OBITUARY: Remembering Nabila Sadiq
A memoriam for an academic in a scholarly journal like Social Scientist must be of a different tone and tenor than what I pen here for Nabila Sadiq. For me she was, first and foremost, a person, a very beautiful…
Book Review – Public Health Care in India: Historical Background and Current Realities
Sanjay Kumar and Jugal Kishore, Public Health Care in India: Historical Background and Current Realities, New Delhi: Century Publications, 2020, 288 pages, Rs 450. Sanjay Kumar and Jugal Kishore’s book, Public Health Care in India: Historical Background and Current Realities,…
Editorial Note, Mar-Apr, 2021
Traversing across ten centuries, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, in the lead article in this issue, covers five phases of ‘imperialism’ involving different forms of conquest, plunder and aggrandisement by the dominant powers of the day. In this history, he identifies forms…
Imperialism from the Eleventh Century to the Twenty-first Century
Everybody knows that capitalism is driven by greed, by the lure of profit. But greed in human beings was not born with capitalism. Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias expressed this perfectly when he said that in making decisions, he would consider…
The UGC’s ‘Framework’ for Teaching Indian History to Undergraduates: A Note
We have to remember all the time that we have a regime whose leading light, soon after occupying the office of Prime Minister of the country in 2014, announced that India had known plastic surgery as early as the mythical…
Patrons, Players and Sports in the Princely States
This essay explores the history of princely patronage to sports in colonial India and argues that the sporting field allowed a hybrid princely culture to evolve. Scholarship on colonial sports has focused either on the diffusion of British principles of…
The Pandemic and Reimagining the Urban
The Covid-19 pandemic is the most severe disruption experienced worldwide since structural adjustment and liberalisation of economies in the 1990s. Indian cities have been unsettled to an extent that happened never before since independence. Reverse migration of millions of urban…
Sacred Spaces as Markers of Disputes
Contesting the views of various religious denominations of Christians and Muslims, Mirza Gulam Ahmad wrote a pamphlet titled Razz-iHaqaiyat (The Truth). It was written in reply to the derogatory remarks made by the Ahl-i-Hadith sect in response to the affirmations…
Conventions and Representations of Love in Early Sanskrit Kāvyas
Understanding how a particular society comprehends, construes and represents love is significant from the point of view of cultural, emotional and literary history. Love has been a prominent theme in Sanskrit literature\ from the earliest times. Often referred to as…
Book Reviews
Suranjan Das and Achintya Kumar Dutta (eds.), Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal: Cholera, Malaria and Smallpox, A Documentation, Delhi: Primus, 2021, pages i–viii+397, Rs 1250. Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N.A. Attewell, Locating the Medical: Explorations in South Asian History,…