Traditional intellectuals, both Hindu and Muslim, suffered and declined under the impact of the colonial rule in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in India. Western ideas, as well as the new conditions of economy and society had a crushing…
Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Anne Waldrop (eds), Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India, Anthem Press, Delhi, 2015, 254 pages, Rs. 695. Sudha Sharma, The Status of Muslim Women in Medieval India. Sage Publications; 2016, 270 pages Rs. 750.
As the lead article of the current issue of Social Scientist we publish the text of K.N. Panikkar’s Chukkapalli Pitchaiah Memorial lecture for 2016, where the author discusses the issue of nationalism. While anti-colonial nationalism in India succeeded in mobilising…
Let me begin by thanking the Chukkapalli Pitchaiah Memorial Trust for selecting me for its prestigious award for the year 2016. It is indeed an honour, an opportunity as well, particularly because it also gives me the privilege of speaking…
I present a theory of exploitation from a Marxist perspective. To situate my theory within existing literature, it is useful to make a couple of contrasts. One, Marx discusses exploitation primarily as a phenomenon in the capitalist mode of production.…
To begin with, let me clarify that I do not wish to approach ‘Europe’s South’ and ‘Global South’ as pregiven, stable, homogenous and bounded entities. I wish to approach them as constructs which have been constructed and reconstructed through various…
Except for the extermination of Tasmanians, modern history recognizes no cases in which the virtually complete supplanting of the indigenous population of a country by an alien stock’s apropriation of their land has been achieved so steadily and ruthlessly. Yet…
India is the corn chest for Scotland, where we poor gentry must send our youngest sons as we send black cattle to the south, - Walter Scott, 1821. The monolithic construction of identities by the imperialist and anti-imperialist historiographies of…
Ali Usman Qasmi, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan, Anthem Press India, 2015, 278 pages, Rs 695 O.P. Jaiswal and Bijoy Kumar Choudhary (ed.), Archaeology and Art of Ganga, Gandak and Kosi Basin, Bihar: A Felicitation…
The current issue of Social Scientist has as its lead article the text of the Kumar Gandharva Memorial lecture delivered by T.M. Krishna, the renowned vocalist of Karnatic music. Krishna addresses the question: what exactly do we mean by ‘classical’…