Inbreeding and nepotism have for long been features of universities. The favoured students go from being postgraduates to doctorates and then become lecturers, all within the same university. This…
The drive to re-introduce the Citizens Amendment Bill and the plan to prepare a nation-wide National Register of Citizens are both part of a larger strategy to re-engineer the India of plurality and…
The 2019 Nobel laureates in Economics should use their new stature to call for a moratorium on experiments done on vulnerable populations since poor ethical standards often mark the design and…
India has enough food; does it have too many people working in agriculture? The pressure on land is an outcome of policy, which condemns most people to marginal farming. India needs a different set…
Even radical dissenters have experimented within some boundaries. Gandhi played with boundaries themselves in nearly every domain of life — politics, sexuality, culture, knowledge. He was uniquely a…
In West Bengal, the symbolic violence of caste is more intense than physical violence. A university teacher describes the everyday exclusionary experiences of adivasis in education spaces and the…
India’s political experiment over seven decades had shown that federalism can accommodate diverse policies for diverse identities and thus strengthen democracy in a plural society. That has now been…
Can an autobiographically-inclined social history reveal the role of English in shaping caste privilege, regulating class mobility and enabling individual agency? This essay risks an answer.
Close to half a century after K. Vela Velupillai tried to visit Cuba, he finally travels to the island in the Caribbean Sea. He sees changes taking place; there is also confirmation of the Cuban…
Ever since the Right to Information Act was enacted in 2005 there have been continuous attempts to dilute this potentially powerful law. The dilution has come from government action as well as by…
