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Seventy five years after his killing, Gandhi’s image is under scrutiny, but the Indian government likes to use it for political gain.
Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi remains, even 75 years after his assassination, a useful symbol for many in India. For secularists, the leader of the (...)
Mittal Institute: Professor Ali, we’re really looking forward to your talk today at the Harvard-Tufts Conference. Before we jump into that, could you tell us a little bit about your first book, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta. Why was it interesting (...)
The fate of the so-called princely states was a particularly contentious issue during India’s Partition, which killed about 1 million people and left millions more displaced.
In 1947, the United Kingdom was exhausted. World War II had ravaged its military and economy, and anti-colonial (...)
Despite being a widely celebrated figure in India’s protracted freedom struggle, Bhagat Singh’s role as a fearless and pioneering journalist at the time is often overlooked.
Bhagat Singh is widely venerated as a radical thinker; political revolutionary; a great intellectual, despite his young (...)
‘We fought for two things, Independence and Freedom – we achieved Independence’
‘Captain Bhau’ (Ramchandra Sripati Lad) Freedom fighter and head of Toofan Sena June 22, 1922–February 5, 2022
In the end, he went unhonoured and unsung by the nation he fought for, but venerated by the thousands who (...)
An excerpt from eminent Hindi writer Yashpal’s first novel ‘Dada Comrade’, translated into English by Simona Sawhney.
Eminent Hindi writer Yashpal (1903-1976) studied at the National College, Lahore along with Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Bhagvati Charan Vohra.
He joined the Hindustan Socialist (...)
The mass starvation that killed three million Indians during the closing years of the Second World War was no act of nature; it was engineered. Britain must face up to this crime, says Jason Hickel.
The Bengal famine stands as one of the single most horrific atrocities to have occurred under (...)
The experiences of women working in colonial India’s textile industry inform the discussion on the discrimination, sexualisation and the wage gap which women in the workplace are faced with today.
This article is the third in a series on the history of labour in India. The first part dealt (...)
The moot point is that even if one keeps one’s religion a private matter, does it not heighten a feeling of alienation in people’s hearts? Does it not affect the aim of attaining complete freedom?
An extract from The Bhagat Singh Reader, edited by Chaman Lal and published by HarperCollins (...)
Bhagat Singh understood caste and the practice of untouchability and its associated binary of purity-pollution as an integral part of Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma).
Note: Throughout this article, we have preserved Bhagat Singh’s use of the word ‘untouchable’ in his writings, which reflected (...)
Interview with the historian and author Suchetana Chattopadhyay.
2020 marks the centenary of the Left movement in India. An émigré communist party emerged in the course of October 1920 in Soviet Tashkent under M.N. Roy’s guidance. The historian and author Suchetana Chattopadhyay in her latest (...)
Gandhi, an essential ingredient in the making of India’s image across the world, needs to be seen through Dr Ambedkar’s eyes.
Mahatma Gandhi is one of India’s most recognisable names, both within the country and in the wider world. But, for most people, what they know of him is what is pieced (...)
The moot point is that even if one keeps one’s religion a private matter, does it not heighten a feeling of alienation in people’s hearts? Does it not affect the aim of attaining complete freedom?
On Bhagat Singh’s birth anniversary, an extract from The Bhagat Singh Reader, edited by Chaman Lal (...)
Today, September 11, marks 90 years of the poet’s visit to the Soviet Union. He had warned against “the imperfect contact between the wills of the leader and the led” – regimes today would do well to remember it.
Rabindranath Tagore reached the Soviet Union on September 11, 1930.
He had aired (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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