Who brought India its Independence? | Prof. P. Sainath | 2022

IIT Gandhinagar
IIT Gandhinagar
8.8 هزار بار بازدید - 2 سال پیش - Speaker: Prof. P. Sainath (Journalist,
Speaker: Prof. P. Sainath (Journalist, Author and Founder Editor, PARI -People’s Archive of Rural India)
Discussant: Prof. Aashish Xaxa (HSS | IITGN)

Bio of the speaker:
Magsaysay Prize -winner P. Sainath is an Indian journalist who focuses on social and economic inequality, deprivation and poverty, particularly in rural India. Amartya Sen has called him “one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger.” In September 2021, he was awarded the Fukuoka Grand Prize, one of Japan’s top international awards.  Though the recipient of over 60 national and global awards for journalism, Sainath has also declined several – including the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian award – as he believes “journalists should never accept prizes and rewards from the governments they cover and critique.” In 2021, he declined the Rs. 1-million YSR award from the government of Andhra Pradesh (he is a member of their AGRI mission, where he serves pro bono).

Sainath was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in Fall 2012 and has been conferred doctorates by the University of Alberta at Edmonton and the St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. In India, he has taught journalism for 36 years. His book Everybody Loves A Good Drought was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013. All the royalties of this bestseller – now in its 56th print – go each year in prizes to rural reporters writing in Indian languages.

A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since then spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for India’s largest newspapers, including The Times of India and for The Hindu (of which he was Rural Editor for a decade). More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides – close to 400,000 in two decades since 1995 – on the national agenda.

In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture, and a lot more. PARI, which publishes in 14 languages, is a totally independent multimedia digital platform creating a unique database, the only one of its kind that can lay claim to journalism representative of every region and section of rural people in this incredibly diverse nation. It is entirely free of both governmental and corporate control.

PARI, which completed 7 years in December 2020, has won 43 national and international awards in the 84 months of its existence – on average, one every 58 days. Of these, 12 are international awards – and 17 were won during the pandemic, mostly for its coverage of livelihoods under lockdown. The latest of these was the Ramnath Goenka prize.

Abstract of the talk:
Who were our freedom fighters? Were they the handful of Oxbridge elites whose names we usually see in the textbooks? Or were they people we’d normally never think of or recognise as freedom fighters – millions of ordinary Indians who fought without thought of reward, who would not later become MPs and Ministers, Governors and Presidents, or hold other high offices? People who were quite unsure of whether they would live to see the freedom they fought for? Surely, in the 75th year of our Independence, it’s worth looking at these footsoldiers of Indian Freedom
2 سال پیش در تاریخ 1401/06/29 منتشر شده است.
8,857 بـار بازدید شده
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