It is an honour for me to give this lecture in memory of Asghar Ali Engineer, one of India’s most distinguished and courageous public intellectuals and activists. I didn’t really know him, though we had met on one occasion at…
Three Phases: Phase I In the years before Independence, the Indian economy had remained more or less stagnant. Per-capita income actually declined by 0.22 per cent per year from 1913 to 1950. After Independence, during the first phase, the state…
. . . one never follows in order to reproduce. The university as a spatial and temporal institutional form has always had many faces – as much in India as elsewhere across various national traditions and trajectories – in keeping…
The 1980s and 1990s were a difficult period for the Left across the world. Depleted by the brutal repression of authoritarian regimes that had cropped up in various parts of the developing world in the 1970s, discouraged by the collapse…
Crisis in the crop production sector has been sufficiently explored at the state and sub-state level ever since its outbreak by the late 1990s in India. A common thread in the analysis of agrarian crisis is generalisation of its causes…
Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, xii+374 pages, price not stated. Much before the Chopra Report (viz. Report of the Committee on Indigenous Systems of Medicine, authored under the…
The present issue is dedicated to the memory of Dr Biswamoy Pati – teacher, communist, historian – who passed away one year ago, in June 2018. Pati was closely associated with the editorial team of Social Scientist. This issue includes…
On 15 August 1947, nearly two hundred years of British colonial rule came to an end in the Indian subcontinent. The anti-colonial movement reaped its political harvest, after decades of political mobilisation. Great Britain, weakened by the Second World War,…
The ‘Amnesty’ constituted an important part of the Queen’s Proclamation which was announced on 1 November 1858 after the brutal suppression of the Revolt of 1857. The Queen’s Proclamation has been studied by the anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn as ‘a…
The Mughal social structure, in line with the Islamic sharia, recognised fosterage as a legally valid relationship, enjoying social acceptability and legal protection. Fosterage not only created possibilities of new familial connections that co-exited with unilateral relations through blood, but…