Gandhi’s Last Fast: January 13-18, 1948 First posted March 30, 2012 This article is based on a lecture I prepared for university students, named Mahatma Gandhi’s Legacy. It includes the text of the Delhi Declaration on communal harmony, January 18, 1948. Citations are from Gandhi’s Collected Works Gandhi’s Last Fast: January 13-18, 1948 From September 1947,… Read More Another time, another mosque
First posted January 31, 2015 यह चिट्ठी महात्मा मोहनदास करमचंद गाँधी को पहुंचे. महात्माजी, मैं न संसद-सदस्य हूँ, न विधायक, न मंत्री, न नेता. इनमें से कोई कलंक मेरे ऊपर नहीं है. मुझमें कोई ऐसा राजनीतिक ऐब नहीं है कि आपकी जय बोलूं. मुझे कोई भी पद नहीं चाहिये कि राजघाट जाऊँ. मैंने आपकी समाधि… Read More हरिशंकर परसाई: महात्मा गाँधी को चिट्ठी पहुँचे (1977)
First posted October 3, 2020 India’s greatest leader had moved to a village called Segaon two years earlier. He had renamed it Sevagram or a village of service. He built an ashram, a commune which was home to “many a fateful decision which affected the destiny of India”. Gandhi had moved in with his wife, Kasturba,… Read More Soutik Biswas: Rare photos of the last ten years of Gandhi’s life
First posted May 24, 2014 On May 27, 2014 it will be 50 years since the passing of Jawaharlal Nehru. Can one ever imagine him instigating or conniving in a pogrom? Or becoming a plaything in the hands of corporate capital? Or spending on a general election amounts bearing comparison with American Presidential elections? – Anil… Read More Anil Nauriya: Gandhi on secular law and state (2003)
In any other time and place, in any other part of the world, seven mass shootings in seven days, nearly two every day of the current year, would not be called “senseless,” “insane” and “barbaric.” Why? Because in any other time and place, in any other part of the world, seven mass shootings in seven… Read More So much mass death: The insurgency we refuse to see
Vedika Sud, CNN Rats in northern India have been accused of eating hundreds of kilograms of cannabis seized from drug dealers and stored in police warehouses. “Rats are small animals, and they aren’t scared of the police,” noted a court in the city of Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, after hearing that local police were unable to… Read More Rats got stoned on 500 kilograms of ganja, say Indian police in Mathura
GABRIEL WINANT While academic historians generally divide political economy, political history, and social history into three separate fields—the study of markets, the study of the state, and the study of ordinary people and communities—they were irreducibly fused for Davis. He certainly could do political economy with the best of them: I return often to his… Read More Mike Davis (1946-2022); lonely pillar of a more open Marxism
George Monbiot So what do we do now? After 27 summits and no effective action, it seems that the real purpose was to keep us talking. If governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, there would have been no Cops 2-27. The major issues would have been resolved at Cop1, as the ozone depletion crisis… Read More Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all
First posted June 15, 2020 NB: Since the Black Lives Matter movement, some intellectuals have begun (yet again) their campaign to slander Gandhiji as a ‘racist’. An interview published in The Caravan in January 2019 reiterated this. Much can be said about the prejudices of various leaders, and I have appended some comments beneath that interview. Leaving India… Read More Martin Luther King on Mahatma Gandhi: “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”, September 1958
First posted June 13, 2014 ‘A persuasive and a totally new way of thinking about a difficult subject, a truly significant achievement‘ Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2013) by Sumit Guha Reviwed by Tirthankar Roy EPW vol – XLIX No. 24, June 14, 2014) Three building-blocks structure this book.… Read More Book review: Sumit Guha’s new book on the history of caste
After the truth-shower 