It has been 150 years since the publication of Karl Marx’s formidable work, Das Capital (Volume 1). This first volume provides a critical analysis of capitalist production and defines Marx’s crucial break with the classical political economy of Adam Smith…
The dramatic increase in exports of readymade garments (RMG) from Bangladesh is an impressive example of a labour-surplus country being able to put some of its labour reserves to use in a strategy of exportoriented labour-intensive industrialisation. On the surface…
Gandhi’s ideas on caste and untouchability have created much misunderstanding in scholarly circles. Gandhi has been attacked for ambiguity and inconsistency on this issue and accused of excessive deference to Hindu orthodoxy. Critics have focused on Gandhi’s alleged ‘specious’ distinction…
The Hindu History Series: K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, Writings in The Hindu, THG Publishing Private Limited, Chennai, 2018, 224 pages, Rs 299. K.A. Nilakanta Sastri was one of the doyens of south Indian history. Although specialising in pre-colonial history of the…
Guru Rao Bapat and Lata Singh, eds., Performing Arts in India: Performances of/and Violence, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2016, 242, pages, Rs. 300. In a troubled time of ours when intolerance and bigotry of almost all sorts are…
We take Akeel Bilgrami’s Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture for 2018 as the lead article of the current issue of Social Scientist. He gives three instances of what he calls the ‘limits’ of liberalism, namely, its acute discomfort with any…
It is an honour for me to give this lecture in memory of Asghar Ali Engineer, one of India’s most distinguished and courageous public intellectuals and activists. I didn’t really know him, though we had met on one occasion at…
Three Phases: Phase I In the years before Independence, the Indian economy had remained more or less stagnant. Per-capita income actually declined by 0.22 per cent per year from 1913 to 1950. After Independence, during the first phase, the state…
. . . one never follows in order to reproduce. The university as a spatial and temporal institutional form has always had many faces – as much in India as elsewhere across various national traditions and trajectories – in keeping…
The 1980s and 1990s were a difficult period for the Left across the world. Depleted by the brutal repression of authoritarian regimes that had cropped up in various parts of the developing world in the 1970s, discouraged by the collapse…