Nanded, a small town in the hinterland of Maharashtra, affixes its coordinates in between the cultures of the past and the travelling tradi...
Nanded, a small town in the hinterland of Maharashtra, affixes its coordinates in between the cultures of the past and the travelling traditions of elsewhere. A Marathi-speaking district, Nanded borders Telugu- and Kannada-speaking states.
In many ways, Nanded was and is a meeting point of diversities: it is shared by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Lingayats, and Sikhs in particular. It was here that Gobind Singh declared that the Granth Sahib, the sacred text of Sikhs, was the final guru and ordered his followers to embrace the path of purity and piety.
Nanded has always been a land of enduring conflicts, natural calamities, caste and religious riots. It is a hotbed of extreme left-wing operations and right-wing populism. Once, after a Muslim man, a classmate of mine from law school, married a Hindu woman, the city was under curfew for two weeks.
It is also a place of progressive activism and the nursery of the Dalit movement, especially the land rights movement, Ambedkar-led movement, Republican movement, and the Dalit Panthers. Harihar Rao Sonul, one of the first Dalit Parliamentarians in independent India, came from Nanded’s Maharwada. Sonule was a member of the Scheduled Caste Federation formed by BR Ambedkar.
The town also contained a mill established by the monarch of...
