Editorial Note, Nov-Dec, 2023
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.
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.
In the lead article in this issue titled ‘The Constitutionality and Rationality of the Secular Imperative’, Rahul Govind defends the constitutional value of secularism against academic and political critiques which contend either that secularism has no roots in the Indian…
This issue of Social Scientist, guest-edited by Indu Agnihotri, brings together a set of papers on the lives of women focusing on issues of work and livelihood, interwoven with their daily struggles in different regions of India. The papers are…
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…
More than a year since the start of war in Ukraine, and with that war still ongoing, the lead article in this issue of Social Scientist by Anuradha Chenoy takes a step back to assess what triggered and sustains this…
6 December 2022 marked the completion of thirty years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which heralded a major transformation of India’s polity with a former right-wing fringe rising to dominance riding on a majoritarian and communal agenda. That…
In the lead article to this issue, Tadd Graham Fernée examines the relationship between the Enlightenment and Gandhian thought, and the ways in which the freedom movement in India was influenced by and reflected the latter. While Gandhi was clearly…
This issue includes a symposium on some aspects of the social dimensions of development in India, with three articles by Dipa Sinha; Aashish Gupta, Vipul Paikra and Kanika Sharma; and Anjana Thampi and Arpita Biswas. Despite few spells of relatively…
Besides being inherently controversial with implications for freedom of choice of religion, anti-conversion laws run into a long-standing practice among oppressed sections even within the majority community: that of opting for conversion as a form of protest. This issue has…
This issue of Social Scientist leads with two long review essays: one based on a book by Rehman Sobhan, on his experiences as a member of the Planning Commission established after Bangladesh’s liberation in 1971; and the other on a…