Venturing to offer anything like a vision of a country as gigantic, as diverse and complex, as contradictory and mixed-up as India, more than three decades into the future, is a risky endeavour. It might also seem pointless, if you…
There is, understandably, widespread boredom with the topic of the ‘Humanities in Crisis’. In the Western world the crisis has been declared repeatedly for over half a century (perhaps from even much earlier – ever since the rise and consolidation…
Violence against women is framed within discourses on gender justice, human rights, health and well-being, partner violence, intimate partner violence, battered women, gendered violence, sexual assault, woman abuse, wife abuse, rape, aggravated rape, marital rape, date rape, among others. So…
French travellers, during their travels in the Orient in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have always shown intense curiosity for diverse issues, besides pursuing political and commercial objectives. A theme that they were immensely interested in, and extensively wrote about…
Can you elaborate more on how you distinguish between the vernacular modernists and the English-oriented modernists? English-oriented modernists were well-intentioned people, good old liberals, and tried to reform religion, get rid of sati practice and so on. They were essentially…
Professor Bipan Chandra, Emeritus Professor of the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who passed away on 30 August, was an outstanding historian, a major figure in the country’s intellectual life, and an indomitable fighter in the cause…
Maya Tudor, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, xvi+240 pages, 2013, Rs 795. What are the reasons that some developing countries, on deliverance from colonial rule, are able to…
We began this collection as a response to the sickening nonsense surrounding the 100th anniversary of the start of the trenches holocaust in 1914 including, at least in the United Kingdom, a celebratory commemoration. For the first time in history…
In order to understand how the Indian society and economy fared during the World War I (WWI from now on), an abnormal period, it is necessary to grasp the ‘normal’ functioning of the economy and society and the normal style…
The highest level of development of theory, Georg Lukacs had argued, is when theory breaks into practice. Lenin’s theory of imperialism represented in this sense the highest level of development of theory: starting from the ‘immanent tendencies’ of capitalism analysed…