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On the “Revenge of the Humanities”

By Sadhika on
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The more esoteric a crowd gets, the more often the defense of the humanities collapses into a kind of self-congratulation: a language of “critical thinking,” “interrogating power structures,” and “deconstructing systemic injustice”, offered as though these were private virtues that set one apart from the “unenlightened ones”. It is not enough to comment on the mere inadequacy of such a framing, much less its deceptiveness. It suggests that the humanities justify themselves only by deepening the inner life of those who study them (a claim that enthusiasts of any discipline could make), when their more urgent function lies elsewhere: in the maintenance of a shared world. To understand this, it helps to notice what has happened to the idea of public service. There was a time when the work of holding society together — of interpreting norms, transmitting memory, arbitrating meaning — was distributed across institutions like family, religion, and community. These were not always just or ben...
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Conservative Feminism: Is There Such a Thing, and What Would It Look Like?

By Sadhika on
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The phrase “conservative feminism” sounds, at first hearing, like an argument conducted in bad faith.  Feminism, after all, emerged historically as a critique of inherited structures: of law, of custom, of the quiet tyrannies embedded in the ordinary. Conservatism, by contrast, is often understood as a disposition towards preservation, a suspicion of rupture, a preference for continuity over experiment. To yoke the two together is to ask whether one can simultaneously resist and revere the same civilisational inheritance. Yet the tension is not, upon closer inspection, as irreconcilable as it appears. For neither feminism nor conservatism is a monolith. Each contains within it rival genealogies, internal dissents, and philosophical ambiguities. If feminism can be disentangled from its more revolutionary impulses, and conservatism from its more complacent accommodations to hierarchy, a space, however narrow or contested, does begin to open up. At its most basic, feminism is a claim ...
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Cultural Suicide by Aesthetic Subtraction

By Sadhika on
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I find a certain silence, when I enter a newly built apartment in the metropolises of India. It is not the contemplative silence of a temple courtyard at dusk, nor the dense quiet of a forest before rain. It is the silence of subtraction. I have lived in various cities — New Delhi, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Mumbai — and I find that the aspirational interior has become startlingly uniform: white walls, recessed lighting, a sofa in obedient beige, a potted plant selected less for its life than for its compliance with a palette. The room feels hygienic, efficient, decluttered, and also faintly amputated. The visual field is disciplined into flatness. Ornament is treated with suspicion, as if it were an embarrassing relative from a less enlightened era. One might think I would hesitate to use a phrase as melodramatic as “cultural suicide,” yet something close to it flickers at the edge of our aesthetic decisions. For what else should we call the systematic stripping away of inherited forms, tex...
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The Heretic of Ayodhya

By Sadhika on
In the long corridors of epic memory, dissent slips in quietly, wearing the robes of a sage. One such voice rises in the Ramayana . Not in the battlefield, nor in the court glittering with intrigue, but in a forest clearing heavy with exile. There, as Rama prepares to honour a promise that has cost him a kingdom, the sage Jabali offers something startling: an argument against dharma itself. Jabali’s speech is among the most philosophically subversive moments in Sanskrit literature. He does not tempt Rama with pleasure or power. He tempts him with reason. He begins with a blunt summation of the human condition: “एको हि जायते जन्तुरेको हि विनश्यति । एकोऽनुभुङ्क्ते सुखदुःखं नास्ति कश्चित् सहायवान् ॥” “Alone a being is born; alone he perishes.   Alone he experiences joy and sorrow; there is no companion.” This is the language of existential solitude. Jabali reduces the human condition to biological arrival and departure. The scaffolding of lineage, obligation and ritual continuity is s...
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The Dangerous Democracy of the Sacred

By Sadhika on
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Indian mythology has an amusing habit of refusing neat moral categories. Its villains pray well, its gods make mistakes, and power, when earned through discipline, is distributed with a troubling fairness. Few figures reveal this better than the Asuras . To reduce them to “demons” is not merely inaccurate; it is intellectually lazy. The Asuras are something far more unsettling: they are seekers who succeed. In the Vedic imagination, the line between Deva and Asura was not originally moral but metaphysical. In the Rig Veda, the word asura is used with reverence, meaning “lord” or “one who possesses vital power ( asu )”. In the Rig Veda, Varuna himself is praised using this title: “King Varuna, the Asura, who knows the paths of birds flying in the sky, who knows the ships upon the ocean” (Rig Veda) Here, Asura signifies sovereignty, cosmic intelligence, and authority, not malevolence. It is only later (particularly in the Puranic crystallisation of cosmology) that the Asuras become antag...
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My Father's Scooter

By Sadhika on
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 A s far back as my memory reaches, my father’s comings and goings belonged to an old scooter, the sort that carried middle-class men to and from work in the early years of this century. It belonged to a time when machines were allowed to age alongside men, when usefulness was a stronger virtue than appearance. It stood in the aangan of my house like a loyal pet, patient, uncomplaining, its metal body dulled by years of sun and dust. It had learned the shape of my father’s hand on the handle, the precise pressure of his foot on the kick-start, and the rhythm of his mornings. Together they formed a small economy of trust. It was a dull, indifferent colour—neither proudly black nor whimsically blue—bearing the soft dents of a life lived fully. The paint had faded unevenly, lighter where the sun struck hardest, darker in places my father’s knees brushed against daily. Rust gathered near the footrest like moss, reminding you that nothing remains untouched by weather. The headlamp flick...
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The Lost Hands of India

By Sadhika on
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The old world does not end with a bang or a riot of sound. It slips away soft-footed, like sugar swirling into warm tea—sweet for a moment, then gone without a trace.  In the old bazaars, where the sun filtered through lattice roofs like sifted grain, there used to be a man who sold bangles. He called out in that rhythmic singsong that echoed across courtyards like the laughter of a household rich in daughters. His voice is gone now. And the lanes, once littered with women in bright sarees bargaining over glass and colour, lie silent, paved and drained of memory. In the India that rises now—glass-towered and software-slick, scanning QR codes and air-conditioned into sterility—there is no room for the knife sharpener either, his whetstone wheel clattering behind a rusty bicycle. Now the knives grow blunt and disappear, their edges worn down by years of bread and bone. We don’t sharpen anymore; we replace.  There’s no place anymore for the puppet master with his wooden stringed ...
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