I knew Javeed Alam for over forty years. We were introduced to each other through our professional membership of the Political Science fraternity in India as well as our mutual interest in Marxism. I remember the first time we had…
Javeed Alam was a close friend and intellectually combative interlocutor from the time I first met him, when both of us were Visiting Fellows at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, in the mid-to-late 1990s. What drew me…
In the past weeks so many persons around the world are together in remembering John Berger – as though he were a friend, almost as though we are all friends. As though in this mourning there is some elation reminiscent…
John Berger’s television series Ways of Seeing famously began with him setting a knife to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. Flouting all rules of television performance, he stood with his back to the camera that instead faced the framed painting hung…
P. Chandramohan, Developmental Modernity in Kerala: Narayana Guru, SNDP Yogam and Social Reform, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2016, xiv + 260 pages, Rs 750 The question of modernity and the theoretical approaches that are used to describe and explain it…
The world capitalist crisis which began in 2007-08 persists, with no end in sight. Its persistence has to do with two major developments, both related to the phenomenon of globalization: the first is a change that occurs in the role…
I feel greatly honoured that I have been asked to deliver the Harold Wolpe memorial lecture for the year 2016. Harold Wolpe was an outstanding thinker who combined political activism for the liberation of the South African people with deep…
In a rear-view mirror, the colonial construction of the idea of the ‘North Eastern Frontier’ was reshaped by partition as a political reality in the form of ‘North East India’ to be integrated with the Nation State. The terra incognita,…
Historical background Concentration of land in the hands of absentee landlords coupled with unprotected tenancy rights, arbitrary and sometimes even forcible ejectment of tenants by landlords, underutilization of cultivable land and increasing exploitation of peasantry under the garb of high…
Natural Rubber (NR) has emerged as a lucky crop in the international market by early 2003 and continued till 2012 (Fox and Castella 2013). India is the fourth largest producer of NR in the world (2012-13) with a share of…