Pankaj Mishra It may be,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, “that the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily extinguished as the German ones were in 1914.” Wilson, born in 1895, came of age when national energies were still turned inward,… Read More Speaking Reassurance to Power
A little-known philosopher’s deep influence over the avant-garde, neoconservatives, and the European Union…. ‘His work on behalf of a resistance group in Puy-en-Velay got him arrested by the Gestapo; anticipating his future talents as a negotiator, he managed to talk his way out of the firing squad.’ The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève BY Marco… Read More Hegel Dust
First posted June 02, 2016 Mike Davis: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) Reviewed by: Sukhdev Sandhu Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked… Read More Late Victorian Holocausts: the famines that fed the empire
Visionary filmmaker of eight Hindi movies, Guru Dutt (1925 – 1964) whose socially conscious work explored various human experiences left a cultural impact that continues to inspire generations. Jinhen Naaz Hai Hind Par – Guru Dutt, Mohammed Rafi, Pyaasa Song By C. Uday Bhasker / Sapan News As film aficionados around Southasia and the diaspora remember… Read More Remembering Guru Dutt in his birth centenary year: A resurrected genius
Siyavash Shahabi The struggle against religious superstition and the effort to sever the bond between religion and power have deep roots in Iran. Contrary to the widespread belief that secularism is purely a Western or modern phenomenon, Iranian history is rich with Enlightenment-driven efforts that have criticized religion not as a matter of faith, but… Read More Sadegh Hedayat on Religion, Power, and Manufactured Ignorance
First posted November 29, 2019 NB: This is a magnificient contribution to Indian historiography. Rahul Sagar and his collaborators deserve the thanks of the Indian public and indeed of all those interested in an honest exploration of the past. DS Starting in the early nineteenth century, ambitious Indians began flocking to newly-founded schools and colleges offering instruction… Read More Ideas of India Archive
Anthony Grafton The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain by Seth Kimmel Libraries were all the rage in Renaissance Europe, and no wonder. Theatres of knowledge, grandly decorated and proudly displayed, they hosted dramas of many kinds. Learned men used them for lively conversation on such… Read More No Cheese Please
First posted November 29, 2019 The single best thing ever written on the idea of the university in India is Ashutosh Mukherjee’s Convocation Address to Mysore University in 1916, and published in the now inaccessible Dacca Review (October 1918). It literally anticipates every single debate we have on the idea of the university – from… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Once upon a time there was another public, another India
Sapan Bookshelf: Coming Back: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India – By Shueyb Gandapur Countless Centuries Press, 2025By Sayali Goyal / Sapan News As someone who has worked on writing stories on the interconnectedness of the world for the last decade, now researching kinship in East and West Punjab through material cultures, I was immediately… Read More Coming Back: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India
Prem Shankar Jha The following are excerpts from The Dismantling of India’s Democracy: 1947 to 2025 by Prem Shankar Jha; reproduced with permission from the publisher, Speaking Tiger. Over the decade since Narendra Modi has been the prime minister of India, at the head of a BJP government supported by a few local allies in the states… Read More Narendra Modi’s Step by Step Journey Towards Creating Fascism in India
After the truth-shower 