It was the autumn of the first half of the seventeenth century when a young Jain merchant from Jaunpur named Banarasidas excitedly travelled to a city named Benares for visiting the holy shrines of the Jain deities Lord Parshwanatha and…
In November 2020, the Government of Odisha (GoO) notified the closure and merger of 14,000 elementary schools in the state under a new policy initiative of the NITI Aayog named Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital in Education (SATH-E). It…
K.L. Tuteja, Religion, Community and Nation: Hindu Consciousness And Nationalism In Colonial Punjab, Delhi, Indian Institute of Advanced Study and Primus Books, 2021, xii + 372 pages, Rs 1250. K.L. Tuteja’s Religion, Community and Nation is a welcome and enriching…
This issue of Social Scientist, concerned predominantly with historical questions, begins with an article by Sanjeev Kumar on what he sees as a contemporary effort on the part of distinct social entities to face the challenge of post-colonial efforts to…
The story of civilisational progress and decadence is one of mankind’s tryst with history and, an account of its capability to preserve the feats of development. It is also a constant race with time, wherein one civilisation may not cope…
In modern Tamil Nadu social protest and anti-caste movements are always attributed to the Dravidian movement and E.V.R. Periyar. Individuals and organisations who played an active part earlier in challenging the odious system of caste and practice of social discrimination…
During the period between fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Karnataka was ruled by kingdoms such as the Hoysala and Vijayanagara. This was a period that witnessed major political developments, including the decline of the Hoysalas and the rise of the Vijayanagara…
The folk music of Paite can broadly be categorised into four periods of time: prior to 1600; from 1600 to 1940; from 1940 to 1990; from 1990 onwards. The stage of ‘prior to 1600’ was the ancient remote past, the…
This is not an obituary in the formal sense. Nor is it an appreciation of Aijaz Ahmad’s life and work. In the days to come, we will engage with his important and enormously erudite corpus, as we come to terms…
For several decades, our understanding of ancient, and what has now been acknowledged as early medieval India, has been slowly but steadily transformed. Bhairabi Prasad Sahu was amongst the scholars nurtured in the post-Independence era who contributed consistently and substantially…