One cannot but be struck by the tone of smug self-satisfaction that pervades this report, that India was the origin of most great ideas including the Pythagoras theorem and the Fibonacci series, that Indian universities like Nalanda and Taxila were…
Biswamoy Pati, Tribals and Dalits in Orissa: Towards a Social History of Exclusion, c. 1800–1950, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2019, 221 pages, Rs 945. This posthumously published book consists of six chapters, of which three have been published earlier…
In the lead article of the current number of Social Scientist Suchetana Chattopadhyay provides a detailed and fascinating account of the early efforts to build a Communist Party in India, which interestingly began almost immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. A…
Before the emergence of a communist party and movement, there was the tendency. Several routes converged to constitute early communism within India and its support abroad. They were represented by muhajirs turned communists who established an émigré party under M.N.…
The most basic form of existence for all living beings is through body, yet this material fact has been ignored for long by historians among social scientists. This was because body was seen as a biological entity and hence a…
The year 2019 marks a century since the brutal murder of Rosa Luxemburg, on 15 January 1919, when she just a little over 47 years old. In her life and death for socialist revolution, Rosa Luxemburg remains a revolutionary icon.…
In 1911, after five decades of relative political obscurity on the map of political influence in British India following the Revolt of 1857, Delhi, the old seat of the Mughal emperor, was rechristened as the capital of the British Indian…
Hermann Kulke, History of Precolonial India: Issues and Debates, English edition revised and edited by Bharabi Prasad Sahu, New Delhi : OxfordUniversity Press, 2018, 383 pages, Rs 1195 The book was originally published in the year 2005 as a volume…
Often in the course of a liberation movement an incident occurs, which expresses the irreconcilable antagonism between the rulers and the ruled; it negates any possibility of their future coexistence by revealing to all in one dazzling moment the true…
The First World War (1914–18) came to an end when, in November 1918, Germany signed the Armistice with the victorious Allies (Britain, France and the United States); Germany’s own allies, Turkey and Austria–Hungary, had already done so. In this war…