The celebrated American novelist, Mark Twain, had recounted an incident he had witnessed during his tour of Europe in 1892. He was invited to a banquet at the University of Berlin. When everyone was seated Mark Twain saw ‘the end…
Khwaja Qutb-ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki, a music afficionado and second in a chain of five great Chishti Sufis who flourished in the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, died in 1235, after bouts of ecstasy caused by the above…
The harmonious bonds shared by the Jains with Mughal royalty is a well- researched area.1 This paper examines the role of religious symbols, beliefs, and practices in the construction of political/religious relations, and the forms of Jain interaction with the…
In the travel narratives of the late seventeenth century, incidents involving gender relations appear regularly; sometimes the travel/author2 narrates them in order to depict these relations, while in other instances, the tropes of gendered discourse need to be excavated from…
The historiography of the Sannyasi Rebellion has a chequered career. The first book about that uprising was a historical novel by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Ananda Math (1882). If Ananda Math is seen as an index of Bankim’s historical consciousness, one has…
Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010, pp. xii+277. In 1870 Bombay and London were connected by telegraph. According to received wisdom, this technological leap enabled greater metropolitan…
There is widespread belief that even though capitalism in its initial phase may bring much misery to the people through unleashing a process of primitive accumulation of capital that leads to dispossession and pauperization of petty producers, it makes up…
It is a privilege for me to deliver the first lecture on social deprivation in memory of Shri T.G. Narayanan, who was such an eminent representative of socially responsible journalism before Independence, well known for investigating and reporting on the…
We propose to discuss in this paper, the Left-inspired and Left-led cultural movement in the erstwhile Andhra and Telangana regions of today’s Andhra Pradesh during the 1930s and 40s and up to the 1950s. The movement comprised of two broad…
During the l930s we notice a narrowing down of the gap between town and country, and between the world of the common people and the middle-class Oriya intelligentsia.1 What also needs to be emphasized is that many of the writers…