One of the striking features of the South Indian rural milieu is the large number of farm labourers who have served the same families of landowners, year after year. Quite often, they are bound to their masters by deep-rooted traditions…
Christopher Thomas Kurien, scholar of distinction and social conscience, and an inspiring teacher of economics, died on 23 July at the MOSC Medical College Hospital in Kolencherry, Kerala. He was 93. CTK’s entry into economics was inspired by the vision…
Tirthankar Chattopadhyay passed away on 23 June 2024 in Kolkata, at the age of 81. He had been suffering from cancer in his last years. I was one of his close friends for the last six decades and his comrade…
S. Irfan Habib, Maulana Azad: A Life, Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2023, xii+306 pages, Rs 899 Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a polymath, nationalist, secularist par excellence, and a key figure in India’s nation-building process. The life and thought of the…
This edition of Social Scientist carries the second part of Aditya Mukherjee’s Presidential Address to the Indian History Congress, in which he provides an assessment of the distance we have travelled from the India of Nehru’s dream. In that perception…
The threat to Indian democracy posed by communalism, or by ‘communal fascism,’ as Amartya Sen, perhaps first, described it,1 is now perceived globally. Michelguglielmo Torri, arguably the foremost Italian scholar on India, has outlined the rapid growth in recent years…
Is anti-fascism a strategy determined by the turns of national politics and the balance of forces of imperialism? To Georg Lukács, writing in the Soviet Union during its invasion by fascist Germany, anti-fascism is the struggle in the sphere of…
A democrat is attracted to the ideas, life and mission of Periyar because of the latter’s lifelong and praxological dedication to the promotion of social justice and scientific temper. These are values enshrined in the modernist sections of the Constitution…
This article aims to explore the materiality and functionality of Braj poetry and the networks that sustained it. Usually, the Mughal empire is associated with the growth of Persian and Arabic literature but in fact, during that period, a large…
The forces of Hindutva have always tried to hunt down Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy. He represents the undoing of all that the RSS–BJP stand for, i.e. modernism, secularism and an inclusive form of nationalism. Nehru represents that current of Indian anti-colonial…