With the passing away of Comrade P. Govinda Pillai (1926–2013), we have lost one of the leading Marxist intellectuals of India, who made his mark in a wide variety of intellectual fields and disciplines from Marxist aesthetics to the history…
dates.sites: PROJECT CINEMA CITY Bombay/Mumbai, a Majlis project, concept and text: Madhusree Dutta, design and graphics: Shilpa Gupta and Madhusree Dutta, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2012, 240 pages, Rs 995. In the Cause of Dalits: Struggle for Social Justice, a…
The lead article in this issue by Prabhat Patnaik surveys India’s social, political and economic journey over the 65 years since Independence, during which the country has moved from what appeared to be a revolution in the middle of the…
To an outside observer, independent India at sixty-five gives the impression of robust health: an economy with a high rate of GDP growth, which, even though it has slowed down a little in the last year or so, still remains…
It is now well documented that the balance of payments crisis of 1991, which saw the government turning to the IMF for emergency finance, provided the grounds for a policy shift, marking a new phase in India’s relationship with foreign…
The period since the 1990s has seen a fundamental change in the manner in which science and technology had been practised in India, viz. from an emphasis on development and self-reliance to an emphasis on integration into and connectivity with…
In 2007, following the practice of erecting pandals (tent-houses) in the style of famous buildings during the Durga Puja celebrations, the FD Block Durga Puja Committee in Salt Lake, Kolkata had recreated the Hogwarts School of Magic and Wizardry from…
When a society moves from one stage of the material base of production and, consequentially, different social relations of production, to another historical stage, it has to go through an extremely complex and long process of dialectics of social transition.…
Michael H. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo Indian MP and Chancery Lunatic, Hurst and Company, London, distributed in South Asia by Foundation Books, 2010, 396 pages, Rs 660 Partho Dutta, Planning the City: Urbanisation and…
Centenaries can be useful occasions for reflection and understanding. In the case of someone as contentious as Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955), his hundredth birth anniversary offers an occasion to not merely locate Manto in the continuum of the short story…