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Anurag Shukla Profile picture
@Anuraag_Shukla
Oct 28, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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~ A girls' school in Mangalore, Karnataka (c. the 1870s). Image
Another picture of the same school. This school for girls was housed in a big building. Image
~ Photograph of a Girls' School at Bombay in Maharashtra (c. 1873) Image
~ A Marathi teacher instructing his students in a class in Bombay (c. 1873) Image
~ A private teacher in one of the local schools in Varanasi. (c. 1870). From the Archaeological Survey of India Collections Image
~ A Mussalmaum Schoolmaster (original title)

by Sir Charles D'Oyly (1781–1845), undated, from Paul Mellon Collection Image
From my earlier thread on schools/colleges/Universities in British India.

~ A Girls School in Jaipur, (c. the 1870s/80s) Image

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More from @Anuraag_Shukla

Anurag Shukla Profile picture
Jul 18
What if the world’s most celebrated idea of “helping the needy” is not universal, but theological?

What if social security systems today are based on a religious fiction about human beings?

SN Balagangadhara asks this unsettling question. Let’s walk through it. 🧵 Image
Modern psychology, economics, even development policies assume that humans are needy beings.

From Maslow’s pyramid to poverty metrics, this anthropology of deficiency drives how we structure society.

But where does this idea come from?
Balagangadhara argues that it is not scientific. It is theological.

In Christian thought, the human is a sinner, defined by lack, craving redemption.

This image, secularized, becomes the “rational actor” or “needy citizen” in modern social sciences.
Read 12 tweets
Anurag Shukla Profile picture
Jul 15
What if the humanities in India are not about remembering but forgetting?

What if the classroom itself is a site of loss, not inquiry?

D. Venkat Rao invites us to rethink the very foundation of knowledge.

This is a thread for those who teach, think, or remember. 🧵Image
We inherit the humanities as a grand civilizational archive. It speaks of reason, beauty, freedom, ethics.

But as Rao reminds us, it also speaks in the voice of empire. Its "human" was never meant to include all lives, all memories.
In India, the university recites the names of Aristotle, Rousseau, Freud, Foucault. It trains us to speak in concepts forged in European crises.

What happens when these are applied to worlds shaped by oral traditions, embodied memory, ritual continuity?
Read 16 tweets
Anurag Shukla Profile picture
Jul 12
What if Indian academia is not producing knowledge but staging its simulation?

Vivek Dhareshwar calls it intellectual parasitism. A condition where concepts are consumed without being metabolized.

A thread on his radical vision for a new humanities. 🧵Image
Intellectual parasitism is not mimicry. It is dispossession.

It is when Foucault, Derrida, Butler are recited like mantras, their concepts floating free of the historical and social wounds that made them necessary.

Theory becomes a fetish. Thinking stops.
In this regime, the classroom is not a site of encounter. It is a theatre of citation.

Learning becomes procedural. Texts are mastered but not suffered. Concepts are deployed but never ruptured. Knowledge circulates without consequence.
Read 10 tweets
Anurag Shukla Profile picture
May 5
How did the British and missionaries react to bare-chested women in South India? A story of colonial morality, caste, and cultural erasure that still shapes our thinking on dress and modesty today.

A thread 👇

A company painting of a basket maker and his wife, late 18th century.Image
In pre-colonial South India, women—across many castes—often went bare-chested. This was not seen as shameful. It was part of local aesthetics, climate, and caste codes. Modesty had a different meaning.
Enter the British and Christian missionaries with their Victorian morality, which equated nudity or partial nudity with "barbarism" or "backwardness".

The bare-chested woman became, to them, a symbol of India’s moral decay.
Read 6 tweets
Anurag Shukla Profile picture
Jan 22, 2024
And VS Naipaul wrote so prophetically

"The construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult… an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Ram.”

"A convert’s deepest impulse is the rejection of his origins.”
In an interview published in Outlook magazine, Naipaul had said;

"You say that Hindu militancy is dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force and it will prove to be so."
"So in India at the moment, you have a million mutinies - every man is a mutiny on his own - and I find that entirely creative. It's difficult to manage, it gets very messy, but it is the only way forward."
Read 4 tweets
Anurag Shukla Profile picture
Jan 4, 2024
Ancient Indian texts (Upavana Vinoda, Kathasaritasagara etc.) talk about two types of gardens.

One attached to a royal place and one that was a public garden.

These gardens were spaciously laid out to include water tanks, flowers, orchard, etc.

Then our historians made Mughals synonymous with gardens in India.Image
Kautilya's Arthasastra confirms that an expertise in planting trees, shrubs and curating gardens was recognised.

Such plantings are also extolled in the Matsya Purana, in the form of dramas, epics, and poems that contain references to well laid out gardens.
Vatsyayana, in his Kamasutra, the 2nd century Sanskrit text, talks about creating a garden around a house with fruit trees, vegetables, flowering plants and herbs.

The 3rd-4th century Sanskrit text Vrikshaayurveda of Parasara classified plants in considerable detail.
Read 8 tweets

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