In India, we now stand at a critical crossroad, as far as the humanities are concerned. The State is creating a situation so that literature departments are either forced to turn into small-scale entrepreneurships for providing a set of skills for proficiency and/or help set-up a finishing school kind of an ambience for prospective customer-students. Research work is being systematically stymied. As a result, neither are the traditional fields being nourished and updated nor is real innovation happening in charting fresh fields.
Author: Prasanta Chakravarty
Prasanta Chakravarty teaches English in Delhi University and edits Humanities Underground
There must be a broad coalition now, silently building up. And years of work lie ahead. A painstaking job. The Right is in ascendancy today because they have done and are doing this painstaking job of hate-mongering effectively, at the grassroots level, for decades. We have to take on that kind of a might.
PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY ON THE COMPLICATED LEGACIES OF THE SEMINAL FIGURE OF #PROTESTANT REFORMATION “Therefore, let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly,…
Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani—he-who-must-not-be named, is present with us through a spectre of vital absence. All we know is that he has been taken into judicial custody on charges of sedition, criminal conspiracy and unlawful assembly in connection with an event held at the Press Club of India on February 9, 2016. No information or update about the extension of his remand, his bail options, his financial travails, the treatment meted out or questions asked of him in custody, the position or anxieties of his family and so on, have been forthcoming.
A few days ago, I found myself among 50 odd listeners, soaking in the field recordings, narrative-snippets, perceptions and emotional responses of singer-songwriter Moushumi Bhowmik…
Delhi University – a liberal university?
Delhi University is fundamentally a feudal fiefdom. Within this kind of a climate the recent injection of the idea of developing market and technocracy means the attempt is to update the fiefdom in keeping with the times. But fundamentally the campus is only intermittently argumentative.
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