BIC TALKS

Today, Kalki R Krishnamurthy (1899-1954) is best known for his historical fiction—Sivakamiyin Sapatham, Ponniyin Selvan and Parthiban Kanavu—recreating the glorious eras of the Pallavas and the Cholas. The mighty conquests and magnificent art and culture of these two kingly dynasties are brought to bear on contemporary Tamil self-fashioning. In a comprehensive biography of the iconic writer, Sunda (the nom-de-plume of MRM Sundaram, writer and known for his stint in the Tamil service of BBC) shows how, for Kalki, writing was an act of protest as India’s part of freedom movement, assert India’s spiritual/cultural values, and commit to Gandhian ideologies. Not only does it reveal a writer’s central pre-occupations, the biography is a panoramic chronicle of the era in which Kalki lived. In sum, the biography turns the story of an individual into the saga of a nation struggling to individuate itself, the journey of a writer as he records its transformations, of a dreamer who believes that writing can charge the mind, change the world. This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from a BIC Venue event that took place in March 2022 which discussed the English translation of the Tamil biography by Dr. Gowri Ramnarayan who was in conversation with S Theodore Baskaran accompanied by readings by Akhila Ramnarayan and music by Aishwarya Vidya Raghunath. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, and Stitcher.

With India in its seventy-fifth year of independence, conventional policy is unlikely to combat the breadth of its economic challenges. Does India need the state to be big or small? Is growth to be manufacturing-led or services driven? Will India produce for the exports market or the home market? Do the young prefer government jobs to private sector employment? Across a range of areas - human capital, technology, agriculture, finance, trade, public service delivery and more - new ideas must now be on the table. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only cost India many lives and livelihoods, it has also exposed major structural weaknesses in the economy. A huge farm and jobs crisis, rising and massive inequalities, tepid investment growth, and chronic banking sector challenges have plagued the economy, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also exposed the limitations of the Indian state, which tries to control too much-and ends up stifling the economy and the inherent energies of its young population. Climate change is no longer a distant threat, while disruptive technology has huge implications for India's demographic dividend. In addition, the dangerous lurch towards majoritarianism will cast its shadow on India's pursuit of prosperity for all.  In this episode of BIC Talks, authors of Unshackling India, Ajay Chibber and Salman Soz in a conversation with Ashima Goyal acknowledge hard truths and examine the question: Can India use the next twenty-five years, when it will reach the hundredth year of independence, to restructure not only its economy but rejuvenate its democratic energy and unshackle its potential-to become a genuinely developed economy by 2047? This conversation is an extract from a session at Bangalore Literature festival 2021, which took place in collaboration with BIC last December.  Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, and Stitcher.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have exerted immense influence on the life and thought of Indians. If the Ramayana is a ‘unitary’ saga, the Mahabahrata is a ‘federal epic’.  Its impact has remained as deep now as it was two thousand years.  Who actually composed it?  Why did the epic allow people to weave in it? This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the second of a series of four masterclass lectures by Prof. G N Devy, titled Memory, Culture and The Being of India that took place in the BIC premises in early February 2022. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, and Stitcher.

Has the artificial memory already taken a complete possession of the human memory? Have Indians altogether forgotten from where they arrived here? Where does one locate the beginning of India as a civilisation? Does it originate in the Vedas? Does it go back to the Indus civilisation? Was there a civilisation before the Indian mythos emerged? What was India when the Holocene began 12000 years before our time? Why is there politics being constructed around the question of India’s origin? This lecture will discuss the need for a People’s Report on Indian civilisation and the efforts being made towards preparing such a report. This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the second of a series of four masterclass lectures by Prof. G N Devy, titled Memory, Culture and The Being of India that took place in the BIC premises in early February 2022. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app!

Indians belong either to castes or to tribes. What makes the tribal people tribal or adivasis? What have been there cultural traditions, their thought patterns and their philosophy of life? What led to some of them getting branded as ‘criminal tribes’? What is the future of the culture of the Adivasis in the 21st century world? This lecture will present views of the speaker based on his experience of creating the Adivasi academy at Tejgadh and a global network of the indigenous peoples. The lecture will offer a perspective on the rapidly disappearing continent of culture that the indigenous of the world inhabit. This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the second of a series of four masterclass lectures by Prof. G N Devy, titled Memory, Culture and The Being of India that took place in the BIC premises in early February 2022. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app!

The Census of India had listed 1652 ‘Mother Tongues’ in its 1961 language report. In 1971, this number was brought down to just 108. Where did the remaining 1455 mother tongues disappear? This lecture will present the story of the epic search for those ‘silence’ languages and the people’s movement which emerged out of the search. It will present the changing profile of India’s language diversity and the need for preservation of the diversity for safeguarding our federal structure. This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the first of a series of four masterclass lectures by Prof. G N Devy, titled Memory, Culture and The Being of India that took place in the BIC premises in early February 2022. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app!

Marriages in India are a universal phenomenon that continue to be characterized by  rigid social and cultural norms. 90% of marriages in India are family-arranged. Individuals have a strong preference for caste homogamy, women tend to marry more  educated men (educational hypergamy). Dowry payments are still quite common at the  time of marriage. Given these sticky norms, how would an unexpected disaster alter these unique features of the Indian marriage market? Disasters, natural (such as floods, earthquakes), industrial (such as a chemical  leak) or a global pandemic (such as COVID-19), often come with little to no warning  with large-scale economic and demographic shocks to households, both temporarily and  permanently. Beyond the impact on economic livelihoods, studies have looked at  fertility responses, changes to human capital formation and other welfare outcomes due  to disasters. However, these events can also change social structures, including  marriages. In this episode of BIC Talks, Instructional Assistant Professor at Temple University, Dr.Shreyasee Das talks about ‘How Disasters Can Shape Marriages’ that she conducted along with Shatanjaya Dasgupta and in this conversation with Finance and Markets Journalist Bansari Kamdar, explores relationships, their social and economics lives and the impact sudden and acute stressors like a natural disaster may have on them. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, and Stitcher.

Listen to the young changemakers who have weathered incredible adversities and pioneered programs that are changing the world. Bringing awareness to the plight of disadvantaged children and youth was important to Rishi, a young teenager who was passionate about the happiness of the world. His sudden departure at the age of 17 years brought people together, bonded with grief and love, and the fire to continue what he started. In his memory, programs supporting these disadvantaged children have uncovered inspiring stories that are transformational. This episode of BIC Talks brings you stories narrated by ordinary children who have experienced extraordinary hardship and faced tremendous loss. They were brave enough to find a doorway into the world that showed them that success is not determined by avoiding challenges, but how they allowed the challenges to shape them. They have become extraordinary individuals and beacons of inspiration to others. And in being a light for the world, they spread their resilience and joie de vivre to others, transforming the world. These are the changemakers. This is an extract from a physical event that took place on August 19, 2022 at the BIC premises.

The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. This episode is a conversation between an author and a historian who are both invested in the histories of cinema and the city, Kolkata in particular. Using ideas in the book Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures as a fulcrum, novelist, essayist, poet, and musician Amit Chaudhuri and Rochona Majumdar,  Associate Professor, Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, discuss the role of art films in postcolonial public life. BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

India and Bangladesh achieved a historic victory in the 1971 war. Yet fifty years later, important questions remain about India’s aims and policy in the war. Did India have a prior plan to break up Pakistan? When and why did it involve itself with the Bangladesh freedom struggle? When did India decide to prepare for military action? Why was no other country prepared to support the cause of an independent Bangladesh? How was India able to counter the new US–China–Pakistan axis that emerged dramatically midway through the liberation struggle? How did India persuade the Soviet Union to shed its initial reluctance to support the liberation war? Did India ‘win the war but lose the peace’ by signing the Simla Agreement? Drawing on previously unexplored Indian records, eminent diplomat and historian Chandrashekhar Dasgupta dispels many myths as he sheds fascinating new light on these and other questions through his new book, India and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Deeply researched over eighteen years, this authoritative, lucid and compellingly narrated book also reveals why and how India fashioned an overarching grand strategy, employing every instrument of national power – political, diplomatic, economic and military – to help the Bangladesh freedom fighters speedily liberate their country. In this episode of BIC Talks, Ambassador Dasgupta discusses the more intriguing parts of this particular chapter in the history of the subcontinent with Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao. This episode is an extract from a virtual event that took place in late January 2022. Speakers Chandrashekhar Dasgupta Ambassador (Retd), GoI & Author Chandrashekhar Dasgupta is a retired Indian Foreign Service officer, who served as ambassador to China (1993-96) and the European Union (1996-2000). He was involved in the UN climate change negotiations for over a decade, both during and after his years in the foreign service. He was a member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from 2007 to 2018. Dasgupta was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008. His previous publications include War and Diplomacy in Kashmir 1947-48 and numerous articles on diplomatic history, climate change and sustainable development. Nirupama Menon Rao Ambassador & Former Foreign Secretary, GoI Nirupama Rao is a former Indian Foreign Service officer. She retired as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, the senior most position in the Foreign Service, being the second woman to occupy the post (2009-2011). She was the first woman spokesperson (2001-02) of the Indian foreign office. She served as India’s first woman High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Sri Lanka (2004-2006) and to the People’s Republic of China (2006-2009). She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013. In retirement she has been a Senior Visiting Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute at Brown University where she has taught an undergraduate seniors course on “India in the World” and George Ball Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Ambassador Rao was a Fellow at the India-China Institute of The New School, New York in 2016 and a Public Policy Fellow at The Wilson Center, Washington D.C. in 2017. She is now a Global Fellow of The Wilson Center. She was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow from 2015-2016 and a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy in 2017. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and a Councillor on the World Refugee and MigrationCouncil. She has an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (2012) from Pondicherry University. . She is a staunch believer in the power of social media as an advocacy platform for policy and currently has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter. In 2016, she received the Vanitha Ratna Award from the Government of Kerala. She also received the Fellowship of Peace Award of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Center in Washington D.C in 2018. Ambassador Rao is a Founder-Trustee with her husband, Sudhakar, of The South Asian Symphony Foundation a not-for-profit Trust which is dedicated to promoting mutual understanding in South Asia through the creation of a South Asian Symphony Orchestra. Her most recent book is ‘The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China, 1949 to 1962’, published by Penguin Random House.