The lead article of the current issue of Social Scientist is the Presidential address by Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya to the Indian History Congress at its Platinum Jubilee session held at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in December 2014. In this remarkable…
The problem – which, if I am allowed to call it a ‘historian’s puzzle’ (as it appears as a contradiction in terms) – has come to me in the form of the expression ‘Unity in Diversity’; it is an expression…
Prologue In the early 1800s, a mother goose rhyme went: ‘To market, to market to buy a penny bun / Home again, home again, market is done.’ Later nineteenth-century versions become sumptuous – include a plum bun, a fat hog…
This year, in May 2015, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai received the Man Booker International Prize, and this burst the belief of Hungarians that they have a great literature that cannot be translated and understood. At the distribution ceremony Krasznahorkai was…
After examination of the Indian emigrants landed from vessel, we have pleasure in reporting that they were a very healthy lot of men and very compact and muscular in build. We have pleasure in stating that none of these men…
India entered the twenty-first century with over 6.5 crore slum population, which is estimated to reach up to 10.4 crore by 2017. The Census Report of 2011 reveals that besides alarmingly increasing in metropolitan cities, slums are fast spreading their…
Ernst Waltraud and Biswamoy Pati, eds, India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, Primus, Delhi, 2010. Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History, Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2014, 326 pages, Rs 595 Gargi Chakravartty and…