Editor | History During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life, Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project
Editor | History Did Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s wife, Ruttie, impact the creation of Pakistan? Did she have a posthumous influence on Pakistan’s polity? Does her legacy still affect Indo-Pak relations? Ruttie Jinnah was a fierce nationalist in her own right, and a proactive political companion to her husband. According to Jinnah’s contemporary political leader Sarojini
By John Cheeran If only religion could resolve men’s troubles. Now here is a film about a film that is in the making exclusively for a religious community—meeting all the safety standards of the sensitive community, unspoilt by the intrusion of other men, women or any other creatures. Totally halal. Oru Halal Love Story has
Book: Chandra Shekhar And The Six Months That Saved India | Author Roderick Matthews By John Cheeran When Chandra Shekhar stepped up to become India’s eighth prime minister on 10 November 1990, he was writing his political obituary. What had sustained the politics of this former Congressman was anti-Congressism, since 1977. Now, he was being
Editor | Politics The year 1971 exists everywhere in Bangladesh–on its roads, in sculptures, in its museums and oral history projects, in its curriculum, in people’s homes and their stories, and in political discourse. It marks the birth of the nation, it’s liberation. More than 1000 miles away, in Pakistan too, 1971 marks a watershed
Editor | Politics Rajnath Singh rose from a Swayamsevak in the RSS to the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, and also served as a Cabinet Minister in the Vajpayee Government. Jailed during the Emergency, Singh was the president of the BJPs youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha. A two-term President, Singh saw the elevation
Editor | Politics My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, these essays trace her journey from the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things
Editor | Politics What is it about the Indian psyche that makes us so incapable of fulfilling our promise as a nation? Why are we so averse to risk, resigned to mediocrity and mired in a collective lack of confidence? India has so much potential but seems forever stuck on the brink of actualization, unable
Editor | Politics A robust defense of democratic populism by one of America’s most renowned and controversial constitutional scholars-the award-winning author of We the People. Populism is a threat to the democratic world, fuel for demagogues and reactionary crowds-or so its critics would have us believe. But in his award-winning trilogy We the People, Bruce
Editor | Politics There is no better time than this after the resounding win of Narendra Modi-led BJP in the Lok Sabha elections to read how Hindu revivalism took hold of the country, subjecting Nehruvian ideals to the hammer blows of majoritarianism. Thirty years before they wrote the award-winning RSS: A View to the Inside,
