Tag: Books and literature

Michael Azar: Transcending ‘the absurd drama – the legacy of Franz Fanon

Frantz Fanon’s impact is as important today as it was when he wrote The Wretched of the Earth, a political work that assesses violence, both of colonists and activists. Glänta commemorates the psychiatrist and political philosopher’s life and work, highlighting his influence on postcolonial theory and anti-racism, in an interview with historian Michael Azar. Frantz… Read More Michael Azar: Transcending ‘the absurd drama – the legacy of Franz Fanon

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Book review: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing

In the mid-1970s, exiled from the Soviet Union for exposing its vast crimes against humanity, and having won the Nobel Prize in Literature for that endeavor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) turned his back on the lionization that awaited him in New York and other cultural capitals of the West and instead settled with his family in… Read More Book review: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing

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Salman Khurshid: Standing against those who divide

My recent book, Sunrise over Ayodhya: Nationhood in Our Times, is over 300 pages long. Throughout the book, I have sought to support and endorse the Ayodhya judgment, despite many of my legal colleagues having doubted its legal correctness, acknowledged and praised the philosophy of Hinduism, underscored the humanist dimensions of Sanatan Dharma. The thrust… Read More Salman Khurshid: Standing against those who divide

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Professor Hubert Dreyfus: Dostoyevsky on how to Save the Sacred from Science / Leszek Kolakowski: The Revenge of the Sacred in secular culture

In The Brothers Karamazov one of the monks tells Alyosha that “the science of this world has … analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old.” The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky’s answer to… Read More Professor Hubert Dreyfus: Dostoyevsky on how to Save the Sacred from Science / Leszek Kolakowski: The Revenge of the Sacred in secular culture

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Bryan Fanning: People like us

Many of the early twentieth-century champions of eugenics were social democrats and feminists. All shared a belief that science and technocracy could re-engineer society for the better. Attempts to institutionalize eugenics coincided with the emergence of welfare states and infrastructure to monitor the ‘feebleminded’. What Malthus called the population question looms large in the intellectual history… Read More Bryan Fanning: People like us

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Book review: Approach to Battle: Training the Indian Army during the Second World War

Approach to Battle is an excellent and meticulously researched narrative of pure vanilla military history. It explores the transformation of the Indian Army from a bloated, undertrained, and poorly led force during World War I and the early years of World War II into a fighting machine that gave the British Empire one of its most… Read More Book review: Approach to Battle: Training the Indian Army during the Second World War

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Simone de Beauvoir’s Lost Novel of Early Love. By Merve Emre

The legend of Simone de Beauvoir—of how an obedient Catholic schoolgirl cast off her rigid, patriarchal upbringing to become the high priestess of existential feminism – is often narrated as a love story. Her biographers trace her escape from the bourgeois Parisian milieu into which she was born, in 1908, first to the Sorbonne and then… Read More Simone de Beauvoir’s Lost Novel of Early Love. By Merve Emre

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Partha Chatterjee: No one, not even Indians, can claim to be part of an ancient nation

There are no ancient nations anywhere in the world. All nations (rāstra) are modern. Ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient India – all of them may have had great civilisations whose architecture, art, and literature are objects of admiration. But they were not nations. To realise this truth, you will have to forget for the… Read More Partha Chatterjee: No one, not even Indians, can claim to be part of an ancient nation

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