Rajesh James

The  narrative  logic  of  mainstream  Malayalam  cinema  is  often  predicated  on  heteronormative  values  and  homophobic  social  practices.  Though  representations  of  LGBTQIA+  (lesbian,  gay,  bisexual,  transgender,  queer,  intersex,  asexual  and  agender)  desires  (both  individual  and  collective)  have  been  subject  to  changes  particularly  after  the  historical  verdict  of  2018,  mainstream  Malayalam  cinema  is  quite  reluctant  to  explore  “the love that had for so long been left out in the cold” (Griffiths 2008, 130). Barring a few exceptions, most of the films produced in Kerala (since Malayalam cinema’s inception in 1928) have characterised LGBTQIA+ as aberrant, abnormal, or deviant. Having said that, there have been considerable efforts from progressive filmmakers to critique and subvert the homophobic sentiments of the society and engage with queer desires in Malayalam cinema either denotatively or connotatively. This has been made possible due to their exposure to variegated  cultural  values  as  a  result  of  the  changing  socio-economic  and  political  conditions.  By  identifying  three major tropes (the closeted queer body, the stereotyped queer body, and the visible queer body) in queer filmic representations, the paper attempts to map the many expressions of queer subjectivities in Malayalam cinema. In the process, the article demonstrates how queer cinema in Malayalam disrupts heteronormativity using its queer aesthetics.

Caste-based discrimination is a grotesque socio-political reality in India. The term " Dalit " (or " untouchable ") refers to a person belonging to the lowest caste in the traditional Indian caste system. Inspired by B. R. Ambedkar, a Western-educated intellectual and the chief architect of the Indian constitution, Dalit writers have produced stories of resistance, stories of caste discrimination and social ostracization, and alternative and parallel visions of casteless societies. As an author of contemporary Dalit writings, Meena Kandasamy describes a broad spectrum of Dalit experiences, and she voices concerns that are often unar-ticulated in the mainstream Indian literary canon. In so doing, Kandasamy not only helps to interpret the reality confronting Dalits but also reclaims their lost voices and identity. In conversation , Kandasamy speaks very much the way she writes—with bluntness and warmth.

Questions of political allegiance between India and Pakistan have turned Kashmir into one of the most militarised zones in the world. Although antagonism between India and Pakistan vis-à-vis Kashmir is predicated on territorial disputes, the Kashmir Valley

India Retold: Dialogues with Independent Documentary Filmmakers in India is an attempt to situate and historicize the engagement of independent documentary filmmakers with the postcolonial India and its discourses with a focus on their independent documentary practices. Structured as an interview collection, the book examines how these documentary filmmakers, though not a homogeneous category, practice their independence through their ideology, their filmmaking praxis, their engagement with the everyday and their formal experiments. As a sparsely studied filmmakers, the book through meticulously tracing a wide ranging historical transitions (often marked by communal conflicts and the forces of globalization) not only details the ways in which independent filmmakers in India address the questions of postcolonial nation and its modernist projects but also explores their idiosyncratic views of these filmmakers which are characterized by a definitive departure from the logic of commercial films or state-sponsored documentary films. More important in many ways, these documentary filmmakers expose incongruences in national institutions and programs, embrace the voice of the underrepresented, and thus, imagine an alternative vision of the nation. During the last three years of the execution of the project, thirty Indian documentary filmmakers are interviewed in this book. Given the dearth of quality interviews and little theoretical engagement with documentary as a genre, this book would not only fill in the gap in scholarship but also would serve as an authentic guide for interested readers and for documentary filmmakers alike.

“Always historicize”! This imperative issued by Frederic Jameson in 1981, has become the watch word of a diverse array of critical methodologies that dominated 20th century. The term historicize implies an analysis and understanding of ‘everything’ in relation to its historical and cultural contexts. As result the contemporary epistemological expeditions believe that every forms of knowledge are within the constraints of its makers. Such radical imperatives were unheard in mathematics until the theories of George Ghevarghese Joseph. His attempt to historicize mathematics and its European bias challenged the perceived aesthetics of ‘real’ mathematics. In spite of all threats from the European mathematicians and their followers in the colonies, he could explore the cultural roots of mathematics.
His The Crest of the Peacock have registered considerable changes in the ways that mathematics in non-Western traditions are perceived, particularly by writers of general mathematics history texts. He asks “Why are non-Western contributions generally neglected in histories of science?” “Why is there such difficulty for new evidence on non-Western contributions to become accepted and then percolate into standard histories of science?”
According to him European sources generally fail to mention or acknowledge transmission or borrowing of any kind, even when the "circumstantial evidence" may be compelling. He described it as the "problem of invisibility" for non-European mathematics. He continues Western historians and writers need to recognize that they have imposed too broad a burden of proof on the East's importance to the historical development of mathematics.
Westerners often overlook circumstantial evidence and subtler signs of where and how mathematical knowledge has arisen. In particular cases, Western scholars have also missed another factor in the puzzle of mathematical development: the role of 16th-century Jesuits. These world travelers may well have been the agents who transmitted Chinese and Indian mathematical knowledge to European mathematicians and centers of scientific learning.
Even though Joseph established how these theories did travel to the West and were appropriated by Western scientists as their own in his works like The Crest of the Peacock and A Passage to Infinity: Medieval Indian Mathematics from Kerala and its Impact, his contributions and arguments are still behind the curtain.  Existing Eurocentric notions contemptuously views  such efforts as a mad cry. The more horrifying thing is the fact of criticism that he had to face from his land and its ‘official’ mathematicians.
Thus this paper attempts to forground the politics of writing histories of non-western mathematics and the efforts of George Ghevarghese Joseph to validate the uniqueness of Kerala School of Mathematics and thereby attempt a cultural critique of Eurocentric believes.
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