Speaker: Prof Anil Sethi, Dept. of History and Education, Azim Premji University

Chair: Dr Rita Brara Mukhopadhyay, Dept. of Sociology, University of Delhi

Holi took on many meanings in 19th-century Punjab. For ordinary people, social licence and frenzy were important elements, marking a symbolic reversal of familial, class and caste hierarchies. There were limits to this overturning of order, however, and all reversals served to affirm the control of dominant groups. Maharaja Ranjit Singh used Holi to display monarchical pomp and power. From the late 19th century, the "purifiers""”Sanatani, Arya and Sikh"”made concerted attempts to rid it of revelry and institute a pavitra celebration

From the Doordarshan Archives

Sangeeta Kokila: M.L. Vasanthakumari: Vols. I & II
(101 min; dvd; 2003; English)
Introduction: Sudha Raghunathan

Otello
(138 min; dvd; 1982; English subtitles)
Conductor: Zoltan Pesko
With Vladimir Atlantov (Otello); Kiri Te Kanawa (Desdemona); Piero Cappuccilli (Iago)
Orchestra and chorus of the Arena di Verona

Giuseppe Verdi's last tragic opera, based on a masterly adaptation of Shakespeare by the librettist Boito, is here shot in the spectacular Arena di Verona

Contemporary Protest Music in India
Speaker: Dr Rahul Ram, lead singer, songwriter and bass guitarist with the Indian Ocean band

Chair: Kajal Ghosh, singer

The presentation will focus on different forms and aspects of protest music in north India. The programme will include recorded music and live rendition

Shri Inder Malhotra, veteran journalist; Prof Ashis Nandy, Senior Fellow, CSDS; and Shri Ajoy Bose, journalist, anchor and author, discuss Ink in my Veins: A Life in Journalism by S. Nihal Singh (New Delhi: Hay House India, 2011)

Chair: Shri Krishna Prasad, Editor-in-Chief, Outlook

Pani, Potties aur Makaan: Fractured Domestic Landscapes

Ms Julia King, PhD candidate in Architecture for Rapid Change and Scarce Resources, London Metropolitan University, in conversation with Dr Renu Khosla, Director, Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence

Presentation on the development of a cluster-based sanitation system in Savda Ghevra, a resettlement suburb west of New Delhi whose inhabitants can seldom afford individual toilets with septic tanks. Following consultation with the community, municipal authorities were involved in revising regulations, and in place of the impractical strategy of community toilets was set up a low-cost system using rainwater collectors and individual basic toilet bowls connected to a common septic tank. For devising a simple, replicable model where service-users partner in a programme's design and management, the project received a Holcim Award for sustainable construction.

Roads of Bhakti Poetry

Speaker: Dr Andrew Schelling, Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado

Chair: Ms Vidya Rao, scholar and singer

A translator from Sanskrit, Pali and Hindi, and author of six volumes of poetry indebted to studies in ecology and ethnopoetics, the speaker has edited The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature (New Delhi, 2011), and describes how Bhakti is "˜salted' with an intensity that requires intellectual effort and much honest probing to get close to, how efforts to break free of social constraint took hundreds of forms across India, and the resonances of this literature for audiences far removed in time and place.