Tag: History

Vanessa Hua on Writing About the Forgotten Women in Mao’s Inner Circle

Vanessa Hua’s Forbidden City is narrated by a courageous, risk-taking sixteen-year-old whose life in a small village in China is up-ended when she is selected to join an elite dance troupe of young women trained in ballroom dancing to entertain Party leaders, including the Chairman. Hua’s is a fresh feminist take on the Cultural Revolution, an intriguing… Read More Vanessa Hua on Writing About the Forgotten Women in Mao’s Inner Circle

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Madhavan K. Palat on Nehru the Historian of Home and the World. Public lecture May 26, Jawahar Bhawan

Nehru was not a professional historian, but he composed four books of history to explain its importance. We may decide our future only if we can satisfy ourselves that the past has made it possible. The future he pursued was a united humanity, not one splintered into warring nations; logically, he began with a small… Read More Madhavan K. Palat on Nehru the Historian of Home and the World. Public lecture May 26, Jawahar Bhawan

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Alexei Yurchak on why Putin hates Lenin and how today’s Russia resembles the late Soviet Union

‘It’s impossible for the system not to change’    While waging war on Ukraine, the Russian state has intensified its already tight control over the Internet, press, and opposition at home. Meanwhile, the anti-war opposition has resorted to what are essentially guerilla tactics. Many politicians, journalists, and activists were forced to leave the country to avoid… Read More Alexei Yurchak on why Putin hates Lenin and how today’s Russia resembles the late Soviet Union

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Ahmed Diaa Dardir: The threshold of fire

The white gunman and the ‘rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners’ Ahmed Diaa Dardir // RP 2.11 (December 2021) On 25 August 2020, seventeen-year-old (white) Kyle Rittenhouse shot three antiracist protesters in the US state of Wisconsin, killing two and seriously injuring the third. Equally shocking was the impunity with which the shooting was carried out. Rittenhouse was protected… Read More Ahmed Diaa Dardir: The threshold of fire

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Jorge Luis Borges – Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)

NB: Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was one of the greatest writers of our times.  He wrote during a tumultuous historical period. Deutsches Requiem, posted below, a short story written in 1946, is an imaginary testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal, Otto Dietrich zur Linde. Before getting to the story, I post two paragraphs he wrote in 1944,… Read More Jorge Luis Borges – Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)

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Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer

Miłosz is best known outside Poland for The Captive Mind (1953), his study of how Eastern European intellectuals were seduced by Stalinism. Through several character portraits, he showed how a combination of opportunism, exhaustion, and hope led Polish writers to swallow the pill of contentment in exchange for compliance. Some prospered, like “Alpha, the Moralist” (based on… Read More Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer

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Anjan Basu: What Can Karl Marx Offer to the 21st Century?

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance… Read More Anjan Basu: What Can Karl Marx Offer to the 21st Century?

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Sudha Bhardwaj: Seventy-Five Years Since Independence, Industrial Working Class Still Struggles for Rights

The Indian working class was a proud participant in the anti-imperialist struggle against British rule in India. Whether it was the six-day strike of the working class of Mumbai in 1908; the attempts of the Ghadar Party organised by Punjabi immigrant workers in Canada, who sailed to India in 1914 to overthrow the British; the… Read More Sudha Bhardwaj: Seventy-Five Years Since Independence, Industrial Working Class Still Struggles for Rights

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Narayani Gupta: The problem with cherry-picking facts from history

NB: A timely reminder of the vulnerability of historiography to ideology. There are some among us who wish to ‘rectify’ history; whose resentment at the past can never be satiated, neither by revising textbooks nor by bulldozing the homes of the poor. Their emotional affliction is best described by Friedrich Nietzsche: The will cannot will… Read More Narayani Gupta: The problem with cherry-picking facts from history

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