It is about time that we at least start questioning this separation of the political and the social. The mainstream media needs to put the social in the dock. The people who lynched Akhlaq were possibly his neighbours and co-villagers. The people who spoke about the Taj and Aurangzeb road were also from amongst us. The social around us is not a mute receptor of political evil. And the intelligentsia needs to more proactively connect, question and engage with the views of the social than being wryly dismissive. They need to go beyond the meaningful but symbolic gesture of protest; with the momentum their collective action has generated so far, they must devise a more sustained engagement with the social.
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In 1930, a sadhu named Dhoortanand had come to a wealthy household of one Lalaji, promising him to double his wealth by conducting a three-day tapasya (penance, ritual). The next morning, Lalaji had to go to the police station to report on the absconding sadhu and the missing wealth. Apparently, Lalaji was not the only one to have fallen prey to the promise of becoming richer; such a tapasya, according to the police, was conducted in at least twenty-five households. Published under the title Gerua Daaku (Ochre-Robe Robber) under a Kahkaha series (joke-stories), the story and the name itself – Dhoortanand, meaning deceitful – symbolised the extent to which the figure of the sadhu had become the stock of social mocking in the early decades of the twentieth century. Cutting across layers of time, perhaps there is no other Indian figure that comes close to sadhus in being seen as the bearer of disguise and artiste of deceit. From the times of the Ramayana when Ravana disguised as ...
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