Category: Biography
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In Memoriam, Reena GeetAnjali Chesla (1965–2025)
Reena GeetAnjali Chesla, beloved mother, sister, aunt, companion, and friend, died on March 6, 2025, at the age of 59.Reena was born to parents Malati (Kesaree) and Varada “Hary” Charyulu in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1965, and named Geeta Anjali Charyulu. She later changed her first and middle names to Reena GeetAnjali.
Reena grew up in Pocatello, Idaho, graduating from Highland High School in 1983. She moved to Salt Lake City, Utah for college and earned a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from the University of Utah. She retained treasured lifelong friends from these childhood and college years. She lived in Honolulu, Hawaii, for six years, during which time her two children were born. Shortly after the birth of her second child, she moved with her family to Logan, Utah. An energetic and involved young mother, Reena accompanied her family on many skiing and backpacking adventures, making time to enjoy Utah’s wilderness even as she worked as a full-time pharmacist and resumed part-time study of art and education at Utah State University.
Category: Biography -
In Memoriam, Dr. Malati Kesaree (1934/5–2025)
Malati Kesaree, beloved mother, grandmother, sister, and friend, passed away peacefully at her home in Eugene, Oregon, on Thursday, February 13th, 2025. She had been on hospice for five weeks.
Malati was born in Dharwad, Karnataka, in South India, about 90 years ago. In her youth, she could speak multiple Indian languages, including Kannada (her mother tongue), Marathi, Konkani, and later Hindi, as well as English. She enjoyed taking part in classical Indian dance and creating skillfully detailed pencil sketches. She went on to become the first woman engineer to graduate from the state of Karnataka, and then the first woman ever to attend Roorkie University, India’s premier engineering college at the time, where she earned a master’s degree and met my father, Varada “Hary” Charyulu.
She arrived in the United States in 1958 to pursue further studies, eventually marrying Varada in 1962 and giving birth to her first child in 1963, while still in graduate school. On her way to the hospital, in labor with her second child, she stopped to hand off her thesis to the typist. She would become the first woman to earn a PhD in engineering from Iowa State University in 1964. Her last child was born in 1965, when she began her career as a professor at Oklahoma State University. In 1968, she moved with her family to Pocatello, Idaho, where she taught mathematics at Idaho State University and became the first woman engineer licensed in the state of Idaho.
Category: BiographyINDIANS: A Book Trailer
My sales pitch for Indians, or as they euphemistically say in the industry, a ‘book trailer’. 🙂
A shorter book trailer with just music (and on-screen text) is here. To learn more about the book, click here.
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Biography, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Justice, Philosophy, Photography, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel, VideoIndians: A Brief History of a Civilization | Namit Arora
Dear friends, I’m delighted to announce that my third book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, was launched today by Penguin Random House India. Among other things, it’s a story of the defining cultural ideas, megatrends, and conflicts of Indian civilization. It’s a history of migration, conflict, mixing and cooperation. It’s also a book of journeys and discovering what it means to be Indian. Click HERE for more details. 🎉🥁🍹This book, over its multiyear gestation, has gained from influences too numerous to mention. Among these are my life partner, my editor, family and friends, and many scholars whose efforts I’ve leaned on. I’m grateful to them and to others who gave advice, opened doors, offered contacts, aided us on our travels, or shared their stories and time. I’m indebted to friends who read early versions. Finally, the six endorsements on the cover come from writers and scholars I admire greatly, who gave me their time and trust—what can be nicer? For their generosity I’m grateful.The book’s release got delayed by the pandemic, but here it is—and open for preorders on Amazon.in (it’ll happen on Amazon.com and other int’l sites in a few weeks; check for links here). The cover shows no Indians, but can you spot the cute stray doggie?
Inside an Indian Family
This essay first appeared in White Wall Review.My grandmother was nine years old when she married my seventeen-year-old grandfather, who was just completing his university studies in South India. They were wed in an Andhran village surrounded by jungle, where tigers still roamed. The pair had never before laid eyes on each other. Nor would they meet again for several years afterwards.
My grandmother, whom I called Avva, remained at home with her own parents after her wedding rites, but she was immediately subject to the dictates of her in-laws, who plainly intended to enforce her subservience: Avva was removed from school, where she attended the third standard. She was denied her violin, which she loved learning to play. She was forbidden to wear black, her favorite color, because her husband didn’t like it. Before she even knew him, Avva’s horizons were darkened by her husband’s shadow, which would follow her for the rest of her life.
Category: BiographyA Tribute to Dr. Nirmala Kesaree (1930–2016)
Dr. Nirmala Kesaree, Aug 2006 My aunt, Dr. Nirmala Kesaree, passed away on the morning of January 8, 2016. Much respected and beloved by those who knew her, she was an iconic personality and a pillar of the community in Davanagere, Karnataka, where she resided for the past 50 years. Aunt Nimmi was one of the first doctors to practice as a pediatric specialist in India. She had studied and worked in the US and in England, but returned to India in the late 1960s with a dream of founding a charitable hospital for children. At first, she treated children for free at a clinic she set up in her own home. And eventually, after much saving, strategizing, and struggle, she opened the Bapuji Child Health Institute to serve the poor of Davangere in 1993, where she served as Director until the time of her death. In addition to this—and among many other accomplishments—Aunt Nimmi spearheaded vaccination drives that benefited hundreds of villages and tens of thousands of children in her area in the 1970s. She is also the developer of Davanagere Mix, a nutritional supplement that predates others of its kind used today by the WHO.
In 2005, Aunt Nimmi was awarded the Kannada Rajyothsava Award for her many contributions to the welfare of local women and children. She was an inspiration to me and I miss her. She is survived by two sisters (including my mother), one brother, and perhaps hundreds of medical students who credit her for, among other things, bringing evidence-based medicine and higher standards to the region where she practiced.
My mother, Dr. Malati Kesaree, with the assistance of Aunt Nimmi’s dear friend, Premalatha G.R., wrote and published a tribute to my aunt. In January 2018, it was released as a printed book in Jagaluru, Karnataka, by Sri Taralabalu Jagadguru Dr. Shivamurthy Shivacharya Mahaswamiji of the Sirigere Math. The full text with images is available here for download (PDF):
Category: BiographyRIP, Pran Kurup (1966-2016)
My dearest friend, Pran Kurup (3 Oct 1966 — 3 Sep 2016), passed away yesterday from a cardiac arrest. He had been in India for several months. His funeral will take place in Trivandrum at 2 PM on Monday, 5th September.I met Pran at IIT Kharagpur 31 years ago. After our first year, some of us freshmen became close friends and moved into a hostel wing. Pran and I took rooms next to each other. He used to wake me up each morning; I would have missed a lot of classes without his help. Not that I learned much in class; I mostly remember my college years for some of the friendships I made, and my friendship with Pran was among the most precious in my life. He was also, as another friend noted yesterday, the heart and soul of our wing, everybody’s favorite guy. Years later, he is still the glue that holds our wing-mates together, encouraging us to communicate and meet often.
In 1989, after four years at IIT, Pran and I went to the U.S. for grad school. There we shared a journey of personal growth and learning, especially during our two decades in California. We spent much time together. With another friend, we even went on a road trip in 1993 to Death Valley, Vegas, Grand Canyon, and southern Utah. At times we would retreat into the lingo and bawdy humor of our college days, and tease each other about our college crushes and unrequited loves—a ribbing that had a rare and sweet intimacy. We sized up our respective dates and eventual mates. I watched him become a deeply involved dad to a daughter and a son. After a couple of company jobs, he founded and ran his own small business focused on e-learning solutions, with a team in Trivandrum. We were immersed in each other’s emotional, intellectual, and professional lives.
Beyond Man and Woman: The Life of a Hijra
On being transgender in India and glimpses from The Truth About Me, a powerful memoir by A. Revathi, which aims to introduce readers ‘to the lives of hijras, their distinct culture, and their dreams and desires.’ (Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
Most Indians encounter hijras at some point in their lives. Hijras are the most visible subset of transgender people in South Asia, usually biological men who identify more closely as being female or feminine. They often appear in groups, and most Indians associate them with singing and dancing, flashy women’s attire and makeup, aggressive begging styles, acts and manners that are like burlesques of femininity, a distinctive hand-clap, and the blessing of newlyweds and newborn males in exchange for gifts.Most modern societies embrace a binary idea of gender. To the biologically salient binary division of humans into male/female, they attach binary social-behavioral norms. They presume two discrete ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ identities to which all biological males and females are expected to conform. These two gender identities are imbued with ideal, essential, and distinct social roles and traits. In other words, the binary schema assumes a default alignment between sex, gender, and sexuality. In reality, however, gender identities and sexual orientations are not binary and exist on a spectrum, including for people who identify as transgender—an umbrella term for those whose inner sense of their gender conflicts with the presumed norms for their assigned sex (unlike for cisgender people). Transgender people often feel they’re neither ‘men’ nor ‘women’.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Biography, Books & Authors, Culture, History, Justice, ReligionMore Than An Atheist
Nirmukta is running a series on Facebook in which people are invited to submit a photo and briefly comment on being “more than an atheist”. An editor invited me and Usha and asked, “can you send a pic in which both of you are together? It would be great to feature more couples.”
Here’s the comment and pic that Usha sent in:
I grew up in a relatively tolerant, liberal, Hindu family. We were taught that Hinduism accommodates atheism, and both my parents professed (mildly) to be atheists. Nevertheless, in my childhood, we regularly did pujas at home, recited Sanskrit prayers, and listened to or read the Hindu myths. But many of my earliest encounters with Hindu mythology awakened a rage in me, an anger at the way the stories made me feel as a girl. Long before I could understand these feelings or the reasons for them, Hinduism and Patriarchy became inseparable in my experience and understanding. And very soon, instinctively, I rejected both. At the same time, I grew up in an extremely conservative, backwards, and religiously overwrought small town in the American West, where friends and classmates regularly tried to pull me to their churches—Mormon, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist—each of them vying to save my soul in all the wrong ways, without a shred of actual human sensitivity. By my pre-teen years, I’d already abandoned all organized religion as useless, alienating, and corrupt. I wanted, instead, to discover a system of ethical beliefs that was meaningful to me.Advice to a Young Artist
By Namit Arora
I first thought of writing this after watching an interview in which an author was reverentially asked, ‘Sir, what would be your advice to a young artist?’ The author turned his nose up and gave a pat, patronizing answer but the question stayed with me. How would I answer it? I didn’t have an audience of young artists in mind. I began with little notes and they grew organically. I considered naming this, more aptly, Notes to Myself, but then opted in favor of honoring the inspiration. I wrote and abandoned the first draft in 1997. Such writing is best thought of as ‘under construction’; still, with some reluctance, I publish here an updated version accrued over a few years. I trust it’ll serve as a quiet record of a personal history. ( —Dec 2001)
_________________________________________________________________________________Caste Iron
I have an essay in The Caravan on Ambedkar’s place in the Indian imagination, and why he hasn’t received his due from upper-caste Indians.
“Turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path,” wrote Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, India’s foremost crusader for dignity and civil rights. That monster has always haunted Ambedkar’s legacy, polarising it along caste lines. On the one hand is his godlike presence in Dalit communities, who, out of affection and admiration, have built countless statues of him, usually dressed in a Western suit and tie, with a fat book under his arm, and in whose folk songs, poems, and calendar art he has long held pride of place. For generations, his bold, secular, and emancipatory ideas inspired many Dalit activists and writers, many of whom recall their lives in “before-and-after Ambedkar” phases. When Omprakash Valmiki, the author of the memoir Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, first read about Ambedkar’s life and work, he “spent many days and nights in great turmoil.” He grew more restless; his “stone-like silence” began to melt, and “an anti-establishment consciousness became strong” in him. Ambedkar gave voice to his muteness, Valmiki wrote, and raised his moral outrage and self-confidence. On the other hand, there remains a longstanding apathy for Ambedkar among caste Hindus. What respect he gets from India’s elites is usually limited to his role as the architect of the constitution—important, but arguably among the least revolutionary aspects of his legacy. The social scientist and educationist Narendra Jadhav, interviewed in the Times of India earlier this year, described Ambedkar as the “social conscience of modern India”, and lamented that he has been reduced to being “just a leader of Dalits and a legal luminary.” Indeed, even thoughtful, liberal elite Indians are commonly ignorant about Ambedkar’s life and social impact, both in his lifetime and in the decades since—as the scholar Sharmila Rege noted in Against the Madness of Manu: BR Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy, not only lay readers, but Indian post-graduates and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and women’s studies are also unlikely to have read him. What explains this severe disjunction in how Ambedkar is received in India?
The Terrain of Indignities
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
A review of Unclaimed Terrain, a book of short stories translated from Hindi, and a conversation with its author, Ajay Navaria.
“Indian writing” is often equated in the West with its small subset: the work of a tiny class of Indians that thinks and writes in English. Salman Rushdie fueled this folly in his introduction to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-97, declaring the work of such Indians a ‘more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the “16 official languages” of India’. He co-edited this anthology and of the 32 works of fiction and non-fiction that appear in it, 31 were written in English and one in Urdu, i.e., only one translation made the cut. Some of this lopsidedness can be explained by the paucity of translations into English, but is Rushdie’s judgment defensible in a country where, even today, less than one percent of Indians consider English their first language, less than ten percent their second, and 80 percent of all books are put out by hundreds of vernacular language publishers, including from authors with far greater Indian readership than most who write in English? Rushdie doesn’t even speak most of these languages. Isn’t his claim, then, an instance of linguistic prejudice? Aren’t the dynamics of class in India, and the power of English language publishing in the West, speaking through him?Revisiting the Idea of India
A review of The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson. It first appeared as “No Saints or Miracles“ in the Himal Southasian print quarterly ‘Are we sure about India?’ (January 2013), and is reproduced with permission. This online version (updated, about 10 percent larger) first appeared on 3QD in two parts: One, Two.
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‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Precursors to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration — which help forge a ‘national consciousness’. Historians, wrote Hobsbawm, have ‘always been mixed up in politics’ and are ‘an essential component of nationalism’. They participate in shaping a nation’s mythos and self-perception. In his vivid analogy, ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.’ The more nationalist a historian, he held, the weaker his bid to be taken seriously as a historian.But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may even see positive value in certain aspects of nationalism—its potential to bind diverse groups and inspire collective action, for instance—but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ‘ancient’ origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). The best of them know that there is no ultimately objective history, but who yet seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts and oppressions that plague any nation.
Tagore: An Interpretation
I came across this recent and promising intellectual biography of Tagore by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya.
Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is an attempt at an interpretative biography of Tagore. Instead of giving the mundane details of his day-to-day life, the writer weaves a fascinating account of Tagore’s struggle with the changing world around him. Bhattacharya’s basic motive is to unveil the life of the legendary figure while focusing on the intellectual evolution of his work. He tries to frame his work in the genres of biography and literary criticism — calling the result an intellectual biography. He admits that “to look at the interrelationship of the inner and outer life of Rabindranath Tagore is not easy for a biographer”.Remembered as a poet and lyricist today, Tagore was also a thinker who greatly influenced his contemporaries and successors alike. The political and social atmosphere of his time helped form his philosophy of life. Empire and nation are two inseparable discourses that emerged out of the close contact between European imperialism and Third World nationalism.
Joseph Anton, a Memoir by Rushdie
Salman Rushdie has written an autobiography in the third person. This New Yorker excerpt describes how his life changed after the fatwa:
Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She called him at home, on his private line, without explaining how she got the number. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door. Pankaj Mishra finds this memoir lacking in significant ways. His review resonated with my own assessment of Rushdie’s life and work:
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar – the Movie
Last night I saw an absorbing film made in 1999 on the life and times of BR Ambedkar that is now on YouTube (in English, 3 hrs). It provides a good biographical sketch of an extraordinary and inspiring man who prevailed over some breathtaking odds. This movie shows why in terms of sheer intellect, critical scholarship, and humanistic vision, Ambedkar was head and shoulders above the better known leaders of the Indian nationalist pantheon, including Gandhi and Nehru. The movie also won several National Film Awards in 1999.
Also check out the 20 Aug, 2012 issue of Outlook India magazine that is dedicated to analyzing Ambedkar and his legacy.
Perry Anderson on Gandhi
In this first of three essays on Indian history in the London Review of Books, British Marxist historian Perry Anderson takes on Gandhi (one, two, three). We might as well call this a rite of passage for historians of South Asia, and Gandhi, with his voluminous writings, iconic status, and polarizing persona, lends himself to prolific reinterpretation. Anderson sees Gandhi as alternately Machiavellian and naive, and presents many of his dubious ideas and intellectual blind spots. I agreed in particular with his take on Gandhi’s anti-modernism, religiosity, and attitude to caste. Anderson considers him an overrated figure who did more harm than good, especially in his infusing the Congress Party with a strong Hindu sensibility, which, suggests Anderson, laid the ground work for Muslim alienation and the partition. More contentiously, Anderson seems to discount Gandhi’s moral courage too, calls Satyagraha, his non-violent struggle, much less successful than is presumed, and argues that “contrary to legend, his attitude to violence had always been — and would remain — contingent and ambivalent.”
Above all though, Anderson holds forth on Gandhi with not a modicum of hauteur, posing as a clear-eyed external observer who only sees insufficiently critical scholarship, “patriotic reveries”, and nationalistic hagiographies from Indian scholars. Not surprisingly, his essay has invited many critiques (see letters to the editor below the article and Anderson’s response), taking some of the shine off his otherwise extraordinary account.
In orchestrating these great movements, Gandhi displayed a rare constellation of abilities in a political leader. Charismatic mobilisation of popular feeling was certainly foremost among these. In the countryside, adoring crowds treated him as semi-divine. But, however distinctive and spectacular in his case, this is largely a given in any nationalist movement. What set Gandhi apart was its combination with three other skills. He was a first-class organiser and fundraiser – diligent, efficient, meticulous – who rebuilt Congress from top to bottom, endowing it with a permanent executive at national level, vernacular units at provincial level, local bases at district level, and delegates proportionate to population, not to speak of an ample treasury. At the same time, though temperamentally in many ways an autocrat, politically he did not care about power in itself, and was an excellent mediator between different figures and groups both within Congress and among its variegated social supports. Finally, though no great orator, he was an exceptionally quick and fluent communicator, as the hundred volumes of his articles, books, letters, cables (far exceeding the output of Marx or Lenin, let alone Mao) testify. To these political gifts were added personal qualities of a ready warmth, impish wit and iron will. It is no surprise that so magnetic a force would attract such passionate admiration, at the time and since.Bilgrami on Gandhi
Akeel Bilgrami, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, has written a very interesting essay on Gandhi’s philosophy. Bilgrami is struck by the integrity of Gandhi’s ideas, in the sense that they derive “from ideas that were very remote from politics. They flowed from the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments.” Here is a brief excerpt for a flavor of Bilgrami’s argument (via 3QD):
What I mean by truth as a cognitive notion is that it is a property of sentences or propositions that describe the world. Thus when we have reason to think that the sentences to which we give assent exhibit this property, then we have knowledge of the world, a knowledge that can then be progressively accumulated and put to use through continuing inquiry building on past knowledge. [Gandhi’s] recoil from such a notion of truth, which intellectualizes our relations to the world, is that it views the world as the object of study, study that makes it alien to our moral experience of it, to our most everyday practical relations to it. He symbolically conveyed this by his own daily act of spinning cotton. This idea of truth, unlike our quotidian practical relations to nature, makes nature out to be the sort of distant thing to be studied by scientific methods. Reality will then not be the reality of moral experience. It will become something alien to that experience, wholly external and objectified.It is no surprise then that we will look upon reality as something to be mastered and conquered, an attitude that leads directly to the technological frame of mind that governs modern societies, and which in turn takes us away from our communal localities where moral experience and our practical relations to the world flourish. It takes us towards increasingly abstract places and structures such as nations and eventually global economies. In such places and such forms of life, there is no scope for exemplary action to take hold, and no basis possible for a moral vision in which value is not linked to ‘imperative’ and ‘principle’, and then, inevitably, to the attitudes of criticism and the entire moral psychology which ultimately underlies violence in our social relations. To find a basis for tolerance and non-violence under circumstances such as these, we are compelled to turn to arguments of the sort Mill tried to provide in which modesty and tolerance are supposed to derive from a notion of truth (cognitively understood) which is always elusive, never something which we can be confident of having achieved because it is not given in our moral experience, but is predicated of propositions that purport to describe a reality which is distant from our own practical and moral experience of it.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
Steve Jobs is dead. Watch once again his Stanford commencement speech, 2005. Also check out two interesting articles about him. The first introduces his biological father from Syria, and the circumstances that led his biological parents to put him up for adoption in the U.S. The second is a view into the mind of the amazing inventor he later became. It comes from an ex-colleague and the former CEO of Apple, John Sculley. And finally, from The Simpsons show, come satirical clips on Steve Mobs of Mapple, on thinking differently, and on a Mapple Store.
The General in Anna’s Labyrinth
(Also consider reading my related opinion piece, On Public Corruption in India.)
Mehboob Geelani has an interesting profile of Arvind Kejriwal, a well-known Indian social activist and anti-corruption crusader most often associated with the Right to Information (RTI) Act. By many accounts, Arvind is the main strategist and mastermind behind the Jan Lokpal bill that is at the heart of the currently raging anti-corruption movement whose populist (and problematic) figurehead is Anna Hazare.
Full disclosure: Arvind and I were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur. We lived in the same hostel, Nehru Hall, for four years and have met many times since, especially during my two years in India, 2004-6. Even in college he was articulate and self-confident, and had a quiet intensity about him. He was Nehru Hall’s mess secretary in his second year and was very active in Hindi debate and theater, serving as governor of the Hindi drama society in his final year. I liked him well enough. For me, he was also a fellow Hindi belter, relatively few in Kharagpur.
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