Numerous families across India’s urban and rural landscape continue to live in conditions not fit for human habitation, even less making for conducive family environs. Large numbers of occupation-based migration to urban areas as well as lack of access to…
Nukta-daan, nukta-sukhan, nukta-shanaas Paak dil, paak zaat, paak sifaat It is difficult to speak about someone who personified life itself and lent vibrancy to whatever he touched. He was at all times involved, responsive, innovative, thought-provoking. He was an institution-builder.
It was easy to be misled by Mushirul Hasan’s external mien. Polite to a fault, full of humour, always meticulously dressed, extraordinarily courteous, full of kindness and generosity, and never raising his voice in an argument, indeed never even particularly…
Professor Mushirul Hasan passed away after a longish battle of over four years with the consequences of a tragic accident. He was a legendary scholar and a wonderful human being who represented our composite culture so aptly. And he did…
The passing away of Professor Aniruddha Ray on 9 December 2018 has taken away from our midst a historian of exceptionally wide range of research and acuteness of perception.
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya passed away in Kolkata on 7 January 2019. An extraordinary scholar and historian, he will be also remembered as a public intellectual with a deep commitment to secular and democratic values so needed in our times.
Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text, Penguin India, Gurgaon, 2016, xvii+305 pages, Rs 599. The historiography on militant and revolutionary anti-colonialism in India is witnessing a dawn of a new era. For decades,…
Reading Gandhi can be both exasperating and exhilarating. And elevating. You often feel exhausted with his fads about health like his staunch avowal of a pure and simple life, which meant, for instance, a tyranny of food without spices in…
Gandhi often thought aloud as he went along, assimilating new facts and situations. One can almost hear the workings of his mind as it grapples, assimilates, suggests, concludes, revises and re-concludes. In this note I take up a few themes…
Kabir lives in legends which are numerous and demand history-rooted readings, considering the vibrant complexity of the time during which he lived and ‘spoke’. One such reading of the popular (one of the most popular, as even illiterate north Indians…