Touche...

...Karnad's civilising mission

Girish Karnad, of course, knows more about India’s complexities than that, but one has to wonder if he really could not have found a better way to confront Naipaul’s generalisations. One can sympathise with his heartfelt agony that Naipaul was being honoured, in Mumbai at that, on the 20th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition and the riots that followed, but one also has to ask him why that, and that alone, was worth memorialising in his grief (and the commentary that followed). The anniversary of 26/11 will be upon us this month, and too many other anniversaries of grief and terror too, anniversaries of events in which the victims have been not only Muslims, but Hindus, and others. It may not be tantamount to Hindutva, or Naipaul, to simply acknowledge that.