Arya Samaj

As recounted by Ambedkar in the prologue to the second edition of Annihilation of Caste, the genesis of the text lay in an invitation sent to him in December 1935 by Santram, the secretary of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, Lahore, to deliver the presidential address of the Mandal’s annual conference. The driving force of the Mandal, Santram was keen to learn about Ambedkar’s “new formula” for breaking caste, namely “annihilating” the religious notions on which it was based. Ambedkar was by then not interested in associating…

On Valentine’s Day 1989, the writer Salman Rushdie’s telephone rang. It was a reporter from the BBC, a woman. “How does it feel”, she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light, Rushdie wrote in his memoir Joseph Anton. “It doesn’t feel good,” Rushdie had replied. Author Salman Rushdie poses for a picture during his visit to HT House in New Delhi on 22 January 2013. (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times) Perhaps…