It has been thirty years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Torn down by a mob in full public view, the destruction of the mosque occurred on the back of a massive mobilisation that shook India’s secular foundations. This…
Jamia Millia Islamia, the Delhi-based Central University, marked the centenary of its foundation in 2020. The university was founded in 1920 during the freedom movement of India following the call of Mahatma Gandhi’s Swadeshi and the Non-Cooperation movements symbolising and…
Modern slavery is an umbrella word that covers forced labour, human trafficking, debt bondage/bonded labour, descent-based slavery, slavery of children, forced marriage, early marriage, domestic slavery, and slavery in the supply chain (Anti-Slavery International 2022). People end up trapped in…
Madhwi, Health, Medicine and Migration: The Formation of Indentured Labour, c. 1834–1920, Primus Books: New Delhi, 2020, xii+383 pages, Rs 1395. Michel Foucault in his path-breaking work The Birth of the Clinic (1973) delineates two significant developments in the field…
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…
Mahatma Gandhi read about the French Revolution in prison, as he explained in his 1942 Quit India speech, in which he also compared the experience of the Indian freedom struggle to the Russian Revolution. Addressing the All India Congress Committee…
Writing over a century ago, Lenin had talked of finance capital as the 'coalescence of bank and industrial capital', and of a financial oligarchy presiding over this capital that sat on the Boards of Directors of both banks and industrial…
The partition of India in 1947, which witnessed enormous bloodshed in the name of religion and is described by Salman Rushdie (1997) as ‘something of colossally horrible proportions’ and ‘one of the century’s great tragedies’, has been one of the…
The predominantly pastoral society of the Rigvedic times seems to have become agricultural and the tribal pastoralists came to be transformed into peasants. But the fact that the Later Vedic texts still provide a mass of information on the significance…
Mainstream scholarship has often overemphasised the importance of merchants in the socio-economic set-up of early Tamil Nadu. In the light of references found in some of the early Sangam anthologies like Eññuttogai and Pattuppàññu, and a few of the post-Sangam…