With the passing of Professor Trilok Singh Papola on 23 November, the country lost one of its front-ranking economists. His life and times coincided with a very crucial phase of India’s economic history – covering the nation’s enthusiastic experiment with…
Biswamoy Pati, ed., Invoking Ambedkar: Contributions, Receptions, Legacies, Primus Books, Delhi, 2014, 172 pages, Rs 795. Saurabh Dube and Anupama Rao, eds., Crime through Time, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2014, lxiii+309 pages, Rs 895 Sabyasachi Dasgupta, In Defence of…
The lead article of the current issue of Social Scientist is the Presidential address by Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya to the Indian History Congress at its Platinum Jubilee session held at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in December 2014. In this remarkable…
The problem – which, if I am allowed to call it a ‘historian’s puzzle’ (as it appears as a contradiction in terms) – has come to me in the form of the expression ‘Unity in Diversity’; it is an expression…
Prologue In the early 1800s, a mother goose rhyme went: ‘To market, to market to buy a penny bun / Home again, home again, market is done.’ Later nineteenth-century versions become sumptuous – include a plum bun, a fat hog…
This year, in May 2015, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai received the Man Booker International Prize, and this burst the belief of Hungarians that they have a great literature that cannot be translated and understood. At the distribution ceremony Krasznahorkai was…
After examination of the Indian emigrants landed from vessel, we have pleasure in reporting that they were a very healthy lot of men and very compact and muscular in build. We have pleasure in stating that none of these men…
India entered the twenty-first century with over 6.5 crore slum population, which is estimated to reach up to 10.4 crore by 2017. The Census Report of 2011 reveals that besides alarmingly increasing in metropolitan cities, slums are fast spreading their…
Ernst Waltraud and Biswamoy Pati, eds, India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, Primus, Delhi, 2010. Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History, Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2014, 326 pages, Rs 595 Gargi Chakravartty and…
The lead article by Prabhat Patnaik in the current issue of Social Scientist distinguishes between two opposed concepts of commodity production, one espoused by Adam Smith which constitutes the theoretical basis of liberalism, and the other by Karl Marx which…