Sheoraj Singh Bechain s short stories are infused with Dalit consciousness and struggle forwardpress.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forwardpress.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Why Bareilly’s landmark Syndicate Book House may find it difficult to reopen after the second wave
After running the shop for over 40 years, co-founder Santosh Verma all but acknowledges it cannot survive now. Santosh Verma and her Syndicate Book House in Bareilly.
“We were happy because we could not go anywhere else,” mused the nostalgic narrator of Nirmal Verma’s 1972 novel,
Days Of Longing. The same sentiment may have been felt by another young man who, on a quiet afternoon decades later, made his way to Syndicate Book House in the small North Indian town of Bareilly.
He had played in the bookstore as a child, just before he and his family moved to another city, and with the passage of time and other distractions, Bareilly had become a vague memory. But what this young adult remembered clearly was the small debt he owed to Syndicate’s cheerful owner – even though she, most likely, would not remember him at all.
‘The real Chipko’: How Shekhar Pathak wrote the first exhaustive, people’s history of the movement
Pathak’s new book focuses on the ordinary, often unlettered, men, women and children who shaped the forest rights struggle. Dec 27, 2020 · 06:30 am
I first came across Shekhar Pathak’s name in the files of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow. The year was 1983, and I was working on a dissertation on the social history of forests in the Uttarakhand Himalaya. In those days the UP State Archives were well run; the files one ordered came to one’s desk fairly quickly, and with all their pages intact. On the inside back cover of each file was a list of all the scholars who had seen that particular document before. Studying the records of the Forest Department and the General Administration, I found that in some cases I was the first person to have ordered a particular file, but in most cases the second. The person who had got to these records before me was a cert