Shot dead by Hindu right-wing fanatics ten years ago, M M Kalburgi was an indelible figure in the world of Kannada scholarship. A spate of books have been published about him in Kannada since his death, but the English-language sphere has seen only little engagement with his work, in spite of his valorisation as a kind of martyr in the battle against India’s Hindu Right. 

Himal’s virtual cover for September 2025 presents an extraordinary, meticulous excavation of Kalburgi’s life and legacy, offering unprecedented insight into the man himself and into the religious, caste and political histories of what we know today as Karnataka.

Published on 30 August 2025 – ten years to the day since Kalburgi’s killing – Srikar Raghavan’s essay unpacks the ideas and intellectual battles that gripped the strident rationalist and scholar. Kalburgi faced censure and controversy for the better part of his life, especially from an orthodoxy that did not appreciate his challenges to tradition or care much for the humanism that drove his intellectual and political convictions.

Alongside this, we present a review essay by Laxmi Murthy from April this year on I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India, which focusses on the journalist Gauri Lankesh. Lankesh was assassinated in 2017, falling to prey to the same species of indoctrination that claimed Kalburgi as well as two other iconoclastic minds – Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare – in Karnataka and the neighbouring Indian state of Maharashtra. Read together, the pieces bear witness to the courage and convictions of two iconic intellectuals who lived and died with targets on their backs, paying the cost of dissent in an increasingly intolerant India.

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All best

Roman Gautam