Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Benjamin Horniman, the founding editor of ‘The Bombay Chronicle’, supported workers’ demands.
The First World War raised costs of living and depressed wages all at once, thus reducing the buying power of Bombay’s inhabitants, who then numbered over 1.5 million. This catapulted labour movements (...)
Out of the ongoing Khilafat Movement emerged the Hijrat of 1920, a mass exodus of Muslims of different classes from colonial India to Afghanistan. The migration of the Muhajirin (plural of Muhajir), or Indian Muslim refugees started in April and converged with Ramzan, the holy month of fasting (...)
Priyamvada Gopal in her book Insurgent Empire looks at the dissent by British critics, who were actively inspired by Black and Asian insurgencies, against the Imperial project
From the Revolt of 1857 in India to the 1905 ‘Mau Mau’ uprising in Kenya, Priyamvada Gopal explores a century of dissent (...)
The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary (...)
This paper charts communist print worlds in colonial India during the interwar period. Beginning in the early 1920s, self-declared ‘Communist’ and ‘Bolshevik’ publications began surfacing across India. Through the example of the Kirti Kisan Sabha (Workers and Peasants Party: a communist group in (...)
This false thesis allows upper-caste intellectuals to maintain privilege in both India and the US.
A Brahmin family photograph from the 1880s, likely from Maharashtra. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The geographer Sanjoy Chakravorty recently promised that, in his new book, he would “show how the (...)
An apology from the British is a necessary but inadequate response to the 1919 massacre in Jallianwala Bagh
April 13, 1919 witnessed one of the most gruesome events of colonial violence on the Indian subcontinent. On this day, hundreds of families gathered at Jalianwala Bagh, a park in Amritsar, to celebrate the spring festival of Baisakhi. The celebrations were being held in defiance of the notorious Rowlatt Act which forbade public gatherings in the Punjab. As a (...)
"The former Indian minister and a member of the parliament, Shashi Tharoor demanded Britain to pay reparations to India and other former colonies for its decades of imperial rule. He made the case in a debate entitled ‘This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies’, (...)
This new study is first time weather data has been used to argue that wartime policies exacerbated famine
The Bengal famine of 1943 was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a result of serious drought, according to a study that provides scientific backing for arguments that Churchill-era British policies were a significant factor contributing to the catastrophe.
Researchers in India and the US used weather data to simulate the amount of moisture in the soil during six major famines in (...)
Truth, as they say, is the first casualty of war. The situation of the ruling classes of India and Pakistan is so disdainful that they cannot go to war nor they can sustain a genuine peace. What they contrive are virtual wars and hoaxes of peace. In the ongoing rhetoric of war and the hysteria (...)
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India - as horrible as it may have been - was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long - (...)
Patnaik, in her essay published in Columbia University Press recently, said Britain drained out over $45 trillion from India, which to date has hampered the country’s ability to come out of poverty.
Britain ruled India for about 200 years, a period that was marred with extreme poverty and (...)
On the 300th anniversary of his martyrdom, Shah Inayat’s ideas on equality and collective economic endeavour remain completely relevant.
Sufi Shah Inayat Shaheed (1655-1718) – whose 300th anniversary of martyrdom falls today on October 25 – symbolised tolerance, social justice, civil liberties (...)
Many accounts ignore the fact that the Assamese territory saw massive geographical expansion under the British and that despite immigration, there was an increase in the Assamese speaking population in what was a multi-lingual society.
The issue of undocumented immigration of Bangladeshis into (...)
"The prime movers of these movements do not in their hearts desire that the agricultural labourers should get real relief. They seek only their own ends. Then how will the poor be benefited? They will be benefited in the long run because despite the determined efforts of dim false leaders to (...)
Iqbalunnisa Hussain was married at the age of 15. She received her higher education after her marriage when she traveled to England in 1933 with her infant daughter, leaving behind five other children in Bangalore with her husband. Once in England, she not only received her postgraduate degree (...)
How India’s dream of using her wartime loan to finance development went up in smoke.
A sea change, with many long term consequences, took place in the US view of India between 1944 and 1947.
By the 1940s, India had many friends in the US. Important members of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (...)
Maulvi Barkatullah Bhopali believed the spirit of Marx’s thought and divine religions was the same. “The objective of both is to provide a dignified and peaceful life to the oppressed.”
Maulvi Barkatullah Bhopali, who was born 164 years ago this month, was a glorious standard-bearer of the Indian (...)
Is there anyone in the subcontinent who has remained untouched by the slogan he coined, ’Inquilab Zindabad’?
The problem with historical icons in the Indian subcontinent is that their fate is closely tied to the demands of present-day politics in both India and Pakistan. If the seven decade-long (...)
Notions of the ritual purity of the Brahmana go back to the Brahmana as the Vedic ritual specialist. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Vedic Brahmanism had been less prominent with the rise of Puranic Hinduism. But there was a revival of Vedic rituals, legitimizing rulers in the multiple kingdoms (...)
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