Lenin is commonly considered responsible for the notion that a single-Party dictatorship is the political form that the proletarian State should take in a socialist society. Prabhat Patnaik in the lead article in this issue contests this view. The Bolsheviks,…
Lenin did not write specifically about democracy. One has to infer from his scattered writings and his actions what his attitude towards democracy was. The basic difficulty about understanding Lenin’s position is epistemic. Lenin was not concerned as such with…
Marx critiques Bauer’s position that saw Jews as a different ‘nation’ despite the political reality of millennia of coexistence of both German Jews and Christians under and in the same state, territory and sovereign power (which was the Christian ‘Holy…
The 2009 Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE Act) was passed in response to the shameful reality that the majority of economically and socially disadvantaged children in India did not have access to quality education. Ironically, even the…
Frederick Engels became acquainted with Irishmen as workers in cotton textile factories, when he went there to manage a joint enterprise of his father in Manchester. His guide to the city and especially its working class quarters, was Mary Burns,…
The 200th birth anniversary of Frederick Engels provides a fitting occasion to delve into an analysis of the conditions of working class under capitalism. An early study was offered by Engels in the book titled Conditions of the Working Class…
C.P. Bhambri (1933–2020) Chandra Prakash Bhambri, the eminent political scientist and Emeritus Fellow of Jawaharlal Nehru University who passed away in November 2020, was one of the last remaining links to an era that is now decisively over. That was…
Monika Saxena, Women and the Puranic Tradition in India, Routledge, Delhi, 2019, 306 pages, Rs 1495 Shalin Jain, Identity, Community and State: The Jains under the Mughals, Primus, Delhi, 2017, pages 402 pages, Rs 1095.
As lead article in this issue we publish the text of Irfan Habib’s illuminating lecture to the India Diaspora Washington D.C. Metro on ‘Interpreting Indian History’. Habib starts by clarifying that the historical method requires the historian to begin with…
I am very grateful to Raziuddin Sahib who has given me the opportunity to speak on ‘Interpreting Indian History’, and to all those colleagues and friends who have decided to spare their precious time in order to listen to what…