Understanding Gandhi on Caste and Modernity

After ten years of its dark night of the soul, Indian politics found, on the 4th of June, that it had groped its way into a tentative shaft of light; and though the sour stink of fascism is still in the air, we are now at least able to breathe. For this entire dishonourable decade, the present speaker was at a comfortable distance in New York, without cause for fear, since all he did was fantasise that the brigands who were running his country would, by some marvellous chance, all break their necks. But we are assembled here to celebrate in memoriam five intellectuals and artists and activists who, like many others in this auditorium, were at no comfortable distance at all, working on the menacing scene each day in dissent and resistance – even Aijaz, who was in a forced and unwilling exile abroad in the years before his death, wrote regular dispatches to Frontline, joining Vivan and Kumar and Suneet and Anil in their remarkable work here, each in their own imaginative way contributing to the political ameliorations that now fill us with hope. It is a tremendous honour for me to be by Professor Romila Thapar’s side this evening, to speak in their remembrance.