Itihasa made itihasya...

  I took my time to watch Kantara, thanks to its release last week on OTT platform. While the world was profuse in its encomiums, I couldn’t say much till I had viewed the film and it took a while for various facets of the film to register. While the plot of the film is rather well known, its implications and import is rather subtle even as the narrative and idiom may be rather on your face. I also don’t claim to have studied Malnad’s culture in any depth but base my views on certain anthropological ‘common sense’.  Set in Malnad Karnataka’s lush and bucolic environ, the Bhuta Kola ritual is primed to be the film’s pivot. Among other things of any ritual, the Bhuta Kola ritual is apparently one of a ‘collective’ bringing all and sundry communities irrespective of caste, class, gender and status (caste) into it. The boar ( Panjurli ) is representative of the forest spirit and an all pervading one where both an individual’s and communities well being, their current miseries, future anx

  The few who have been following my blog, over the last 15 years, I have shared a lot on history, historiography, its politics and its pedagogies. All these have now been brought together as a book. It was long overdue. It’s a pretty long book and I suppose intense at many levels.  I present a summary here which I muse can also be seen as a précis of all my posts and also the shifts in my evolution as a history teacher and an eternal student of social sciences. I have always been deeply engaged and responding to issues and tumults in all domains of our socialisation in this site.  - - - - - - - - - History, representations of past and its textbooks have remained mired in controversies. Notwithstanding certain nuances and differences, broadly two visions jostle to inform our understanding of history. One is the left and so called liberal version in which India is construed as a modern imagination which was brought to life in the course of the freedom struggle. Second is the Indic view