Ideology, Theory and the Problem of Reality Historically, the term ‘ideology’ made its first appearance at the time of the French Revolution, its author, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, being one of the group of savants whom the Convention in 1795…
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendency of Capital, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2005; paperback edition 2008. Capital and the capitalist economy have been striding the world for five centuries. Have they won its victory for…
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire, Penguin/Allen Lane, 2011, 388 pages, Rs 699. Subhas Chandra Bose is one of Indian history’s most enigmatic and emotive personalities. Yet, despite being so widely revered and…
The current issue of Social Scientist carries the first instalment of the papers presented at a seminar organized by Sahmat on the Progressive Cultural Movement (‘Awaaz Do: Legacy and Relevance of the Progressive Cultural Movement in India’, 13–15 October 2011,…
The period from the beginning of the First World War until the end of the Second was one of acute crisis for world capitalism: apart from the two horrendous wars, it also witnessed the Great Depression which was the most…
The All India Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA) have completed 75 and 70 years respectively. The formation of these organisations in 1930s is a landmark in the cultural history of India, as they heralded a…
In this paper, I will comment largely on what I have called ‘the international setting’ of the progressive movement as such. This, I want to do for several reasons. First, by the time I was invited to speak at this…
Frederic Jameson, in his Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, captures three cri- tical historical junctures of capitalism and their respective cultural tempers: the market capitalism of the 1840s whose cultural logic was realism; the mono- poly capitalism of the 1890s…
If you look back on the years marked by the vital presence of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in Bengal – the 1940s and 50s in parti- cular, though the movement started earlier and lasted longer – you may…
I have been told that in my early childhood I spent more time lying on a charpai behind the stage than in a regular bed, and that anybody who passed by covered me with whatever was at hand – shawls,…