Editorial Note, July – August, 2024

This issue leads with an essay by Akeel Bilgrami on ‘Understanding Gandhi on Caste and Modernity’, a slightly modified version of a lecture he delivered at a meeting in memory of five leading progressive intellectuals and artists and activists – Aijaz Ahmad, Vivan Sundaram, Suneet Chopra, Anil Bhatti and Kumar Shahani – all contributors to and close collaborators of Social Scientist. Bilgrami seeks to elaborate the larger framework within which Gandhi’s views on the subject of caste and his motivations in forming them must be placed, for a needed but absent sympathetic understanding.