Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text, Penguin India, Gurgaon, 2016, xvii+305 pages, Rs 599. The historiography on militant and revolutionary anti-colonialism in India is witnessing a dawn of a new era. For decades,…
Smita Sahgal, Niyoga Alternative Mechanism to Lineage Perpetuation in Early India A Socio-Historical Enquiry Delhi: Primus Books, 2017, 242 pages, Rs 995 Submission has been held to be an appropriate virtue of women. It was supposed that a woman submits…
Anand Chakravarti, Is This Azaadi? Everyday Lives of Dalit Agricultural Labourers in a Bihar Village, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2018, (xiv+266) 280 pages, Rs 750. This book is a major contribution to the ongoing research in the academic sphere on…
History and Class Consciousness – Lukacs’ interpretation of Marx, together with the reification chapter of the book – still commands a certain authority. But the book’s political texts, which Lukács thought originated from the same source as the book’s philosophical…
I must have been no more than four years old. A hired Omni Van used to ferry all the neighbourhood kids to our preparatory school. One day, the driver of the Van relayed to my mother - either bemused or…
Guru Rao Bapat and Lata Singh, eds., Performing Arts in India: Performances of/and Violence, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2016, 242, pages, Rs. 300. In a troubled time of ours when intolerance and bigotry of almost all sorts are…
Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, xii+374 pages, price not stated. Much before the Chopra Report (viz. Report of the Committee on Indigenous Systems of Medicine, authored under the…
Book Reviews Deepak Kumar, The Trishanku Nation: Memory, Self, and Society in Contemporary India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016, 211 pages, Rs 495. Intellectuals always struggle with the question of relevance of their work in the face of the…
Recent studies of the contemporary situation of labour in neoliberal economies and of labour movements have emphasized a ‘decline of trade unionism’. This assessment is widespread and holds true for India, especially when we consider that the period following large-scale…
The purpose of this note is to look at certain formulations in Györg Lukács’ little booklet called Lenin, published in 1924, shortly after Lenin’s death, and to examine whether their validity extends beyond the specific historical context in which they…