Asok Sen (1927–2015) was a mentor to a generation of scholars from Bengal. He went to South Suburban Branch School in Calcutta, and then studied economics at Presidency College and at the University of Calcutta. As an economist, he worked…
Ellen Meiksins Wood, a Professor at York University, Canada, died early this year. During the 1980s, when Marxism came under attack in the West, Ellen Meiksins Wood built a barricade to guard its intellectual existence. She systematically defended Marxism from…
Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, Indo-Persian Historiography to the Fourteenth Century, New Delhi: Primus, 2014, 260 pages, Rs 1095 The present volume makes an attempt to study literary production in the fourteenth century, and the cultural milieu that made the amalgamation of…
Akeel Bilgrami’s paper in the current issue of Social Scientist contains a powerful and comprehensive critique of liberal thought as it has developed from John Locke’s theory of Social Contract to the ‘multi-person prisoners’ dilemma’ underlying the argument regarding the…
The fact that several third world countries, especially in Asia, have experienced remarkably high rates of GDP growth has been a matter of much discussion. There has been talk of a development of ‘multi-polarity’ in the world, of a shift…
My two surprisingly closely related subjects are, firstly, the place of political agency in the face of the claims of historical necessity, and secondly, the possibilities for individual human subjectivity to be socially un-alienated by being theoretically configured in non-individualistic…
Unfreedom and the Indenturing of Labour:A Few Conceptual Aspects We intend to analyse in this paper aspects related to the large-scale movements of indentured labour from colonial India, between the years 1834 to 1920, to plantation islands owned by Britain.…
In the demise of Professor Noboru Karashima, who succumbed to acute leukaemia on 26 November 2015, we lost a historian who brought about a major methodological shift in the historiography of South India. He replaced the impressionistic, speculative generalisations based…
Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Amita Chatterjee (eds.), Marxism: With and Beyond Marx, Routledge, New Delhi, 2014, 279 pages, Rs 850. A rapidly changing world and newly emerging challenges to a progressive social transformation demand a re examination and rethinking of…
The papers in the current issue of Social Scientist deal with diverse themes. The lead article by Samita Sahgal, which seeks to locate kingship in early India within a frame of masculinity, shows how this frame mutated over time. While…