Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper hold that while “empires” are often seen now as haunting specters of tyranny and oppression, it has not always been so. Instead, they posit that empires have taken many different shapes and have been the most influential form of political rule over the last two millennia. The authors seek not… Read More Book review: Empires in World History
The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects’ faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army’s 25th Division follow helplessly behind. Taken… Read More 'Napalm Girl' at 50: The story of the Vietnam War's defining photo / “Because Our Fathers Lied”: Craig McNamara Reveals the Lies of His Father, Robert McNamara
NB: A very well written and timely reminder. My two caveats are 1) with the word back; and 2) with the positioning of the word crisis. It is not ‘back’, because after the Napoleonic wars it never went away; and a more appropriate title description of our time (with due respect to Gurudev), would be… Read More Anjan Basu: The Crisis in Civilisation that Rabindranath Tagore red-flagged Is back upon us
NB: An excellent review of an excellent book. Purushottam Agrawal has done us a public service. DS Kabir, the famous religious poet of Varanasi, lived from roughly 1440 CE to 1518 CE. He first became well-known outside of India in 1915 when Rabindranath Tagore published an English translation of 100 songs, or bhajans, attributed to Kabir. Tagore’s translation… Read More Book review: Kabir and the Question of Modernity
When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature, had trouble getting the third part of The Quiet Don approved for publication, he appealed to Maxim Gorky, then the supreme authority in Soviet literary affairs. Gorky invited him to his mansion, which had been a gift from Stalin to lure Gorky… Read More Book review – Stalin: his own avatar
Imagine an America in the not-so-distant future. A right-wing populist politician has just been reelected president of the United States, stirring a wave of ethnonationalism not seen since the Trump presidency. Amid the country’s nativist turn, a cult of personality forms around John Wilkes Booth, the actor who fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s… Read More What the Veneration of Gandhi’s Killer Says About India. By Yasmeen Serhan
In use since 2017, the existing set of school textbooks in Karnataka were certainly in need of revision: many of the chapters in sociology were outdated, the discussions in economics, political science, history and geography drab and listless, and typographical and grammatical errors were found in the hundreds in the social science books. But the… Read More Chandan Gowda: Keep party politics out of textbooks!
Colourful onion-domed churches capped with sparkling snow, seductive spies in lavish mink coats, dancing bears, strong-willed revolutionaries…we see these tropes everywhere. They feature in Netflix shows such as Shadow and Bone, in Marvel blockbusters, gritty Cold War-inspired thrillers, and children’s animated films like Anastasia. Western pop-culture’s fascination with Russia – or, rather, with a simplified… Read More Olexandra Povoroznyk: Tsars, spies and colonialism
“BJP is saying that if anyone speaks against Veer Savarkar then he is an anti-national. Yes, I am saying I am speaking against him. If I am anti-national arrest me and put me behind bars,” he added. In a letter to the director of Salarjung museum in Hyderabad, Rao said that the name of former… Read More If speaking against Savarkar is antinational, then put me in jail: Congress leader V Hanumantha Rao
NB: A timely tribute to a great intellectual. I will add something to this account: Ranajit Guha was always a political activist as well as a historian. This article mentions his affiliation with the CPI, and his disaffection with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; but it passes over his return to communist politics… Read More Ranajit Guha, India’s oldest living historian, starts his 100th year with a dazzling legacy
After the truth-shower 