In a biographical interview titled Record of a Life that was undertaken by his Hungarian translator, István Eörsi Lukács speaks about the historical conditions under which The Destruction of Reason was written. He speaks about the manuscript that ‘was written…
Between the putative indeterminabilty of the first part of my main title – ‘Criss-Crossing Theory, History and Method’ – and the sustained flashiness of my subtitle – ‘New Measures of Reflexivity’ – there lurks a problem that I wish to…
The term ‘subalterno’ is drawn from Gramsci’s analysis of Italian history in Prison Notebooks (1971) (Currie 1995: 219–46). His notion of the ‘subalterno’ provided the initial intellectual inspiration for the Subaltern Studies project led by Ranajit Guha in 1982. Guha…
There has been a growing demand1 since the late twentieth century to enumerate caste, especially the backward castes, in the censuses conducted by the Union Government every ten years (a practice commonly referred to as a ‘caste census’). Enumeration of…
Teacher, comrade and lifelong revolutionary Badruddin Umar (20 December 1931–7 September 2025) is no more. We offer him our deepest respect and love. Alongside this, on behalf of the people of Bangladesh, we convey our gratitude – for he devoted…
H.A. Qureshi and Shreya Pathak, The Lost Hero of Banaras: Babu Jagat Singh, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2024, viii+320 pages, Rs 1195 Book Review by Ashok Aounshuman Santosh Kumar Rai, Weaving Hierarchies: Handloom Weavers in Early Twentieth Century United Provinces,…
This issue of Social Scientist carries three articles that in different ways examine the transformation wrought by colonial rule in pre-Independence India. Aparna Balachandran in her article titled ‘Colonialism, Caste Formation and Urban Rule in Early Colonial Madras’, examines the…
This paper examines the relationship between caste labour and colonialism from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century through the lens of urban governance in the port city of Madras in South India under East India Company rule. A substantial…
The extant economic history of Jammu and Kashmir largely neglects the impact of the famine of 1877–78 which re-oriented the traditional occupational patterns to form new livelihood alternatives and labour regimes derivative of colonial rule. Such histories focus rather on…
Every historical age in which the production and reproduction of social relations take shape has its specificities. There is a position that over the course of capitalist progression, pre-existing social forms would evolve into capitalist forms (MECW, Vol. 6, 1976:…