Scissors and scared scholars

In a country suffering from a chronic irony deficiency, it was no surprise that academic Ashis Nandy’s glib remark about corruption and caste, made at the just-concluded Jaipur Literature Festival, morphed into a gargantuan controversy, as though he had risen on a pulpit calling for a caste war in India. Assuming the intimate setting of a literature festival as something similar to the lawns of the India International Centre in Delhi—he was after all chatting with people he likely thinks of as friends, publisher Urvashi Butalia, journalists Tarun Tejpal and Ashutosh, and British writers Patrick French and Richard Sorabji—Nandy said, probably ironically, that some of India’s most disadvantaged groups were the most corrupt.

Read Full Story>>