Media and Modernity is primarily about Kerala, its politics and its women and then about media and communication in Kerala. It is a book of previously published essays in which Robin Jeffrey explores his fascination with Kerala’s communism, its matriliny, its literacy, and its women. Intertwined with this is his research…
The core of any commercial cinema—be it Bollywood, Hollywood or the Tamil film industry—is its stars. The ones who make or break a film, set box office records and fashion trends and fire the dreams and imagination of billions of fans. They are the face of our popular culture. Then again the notion of stardom is not static…
The insecurity of people, faced with helpless conditions of violence, confron-tation, lack of access to basic services, has surged incrementally across India. In regions as ethnically complex and challenging as what is commonly called the ‘North-east’,
What are or should be the guiding principles of Indian foreign policy? At a function of the Ministry of External Affairs some time ago, an IFS officer was reviewing the year, gone by. ‘If I were to sum up the biggest success in our relations with other countries in one word, ‘ he said, with some pride, ‘It is continuity….
One of the stark reminders of the failure of the discipline of history was evident in the recent sessions of the Indian History Congress as it was clearly recognized that dalit history was virtually nonexistent, with very few exceptions. Mainstream historians’ apathy towards the dalit question indicates a failure of the historian’s…
Narendar Pani, In his introductory essay, states that the book was compiled in the wake of an absence of ‘a collective effort to recognize. . . (the city’s) past (4).’ After noting that a dialogue between ‘the present and the past’ . . . has never gathered momentum in Bengaluru,’ he offers an intriguing explanation for it…