Articles by Bhupendra Yadav

Athletes from Haryana won more than half of the gold medals at the Commonwealth Games 2010. Against the backdrop of the transformation of sports into global commerce, corporatisation and "shamateurism", this article uncovers some of the reasons for the success of the Haryanvi athletes in combat and contact sports. Rewards have so far only celebrated the famous; they have not created a sports culture. And a "sports policy" has been announced by the state government only after the CWG success. Will the new sporting icons help Haryana make the transition from an obsession with honour to a concern for human dignity?

Suraj Bhan evolved from being a chauvinist who believed his Haryana was the centre of the world into a scientific professional who undertook landmark excavation at Harappan sites. In conservative Haryana he was a man of the Renaissance who on many occasions took on proponents of Hindutva.

Khap or caste panchayats wield much more power than the statutory panchayats in states like Haryana and order harsh punitive measures against couples who marry within the gotra. Even powerful politicians do not dare invoke the law against them. However, in a couple of recorded cases, the aggrieved women have dared to come out in public and demand action against these khap panchayats.

Victor Gordon Kiernan (1913-2009), like many other Marxist scholars, stood resolutely with labour in its contest for hegemony with capital, sang paeans to the peasants and condemned imperialism. His unique niche among historians, however, is assured by two things. First, he pioneered a study of cultural imperialism. He was interested in knowing what imperialism meant for its victims and which attitudes shaped it in the metropolis. Second, Kiernan was among the very few who understood the language and idiom spoken in the south Asian subcontinent. He was among the earliest translators of the sublime Urdu poetry of Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

The blame for Sanskrit's decline lies not in the manner the new curricula framework has been drafted, but in its very "complexity" that for long made it inaccessible to a majority of the population.