Notes of Nagesh

  "Bhakti jamming" and "bhakti clubbing" refer to the integration of devotional music and Hindutva pop into everyday urban leisure, social gatherings, and festive nightlife in major Indian cities like Delhi and Mumbai

How music, machines and myth turned Hindu nationalism into a mass aesthetic A new book argues that India's ruling ideology has embedded itself less through doctrine than through spectacle For most of the four decades that Indian journalists have covered the rise of Hindutva, the Hindu-nationalist project has been analysed the way political scientists analyse most things: through manifestos, election results and organisational charts. Brahma Prakash, a professor of cultural studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, thinks that lens misses the point. In his book, Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture , and in a recent interview on the online outlet The Federal , he argues that Hindu nationalism's most effective vehicle in the past decade has not been ideology at all, but sensation: sound, colour, motion and touch, deployed at a scale and with a coordination that has no real precedent in Indian public life. This is a claim worth taking seriously, and one worth int...

Process as punishment A six-year wait for a trial that has not begun raises hard questions about India's anti-terror law — and about the state's confidence in its own evidence IN THIHAR JAIL, on the outskirts of Delhi, a prisoner has spent six years waiting for something that has not yet happened: the start of his own trial. Umar Khalid, a historian arrested in September 2020 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in connection with riots in north-east Delhi that year, has aged from 33 to 39 behind bars without charges being formally framed, let alone a verdict reached. His case has become the most closely watched example of a broader pattern that critics call "process as punishment": a system in which the ordeal of prolonged incarceration, rather than any eventual conviction, becomes the real sentence. This is not a uniquely Indian phenomenon — pre-trial detention is used and abused in democracies from Brazil to the Philippines. But the scale and d...

Manusmriti was supposedly buried decades ago. India keeps digging it back up A DALIT speaker of a state legislature is insulted. Public outrage, rightly, follows. Then, almost reflexively, comes a second wave of commentary — not about the insult itself, but about the caste of the man who delivered the rebuke. Was he Dalit enough? Should the retaliation have come from a fellow Dalit, an upper-caste ally, a woman, a Brahmin, a Backward Class leader? The question is absurd on its face. An insult against dignity does not require a caste-matched avenger. Yet in modern India, even movements built to dismantle caste hierarchy find themselves, again and again, reaching for caste as the measuring stick of legitimacy. That reflex is worth examining, because it says less about the insult than about how deeply the logic of an ancient text has lodged itself in the modern mind. That text is the Manusmriti, a Sanskrit law code compiled roughly two millennia ago, and its intellectual scaffolding p...

 By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan Every summer, a fresh cohort of Foreign Service officers packs up one posting and reports to another—Kathmandu to Cairo, Washington to Wellington—typically after three or four years, sometimes less. They arrive with briefing books, cable archives and a predecessor's parting notes. What they rarely inherit is the thing that mattered most: why the last round of talks stalled, which counterpart could be trusted and which could not, what a foreign ministry's polite "under consideration" actually meant the last three times it was said. That knowledge leaves with the officer who leaves the post. In a profession built on relationships, timing and the reading of intention, this is a strange thing to keep losing. WHAT IS INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY Institutional memory is the collective knowledge, operational context, past experiences, historical insight, and unwritten administrative wisdom stored within an organization. While formal record-keeping s...