Category Archives: New Utopia

How we respond to this moment is what our grandkids are going to ask us about, the Tony Award-winning actor and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson said, on Tuesday, during the latest installment of The New Yorker Live, the magazines monthly event series for subscribers. Broadway is preparing to reopen next month, after the pandemic forced theatres to take a year-and-a-half-long hiatus, and the industry faces a changed world. Santiago-Hudson and David Byrne, the musician and producer best known as the front man of the Talking Heads, joined the New Yorker staff writer Vinson Cunningham to discuss how they hope to shape the contours of this age.

I will not allow Broadway, or any theatre, to assume that they can come back with the same attitudes that they had prior to the pandemic, and prior to the racial strife that tore this country apart, Santiago-Hudson said. His noted solo show Lackawanna Blues, an autobiographical, blues-inspired play about the woman who raised him, returns on September 14th. American cultural institutions are reckoning with racial injustice and looking for ways to address it, both in the substance of their work and in the way that their organizations operate. Santiago-Hudson said that he had called on the Manhattan Theatre Club, which is presenting his show, to rise to the challenges of the moment: Acknowledge the land youre on; acknowledge the labor that built this country. Look at your staff and revaluate the percentages in there. Revaluate the parity of men and women; look at the pay-scale differences. Look at what youre developing, where youre seeking your art from. What does your board look like? But, he added, One thing I know for certain: they want change as well.

Byrne said that the events of 2020 and 2021 have altered his perspective on his own show, the Tony-winning theatrical concert American Utopia, a performance based on Byrnes 2018 studio album of the same name. Adapted by Spike Lee into a film for HBO last year, the live show, which combines themes of protest with a tone of resilience and joy, reopens, at the St. James Theatre, on September 17th. Some of the things that I address in the showwhether its voting, race, immigration, all those thingsare, if anything, more relevant, more of the moment than they were then, he said. Which is kind of hard to believe.

The two also discussed the public-health challenges of reopening theatres while the Delta variant is spreading, and why the communal experience of live performance is irreplaceable. Both are eager for Broadway to returnsafely, of course, in accordance with the guidance of the Actors Equity union and the C.D.C., including mask wearing for audience members and special protocols for ticket taking. And yet the need that we have to be together is justits overwhelming, Byrne said. It really is part of who we are.

The clip above includes highlights from the New Yorker Live discussion, including how the Broadway community fared during the shutdown, how to speak the truth through songwriting, and why its important to make art that reflects what the country looks like. Subscribers to The New Yorker can watch the full conversation, as well as all previous installments of The New Yorker Live, at newyorker.com/live. Check the page in the weeks ahead for details about upcoming events, and subscribe to gain access.

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Watch Highlights: The Return of Broadway at The New Yorker Live - The New Yorker

In the winter of 2004, Akash Kapur and his wife Auralice moved to Auroville, not to look for something new, but to look into the past. Both of them had grown up in Auroville; the latter leaving after the sudden death of her parents, John Walker and Diane Maes, when she was 14. Like the rest of their community, they never really understood those deaths. This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone and slowly they come to understand how the tragic individual fates of John and Diane intersected with the collective history of their town. This is a book about the human cost of our age-old quest for a more perfect world. It probes the under-explored yet universal idea of utopia, and portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one utopian community.

The ghats, sometimes buzzing with mortal activity, sometimes deathly calm, the lanes lined with wall in the hole shops promising nirvana, the many temples, the sadhus, the urban populace, the fleeting visitors... Banaras is a living landscape, with elements of antiquity, symbolism and built-in environments created and recreated by agencies that have made it the city that millions throng. In Banaras: Of Gods, Humans and Stories, author Nilosree Biswas and photographer Irfan Nabi discern the engaging narrative of a unique chromosome that makes Banaras. Written about so many times, the book is the authors attempt to understand a city that has intrigued her since childhood, so much so that she goes back to it again and again.

by Nilosree Biswas

& Irfan Nabi.

Niyogi Books.

Pages 240. Rs1,750

Published in 1972, this book is the last of Mahadevi Varmas prose works, and the most neglected as well. However, it is a work that demanded attention, for in the preface to the book she writes that all her prose stems from her writings about animals. The book, aptly titled Mera Parivaar, brings together her world of animals, her family. The relationship that began with saving a chick in her childhood persisted till the very end of her life. Animals were the only beings permitted beyond the living room of her house; Gillu the squirrel being the special one who ate off her plate, died clinging to her finger. This work sprang from the fount of Varmas feelings for animals. It has been translated into English for the first time by Ruth Vanita, a professor at the University of Montana.

by Mahadevi Varma.

Translated by Ruth Vanita.

Penguin Random House.

Pages 168. Rs399

With the political patterns beginning to worry, with the Muslim community being made to feel threatened for being the other, it was important for author Humra Quraishi to help people comprehend the ground realities of present times. Quraishi says she had never imagined that a day would come when she, an Indian Muslim, would be looked upon as a suspect just because she greeted with a loud and clear As-Salaam-Alaikum, or because she was critical of the government of the day. In the recent past, several Muslim scholars have tried to reason being a Muslim in India. This book is based on the authors writings of the last many years, including on the living conditions of Muslisms and the challenges they face in everyday life.

the Largest Minority Community in India

by Humra Quraishi.

Aakar Books.

Pages 292. Rs595

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Backflap - The Tribune

When she first came to India in 1963 to stay for a year, Gail Omvedt was 22 years old. Earlier, she had been a student at Carleton College, where that other great scholar of anti-caste movements, Eleanor Zelliot, was teaching. Her journey east presaged other such crossings, notably by seekers of various kinds, including musicians and music lovers.

For her part, she returned to university and enrolled for graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley, and did not come back to India until 1971 to begin work on her dissertation on the Non-Brahman Movement in that part of the country. This would go on to become a pioneering study in English, of Mahatma Phule and his movement: Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873-1930.

But Omvedt did not only work at her research. The tumultuous politics of the times engrossed her attention and soon she found herself attending meetings held by trade unions, new Left formations and anti-caste groups in Maharashtra.

Having come of political age in the United States of the 1960s, she turned her attention to the most important contradictions that marked the social order in India: of caste and gender. And as she grappled with these divisions she realised that existing frameworks of analysis, Marxist or feminist, as she had known them, were not adequate to unravel the conundrum of inequality exemplified in the caste order, or indeed to the bewildering and complex operations of patriarchy in the Indian context.

In a note that she wrote to the Canadian feminist zine, Off Our Backs in 1985, she observed that the inadequacy of Left theorising was being increasingly felt in India, and not only in feminist circles but also amongst those engaged in peoples science and health movements, in environmental circles and those fighting religious chauvinism and casteism. As to what feminism could offer, she conceded, was not clear either, but it was a terrain worth exploring.

And explore she did, spending time with womens groups and movements, thinking along with others, fellow feminists, trade unionists, women labourers, domestic workers, students and this exploration is writ large in her 1979-80 publication, We shall Smash this Prison: Indian Women in Struggle.

Meanwhile, she raised a plethora of questions, impelled by the feminist politics that came to be, from the late 1970s, and was focused on womens sexual subordination, in the family and elsewhere. Women were sexually exploited and cultural oppressed, but not always in the same way. Lower caste, Dalit and working-class women were subject to what she termed social patriarchy, while women from the upper castes were subject to the punitive ethics of the family (see her remarkable Violence against Women: New Movements and New Theories in India, published in 1990).

She looked to the writings of the historian Sharad Patil to understand the making of a social structure that was shaped by caste hierarchies on the one hand, and conjugal and familial arrangements, on the other.

It was not that she agreed with him entirely, but his Dasa-Shudra Slavery opened up ways of thinking about family and caste, and as important to her, suggested how one might rework Engels theory of the origin of family, private property and the state.

Meanwhile, she remained a purveyor of anti-caste politics in the present, even as she wrote of its pasts, of Phule and Shahu Maharaj, and subsequently of Ambedkar: and called attention to the various ways in which it had come to permeate popular struggles, whether of the Bahujan Samaj Party, or the Bahujan Mahasangh, or of peasant organising.

This latter came to absorb her attention in the late 1980s and thereafter, when, along with her husband, Bharat Patankar, she was drawn to peasant protests. Sharad Joshis Shetkari Sanghatna appeared to her an interesting experiment in viable agrarian populism, and she was particularly admiring of how it mobilised women to its ranks and the manner in which the organisation addressed womens claims on land and their assertion of equality and dignity, within the home and the community.

She was watchful too of environmental struggles, but while she was taken with their logic, could not always abide by their reasoning. In the 1980s, along with many others, including her mother-in-law, Indutai Patankar, she co-founded the Shramik Mukti Dal, a toilers movement, which sought to address issues to do with drought, water use and the shrinking of the commons, on account of various development projects, including dams and power projects.

The practical work undertaken under the aegis of the movement, and the example set by other such efforts, supported by non-conventional Left groups, such as the Lal Nishan Party, led her to theorise issues to do with development, science and progress in two ways: in the circumstances given to the populace, and how they might work with these, without conceding the justness of their demands and also with regard to the greater common good that looked to the interests of small producers, the working poor and women, especially the most marginal amongst the latter, single, deserted and widowed individuals.

Through the 1980s and even after, she kept up with writings on peasant struggles, concerns and resistance: the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly and the Journal of Peasant Studies bear witness to her incessant commitment to justice for agrarian India. And here, she had to confront, parley with and fight back arguments that challenged her own: from Marxist theorists, fellow sociologists and other equally keen watchers of the Indian agrarian scene, such as the late K Balagopal.

The 1990s saw Omvedt look to a different sort of scholarship: while she continued to be interested in peoples movements, the lives of women and matters to do with the environment, the stubborn casteism of Indias elites, on full display during the Mandal-Masjid years, led her to focus on all matters that she had hitherto been concerned with, from the point of view of social justice.

Whether economic growth and distributive justice, democracy and freedom, sexual equality and emancipation from patriarchy: these were to be realised in and through measures that brought material relief, social uplift and cultural freedom to the Bahujan-Dalits of India. Her scholarship too came to be focused on these matters: Dalit Visions: the Anti-caste movement and Indian Cultural Identity, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and The Dalit Movement in Colonial India and Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India were all products of these years.

An interesting transitional volume in this regard was Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements, which signalled perhaps for the last time, her desire to retain dialogic engagement with the Left and various peoples movements.

But given that such dialogues as she envisaged, especially with the Left and with feminists, did not quite unfold in the manner she imagined they would, she crossed this threshold to move on to another way of political being and writing.

This period also saw her writing in the popular press the lively column she wrote for The Hindu in the late 1990s featured many valuable and at times contentious observations about faith, caste, social habit, belief and Hindu philosophy.

Meanwhile, she honed this manner of writing, creating, as she remarked, a hybrid genre that combined expert scholarship and activist journalism and which found its fulsome expression in two volumes, both published in the new millennium: Buddhism: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste and the fervently written, Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals.

She also created a blog by the same name and kept it active until a few years ago. Subsequently, she wrote a pedagogic book, on caste through history, and her last work appears to have been translations of Tukaram.

Omvedt wrote and thought in context: her writing was situated and addressed particular realities. But she ensured that the present, whatever moment it was that she was addressing, was not folded into itself. She placed it in times unfolding, looking beyond and after: a fine instance of this manner of expounding the moment is to be had in an essay that examines the reasons for the Bahujan Samaj Party wanting to name the University of Kolhapur after Shahu Maharaj.

But rather than only focus on the politics of the hour, she uses the occasion to dwell on Shahu and his historical role (Economic and Political Weekly, August 13, 1994). Or consider her early essay on Maratha assertion in the 1980s: she takes us through the making of Maratha identity, and pulls in developments from the 19th century into her story, differentiates between identity markers in the past and present, points to the way such assertion looked to align with or keep away Dalits and through his remarkable sociological and historical journey she folds the present into an ongoing dialectic of caste and secularity (Economic and Political Weekly, February 6, 1982).

Her studies of Phule and his times, the non-brahmans in Bombay union politics, the relationship between Communists, nationalists and the Non Brahman Movement are very valuable for what they tell us about the emergence of a distinctive third sort of politics in late colonial India.

As much as nationalism and communism, the anti-caste assertion was a response to the times, and its adherents straddled several political traditions, seeking to align them along the plane of a common justice. Omvedt might be said to have rendered anti-casteism a formidable political and cultural tradition of dissent, and one that had its own vision for the India to be.

That meant that it could not be viewed only in terms of its relationship to colonialism: rather it had to be understood as offering a substantive critique of the internal logic of Indian society and by that token, pushing at the boundaries of words such as freedom and equality.

These words, Omvedts work makes clear, have to be understood in more expansive ways. Political liberty did not translate automatically into social emancipation: this latter had to be fought for and won on the terrain of the nation-to-be. Likewise, equality could not be construed only in terms of what was being denied to subject peoples: it was to be realised by the subject peoples in their relationship to each other as well.

Perhaps Omvedts most contentious writings have to do with the land, caste, class and gender questions: and while her gender politics is less contested, her arguments on Indias agrarian worlds have elicited sharp commentary and critique, chiefly from the Left. However, in order to understand her theorising of peasant worlds, as also her Marxism, as these were expressed in the 1980s, we need to also locate her in context: she examined Indian arguments within the broader context of an evolving Asian Socialism.

The contours of this latter had been sketched in briefly in independent Left circles in the United States in the 1960s, and amongst the many who argued for various sorts of socialisms was the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. This comprised a group of academics who came together to set themselves against US policy in Asia that was clearly anti-communist and which viewed Asian Studies as a discipline that ought to aid its cold war objectives.

These men and women eventually came to be found in the late 1960s, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Omvedt wrote for the Bulletin from the early 1970s, and well into the 1990s, and her views on Communism were shaped by the comparative histories of the present that its pages presented.

Developments in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines pointed to the need to revalue socialist arguments that had emerged in European and Russian contexts, and Omvedt saw her own work as doing this for India. She made it clear that the view from the field cannot be adduced from theoretical claims or indeed from tidy socialist concepts.

And it was precisely on this score that she entered into lively debates with the Indian Left: that the actual details of the geography that they were concerned with ought to be heeded before any large theoretical claim could be made, about class attitudes or about exploitation (See her review essay, Marxism and the Analysis of South Asia, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 4:4, 1974).

This was evident not only in her essays on Maharashtras agrarian worlds but also in other terrains where Left intellectuals held on to broad conceptual arguments, without quite heeding the specificity of developments on the ground. Omvedt took critical measure of such an oversight, when she took on Amalendu Guhas views on the Assam agitation (Economic and Political Weekly, March 28, 1981).

And by the same token, she sought to underscore the limits of Left reasoning in the Sri Lankan context, in a short but densely argued essay on the Tamil problem. The right to self-determination, she noted, cannot be reduced to class politics merely, but had to be adduced in its relation to the totality that it sought to criticise and hold accountable (Economic and Political Weekly, October 23, 1982).

Her writings on peasant movements have been criticised and lauded: and in view of the current farmers agitations, her exchanges with Balagopal in Economic and Political Weekly acquire significance: Balagopal did not take kindly to her view of the peasant movement as capable of speaking for, and representing all those who made up the agrarian community.

Agricultural labourers, he held, could not be spoken for thus. And neither did he think that the caste divisions with agrarian society could be subsumed easily with the putative notion of a Bharat that was yet different from India. He did not also imagine that the peasantry might be viewed as such, and pointed to how it was stratified along class and caste lines (Economic and Political Weekly, September 10, 1988). Omvedts reasoning drew on arguments that partially, at least, have been made in the context of other peasant struggles, particularly by Swami Sahajanand and others in the 1940s.

But she also sought to make a case for the peasant producer in himself, as a deserving agency and right to mediate his world without interference from a domineering and elitist state and enter into a social market on his own terms. And this proved a difficult argument to sustain, given the nature of the market as Jairus Banaji (Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 17) and Paresh Chattopadhyay (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Volume 27) pointed out.

Yet the questions she raised, of the elitist state, its casteist biases, and the parasitic plundering of agrarian resources, have remained with us. In addition, her clear-eyed sense of what land means to women, and the value of their labour are matters that have not been sufficiently addressed by the Left (See Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 29).

Also, it must be said that her view of the peasant universe was nuanced: her reviews of the published literature on agrarian issues in Tamil Nadu and Bihar are testimony to how closely she followed developments in these regions.

In this context, we need to acknowledge how her work features aspects of feminist political-economic thought, and here she shared common ground with others of her time, particularly Maria Mies and Bina Agarwal.

Feminist political economy in the Indian context needs to be valued for its unique insights, and this is something that we have been made aware of, this last decade, in and through Ranjana Padhis work on the widowed farmers of the Punjab, Those Who did not Die and Dolly Kikons Living with Oil.

Gail Omvedts journey in politics and thought was undertaken in and through several historical conjunctures, but she retained aspects of all her stopovers: in her view, these various sites of sojourn, whether feminist, Marxist, Phule-Ambedkarism, were united in their vision of utopia: a world that ought to be rendered real, in times to come, but for which one needs to labour in the present.

While reason and analysis were central to divining the nature of this world-to-be, it yet had to be desired, longed for and in this passionate wanting, lay the potential for political comradeship. And this is where the struggle against caste and patriarchy came together: for it was in the remaking of caste and gendered selves that the promise of utopia stood to be redeemed.

This article first appeared on RAIOT.

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Land, caste, class and gender Gail Omvedts writings were united in their vision of utopia - Scroll.in

The federal government of today would disturb our founding fathers. The federal government has grown uncontrollably over the last several decades at the expense of both the states and the people. Our nation has almost $30 trillion in debt but President Joe Bidens administration wants to add trillions of dollars in new spending.

The new social programs and government money in your pockets is a great enticement. The words of the socialists are alluring, even utopian. But this is not what has made us the envy of the world. There will be no upward mobility for the masses in socialism, as there is in our current capitalist system. America provides an opportunity to each individual to find their own utopia within themselves.

The American people must fight the expansion of the federal government and Marxism. If we give up on our founding principles, we will give up our liberty. If we give up our self-reliance to the government, we will lose our individualism. If we do not hold our government accountable, we will lose our republic. Benjamin Franklin once said, When people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

Washington has a bad track record of spending our tax money. Why do we think that will change? The federal government must be reformed by reducing the administrative state. The consequences of not defeating government expansion and this Marxist insurrection are too high. Our liberty, our individualism and our republic are at risk.

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Gov't expansion through spending threatens our republic - The Daily Advance

After an 18-month-long shutdown, the longest in theatres history, Broadway is returning in full swing this fall. New shows and classic favorites alike will open and reopen this month, ushering in a new era for Broadway. Beyond the Theatre District, numerous Off-Broadway theatres are celebrating the return to live performances with new in-person productions, and comedy shows, concerts, and more special events are also opening throughout the city. You can become part of the great return, too check out our top picks for New York theatre in September 2021.

Many of your favorite shows are back and brighter than ever. Long-running blockbusters, Disney classics, and recent hits are all returning to Broadway and are ready to welcome new and returning audiences alike.

Broadways never ever getting rid of Waitress! After a Tony-nominated four-year run at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Waitress is opening up once more at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Through October 17, Sara Bareilles will return as the savvy pie chef Jenna who bakes her way through a rocky pregnancy and an even rockier marriage.

Ethel Barrymore Theatre, from September 2.

Waitress tickets are on sale now.

Hadestown was livin it up on top in 2019 when it won 8 Tony Awards out of 14 nominations and became the most talked-about musical of the year. Anas Mitchells adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, set in an industrial underworld with folk and jazz music, is ready to take audiences way down to Hadestown again. Original Broadway cast members Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, Patrick Page, Amber Gray, and Andr De Shields will all return to their fabled roles.

Walter Kerr Theatre, from September 2.

Retake your place in the circle of life at The Lion King. Its story of a young cub who aspires to lead his fathers animal kingdom one day has become a staple of the Disney canon. The musical adaptation features all the films most beloved songs including Hakuna Matata, Circle of Life, and I Just Cant Wait to Be King and is bound to delight audiences of all ages.

Minskoff Theatre, from September 14.

The Lion King tickets are on sale now.

Lin-Manuel Mirandas groundbreaking hip-hop history lesson Hamilton will return to Broadway September 14. Fans worldwide got to experience the modern retelling of the Founding Fathers story on Disney+ last summer and can now once again see it live. Still one of Broadways hottest tickets more than six years after its opening, Hamilton has cemented its own place in the history books.

Richard Rodgers Theatre, from September 14.

Get ready to defy gravity, as the ever-popular Wicked is back on Broadway. Dance through life, or at least through two and a half hours, with Elphaba and Glinda in this blockbuster prequel to The Wizard of Oz. Before they were known as the Good and Wicked Witches, The Tin Man, The Scarecrow and more, the citizens of Oz were friends and schoolmates, and their story has put a spell on audiences for nearly 20 years.

Gershwin Theatre, from September 14.

Wicked tickets are on sale now.

Broadways longest-running American musical is back with all that jazz. The reopening cast of Chicago includes Tony winner Lillias White as Matron Mama Morton, Ana Villafae as Roxie Hart, and Bianca Marroqun, a longtime Roxie, now debuting as Velma Kelly.

Ambassador Theatre, from September 14.

Chicago tickets are on sale now.

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne debuted his theatrical concert, American Utopia, on Broadway in 2019 for a limited run, and the production was filmed for streaming in 2020. Byrne and his 11-person ensemble now return to the New York stage for one more limited engagement through March 5, 2022. The group performs songs from Byrnes album of the same name along with hits from throughout his career.

St. James Theatre, from September 17.

David Byrnes American Utopia tickets are on sale now.

Come From Away is finally returning to Broadway, telling a story of personal connection that is just what the world needs after months of isolation. The musical tells the true account of a Newfoundland town that welcomed hundreds of people displaced by 9/11. The show has welcomed audiences from all over the world since 2017, and it is ready to welcome you back to the rock, too.

Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, from September 21.

Bohemians, lovers, dreamers, muses, and artists welcome back to the Moulin Rouge! The glamorous musical adaptation of Baz Luhrmanns iconic film will take theatergoers into the glitzy and raucous Parisian club where the writer Christian becomes enchanted with the star performer, Satine. The shows score features more than 70 classic and contemporary pop songs to bring the 1900s to today.

Al Hirschfeld Theatre, from September 24.

Moulin Rouge! The Musical tickets are on sale now.

Take a magic carpet ride at the New Amsterdam Theatre with Aladdin on Broadway. The poor street-dweller Aladdin discovers a genie in a magic lamp, and Aladdin is given three wishes to get himself the noble life and the princess he desires. Audiences will recognize all the films hit songs like Friend Like Me and Prince Ali, but the live Broadway experience of the Disney tale is A Whole New World.

New Amsterdam Theatre, from September 28.

Aladdin tickets are on sale now.

A new theatre season is beginning, and many new shows are ready to make their premieres. From highly-anticipated West End transfers to original musicals to a special concert celebration, theres plenty of new Broadway and Off-Broadway theatre to discover for the first time.

Known for his work co-creating Chappelles Show and his own solo stand-up special 3 Mics, comedian Neal Brennan returns to the stage with a new theatrical comedy show, Neal Brennan: Unacceptable. With true stories from Brennans childhood through the present, he honestly yet humorously discusses feelings of loneliness in an attempt to understand them.

Cherry Lane Theatre, from August 25.

Neal Brennan: Unacceptable tickets are on sale now. Rush tickets are available on TodayTix.

Daniel J. Watts stars alongside the show's playwright, Ngozi Anyanwu, in a story about two people deciding whether to stay in a relationship or let go of the thing they love most, as painful as the goodbye may be.

Linda Gross Theater, from August 26.

The Last of the Love Letterstickets are on sale now.

Award-winning actor, playwright, and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson returns to Broadway with a new solo show. He plays more than 20 characters in the autobiographical story of Nanny, the woman who welcomed a young Santiago-Hudson into her upstate New York home and raised him. This tribute to Nannys compassion and Santiago-Hudsons youth also features original blues music by Bill Sims., Jr.

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, from September 14.

Thirteen years after Second Stage Theater premiered Rajiv Josephs play Animals Out of Paper, the company is presenting its companion play, Letters of Suresh. Told through a series of letters between family members, friends, and strangers, the play is a story of people seeking connection and hope as a city they love is consumed by war.

Tony Kiser Theater, from September 14.

Letters of Suresh tickets are on sale now.

Curtain Up! is a three-day celebration of Broadways reopening that will include live concerts and performances, panels, and interactive experiences. The free outdoor festival will take place in Times Square from Friday, September 17 to Sunday, September 19 with a host of theatre talent.

Times Square, from September 17.

After enjoying a hit West End run, multiple tours across the globe, and multiple productions in America, the fast-rising phenomenon Six is finally opening on Broadway, 18 months after its original opening night was canceled by the shutdown only hours before curtain. Now, audiences can get down with the Queens, Henry VIIIs six wives, in their 80-minute pop song competition to determine who had it the worst as the kings bride.

Brooks Atkinson Theatre, from September 17.

The first new musical to premiere in New York since the Broadway shutdown is making a celestial debut off Broadway. Two commercial jingle writers dream of their big break, which comes when pop star Regina Comet taps them to write a jingle for her new perfume line. Ben Fankhauser and Alex Wyse wrote the musical and star as the hopeful songwriters alongside Bryonha Marie Parham as Regina Comet.

DR2 Theatre, from September 17.

A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet tickets are on sale now.

This three-part saga, told as one theatrical piece, follows the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers financial institution. Told over 164 years spanning multiple generations of a single immigrant family, the story highlights the businesss greatest successes and its eventual bankruptcy that inflamed the 2008 financial crisis. The production had an acclaimed run on the West End, and two actors from the production Simon Russell Beale and Adam Godley will reprise their roles, joining Adrian Lester in his Broadway debut.

Nederlander Theatre, from September 25.

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New York theatre to see in September | NewYorkTheaterGuide.com - New York Theatre Guide

Its interesting whenever Elon Musks name comes up and people begin discussing his accomplishments, such as the reinvention of money, automobiles and space travel, theres always someone who says: Yeah, but I hear he can be a real dick.

Take that, Elon.

So then, lets be totally honest here, because in your heart, you know, and I know, dear reader, that you can be a real dick, too. So can I, and, if were being truly honest, so can, say, the Queen. She probably has to be a dick 10 times a week. So since when does being a dick somehow invalidate you as a person? It doesnt. Thats just stupid. And whats in it for you to dis someone you dont know, anyway? Being negative is a stupid persons way of trying to appear smart without actually being smart. And lets also be certain about something else: we all hate a goody two-shoes, so come on, what kind of perfect behaviour is it you expect from a person, any person, let alone Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is actually terrible at publicity. His Cybertruck launch was a disaster, and the Tesla in space thing was cringey. When being interviewed hes opaque, overly techy and difficult to connect with Richard Branson is a million times better with publicity, but theres something about Musk that makes Branson seem a thousand years old.

Hes terrible at that, too. After the deplatforming of Donald Trump, Musk is undebateably the planets alpha tweeter. One of those Kardashian people can make a line of armpit hair remover go viral, but Musk can generate or destroy billions of dollars of wealth in three or four words. Why on earth would he bother wasting three brain cells trying to manipulate the media? As well, his often-lame tweets frequently backfire, as hes the first to attest with his all too true tweet: Tweeting on Ambien isnt wise. Musk doesnt need to manipulate the media because what he does is fantastically interesting. He isnt someone who needs to fish for press.

a) So, what if he is? But, b) He isnt. Hes just doing what he does. Hes also, at the time of writing, the second richest person on Earth. He probably got used to going to the candy store and buying 10 of everything a long time ago. He lives modestly. He always reinvests in his own ideas and his ideas are good.

Grow up.

Musk didnt just generate a few fundamental patents and move to Santa Barbara to golf for the rest of his life. Every day he tries to reinvent the wheel and its working. Shopped online lately? Ever wanted to visit the International Space Station? Want a new car? With cars alone, Musk pretty much single-handedly shamed and forced the global auto industry to accelerate the electric car rollout by seven to 10 years. Yet people kvetch, and it makes me wonder if there is something fundamentally flawed about our era that it is almost impossible to get people to say something nice about pretty much anyone else. A like given to someone else is a like that could have instead gone to oneself, which I suppose indicates that theres something fundamentally different about selfhood than, say, 25 years ago. I pick 1996 because it seems to me to have been the acme of the celebrity profile remember them? In Vanity Fair, say. The glossy cover. The fawning. The expectation of dirt revealed. Will they backstab? Even the interviewers were famous for interviewing, and it all feels like a million years ago. Are there any celebrity interviewers left? Oprah, I guess, but her heart doesnt seem to really be in it, and she now seems to be merely an enabling conduit for the Megan-and-Harry feelings politics that blights our era.

First, we already discussed this: he can be a dick, so dont be surprised when he is. Second, people know theyre going to be working with Elon Musk, so they cant play woe is me if he goes Elon on them. And third, hes incredibly smart and is used to working with the worlds smartest and most accomplished people, so if you dont cut the mustard then you didnt cut the mustard. And heres something funny he actually said to someone who was pissing him off in the Tesla factory: You know, I could be drinking mai tais with naked supermodels, but instead Im here with you. He has a point.

Dear God, is this what our society has been reduced to?

Hes a good father with six sons: triplets, twins and one solo. A first son died of Sids at the age of 10 weeks.

He has been married to two women (his second wife twice).

He is famous for his need to be in love and for being unable to sleep alone.

He spent his 47th birthday in his factory fixing robots for 24 hours.

He loves his mother, who is a top global fashion model at 73.

He sees no future in fossil fuels.

He hates visible seams on his products.

He swears a lot.

In 2018 his tunnel-drilling company, the Boring Company, sold 20,000 novelty flamethrowers as a publicity stunt. They now sell on eBay at an average of $3,000.

No, hes not. The left doesnt like him because he doesnt fund them or show interest in their causes. And the right doesnt like him because he messes around with the stock market and doesnt take classical capitalism seriously. For example, he thinks short selling the stock market should be banned. Musk donates to Democrats and Republicans only because its the cost of having a voice in government. He seems to see left versus right as an obsolete binary and instead focuses his altruistic energies on ecology and invention. He seems to be more about the systems that create signals rather than the signals themselves.

I know, saving the world could anything be more Megan-and-Harry? But Musk isnt trying to save the world, only to make it better. Musk has created three multibillion-dollar companies in four profoundly difficult fields in which to create anything. And these companies are successful, usually without help from the people we once considered gatekeepers. Like lots of people who do lots of things, hes too busy for elaborate introspection.

This is actually the most baffling thing about Musk: whats his deal with Mars? He loves discussing the creation of new platforms for humans elsewhere in the cosmos. He wants humans to be multiplanetary, telling Rolling Stone: There have been five mass-extinction events in the fossil record. People have no comprehension of these things. Unless youre a cockroach or a mushroom or a sponge youre fucked. So, I guess hes expecting a mass extinction event soon, but really though, arent we all? *Nervous chuckle* Well, maybe not. But his Martian plans will probably happen soon enough, and if nothing else have spurred great general discussion on just what sort of person it takes to go to Mars on what is most likely a one-way trip. I know nothing about therapy, but it strikes me that perhaps Musk sees himself as a prime candidate. This is maybe reading too much into it. Maybe he simply thinks its a cool idea. Sometimes its that simple.

This is true. But Zowie Bowie turned out just fine, so why shouldnt X AE A-XII Musk?

OK, but what if hes right? The radio gave us Hitler. The internet gave us the past five years. Maybe AI will happily surprise us, but Musk only foresees a 5-10% chance of humans being able to contain AI and make it safe. It will possibly do this using the systems devised by his non-profit, Neuralink, which aims to create mind/machine interfaces. So combatting potential AI enslavement down the road may seem quixotic, but frankly, why not give it a go?

Hes done more than his share down here, if nothing else, making great leaps at reducing fossil fuel consumption, but I have no idea if he recycles rubbish at his house wherever he lives. What if he didnt? Thats right: that would make him a terrible human being. We could go jump on him and beat him with sticks.

If you search for Musk online comment threads on, say, Reddit, youll quickly sense the presence of teenage male body sprays and stained gym socks. Its incel heaven. Adult voices discussing Musk are rare, and it seems the vast bulk of Musk commentary centres on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and yes, I can hear you stifling a yawn, but were stuck with these things, so wed better cobble together some sort of peace deal with them. Cryptocurrency does seem to be the one topic where Musk genuinely enjoys messing with peoples minds as well as with stock market regulators. I suspect that he doesnt have a stand on crypto at all my guess is that he sees cryptocurrencies as being interesting simply because they exist at all, like Klein bottles or those Japanese Kit-Kats in flavours such as pumpkin or green tea. Regardless, Musks public toxic trolls included seem to adore his ongoing dance of taunts and teases and hints and theyd have it no other way, especially with a crypto called dogecoin, which is like Daffy Duck to b itcoins Bugs Bunny, and the two are locked in an eternal battle for relevance, and even onlooking Belarusian troll farmers must be thinking: Wow. We were going to fabricate a pseudo-conflict between these two things, but it looks like the real world is already doing it for us. Moi slezy ne soderzhat antibiotikov! *

Its also interesting to note that when Musk posts big events in his life on Twitter, successful experimental space launches, say, his detractors will post things like a photo of a Tesla Model 3 whose real wheels went off a suburban garden ledge a photo appended by vitriolic meta-commentary along the lines of: My moms Roomba has better edge detection than a Tesla. #VeryDisappointed.

PS: Musk is already worth $185bn.

* My teardrops contain no antibiotics!

*Cringe* Hearing this makes it feel like its the 1920s and were comparing Vanderbilts with Rockefellers. But, having said this, I will admit that there is a deeply concealed dark part of my soul that aches for Bezos and Musk to even somewhat resemble that blank-eyed, walrus-mustached plutocrat who haunts the Monopoly game board, but alas, that is not going to happen. Both men seem to dress exclusively from Tommy Hilfiger shops at outlet malls. Maybe Lauren Snchez buys Bezoss shirts in those hotel lobby stores in coastal resort towns but honestly, even if youre the two richest unmarried guys on Earth, whose job is it to pull your wardrobe anyway? Your girlfriends? No. So who? A personal assistant? Your mum? Its actually kind of a miracle that new clothing ever even appear in these guys dressing rooms to begin with. But this doesnt directly address the Bezos/Musk rivalry, which I dont think actually exists. It technically seems like it could be a good rivalry, but they both made their money in such different ways (and remember, money is a primary lens through which we view them) that it feels wrong to lump them together. Bezos is like your mums leathery third boyfriend after her divorce, while Musk is your maths tutor who won the Powerball lottery. Zero overlap.

People want to believe that, but heres the thing: Musk has a huge IQ. He is measurably, scientifically, clinically and demonstrably the smartest person in any room anywhere. He can tell you the square root of your Amex card number at a glance. He can tell you, I dont know the square root of zinc. He has mild Aspergers, which prevents him from snagging on details and talking himself out of trying new things. Hes a perfect storm who comes from about as middle class a family as was possible in the late 20th century, so you cant beat him with sticks. His family was like scores of millions and then he became one of the richest people on Earth.

I think the biggest difference between the 20th century and the 21st is that in the 20th century you were able to see the future in your head. There were new ways of envisioning, say, an information utopia or an ecological harmonisation of humans with everything non-human. But here in the 21st century were only able to possibly glimpse a small workable future, and even then only if we work at it incredibly hard. Thats a huge difference in looking at what lies down the road. Musks appeal is that he still sees both the future as well as a future albeit a future on Mars, which has 38% of the gravity of Earth and about 1% of its atmosphere. And wifi back and forth to Earth would take six-and-a-half minutes each way. Hardly smoking hot, so good luck watching random episodes of The Big Bang Theory while real-time wisecracking with your former cubicle mates back in Palo Alto.

On 28 June, Musk turned 50. He has at least three more high-functioning decades to go. More likely five or six, so were not even halfway through his movie. Pundits who think hell soon be over are either naive or assassins.

Douglas Couplands Binge: 60 Stories to Make Your Head Feel Different will be available in the UK in October via Amazon

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'The smartest person in any room anywhere': in defence of Elon Musk, by Douglas Coupland - The Guardian

Three months after touching down on the Martian surface, Chinas Zhurong rover has completed its primary mission and is still going strong.

The ambitious robotic exploration vehicle launched on a Long March-5 rocket from Wenchang, China back in July 2020, along with an accompanying Mars orbiter. After a 6.5 month journey, the spacecraft arrived at Mars in February.

Unlike recent NASA missions to Mars, which perform their Entry, Descent, and Landing procedures immediately, Zhurong stayed in orbit for several months before landing. The wait allowed the team to gather data about the health of the vehicle, move it into the most advantageous orbit, and decide on a landing zone.

The decision to take their time with the landing makes sense: Mars is a notoriously difficult place to land safely. About half of all historical Mars landing attempts have ended in failure, and until Zhurong, only the United States had ever succeeded (it might be argued that the Soviet Unions Mars 3 and the United Kingdoms Beagle 2 landers both soft-landed successfully, but both vehicles also broke down seconds after landing).

In any case, Zhurongs cautious approach paid off, and it successfully touched down on May 14th, 2021. Its landing site is in the region known as Utopia Planitia, a wide rocky plain, parts of which were previously explored by the Viking 2 Lander in 1976. Utopia Planitia is a desirable landing site because its flat, open terrain makes for an easier touchdown, but also because it is believed to be an ancient lakebed, giving the region scientific value to researchers hoping to learn about water, or even life, on ancient Mars.

Since landing, Zhurong has traveled 886 meters, stopping to take scientific measurements, and some selfies, along the way. The rover carries a ground-penetrating radar system which, along with a similar system onboard NASAs new Perseverance rover, is the first of its kind on Mars. Several other instruments will enable it to carry out geological investigations.

As Zhurong is Chinas first Martian rover, part of the primary mission involved testing the vehicles design and engineering: learning how to land on Mars and navigate a robotic rover there is a feat in itself. As part of this technology demonstration campaign, one of the rovers first targets was its own discarded parachute and backshell, which were intentionally detached as part of the landing procedure. The rover drove up to the backshell and inspected it, taking photos to send back to the team.

This week, the China National Space Administration announced that both the scientific and engineering goals of Zhurongs 90-day primary mission had been achieved. So far, Zhurong seems to have been a resounding success. The rover appears healthy and will continue to explore the surrounding region in the months to come. It has returned 10 gigabytes of scientific data so far. Hopefully, this and future data collected by the rover can help broaden our understanding of the red planet.

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"When it comes to development, when you do it right, it really is a rising-tide-lift-all-boats type of scenario," said Stef Halmos, the artist and developer who, in 2017, began transforming three abandoned mills in the Village of Catskill into an 85,000 square-foot arts campus called Foreland that opened this month.

"I feel like the ripple effect of Foreland will be very positive just by the nature of who occupies these buildings and what the mission is of their new use."

These three buildings, two of which are now connected by a floating glass pedestrian bridge, were constructed in the mid-1800s and originally used to produce uniforms for Union Soldiers during the Civil War. They were empty for decades before Halmos re-imagined and revitalized them to house 30 artists' studios, three art galleries, two event spaces, and two eateries one cafe that is already open, and a restaurant that will follow.

Related: Exploring the mellow mountain village of Catskill

"The Foreland building has been under construction by multiple contractors for the past 15 years, Patrick McCulloch, Village of Catskill Planning Board Chairman told Times Union: Hudson Valley via email. Stef Halmos had the right vision to take over this project and see it to completion.

Now that it is finally complete, the challenge will be to keep the entire operation afloat especially in a mellow little river town like Catskill. And yet, Halmos has more than high hopes. She has real estate development in her blood, an artistic vision that celebrates both old and new, and a vested interest in improving the village where she set down roots with her wife and toddler.

"It's a complex eco-system with a lot going on to make these old buildings be alive," Halmos noted. "Multiple revenue streams keep the project stable." The galleries and caf will give the public access to the space, bringing life into Foreland after four years of development. And this coming weekend, Saturday, August 28 and Sunday, August 29 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Foreland is partnering with Upstate Art Weekendand New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA)on an exhibition featuring artists working in Upstate New York.

"There are over 100 artists that are exhibiting and just by the nature of the exhibition, you'll be able to walk through two of our three buildings," Halmos said.

Caitlin MacBride is among the artists who have rented out one of Foreland's 30 artist studios. "I love the historical details of it being an old mill because so many of my paintings are about history and design, so this environment really inspires me, she said. Pictured is her painting, Mill," 2021, oil on panel, that will be included in Foreland and NADA Art's exhibition during Upstate Art Weekend.

Visitors can also check out Foreland's inaugural show in the ground floor gallery, a joint exhibition between Rachel Uffnerand Mrs.

While there's definitely an element of pie-in-the-sky artistic-utopia vibe built into the Foreland's vision board, there's also a business sensibility behind the project, too. Those visiting Foreland's campus could potentially become future studio renters, or they may keep Foreland in mind for future weddings and parties, or at the very least they might support their in-house caf, Willa's, by grabbing a coffee and a snack.

Foreland's heart and soul is in its affordable art studios, which Halmos recognized were in short supply when she lived in Brooklyn and was seeking a workspace for her own art. Halmos's studio work includes sculptures, photographs, and objects. While she doesn't have any of her on art on display at Foreland at the moment, she is in the process of creating a new body of work, with some forthcoming exhibitions in the pipeline. Halmos's own Foreland studio is a 1,500-square-foot space, which is partly used for her studio work and partly used for the Foreland staff headquarters.

"The prices were so extravagant for crappy [Brooklyn] studios. People were paying prime money for [a] subpar product," Halmos said of the studios. "I thought, 'I can do it better. I'm an artist and I want to build a studio that I want to use.'"

As she and her wife started spending more time upstate, her dream studio site appeared. "Just by a total fluke, I was having an ice cream across the creek from [what is now] Foreland and I was staring at that beautiful building," Halmosrecalled. "I fell in love with it immediately and said, 'That's my building. That's it.'"

"Just by a total fluke, I was having an ice cream across the creek from [what is now] Foreland and I was staring at that beautiful building, Halmos, pictured here, recalled. "I fell in love with it immediately and said, 'That's my building. That's it."

Halmos says the Foreland studios are affordable pricing is available upon request, following an application process that shows proof of work but this isn't a non-profit organization. The artists' rent helps sustain the project. "My rule of thumb is that you're going to pay 30 percent less for 100 percent better of a product. You get it all with these studios everybody has a lot of light, big, beautiful, tall windows," Halmos said.

Caitlin MacBride,a painter who recently relocated to Hudson and rented a studio at Foreland, agrees the new space is an upgrade.

"I spent 15 years living in Brooklyn and this studio would have been way out of my price zone there. Its large and has wide floorboards and exposed beams. I love the historical details of it being an old mill because so many of my paintings are about history and design so this environment really inspires me, she said. "Also as someone who is still relatively new to the area its been such a gift I feel like the studio has already provided me with new friends and an amazing community of makers."

Ninety percent of the studios have been rented to date by an array of artists and makers, including painter Shara Hughes, multidisciplinary artist Lyle Ashton Harris, filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, and sculptor Marc Swanson.

Since Halmos first laid eyes on the trio of buildings in 2017, she also started a family. Now the mother of an 18-month-old child, she joked, "Restoring these old buildings took longer and was more draining that growing and giving birth to an human."

Two of the 1800s-era buildings are connected by a floating glass pedestrian bridge.

Though Halmos is somewhat new to Catskill and new real estate development, her work on Foreland shows reverence for the buildings' past. Halmos began the project with a focus on preservation, spending a year and a half on structural remediation that is, dealing with all the engineering elements to stabilize the buildings and improve their health, safety and longevity. Her respect for the buildings' history shines through her artistic vision.

"We don't patina new things to look old and we didn't let the old things look new. We let them live together to show that there are a lot of people who have done work on this building before me and there will be many here after me," Halmos explained. "If we had to replace a beam or a floor system, we would use new wood wide planks, tongue and groove and let it show that it's new against some of the old things. You might see one column that is this big chunky piece of fresh timber, but the old one next to it has that patina of age."

Clearly, Halmos is looking to build on the good bones that already exist in Foreland and in the Village of Catskill, too. She mentioned the kindness and support of the town boards, the Department of Public Works, and the local police throughout her project.

"It's really bad for a town when giant footprints sit empty, she said. Statistically, it keeps growth stagnant. And so, just from the most basic standpoint, having these buildings full and increasing the amount of bodies that are coming in and out will be really positive. All these people want places to eat, they want places to go they want to enjoy life in such a beautiful little town."

Others are also looking forward to the role Foreland will play in the community. "Foreland is in the heart of our village, said McCulloch. We cant wait to see what their future holds."

Hudson Valley Art, Music and Culture

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Picture a surfer. You probably imagine someone blonde and blue eyeda classic Southern California type, The Beach Boys playing in the background. Maybe you think of Elvis and one of his many surfmovies. Heck, youre more apt to see Scooby Doo on a board than a person of color.

Like many sports in the US, surfing has been actively non-inclusivea stark reality that Selema Masekela came to understand as a teenager surfing in Southern California in the 1980s.

There were no other [Black] kids doing it, Masekela says. And the kids in my school were very much informative in making sure I knew that. Everything from You people dont swim, how are you gonna learn to surf, to outright usage of the n-word and harassment about my color and being in the water, everywhere I went.

Ironically, Masekelanow a TV host, musician, and surf enthusiastfaced similar tensions when he visited South Africa, the home of his ancestors and some of the worlds most sought-after waves. It was the early 90s and he was accompanying his father, the musician and apartheid activist Hugh Masekela. Though apartheid had just ended, it was still very much the law of the land... and the water. Beaches were segregated, and the high price of entry for surfing meant that many indigenous South Africans couldntand still cantafford to try it.

I walked out of an elevator in a hotel in Durban with a surfboard in my hand and the whole lobby stopped, like a movie, recalls Masekela. When I walked out on the street to go to the beach, cars hit the brakes and you could hear the screeching of tires. People were looking like, what is happening? This is the new South Africa that theyre talking about on the radiois this what it is?

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When I ask Masekela why he chose surfing as the lens for his new book about Africa, the question pretty much contained the answer.

When [travelers] think about Africa its like we went, we landed, they drove us into a safari, he says. Or I volunteered and worked in this village or we went and taught people about Jesus and we saved them. Thats how weespecially in the Westlook at the richest, most vibrant, culturally diverse continent on the planet.

What people dont typically associate with the Africadespite 18,950 miles of coastlineis its waves. Masekela wants to change that with his new book AFROSURF. Itdelves into the history of surf culture in Africa, challenging stereotypes and popular ideas of provenance. Compiled with Mami Wata, a surf company based in Cape Town that Masekela co-founded, the collection features some 200 photos and over 50 essays, plus illustrations, profiles, even poems and recipes that span Africas shores from Morocco to Ghana to Somalia, and even landlocked countries like Congo.

There are thrilling tales of navigating shark-infested waters in Madagascar, and the surfable (and less terrifying) Skeleton Coast in Angola. Read about the tiny surfing utopia of Gabon, known to water-lovers for centuries, as yet undiscovered by much of the outside world. An essay by Kevin Dawson, history professor and author of the award-winning Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, traces the origins of surfing not to Hawaii, but to what is now Ghana, in 1640, with fishermen foregoing canoes for longboards and using them to paddle across lakes.

The book also emphasizes the reverence of water throughout the continent. Before [my father] left South Africa, my grandmother would always ask him to bring her back seawater from the beach, Masekela said. She believed in its spiritual power. His father told him this story when they were sitting on a beach in 2010, working on an ESPN documentary together. It was the first time that he ever really helped me to see that my love for the ocean water isnt foreignits actually native to us. To our family and to our culture.

Charities like South Africas Waves for Changewhich receives some of the proceeds from sales of AFROSURFlooks to the sea for therapy, helping kids heal trauma and gain exposure to the sport. Were creating a space where kids can be kids, says founder Chemica Blouw in the book. Because they dont always get to be kids in the communities they come from.

Decades later, the experience of surfing in South Africa has changed for the better for Masekela. But not enough. Its a start that South Africa now has its first Black championship surfer in Michael Mikey February, who is also profiled in AFROSURF. Were stoked on Mikey February, but we have a long way to go, he says. It needs to get to the point where its no longer notable, but the norm.

The sea change is most felt on the water. When you get an opportunity to surf with people who look like you, its very hard to explain what that feels like, the ease and the safety, Masekela says. Its so much fun to paddle out in Durban and be surrounded by tons of kids that look like me, and are rabid surfers. Its incredible to go up and down the coast and have it not be strange.

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The bhakti radical Ravidas (c 1450-1520), calling himself a tanner now set free, was the first to envision an Indian utopia in his song Begumpura a modern casteless, classless, tax-free city without sorrow. This was in contrast to the dystopia of the brahmanic Kaliyuga.

Rejecting Orientalist, nationalist and hindutva impulses to reinvent India, Gail Omvedt threads together the worldviews of subaltern visionaries spanning five centuries Chokhamela, Janabai, Kabir, Ravidas, Tukaram, the Kartabhajas, Phule, Iyothee Thass, Pandita Ramabai, Periyar, and Ambedkar. These are contrasted with Gandhis village utopia of Ram Rajya, Nehrus hindutva-laced brahmanic socialism and Savarkars territorialist Hindu Rashtra. Reason and ecstasy dnyan and bhakti pave the road that leads to the promised land.

The following is an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals.

From Namdev, Kabir, Ravidas and Tukaram through Phule, Ramabai and Ambedkar, dalit-bahujan and many women intellectuals have evoked an ideal of a casteless, classless society, and have increasingly outlined its characteristics as a prosperous, democratic, socialist, development-oriented society. This study has traced the varying expressions of the ideal and the concrete forms in which it was envisaged.

In the form of utopian values they upheld, the anticaste intellectuals differed significantly from those who are taken today as nationalist leaders. As G Aloysius (1997) has pointed out in describing a nationalism without a nation in India, Congress as well as Hindu Mahasabha leaders had aimed for cultural nationalism that is a transfer of power without a change in the basic culture (as they saw it) of the Indian people. In doing so, they explicitly or implicitly endorsed its brahmanic elements, and in doing so laid the foundations for a more virulent Hindutva.

Nehrus ideal was a vague socialism, but he associated it with a managed economy, an updated version of what he saw as the traditional brahmanic ideal of service, taking the values of collectivity in family, caste and village as positive and somehow socialistic. This connected him ideologically with Gandhi, though in many respects his marxist emphasis on economic development puts him in the same camp as Ambedkar.

In contrast to the tendency of the elites to seek an independence ideal in the recreation of past values located in an imagined vedic golden age, with many of them idealising varnsashrama dharma, and without much change in the hegemonic structures of society the subaltern intellectuals sought what Aloysius calls a political nationalism, that emphasised equality with solidarity. Theirs was a vision that sought the reconstruction of Indian society, the creation of a new society that would flourish under independence.

Its prosperity is also stressed. This was to remain a themethe ideal, whether Begumpura or an imagined Pandhari, was a city of dancing, of merchants, of prosperity. Its anticaste vision may be contrasted with Gandhis Ram Rajya which indeed focused on village India, with Ram as a supposedly ideal king. Ravidas, even in the fifteenth century, was more secular and certainly more socialistic than Gandhi.

With independence, the creativity of dalit-bahujan intellectuals seemingly died away. Ambedkar died in 1956; he left behind a political party, a policy of a broad Left alliance, a new religion, and a heritage of pride. But the Republican party, though conceived of as a party for all the oppressed (and named after the US Republican Party, seen as the party of Lincoln and the ending of slavery), turned out to be only for dalits and more or less limited to being a powerful pressure group in Maharashtra.

A later, greater effort by Kanshi Ram to recreate the alliance of dalits and OBCs with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has had limited success: for a time it seemed to arouse a thunder all over India. For some time it remained confined to Uttar Pradesh and the northern, chamar belt of the state though Mayawatis resounding victory in the 2007 assembly elections brought new hope and new questioning, especially regarding the alliance with brahmans.

When the Dalit Panther was formed in 1972 by some of the leading writers of Maharashtra, it emerged as a militant organisation but quickly became split over marxism versus ambedkarism, and died within a year. Much of the dalit movement in the following years appeared to be under the hegemony of the Left, and this sapped its creativity.

After 1990, with the new globalisation, and propelled by the internet, a new dalit intelligentsia seized the opportunity to take their cause to the world arena, and in 2001 put caste on the agenda as a form of racism at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. This new form of mobilisation has found it difficult to connect in an organic way with the dalit masses; it was too often based on NGO activity rather than strong mass movements. Yet the many initiatives heralded the beginning of a new era.

Looking a bit like the Statue of Liberty with a floppy hippy hat, the goddess was standing on a computer, with book and pen in hand, springing from the map of India as if to move on to the world. Claims Prasad, who hosted the party, English the Dalit Goddess is a world power today; it is about emancipation; it is a mass movement against the caste order. Over a century ago, Savitribai Phule, wife of social revolutionary Jotirao Phule, had written the same thing, saying in a poem that sudras and ati-sudras (dalits) now have the right to education; and through English, casteism can be destroyed and brahmanical teaching can be hurled away. But it remains to be seen how much the subaltern castes will be able to use the weapons of global connections, computer, and English skills.

In fact, the ups and downs of the emergence of anticaste intellectuals were probably not accidental. The two main eras of creativity were the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries when the great poet-saints and wandering minstrels known as leaders of the bhakti movement sang their songs to arouse the people against priestly dominance and caste exclusiveness and the colonial period. Both represented forms of globalisation.

In the first case, Muslim rule brought a wide commercialism and an era of order to the subcontinent, broke through the stagnation of brahmanic regionalised states, and brought a connection with global trends, both in terms of mysticism and broader stirrings of assertion. In the second case, it was British colonial rule that linked India to a wider heritage. These linkages, and the resources they offered, benefited the anticaste intellectuals who emerged to try to give a telling blow to ritualism and hierarchy.

Similarly, other bhakti poets rejected many of the brahmanic symbols choosing Pandhari over Vaikuntha, often rejecting the avatar theory or turning it upside down, to hail the goodness of Bali, Sibi and the like. Even where names such as Rama were used by poets like Kabir, he made it clear that this was not the avatar Ramchandra and at times combined Allah-Ram: Every man and woman born are forms of you, so says Kabir: Im Ram and Allahs foolish baby, hes my guru and my pir (shabd 97).

Similarly, during the colonial period the initial response of the subaltern Kartabhajas was to hail the prosperity of the kompani, a king bringing wealth and prosperity from oversees. Intellectuals like Phule drew upon missionary research and propagandising to help them provide a full-fledged theory of brahmanism, created by Aryans and maintained through keeping the masses in ignorance. And he turned the avatar theory on its head, again, to hail the rakshasas (connoting demons in Sanskrit) as defenders of the people and Bali Raja as the good king, both powerful and sacrificial.

These early eras of globalisation in many ways benefited the anticaste movement.Yet just as theorists today stress that globalisation has both dangers and opportunities, so it did earlier. The ruling classes and ethnic groups during these early periods also were not interested in promoting mass welfare; outsiders themselves, they often made alliances with brahmans and worked to maintain caste. Muslims themselves absorbed much of caste hierarchy, defining their elite as ashraf descendents of Turks and Persians, Sayyids and Shahs and treating the subaltern caste converts as inferior.

In both cases, in spite of challenges from below, a brahmanic recuperation occurred: the bhakti movement was absorbed, and the anticaste intellectuals of the colonial period were deflected as the call for national independence took on a powerful aura. And with independence, most of the issues raised by subaltern groups were buried.

The way affirmative action was handled was typical: through the policy of reservation that absorbed all the rigidities of the public sector bureaucracy, renouncing any trust in broader policy decisions, and institutionalising an ideological split between merit and reservation candidates. The global forces have been used, in the end, more effectively by the elites, and rather than revolutionary moves towards abolition of caste, an updating and restructuring of caste inequality has occurred.

Excerpted with permission from Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals, Gail Omvedt, Navayana.

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Neither Ram Rajya nor golden Vedic age: Gail Omvedt (1941-2021) on the history of a casteless future - Scroll.in