The present issue is dedicated to the memory of Dr Biswamoy Pati – teacher, communist, historian – who passed away one year ago, in June 2018. Pati was closely associated with the editorial team of Social Scientist. This issue includes…
On 15 August 1947, nearly two hundred years of British colonial rule came to an end in the Indian subcontinent. The anti-colonial movement reaped its political harvest, after decades of political mobilisation. Great Britain, weakened by the Second World War,…
The ‘Amnesty’ constituted an important part of the Queen’s Proclamation which was announced on 1 November 1858 after the brutal suppression of the Revolt of 1857. The Queen’s Proclamation has been studied by the anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn as ‘a…
The Mughal social structure, in line with the Islamic sharia, recognised fosterage as a legally valid relationship, enjoying social acceptability and legal protection. Fosterage not only created possibilities of new familial connections that co-exited with unilateral relations through blood, but…
The western medical policy was initiated in Bengal by the colonial government during the early eighteenth century and expanded in a large scale thereafter. This work engages in revealing the attitude of the colonial government towards western medicine vis-à-vis traditional…
In 1893 in Singhbhum, located in south-eastern Chotanagpur plateau (present day Jharkhand), the British, preparing to initiate a new survey and settlement operation in the region, were vexed with a dilemma. There was widespread unrest in the adjoining regions and…
What was remarkable about Ashok Mitra, who passed away on 1 May 2018, was his steadfast commitment to the cause of the people. A telling episode he records in his autobiography may explain how he came to acquire his sympathies.…
Biswamoy Pati passed away on 24 June 2017 at a hospital near Delhi after undergoing a routine surgical investigation. His most untimely death had come as a great shock to his friends, colleagues, students and the community of historians both…
Book Reviews Deepak Kumar, The Trishanku Nation: Memory, Self, and Society in Contemporary India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016, 211 pages, Rs 495. Intellectuals always struggle with the question of relevance of their work in the face of the…