Andre Beteille is one of India’s foremost sociologists, well known for his work on social inequality and institutions, and for his qualities as a teacher, always meticulous and eloquent, enthusiastic, supportive and generous with students, and ever ready for a good discussion and argument. In his engaging style…
About 10 years ago Pavan K. Varma wrote The Great Indian Middle Class, in which he lamented the fact that this class had forgotten the virtues of nationalism and social concern which inspired it during the freedom struggle and in the years after Independence, and how it so easily abandoned itself to the easy…
Pranay Gupte provides us a highly gripping multidimensional account of Indira Gandhi’s life, times and politics. As a credible journalist of with varied media outlets like the prestigious New York Times, Forbes and BBC he has taken great pains in reaching out to his potential news sources to capture the complex personality of India’s…
The political memoir is a much underdeveloped literary genre in India. Our politicians and policy-makers are seldom tempted to pen detailed and analytical accounts of their role in crafting and executing policies. This has had a deleterious impact both on the historical memory of our institutions and on the writing of contemporary history…
The multifaceted encounter between tradition and modernity in colonial Indian society continues to intrigue today’s historians, who discover new dimensions in the recorded experiences of that period. A little over a decade ago, Tapan Raychaudhuri, in a brilliant study called Europe Reconsidered (1988), explored the changing perceptions…
As with earlier works by the author, Writing The Self is a book that I read with avid interest. And having read the work it would be quite uncharitable of me not to admit that there is much on offer here. First, there is the sheer excitement of encountering the unusual: in this case, an autobiographical fragment written by a Baul…