Ahmedabad, India. Photograph by lecercle by Samantha Christiansen Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India, by Howard Spodek, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 352 pp. The field of South Asian urban history has a rich history of examining India’s major urban centers. Numerous astute studies of Delhi, Bombay (Mumbai), and Calcutta (Kolkata), for example, have contributed to…
Read MoreIndians have remade London in various ways over the last five hundred years…
Read MoreEverything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else…
Read MoreTalat Ahmed’s political biography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s life is a welcome addition to the existing literature attempting to theorize his principles of nonviolence…
Read MoreAmartya Sen is reasonable in saying that Narendra Modi, re-elected as Prime Minister of India last week, has simply won the vote share, but not the battle of ideas.
Read MoreThe final phase of voting in India recently concluded with approximately 62% turnout. If one is to pay attention to the outrageous exit polls, it looks like the joke is going to be on me…
Read MoreWith the most expensive elections in the world taking place as we speak, comes a raucous confusion around funds and bribes. Are they distinguishable at all?
Read MoreIn some ways, I feel I shouldn’t go there, so naturally I am drawn like a moth to the flame. I can’t get around race and identity politics, and I shouldn’t. But as deliciously pearly white as I am—and given that it’s ipso facto my “identity”—I have still never felt an urge to belong to a white community.
Read MoreIn a 60-page essay I wrote on the nature of a “morbid curiosity,” I struggled not only with the ethics of viewing actualities of death found on shock sites—usually, the premature deaths of non-white victims of car crashes, industrial accidents, drug cartel violence.
Read MoreArundhathi Roy in 2013. Photograph by Augustus Binu. From The New York Times: “I’ve always been slightly short with people who say, ‘You haven’t written anything again,’ as if all the nonfiction I’ve written is not writing,” Arundhati Roy said. It was July, and we were sitting in Roy’s living room, the windows closed against the…
Read MoreFrom the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE
Republicans, and the way he says HATE,
saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
Patwardhan both captures and manifests this wavering time of modern India: history exists in his films not as a static object for reflection, nostalgia or mourning, but as something which constantly returns, flashing up, animating politics and inflecting horizons of possibility in the present.
Read MoreAmar Kanwar wants us to see what most of us prefer not to see: destruction and suffering caused by social injustice and violence fuelled by poisonous racist ideologies, political power battles and corporate greed. It’s not that his images are particularly hard to see.
Read MoreKim Jong-un, Vasily Galaktionov, 2013 by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman The changing dictatorships Dictatorships are not what they used to be. The totalitarian tyrants of the past – such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot – employed terror, indoctrination, and isolation to monopolise power. Although less ideological, many 20th-century military regimes also relied on mass…
Read MoreThis spring, I spent some time watching these films from Kabul in a small room deep in the depths of the ICRC building, a room located inside a network of corridors and sliding doors. It was a silent, small room, a room with space for the past, filled up with the tools of bearing witness, from U-Matic to Beta players.
Read MoreOne midsummer afternoon, forty-three years after that terrible night, I’m at the computer. Five o’clock. I’m expected in the pub soon, but I just have time to check my emails. On Friday afternoons, nothing much comes in except offers to enhance my breasts or invitations to share the booty of some recently deceased dictator.
Read MorePhotograph by Nick Krug by Sumana Roy Soon after I was born – one year, eleven months and twenty-three days to be precise – I became a palindrome. A brother was born to me, and so I became an elder sister. The Bengali word for that is ‘didi’. Phonetically and in the written script, ‘didi’…
Read Moreby John Gaffney Last month saw the broadcast of Laurence Rees’ acclaimed The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler on BBC2, of which there is also an accompanying book. The stunning spectacle of mass hero-worship in the Third Reich is compelling, in particular, the sight of unbridled joy at these mass rallies. This is even more…
Read More
