Brought up in Burma, and educated at LSE (London School of Economics), Rajni Kothari belonged to a generation which ran high on an idealism inspired by Indian socialism – Nehruvian or later. He is remembered as an institution builder and…
Siddharth Kara, Bonded Labour: Tackling the system of slavery in South Asia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, xx+314 pages (Tables, figures, b&w photos), US$ 29.50. Social scientists in the contemporary world often differentiate the working people in terms of…
In the lead article of the current number of Social Scientist Irfan Habib discusses the issue of equality which has recently attracted much attention in the advanced capitalist countries. Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book has underscored the threat to democracy from…
When one speaks of inequalities, it is usual for the listener to assume that one is not speaking of lack of equality in physical strength, quickness of tongue or store of wisdom, qualities that nature supposedly bestows in different measures…
In 1873 Dadabhai Naoroji published his tract ‘Poverty of India’, and followed it up ten years later with one titled ‘Condition of India’ (1883). In these papers, producing an array of official statistics, he showed that India was being impoverished…
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was one of the prominent public men of the later half of the nineteenth century. Gradually, after the Revolt of 1857, Indians became used to meetings, public addresses, associations and conferences in the European manner, practices…
Modern science administration, like modern education and many other things, came as part of the colonial baggage. It needs to be seen in the context of colonialism. The concepts of modernity, new socio-economic forces, techno-scientific changes, globalisation, etc., are in…
Crisis in Higher Education Higher education is in crisis. The nature of the crisis is not what Phillip Coombs (1968) identified in the 1960s, nor it is the ‘continuing crisis’ of the kind J.P. Naik (1982) described. The crisis is…
Disease is both a pathological reality and a social construction. It befalls individuals, and since individuals are the actors in the drama of history, it may well happen that the illness of a man in position of power influences his…
I met Pandian in the corridors of the Centre for Historical Studies the day before he went into hospital briefly, only to pass out of our lives forever. He was there to meet his students and had just finished a…