In 1944 Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Polanyi was born into a well-heeled Jewish family in Austria and grew up in Hungary, where for a brief while, he was a local political leader active in the Radical Citizens’ Party. He is best known for his work as an economic historian.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Twilight Falls On Liberalism, as the name suggests, diagnoses the present political conjuncture—from Trump to Brexit and Modi—as one where liberal ideas such as freedom, tolerance and fellow feeling ‘seem to be under a shadow’ ( p. ix). However, he immediately qualifies this to argue that liberalism has always been beset with contradictions in theory…
Saifuddin Soz hit the national limelight when his lone vote in the Lok Sabha brought down the Vajpayee II government. In 1999, the late Prime Minister Vajpayee was into the thirteen month of his second stint—the earlier one in 1996 being aborted in a mere thirteen days. Vajpayee’s coalition lost the No Confidence Motion in April 1999 by the narrowest margin possible of one vote…
The Valley of Kashmir arouses a peculiar interest as a land of almost mythic and mysterious beauty and, since the end of colonialism in South Asia, as a space of violence. This imagination has taken further root since 1989 following the emergence of an insurgency and a movement for independence in Kashmir and from India and the drastic militarization of life by the Indian state.
Kashmir, an idyllic haven in the foothills of the Himalayas, is a space in which conflicting discourses have been written and read. Cultural notions of Kashmiris in image and word have been reconstructed, I believe, to emphasize the bias that reinforces the propagandist agenda of the hegemonic powers involved in the Kashmir dispute, India and Pakistan.
The Partition of India in 1947 was supposed to forever settle the Hindu-Muslim question. Yet, pick up any newspaper today, turn on the television, browse the Internet, one aspect is clear: as a nation we have not learnt the lessons from the greatest tragedy of the subcontinent…