Imtiaz Ahmad passed away on 19 June 2023 at eighty-three, leaving a considerable loss and void in Indian academia. A legendary teacher and scholar par excellence, he taught at the Centre for Political Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New…
Saurav Kumar Rai, Debating Modern Indian History, Manak Publications, New Delhi, 2021, 218 pages, Rs 500 Debating Modern Indian History by Saurav Kumar Rai is a fascinating, engaging and reader-friendly book. It is an ambitious project which reappraises the conventional…
This issue of Social Scientist leads with two lectures delivered in memory of the legendary Communist leader P. Sundarayya – one delivered at Hyderabad by P.D.T. Achary and the other at Delhi by Prakash Karat. Achary’s lecture addresses the implications…
The Preamble of India’s Constitution declares India as a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic. The words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ were added to it through the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution in 1976. The later addition of these words gave rise…
I consider it a privilege to be asked to deliver the first P. Sundarayya Memorial Lecture in Delhi organised by the Sundarayya Memorial Trust. P. Sundarayya (PS) made the biggest contribution to the CPI(M)’s understanding of the agrarian question in…
There is a whiff of nostalgia today about the debates related to industrialisation that occurred in India in the fifties. Its bolder versions suggested not accepting an unequal international division of labour that condemned developing countries to being hewers of…
The post-Khilafat–Non-Cooperation period occupies a distinctive position in modern India’s history for several reasons. Although one can say that this period (1920s) witnessed a widening of anti-British movements, at the same time, it also demonstrated a kind of aggressive communalism…
A century after Mussolini seized power in Italy (1922), we are reminded of the words written by the wise Bertrand Russel (1988: 82) that the ‘follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the…
In the middle of January, Hungary lost a brilliant thinker. Miklós Gáspár Tamás is remembered as a defining figure of the dissident scene at the time of ‘real socialism’ in the 1980s, one of the founder members of the underground…
The closest I came to meeting Ranajit Guha was when I was ICCR Guest Professor at the University of Vienna in 2014–15. A French student in my class informed me that Guha was settled in Vienna but, to my great…