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An interview with the author of ‘Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir’.
In September 2009, when newspapers reported that activist Kobad Ghandy had been arrested in Delhi’s Bhikaji Cama Place, there was a curious historical coincidence to the event.
Just over 90 years earlier, Madame Cama had been (...)
Why Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were never really on the Left to begin with.
Were India’s early postcolonial leaders socialists? Yes, undeniably, goes the common reflex, both on the Left and Right. To most conservatives, following the economist Jagdish Bhagwati, it took a new generation (...)
Mujh ko is ka ranj nahiñ hai, log mujhe fankaar na maaneñ Fikr-o sukhan ke taajir mere sheroñ ko ash’aar na maaneñ
I do not regret that people do not consider me an artist That the traders of thought and words do not think of my poems as poetry
With this characteristically bold verse, Sahir (...)
The renowned historian’s new book, Voices of Dissent, looks at moments in India’s past when the dominant narrative was challenged.
Romila Thapar is one of India’s most distinguished historians, whose work beginning in the 1960s has sought to nuance our understanding of India’s past. A recipient (...)
If religion is separated from politics, then we can all come together in politics even if we belong to different religions, wrote Bhagat Singh.
On Bhagat Singh’s birth anniversary, an extract from The Bhagat Singh Reader, edited by Chaman Lal and published by HarperCollins India.
The essay (...)
Narendra Modi has from his childhood been a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which had links to Italian fascism and Nazism; from the period when Modi was chief minister to this day, school textbooks in Gujarat, ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, an affiliate of the RSS), (...)
Extracts from Sabitri Roy’s ’Harvest Song’, which depicts the Tebhaga movement that began when landless peasants and sharecroppers rebelled against landlords.
Sabitri Roy’s work is filled with a kind of light that originates in the author’s deeply held belief that human beings will always rise, (...)
The scale of Modi’s BJP hegemony today can bear comparison to that of the Indian National Congress party in the first decades after Independence. What sort of rupture do these new hegemons represent with the more reverential forms of bourgeois rule that went before? Between the two eras lies a (...)
Hindu nationalism is more Italian and Christian than Sonia Gandhi.
Hindu nationalists have always made large claims about their exemplary and inimitable Hindu-ness. In Essentials of Hindutva, the book that comes closest to defining the ideology of modern Hindu nationalism, V D Savarkar claimed (...)
Bruce Reidel’s ‘JFK’s Forgotten Crisis’ offers startling revelations and what-if possibilities.
For many years there’s been a story floating around that in 1962, when the Chinese invasion was into its fourth unstoppable week, the Indian government panicked completely and wrote to the US government (...)
Review of Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology, Verso, 2013 · 192 pages · $19.95.
First published as a series of essays in the London Review of Books, this is a provocative book that deftly cuts through the mythologies of Indian nationalism. The essays and the book have elicited several critical (...)
An Uncertain Glory. India and Its Contradictions. By Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen.
The Indian Ideology. By Perry Anderson.
In May, in a national election widely perceived as marking a dramatic new phase for India, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an absolute majority in (...)
India recently concluded its 2014 federal elections in which a record 550 million people cast their votes, electing Narendra Modi of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as Prime Minister and securing his party’s position with a majority 282 out of 543 seats in (...)
An outstanding Marxist scholar, historian and essayist, and editor of the New Left Review since 1962, Perry Anderson is known for a rich, incisive body of work spanning European history, the contemporary world, the Western Marxist tradition and intellectual history. The distinguished professor (...)
See also from Perry Anderson and this issue of the London Review of Books:
Gandhi Centre Stage (ESSF article 26028), and
India 1947: Why Partition? (ESSF article 26033). To hallow the solemn occasion, Nehru and his colleagues sat cross-legged around a sacred fire in Delhi while Hindu priests (...)
Bangladesh war led to considerable internal consequences for India.The political cost of the war and the victory was even higher than the economic (Rs. 4000 million). The events paved the way for a return to the political centre-stage of the religious-communal Right. Then Opposition leader Atal (...)
Full transcript of the speech citing which charges of sedition, promoting enmity between classes, and more have been filed against Arundhati Roy and others.
After “necessary investigations” of the speeches on Kashmir made by Arundhati Roy, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Varavara Rao, Syed Ali Shah (...)
Twenty-five years later, it doesn’t look very good.
Twenty-five years ago on October 31, I was in Mussorie listening at lunchtime with other British journalists and diplomats to Tibetan refugee children singing to Princess Anne, who was visiting from the UK. The car drivers turned their radios (...)
It is 60 years now since I, like many other schoolchildren, stayed up till midnight, bleary-eyed, to hear Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to be prime minister of India, give his famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny.”
This was on the eve of India’s independence from British rule on Aug. 15, (...)
The survival of humanity inhabiting the South Asian subcontinent critically depends on the demystification of the nuclear myths, that invest the Bomb with magical powers of immense proportions, and consequent denuclearisation of the region as an integral and crucial component of global (...)
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