I would like to place on record my deep gratitude to Professors Sasheej Hegde and Atlury Murali (2021) for having engaged with my book, Infinite Double: Persons/Things Empire/Economy (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2015) (hereafter ID), in such a…
Kalhana’s Rajatarangani, written in the twelfth century AD, contains a quasi-history of Kashmir which provides a valuable and accurate picture of the socio-cultural life of the region from the eighth century onwards. Prior to the eighth century, we know that…
This paper is primarily confined to the geographical limits of northern Tamil Nadu during the reign of the Pallavas. The rulers of this house were responsible for establishing the first known state in this region in or shortly before the…
The organised labour movement in our country has just completed a century. The first all-India level trade union – the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) – was formed in 1920. Over this long period, the labour movement has faced…
I first heard of Sheila Bhalla from my friend and colleague at Cambridge University, Ajit Singh, who used to come to Chandigarh every winter to meet his family. Ajit spoke with some awe of ‘Darshan’s chain-smoking Canadian wife who teaches…
Noted scholar and activist Gail Omvedt died after a long illness on 25 August 2021 in Kasegaon, Sangli district, Maharashtra, which she had made her home since the 1970s. In its obituary of the noted scholar, the CPI(M) recognised her…
In the lead article to this issue Swarup K. Chakrabarti, Amartya Chowdhury, Dhrubajyoti Chattopadhyay and Suranjan Das discuss the role of stigmatisation in determining the collateral fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using insights from the conceptual and empirical literature on…
The world witnessed one of the major pandemic events in 1918, wherein approximately 50 to 100 million lives, or about 5 per cent of the global population, were lost due to the H1N1 (influenza) virus (Oxford 2000). About half a…
Crises are endemic to capitalism. There were 38 banking, currency and twin (combining both) crises in developed countries and emerging markets during the period 1945–71, and 49 during the period 1919–39 (Joyce 2013: 33). Between 1970 and 2011, there were…
In the decades preceding the pandemic, India and China were often posited as the ‘success stories’ of contemporary globalisation. High and sustained rates of growth of aggregate and per capita national income, phenomenal growth in trade and investment flows, and…