The regime’s mimicry of Pakistan in rewriting India’s history Mukul Kesavan The decision to allegedly unburden schoolchildren by deleting the Mughal era from their history curriculum has provoked amusing memes: images of the Taj Mahal complete with captions about its mysterious origins and jokes about gallant medieval Rajput rulers routed by invisible armies. These are… Read More Maiming India
by J. BRADFORD DELONG Interpreting politics through the rise of technocracy, morality, and the “web of capital” NB: A thought provoking but to my mind flawed analysis. Our world is run according to the poltical theory of Carl Schmitt, moral principles are subjugated by power; the rule of law replaced by the rule of ideology; and… Read More The Modern World Reconceived
First posted December 10, 2015 April 24, 2015, marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide: how many of us remember? The Ghosts of Ararat After all, who today talks about the murderous dispersal of the Armenians? Adolf Hitler, 1939 Hitler is believed to have said this whilst commenting on the genocide of Armenian residents of the… Read More Suman Keshari: The Ghosts of Ararat
Authors of the revised Class 11 political science textbook have also deleted the fact that Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to India on the basis of a promise that the State would remain autonomous. MAITRI PORECHA He was a freedom fighter and India’s first Education Minister, but any mention of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad has… Read More Maulana Azad, freedom fighter and India’s first Education Minister removed from NCERT textbook
“What is history for? … It makes us brave!” ADAM TOOZE I’ll never forget this response by my distinguished colleague Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith to one of the “theory and practice” questions with which we used to torture Cambridge undergraduates back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Riley-Smith’s answer resonated with me, precisely for its profound, almost archaic… Read More The courage of Vladimir Kara-Murza
William Shakespeare (aka William Sexpeare in Waste Bengal) had got most things right, especially when it came to portraying the seven deadly sins, as per their revised version in India’s Amritkaal. Whether it was “honour killing” in Othello or “love jihad” (by Romeo, naturally, trying to entice a Capulet to become a Montague) in Romeo… Read More Avay Shukla: ‘A rose by any other name..’ really?
Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past: George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty four The will cannot will backwards… That time does not run backward, that is his wrath; ‘that which was’ is the name of the stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath… Read More Rectifying the past
Knowledge is a deadly friend / When no-one sets the rules The fate of all mankind I see / Is in the hands of fools. The wall on which the prophets wrote Is cracking at the seams. Upon the instruments of death The sunlight brightly gleams. When every man is torn apart With nightmares and… Read More King Crimson – Epitaph
Respected colleagues, In the light of the deletions of several crucial themes from school textbooks produced by the NCERT, the following statement has been drafted. You would agree that the entire “rationalization” of textbooks is a process that is questionable and one which has wrongly excluded the informed opinion and expertise of the actual community of… Read More Public statement of historians on changes in school History textbooks of the NCERT
White Bird: It’s A Beautiful Day -1968 NB: The NLF marched into Saigon on April 30, 1975. Whatever we did as comrades, was above all motivated by love and solidarity with the heroic Vietnamese people. I remember on that day, rushing to the DRV Embassy on Prithviraj Road and embracing the first Vietnamese diplomat I… Read More Vietnam: Epitaph of a soldier
After the truth-shower 