Category: Features

He’s the destroyer of evil, the pervasive one in whom all things lie. He is brilliant, terrifying, wild and beneficent. He is both an ascetic and a householder, both a yogi and a guru. He encompasses the masculine and the feminine, the powerful and the graceful, the Tandava and the Laasya, the darkness and the light, the divine and the human.

In her book, The Reluctant Family Man, Nilima Chitgopekar uses the life and personality of Shiva-his self-awareness, his marriage, his balance, his detachment, his contentment-to derive lessons that readers can practically apply to their own lives.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction of the book!

Many a tumultuous event in the life of Shiva is recounted in the various Puranas. Shiva led a life of contradictions, unmitigated wonder and beauty. When faced with difficulties, he had to tread gently, take a deep look into himself, sometimes go against his inherent nature, and change, when need be. In the earliest and rather scant appearances, Shiva seems to have been a marginalized deity among the pantheon of gods, and yet he has become one of the most ubiquitous. Shiva, as Rudra, started off as being a silent, brooding sort of deity, but over the centuries, a spouse and two children were grafted on to his personality. The mythographers realized that they had to retain some of Shiva’s earliest features, for the sake of authenticity, but there was also a need to expand his range. New myths were added, providing Shiva with additional traits, enhancing his repertoire and ensuring his survival in an ever-expanding celestial world. Sometimes, these traits clashed with his older image and gave rise to interesting scuffles, tussles and uneasy truces, that may or may not flare up, to provide new teachings as the millennia roll by. I have endeavoured to distil from the whole mass of Shaiva mythology a fine essence. In spite of this individual effort, as so many before, I am often stumped, for Shiva has the aura of an enigma, constantly baffling, constantly satisfying and constantly fulfilling the needs of followers through the centuries.

A group—to the uninitiated, a bizarre group—is depicted in artistic renderings, under trees amid rolling hills, with partly snow-capped mountains in the background against a golden evening sky. The scene is one of calm comfort and general contentment. Shiva and Parvati are seated on leopard skin, absorbed, preparing an intoxicating drink. Parvati is richly dressed while Shiva is resplendent in all the accoutrements of an ascetic. He has a detached yet comely look on his face, covered head to toe in white ash as snakes slither around his neck. A smaller figure on the side is that of Skanda with six heads, and yet another is of Ganesha, who has an elephant’s head and the torso of a prepubescent boy. This is the most well-known celestial family, referred to as Shivaparivara—Shiva with his wife and two sons. The moment you think of a god with a family, you think of Shiva, with each eminent member of his family, holding a place in the hearts of devotees in and around the subcontinent and beyond. Shiva, the father of Ganesha and Skanda. Shiva, the husband of Parvati. Shiva, the son-in-law of Daksha. He truly has an actual family. Then there are the hordes of ganas who are inseparable from him, a family of followers whom he adores, and whose misshapen physical bodies are simultaneously a cause for mirth and deep philosophical understanding.

However, when we look at Shiva, in a clear visual sense, he seems to be verily clothed in the traits of an ascetic. Not just any old ascetic but a pronouncedly antinomian ascetic. He is a renouncer who is not supposed to have any interest in the family hearth and in everything that ties down a male member of Hindu society. His attributes of asceticism are unique and outlandish, to say the least, denoting a disregard for personal physical appearance, and a defiance and rejection of all socially sanctioned, literally man-made conventions and rules of conformity. It also represents a forsaking of all worldly activities and social participation while functioning as a dramatic marker of ‘outsiderhood’. So, Shiva is the only major god known to be an ascetic. Therefore, he is not just a yogi but a Mahayogi. He has opted out; no mores apply to him as he leads the solitary and contemplative life.

To know more about The Reluctant Family Man, click here!

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways.

Rohit De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution

Here is an exclusive excerpt from the introduction of the book!

In December 1950 Mohammed Yasin, a young Muslim vegetable vendor in the small town of Jalalabad in north India, was in distress. He had received notification that the town government was implementing a new set of bylaws licensing the sale of various commodities and was providing only one license for the sale of vegetables in the town area. This license had been issued to a Hindu merchant, granting him a virtual monopoly over the vegetable trade in Jalalabad, which forced Yasin and other vegetable vendors to sell their goods after paying the license holder a certain fee. Yasin petitioned the Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus directing the town committee not to prohibit the petitioner from carrying on his trade.

A writ of mandamus is an order issued by a superior court to compel a lower authority or government officer to perform mandatory or administrative duties correctly. Yasin’s lawyer argued that not only was the new regulation ultra vires (i.e., beyond the powers of the municipality), it also violated Yasin’s rights to a trade and an occupation, conferred by the Constitution of India.

As a vegetable vendor from a minor town, Yasin appears to be a nondescript bystander as the grand narratives of Indian history—independence, partition, elections, the integration of princely states—play out around him. Why should he be interesting to us today? Yasin is one of the first Indians to present himself before the new Indian Supreme Court as a rights-bearing citizen.

His problem and its solution both emerge from India’s new constitutional republican order and represent a phenomenon that is the subject of this book. Yasin’s constitutional adventure highlights three features, this book argues, that form the basis for Indian constitutionalism. First, the Constitution mattered as a limit to or a structure for daily living. Second, this constitutional engagement included large numbers of ordinary Indians, often from minorities or subaltern groups. Third, a significant number of these constitutional encounters were produced through the new Indian state’s attempt to regulate market relations.

India became independent at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. Three years later the Constituent Assembly, whose members were nominated by elected provincial legislatures, promulgated a new constitution declaring the state to be a “sovereign democratic republic. ” This was a remarkable achievement for that time. The Indian Constitution was written over a period of four years by the Constituent Assembly. Dominated by the Congress Party, India’s leading nationalist political organization, the assembly sought to include a wide range of political opinions and represented diversity by sex, religion, caste, and tribe. This achievement is striking compared to other states that were decolonized. Indians wrote the Indian Constitution, unlike the people of most former British colonies, like Kenya, Malaysia, Ghana, and Sri Lanka, whose constitutions were written by British officials at Whitehall. Indian leaders were also able
to agree upon a constitution, unlike Israeli and Pakistani leaders, both of whom elected constituent assemblies at a similar time but were unable to reach agreement on a document.

The Indian Constitution is the longest surviving constitution in the postcolonial world, and it continues to dominate public life in India. Despite this, its endurance has received little attention from scholars. Although there are a handful of accounts of constitution-making and constitutional design, the processes through which a society comes to adopt a constitution still remain underexplored.

Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.