The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

Teaching as Meditation by Mohan J. Dutta A story told in the village circle is the school, the law, and the memory of the ancestors. — after the Santali oral tradition In the Santal villages of Jharkhand, Bengal and Odisha, knowledge has travelled for centuries by voice and by drum, and by the slow return of the seasons. Long before Pandit Raghunath Murmu gave Santali its own script, Ol Chiki, in 1925, the people carried their history in the binti. This is the creation story that a guru recites at important ceremonies, telling how Pilcu Haram and Pilcu Budhi, the first man and the first woman, came into the world. The story was heard in a circle, with listeners sitting close enough to feel one another's warmth. A child learned the law of the village the way she learned the path to the well, by walking it again and again beside someone older. At the edge of each village stands the jaherthan, a grove of sal trees kept for the spirits who watch over the people. It is never cleared...

  What We Say Between the Songs The harmonium is still open on the carpet. Someone has just finished singing Aguner Poroshmoni , and the room has done the thing Bengali rooms do — the collective sigh, the half-closed eyes, the murmur of aha . Then the plates come out, the luchi and the aloor dom and the mishti someone drove two hours across the island to collect. Somewhere between the second helping and the recitation, a man in a kurta says it. Ora to kaaj korte chay na. They don't want to work. The dole. The crime figures. The special treatment. The houses handed over. Heads move. Someone adds a detail from talkback. Someone's wife says she doesn't feel safe near that part of town any more. Then the harmonium is pulled back, and we sing about the touchstone of fire, and nobody in the room believes anything has happened. Something has happened. We have just performed caste in te reo-less English, on land that was taken by the Crown, in a hall we rent from a council that ...

The Table and the List I first stepped onto a debate stage at nine years old. What followed was a long apprenticeship: school circuits, university tournaments, regional championships, more wins than losses, a top-three finish at an international championship. Later I coached teams, judged rounds, taught public speaking. None of this makes me an authority beyond the rooms I have worked in. It means I have spent most of my life inside the form, close enough to know what sustains it and what hollows it out. That life has left me certain of one thing. What Charlie Kirk practiced, and what he came to symbolize, was never debate. His organization built two things on American campuses. It built a table on the quad, with a microphone and a camera and a sign daring students to prove him wrong. And it built a list of professors. Read together, the table and the list tell you what the word "debate" was made to do. *** Start with the form itself. Debate is a structured contest of i...

  The Gated Enclave and the Mirror We Refuse to Hold In the eastern reaches of Singapore, a particular kind of Indian migrant built a parallel world. Not the whole diaspora. A visible, upwardly mobile slice: the techies, the investment bankers, the professionals who arrived with degrees, capital, and the quiet certainty that caste and class privilege breeds. They settled into gated communities that felt less like Singapore than like fragments of Noida, Bangalore, or Gurgaon lifted whole and set down by the sea. High walls. Controlled access. Familiar festivals. Diwali lights and Holi colours, carefully contained within the perimeter. From inside those walls, videos leaked out now and then. Anyone who has watched power operate in India recognised what they showed: the studied disdain reserved for working people. Taxi drivers. Hawkers. Security guards. Domestic workers. The precarious Singaporeans whose labour keeps the city fed, guarded, and moving. The tone, the body language, t...

  F*#%K Civility. Civility is the velvet glove. Peel it back and you find the fist. The word comes most often from the mouths of people who already own the microphone. They hold the endowments. They sit on the boards of trustees. They keep the donor lists and tune the algorithms that decide whose voice travels and whose dies quietly in the feed. When they demand civility, they want your dissent delivered pre-neutered. Strip out the anger. Strip out the urgency. Strip out the moral clarity that might actually shift something. Speak softly, in their register, at their pace, and whatever you do, leave the furniture where it is. The trick is old, and it has worn every costume. Plantation owners demanded it of the enslaved. Colonial administrators demanded it of the colonised. Factory bosses demanded it of strikers, and the dominant castes demanded it of those they pushed to the edge of the village. Today the loudest demand comes from far-right political networks and a billionaire cl...