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…
The iconoclastic British philosopher Roy Bhaskar died of heart failure on 19 November 2014, aged 70. He was a productive scholar, consistently original and interesting, often ahead of his time. His work is, unfortunately, not nearly as influential in contemporary…
Amrik Singh, Mulk Raj Anand: Role and Achievement, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2008, 138 pages, Rs 45. Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern South and Central Asia, I.B. Tauris, New York,…
The lead article in the current number of Social Scientist, which contains the text of Romila Thapar’s Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture this year, discusses an issue which has not received the attention it deserves, namely the role of the ‘public…
Deciding on a topic for this lecture has been problematic. As has been rightly said, Nikhil Chakravartty was a man of many parts. He was a warm and affectionate friend; he was curious about people, about politics and about the…