First posted November 3, 2017 NB: This essay has appeared in EPW’s special number commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which falls on November 7. (A Word file is downloadable here). The revolution began on February 23, 1917, (March 8 according to the new calendar adopted in 1918); but for complex reasons, tended to be identified with the… Read More The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
First posted December 29, 2016 The Disappearance of Emil Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case by Michael Rosen[Emile Zola was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment after writing “J’accuse”, an open letter to the French government accusing it of anti-semitism in the Dreyfus affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, had… Read More Alfred Dreyfus revisited: Émile Zola on the run in London, 1898, by Michael Rosen
First posted November 27, 2014 NB: Here’s the greatest (my humble opinion) short story of the 20th century. Not that I’ve read many. DS From Simon Ley’s translation of The Analects of Confucius; Introduction: Lu Xun (who is rightly considered as the greatest writer of modern China; he died in 1936, and – by the… Read More The True Story of Ah-Q – By Lu Xun
One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion. The proof of capitalism’s religious structure – as not only a religiously conditioned construction, as Weber thought, but as an essentially religious phenomenon – still today misleads one… Read More Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)
First posted May 8, 2018 NB: This is a longer version of my review of this book which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Biblio. DS The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 By Frank Dikötter; Bloomsbury Press, 2016 The GPCR was yet another example of the totalitarian impulse, the open secret that motivates all… Read More Book review: The State as Faction: Mao’s Cultural Revolution
First posted on May 18, 2016 NB: The late and much revered Professor Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation appeared in 2011. His most recent essay on Tagore deals with the much-discussed theme of nationalism. DS Antinomies of Nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore In our endeavour to understand Rabindranath Tagore’s approach to nationalism we have to recognize three… Read More Sabyasachi Bhattacharya: Antinomies of Nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore
First posted on January 24, 2017 By CZESLAW MILOSZ Translated by Louis Iribarne Milosz’s poem has been described as one of the most moving tributes to the Holocaust victims ever written In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with… Read More Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz
Ben Okri NB: This is a fascinating meditation, not merely on the Queen, but on God, monarchy, twentieth-century history and impermanence. Not to mention our regard for sheer human decency. Well written sir. DS Monarchs have passed away before, but there is something special which Queen Elizabeth has done, which makes it harder for the… Read More Queen Elizabeth was part of our psyche
The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 brought the miseries of the region’s peasants to official notice. A volume of 165 testimonies of peasants translated into English is revealing of their wretched lives, but many aspects of the struggle remain unexplored and there remain gaps in our understanding. MOHAMMAD SAJJAD Thumb Printed: Champaran Indigo Peasants Speak to… Read More Book review: Chronicles of the Champaran Satyagraha
KUNAL DUTT NB: Like Kishanji, resident of Varanasi (quoted below) I too was a small boy, just less than eleven years of age, when Queen Elizabeth arrived in Delhi in January 1961. Us schoolchildren (from what is now called the Army Public School), were taken to Sardar Patel road, to welcome her. We stood on… Read More When the Queen came calling in 1961
After the truth-shower 