Traversing across ten centuries, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, in the lead article in this issue, covers five phases of ‘imperialism’ involving different forms of conquest, plunder and aggrandisement by the dominant powers of the day. In this history, he identifies forms…
Everybody knows that capitalism is driven by greed, by the lure of profit. But greed in human beings was not born with capitalism. Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias expressed this perfectly when he said that in making decisions, he would consider…
We have to remember all the time that we have a regime whose leading light, soon after occupying the office of Prime Minister of the country in 2014, announced that India had known plastic surgery as early as the mythical…
This essay explores the history of princely patronage to sports in colonial India and argues that the sporting field allowed a hybrid princely culture to evolve. Scholarship on colonial sports has focused either on the diffusion of British principles of…
The Covid-19 pandemic is the most severe disruption experienced worldwide since structural adjustment and liberalisation of economies in the 1990s. Indian cities have been unsettled to an extent that happened never before since independence. Reverse migration of millions of urban…
Contesting the views of various religious denominations of Christians and Muslims, Mirza Gulam Ahmad wrote a pamphlet titled Razz-iHaqaiyat (The Truth). It was written in reply to the derogatory remarks made by the Ahl-i-Hadith sect in response to the affirmations…
Understanding how a particular society comprehends, construes and represents love is significant from the point of view of cultural, emotional and literary history. Love has been a prominent theme in Sanskrit literature\ from the earliest times. Often referred to as…
Suranjan Das and Achintya Kumar Dutta (eds.), Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal: Cholera, Malaria and Smallpox, A Documentation, Delhi: Primus, 2021, pages i–viii+397, Rs 1250. Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N.A. Attewell, Locating the Medical: Explorations in South Asian History,…