In a context where the argument for sustainable development has not taken adequate root, proponents of economic growth-oriented policies view the expansion of mining and extractive industries as an important tool for various ‘development’ agendas, including accelerating economic growth and…
In the lead article to this issue, Tadd Graham Fernée examines the relationship between the Enlightenment and Gandhian thought, and the ways in which the freedom movement in India was influenced by and reflected the latter. While Gandhi was clearly…
Mahatma Gandhi read about the French Revolution in prison, as he explained in his 1942 Quit India speech, in which he also compared the experience of the Indian freedom struggle to the Russian Revolution. Addressing the All India Congress Committee…
Writing over a century ago, Lenin had talked of finance capital as the 'coalescence of bank and industrial capital', and of a financial oligarchy presiding over this capital that sat on the Boards of Directors of both banks and industrial…
The partition of India in 1947, which witnessed enormous bloodshed in the name of religion and is described by Salman Rushdie (1997) as ‘something of colossally horrible proportions’ and ‘one of the century’s great tragedies’, has been one of the…
The predominantly pastoral society of the Rigvedic times seems to have become agricultural and the tribal pastoralists came to be transformed into peasants. But the fact that the Later Vedic texts still provide a mass of information on the significance…
Mainstream scholarship has often overemphasised the importance of merchants in the socio-economic set-up of early Tamil Nadu. In the light of references found in some of the early Sangam anthologies like Eññuttogai and Pattuppàññu, and a few of the post-Sangam…
Manager Pandey, one of the most significant Marxist literary critics in Hindi, breathed his last on the morning of 6 November 2022 after ailing for a long time. He was 81. What distinguished him from his peers was his firm…
Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Nationalism in India, with an Introduction by Amrita Basu, New Delhi: Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University, 282 pages, Rs 695 Subhoranjan Dasgupta Suranjan Das, ed., Gandhi and Champaran Satyagraha: Select Readings, New Delhi: Primus Books,…
This issue includes a symposium on some aspects of the social dimensions of development in India, with three articles by Dipa Sinha; Aashish Gupta, Vipul Paikra and Kanika Sharma; and Anjana Thampi and Arpita Biswas. Despite few spells of relatively…