Dear reader,
First of all, very warm greetings on the start of the new year. Hope you manage to be in good physical and mental health in 2021 (with or without the pandemic) and all your wishes come true. This newsletter is going to be short because we did not publish any articles in the month of December, because of which I will also be doing away with our usual format this time.
I also wish you all on the 189th birth anniversary of Savitribai Phule, the revolutionary educator and social reformer who played a foundational role in Satyashodhak Samaj. Coincidentally, all the articles I will be recommending in this edition happen to be written (or co-written) by women.
The Satyashodhak is in the process of getting registered as a non-profit trust, which will allow us to seek voluntary contributions from well-wishers like you so that we can start paying our writers and translators. The whole process may take a few months: I promise to keep you in the loop.
What we read in December
The first piece I am going to recommend is by gender studies scholar Sujatha Subramanian in the journal Feminist Media Studies. Subramanian’s short yet crisp paper shows how Bahujan girls are (or were) using (the now banned) app TikTok for anti-caste activism. Subramanian says, the “content created and shared by Bahujan girls on TikTok are rich sites for understanding how self-assertion and forging of intimacies constitute a potent form of anti-caste activism.” Click here to access the paper.
Veteran journalist Sukanya Shantha wrote a detailed report on the caste discrimination practiced inside prisons, which makes for a pretty grim reading. The Wire article was part of the series ‘Barred–The Prisons Project’, produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Click here to read the article.
Actor Anjali Patil left a striking impression on viewers for her meaty roles in Newton and Kaala. However, Patil is still struggling to establish herself as an actor due to her darker skin as well as her social location. Nolina S. Minj captures Patil’s persona and career trajectory really well in the cover story for the December issue of Verve. Click here to read Minj’s profile of Patil.
For the Hindu, Nikita Sonavane and others wrote an opinion piece on how bail, at the hands Indian judges, has become an exception while it should have been the rule. “Courts introspect little about standards of liberty, reasonableness and proportionality when deciding bail matters,” they write. Click here to read the article.
Thank you for reading. If you have any thoughts, comments or ideas, please write to us on thesatyashodhak@gmail.com. Do follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Mastodon and please subscribe to our Telegram channel. See you next month!