It is often claimed that in contrast to the semitic religions, which are imbued with a proselytising drive and are therefore intrinsically incapable of settling down to a state of peaceful mutual coexistence, Hinduism is characterised by a certain tolerance…
The construct of tolerant Hinduism seems to have been of relatively recent origin and seems to have first acquired visibility in Western writings on India. In the seventeenth century, Francois Bernier (1620–1688), the French doctor who travelled widely in India,…
Tolerance and intolerance are not natural faculties of the human mind. They have their own histories which find particular expression in specific spatio-temporal locations. In this essay, I wish to look critically at the claim that Hinduism, unlike the Semitic…
Immediately after assuming power in May 2014, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) decided to set up ‘100 Smart Cities’ throughout the country. With the contribution of urban India to the national GDP…
Medicine and Gender: An Introduction One of the central features of the women’s health movement that originated in the West in the 1960s and 1970s was to reclaim pregnant women’s bodies from the allegedly authoritative control of the male-dominated medical…
Indian capitalism in the twenty-first century seems to be succeeding in establishing its hegemony, not only over subordinate labouring classes, but also over the inherited pre-capitalist, feudal land ownership strata of society, and in its ongoing effort to integrate the…
Vaqar Siddiqui, Do Sarfarosh Shaa‘ir, Ram Prasad ‘Bismil’ aur Ashfaqullah Khan ‘Hasrat’ (Urdu), New Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu, 2015, 179 pages, Rs 180 Sunayan Sharma, Sariska: The Tiger Reserve Roars Again, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2015, 224 pages, Rs 650…