Interview with the author November 11, 2025 There is a whole agenda out there waiting for a younger generation of the left to lay out in a rigorous and comprehensive way. But that is an agenda that will simply collapse if it subscribes to “orthodoxies” and other forms of intellectual snobbery. Historical materialism as Marx… Read More Jairus Banaji on his book A Marxist Mosaic
NB: Shashank is a former student of history at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi. He can be assured that his erstwhile teachers are very proud of him. DS The 2025 Karwaan Book Award has been awarded to Shashank Shekhar Sinha for Casting the Buddha: A Monumental History of Buddhism in India. The Jury also awarded… Read More Shashank Shekhar Sinha wins the 2025 Karwaan Book Award for ‘Casting the Buddha’
The Bible is unquestionably the most scrutinized “book” in history. Yet certain obvious facts about it nonetheless escape notice. For example, as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in the Review’s December 18, 2025, the Bible is not in fact a book, but “books,” as its original Greek name (biblia) attests: sixty-six of them, or seventy-three, or seventy-six, depending… Read More A Christmas Story
NB: Those who bang on about Macaulay’s Minute on education (1835) should acquaint themselves with this early Indian patriot, whose work in education inspired a generation and who preceded Macaulay by many years. DS The men of Young Bengal emerge not as pale imitations of British liberals, but as creative political thinkers who addressed India’s… Read More ‘India’s First Radicals’ argues for a generous assessment of 19th-century Indian intellectual life
By Irfan Chowdhury / Sapan News Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan 1971-1974By Ilyas Chattha; Cambridge University Press, 2025 Growing up in the 1980s in Bangladesh, I had heard many stories of the 1971 war. I knew about the Bengalis working, for example, in the civil service of Pakistan, like my uncle who was stranded with… Read More Silences within silences: excavating the hidden history of Bengalis interned in Pakistan after 1971
In post-May Paris, a mysterious Maoist activist, Fernando, brings about a dozen of people to form a revolutionary group. Studying this charismatic-led organization allows Julie Pagis to deepen our understanding of Weberian domination through sociological enlightenments by David Copello , 25 November What became of the activists of May ’68? The question of the long-term… Read More A Maoist Enigma in Post-May France
Dr Rebecca Reich examines politics, culture and reality in the Soviet Union “Dissenters in the USSR responded by making literary use of psychiatric discourse to both validate themselves and challenge the authority of the state. “The impact of their essays, transcripts, poems and works of fiction may have seemed limited within the isolation and silence… Read More State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin
Miłosz’s complicated Second World War Alan Jacobs The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine… Read More A Quarrel With the World
++++++Readers outside of India can donate hereto support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue DOCUMENTS: BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks: Books of Note
László Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his compelling and visionary work that, amid apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition, stretching from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and characterized by absurdity and grotesque excess.The writer recalls how Franz Kafka introduced… Read More László Krasznahorkai, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Literature: “Human beings remain the same, dangerous to themselves”
After the truth-shower 