This paper, in its primary aim, attempts to question the notions regarding the appearance and proliferation of the goddess cult and worship ritual in India, especially with reference to early historic Bihar (fifth century BCE to fifth century CE), through…
Among historians of early India, all of repute who have made notable contributions to our knowledge, there has been a worrying tendency of a remarkably relaxed attitude, bordering on apathy, towards the numerical value of all kinds of important facts.…
In the 83rd annual session of the Indian History Congress (IHC), certain issues concerning the teaching and purveying of secular historiography in India were tagged. Of the five resolutions taken up by the Executive Committee and the General Body of…
The partition of India in 1947, which witnessed enormous bloodshed in the name of religion, and was described by Salman Rushdie as ‘something of colossally horrible proportions’ and ‘one of the century’s great tragedies’ (Rushdie 1997), has been one of…
Unique systems of exploitation and forms of societal contradictions make India a distinct South Asian nation. Indian society is stratified along the lines of caste, gender, class, ethnicity, language, and religion. B.R Ambedkar reasoned, ‘You cannot build anything on the…
Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2020, 287 pages, Rs 995 Ali Raza’s book under review, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India, is a significant contribution to the history of the communist…
There is perhaps no more urgent and fraught issue in India today than the question of the relationship between the democratic State, secularism and religion. According to a widely held view, either secularism as a conceptnorm is inapplicable in India…
It is to the great loss for the intellectual community of the world that Professor Franson Manjali (born 10 November 1955) – whom many of us lovingly call simply by his first name ‘Franson’ as he himself loved to\ be…
A slightly expanded version of the message Tapati Guha-Thakurta read out at the memorial meeting for Vivan Sundaram in Delhi on 17 April 2023.