OBITUARY: S. K. Rao
S.K. Rao was born in a village called Gogulumpadu in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, a village that lacked even a post office, for which one had to go to the adjacent village Chintalavalli; and even though he spent…
OBITUARY: Joseph Prabhu
Joseph Benedict Prabhu (lovingly known as ‘JB’) breathed his last the evening of 27 September 2021, at their home in Los Angeles; wife Betty Bamberg and Joseph’s daughter Tara were by his bedside when he passed away peacefully. The first…
Book Review : COVID-19 and the Structural Crises of Our Time
Lim Mah-Hui and Michael Heng Siam-Heng, COVID-19 and the Structural Crises of Our Time, ISEAS Publishing, 2022, xxi+198 pages For generations born after World War II, the COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe they have encountered at a global…
Editorial Note, Nov-Dec, 2021
We had brought out very recently a special number celebrating the ninetieth birthday of Professor Irfan Habib, the renowned historian. The current issue is another special number that celebrates the ninetieth birthday of another renowned historian, Professor Romila Thapar. We…
Introduction
Romila Thapar, arguably one of the great historians and public intellectuals of our times, turned 90 on 30 November 2021. This issue of Social Scientist is a tribute to her work, and includes contributions from young and not so young…
The Rajan and the Raksasas: Revisiting Exile and the Kingdom
Professor Romila Thapar’s Rao Bahadur R. Narasimhachar Endowment Lecture, 1977–78, was published by the Mythic Society under the title Exile and the Kingdom: Some Thoughts on the Rāmayaṇa. It was one of a series of essays pointing out the implicit…
Beyond Gargi and Maitreyi: Exploring the Theri and Thera Apadanas
Romila Thapar has been an inspiration, an inimitable role model as a scholar, teacher and, more visibly in recent times, as a public intellectual for several generations of students. I have learnt from her for many decades, and we have…
Engraving New Horizons: Romila Thapar and Inscriptions
On 15 July 2020, epigraphists working at the Epigraphy Branch of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) protested in front of their office in Mysore. The cause of their anger was the fact that during the recent restructuring of the…
Between History and Anthropology: Finding a New Home for Archaeology
This essay is dedicated to Romila Thapar, who recently turned ninety. As I was writing this article, I recalled my struggle in the initial years of my doctoral research to frame questions for a project centred on text-aided archaeology, one…
Reconfigured Archaeologies: A Reflexive Approach to Sites of Intersection
In his introductory essay to the volume on ethnographies of archaeological practice, Matt Edgeworth (2006, p. 7) points out how ‘the excavation site itself can be seen as only one of multiple sites\ (overlapping and occupying the same space) .…