It wasn’t a radical film by any definition of radical that existed at the time. The maker himself was clearly a radical figure. The first impression of Kumar Shahani was always that of frailty. A pronounced limp, sharp eyes and…
The current number of Social Scientist is a special issue on Mahatma Gandhi on the seventy-sixth anniversary of his martyrdom. We are grateful to Sucheta Mahajan for helping us prepare this issue.
It is well-known that in his major work Hind Swaraj as well as a vast number of dispatches, letters and speeches, Gandhi (2010 [1909]) expressed a recoil from the various elements of modernity that he detected in the last two-and-a-half…
Here is more of the same. The same with additional information, different illustrations, other arguments. And, of course, with a greater sense of urgency and desperation. It is more of the same that five years back I had written for…
India’s freedom struggle has been the biggest ever mass movement in the world. With the British enslaving the country, they brought in many changes leading to the change in composition of social classes. They established the railways, improved communication (with…
On 30 January 1948, at 17 minutes past 5 pm, Nathuram Godse shot Bapu thrice at point-blank range and killed him, as he arrived to conduct his daily evening prayer meeting. But this person who was a chronic failure was…
In the three-quarters of a century since the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) tried to obfuscate its links with the assassin, Nathuram Vinayak Godse. It claimed that Godse had left the organisation…
Nearly a month after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in India on 30 January 1948, Sardar Patel, the then Home Minister, wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 27 February 1948 pointing to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his group: ‘It was a…
The terrain of this paper, the writing and rewriting of history, is much traversed and contested. When we speak of the contested imaginings of the nation, history writing generally comes to mind. This is where the battle for the minds…
Tushar Gandhi, The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba, Harper Collins: Gurugram, 2023, ix+299 pages, Rs 399 ‘I have already said that Kasturbai was illiterate. I was very anxious to teach her, but lustful love left me no time. For…