically? Ambedkar’s caste conversion to Buddhism in Nagpur in 1956 is now a relatively well-known episode of India’s postcolonial history. It is less known how the ex-Mahar caste, alternately called Buddhists, neo-Buddhists or Ambedkarites, have reconstructed themselves from an inseparably aesthetic and social point of view. We intend to address this lack and show how circulating cultural practices have enabled the construction of a subaltern kind of nationalism. These practices have also made possible legalist dissent through musical narratives widely influenced by Muslim poetry and musical forms, such as Qawwali, although Hindu devotional styles more commonly found in bhajan and kirtan, which are widespread musical genres in India and beyond, have also had an impact. A small fieldwork video accompanies this article and begins by proposing a few sonic examples to its readers to illustrate this significant variation and pool of influences within the category of Bhim Geet.

The Vanished Path of Buddhism: Religious Non-Conformism as Political Dissent in Contemporary India

Libri et Liberi

The figure of the Buddha, apparently lying in a sleeping position and bathed in an aura of golden, tawny, and sepia washes in watercolour, can be seen in the cover illustration of The Vanished Path: A Graphic Travelogue (Fig. 1). This book was written and illustrated by Indian comic artist and filmmaker Bharath Murthy, and published in 2015 by HarperCollins India. The cover illustration is a reproduction of a black-and-white drawing within The Vanished Path, showing a 6.1-metre-long statue of the Buddha "carved out of red sandstone"-hence the distinctive hues in the cover This paper takes a close look at the graphic novel The Vanished Path (2015) by comics artist and filmmaker Bharath Murthy. Sub-titled as "a graphic travelogue", The Vanished Path relates Murthy and his wife's pilgrimage, as new entrants to the Buddhist faith, through Hindu-dominated northern India and Nepal, where the religion was born but later lost popularity. Murthy himself acknowledges the influence of manga author Osamu Tezuka's epic series Buddha (1972-1983), set in the era of early Buddhism. However, The Vanished Path departs from Buddha in engaging with religious politics in contemporary India, which has witnessed the recent rise of Hindu militant nationalism. My analysis shows that while the visual text of The Vanished Path presents an overt plea for rehabilitating early Buddhist thought in modern India, the visual text concurrently encodes a covert defence of the longstanding tradition of secular values in the region. This tradition encompasses the acceptance of religious minorities. The paper also addresses creative engagements in comics and graphic novels between two different Asian cultures, as opposed to the critically familiar historical and geopolitical nexus between Western countries and India.

Bhakti Movement and Literature

Rawat Publications, Jaipur, 2017

As counterculture Bhakti movement embraced into its fold all sections of people breaking the barriers of caste, class, gender and region. It performed a subversive, reformatory function that changed the dynamics of worship at religious level and challenged hierarchies at social level. A heterogeneous group, the bhasha poets are distinguished from non-sectarian attitude, spontaneity and ecstasy, vernacular idiom, and dismissal of rituals. The anthology traces the beginnings and growth of Bhakti movement and literature while examining the seminal work of some saint-poets.

Bhakti Movement: A Socio-Religious Struggle of The Marginalised Society

Indian Journal of Applied Research, 2014

Bhakti Movement, as a socialist criticism, became a platform for the marginalised sections of shudras and atishudras to protest against social inequalities based on the 'varna' system, authorised by Manusmriti and other vedic scriptures. It belied the term 'bhakti' to not only mean institutionalised religion, but also individual salvation. The sants preached exemplary standards of castelessness and a non-hierarchical life of fellow humanism, spread the message of love and unity, and urged people to shed their slough of rituals and superstitions. Islam also played its role in spreading the message of equality through Sufism. The egalitarian reforms in the Vedic ideology further led to the division of Bhakti Movement into Saguna and Nirguna school, both having its separate set of ideals and practices. The tradition of dissent and protest culminated in the Sant Mat of Kabir and Nanak who spoke not only against the practices of untouchability, but also the social and economic concerns of the farmer and labour classes.