It would not be amiss to say that Dadabhai Naoroji has been languishing for a long time in the lounge of history, waiting to be ushered into the hall of fame. The near absence of Naoroji’s memory from the political landscape of today is a rude reminder of the injustice done…
This book is a romantic narrative about overcoming the centrifugal forces unleashed by various Indian Princely States during the tumultuous years leading up to and shortly after Independence. Like all romantic narratives, the tone of the book is heroic…
Stretching her observations across some 200 pages, Naomi Appleton has managed, in her book, to fence in a scholarly enclosure into which she has herded not only the three major dharmas of the subcontinent but also some of their most important deities and heroes…
Books such as Making India Great Again: Learning from Our History are meant to have a long life. However, books are also reflective of a particular time and a milieu. Context does have an influence on what is written and when it is written…
Ananth Krishnan’s book is a refreshing take on a topic India has grossly underinvested in. It is well known that dealing with its neighbour has been one of the most significant challenges confronting India’s foreign policy-makers; however, a very honest and sincere attempt to understand China from multiple lenses has been elusive. Discourses on China in India have been captive to the ghosts…
Film scholarship across the world has been using various theoretical concepts to deal with aesthetics, especially the visual aesthetic of different genres of cinema. These broader theoretical approaches are linked to semiotics and representation, ideology and mass mediation…
What makes Devika (the little goddess) Rani (the queen) so unique in the history of Indian cinema? And what has sustained public imagination on this enigmatic lady till now? Is it her ethereal beauty, acting ability, radiant personality, pedigree or upbringing…
Sometime during the early decades of the 1900s, with India in the throes of the anti-colonial movement, Kulsumbai decided that her family—the couple and their six children, three boys and three girls—would move to England, and the kids would be admitted to a boarding school there…
In this virtual world where image consumption on the screen is the norm and many web-based platforms offer our eye the luxury to look at the work of talented photographers, coming across the printed picture is an experience that still goes unmatched. The materiality of paper…
Writing on the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, in its post-1947 avatar(s), is a challenge that few of us have met without being called out for missing out on not one but many strings which weave together the chaotic mess that has come to be euphemistically called the Kashmir problem…
The on-going farmers’ protest in India has once again highlighted the continuous significance of land on the one hand and its continuous process of making and re-making on the other. These protests point towards the fact that the land issues and agrarian politics are not settled…
British ethnographers and administrators commenced the documentation of Tribes and Caste in India. HA Rose, HH Risley, E Thurston, RE Enthoven, RV Russel and others made painstaking efforts to identify different communities present in British India. After Independence…
Amartya Sen’s ‘Capability Approach’ and ‘Development as Freedom’ continues to intrigue, interest and push scholars to explore what emerges when these are applied in the concrete, on the ground, to specific sectors, and, categories of people within these sectors…
Rural society in India has undergone social and economic transformation in varying degrees during the past decades giving rise to new questions and issues such as decline or demise of traditional social classes and the rise of new ones, changes in patterns of power relations among them…
‘When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.’– Benjamin FranklinIndia woke up to a spate of farmer suicides through Everybody Loves a Good Drought by P Sainath, and the first State where suicides were reported was Maharashtra. Two decades after that book…