A 17-year-old schoolboy and his 14-year-old sister, both belonging to the Scheduled Community, were allegedly attacked by the students of dominant castes in the Valliyoor-Nanguneri area of Tirunelveli district of southern Tamil Nadu on 9 August. The siblings are undergoing treatment in Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital for injuries. Tragically, a 60-year-old relative of the victims,…
The movie Mammannan (2023) released by ‘Red Giant’ has become embroiled in a caste controversy. The film, directed by Mari Selvaraj, reportedly takes a minor character perceived as marginalized from the caste-based movie Thevar Magan (1992) and expands on the theme of villainous caste arrogance and democratic social justice. The cast includes renowned actor Vadivelu,…
Twenty years ago, in 2003, a study in Nature that analysed ‘a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items’ came to the conclusion that the Indo-European languages ‘expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around 8,000–9,500 years Before Present (BP)’. The study used the model to evaluate two dominant hypotheses – Steppe expansion…
Forever Ayodhya. Koenraad Elst. Aryan Books International. Pages 337. Rs 995. The Ayodhya temple liberation struggle began as a mass movement with sharp political implications in the late 1980s. It achieved its definitive victory with the Supreme Court verdict in 2019. January of 2024 will see the realisation of the temple. Arguably, the Ayodhya liberation…
The People of the Indus: and the birth of civilization in South Asia. Nikhil Gulati and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. Penguin Random House India. Pages 173. Rs 599. The Harappan civilization is both a mystery of the past and of the present. A mystery of the past because its real nature has not yet been completely…