Marking the birth centenary of one of India’s great filmmakers, this issue carries a piece by Subrata Sinha titled ‘In Search of a Revolutionary Modernism: The Art and Activism of Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’. Starting his professional life as a Communist…
Sudhindranath Datta, one of the post-Tagore modernist thinkers and poets of his time, penned his experience of watching a movie in his 1928 poem called ‘At a Cinema’ with these words: Upon the white backdrop Passes the imitation of life…
In recent decades, the liberal arts and social sciences have fruitfully come together to generate new meanings about literary/social texts and contexts. In this article, I shall raise the following question: What critical tools and theoretical approaches should we deploy…
The tradition of doubt and dissent harks back in India to her earliest literature, to the celebrated Hymn of Creation, the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛigveda (10.129), a brilliant expression of the enigma of creation and existence. Instead of providing…
Since the inception of the capitalist mode of production, it was clear to its early observers that the relationship between capital and labour is antagonistic. Although among Classical Political Economists, Karl Marx, through his demonstration of the origin of surplus…
The advent of biodiversity conservation in contemporary environmentalism towards the end of the twentieth century (Zimmerer 2006) and its relationship with conventional methods of protecting areas for conservation purposes throughout the colonial era (Brockington 2002) have become a contentious discourse.…
The sources for this article are all in the public domain. The lists of films on epidemics that appeared in popular media outlets during the global Covid-19 outbreak offered a ‘canon’ of epidemic films from the Silent Film era to…
Sohini Sarah Pillai, Krishna’s Mahābhāratas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative, Oxford University Press, 2024, xiv+278, Rs 1095. As an epic tradition, the Sanskrit Mahābhārata has been narrated, retold, imagined and performed by poets, authors, composers, and storytellers, repeatedly, ever…
This issue leads with an overarching assessment by Jayati Ghosh of how the vision of economic development itself has changed over time and the implications that follow. While the post World War II development discourse started with an emphasis on…
In this paper I intend to discuss some of the central concerns that have emerged – at least for me – about development in recent times. I will try to cover three very broad questions: How has our vision of…