Humanities Underground

The Child is Given Over to a Stepmother

Prasanta Chakravarty Unappeasable and plain. That is the reason Simone Weil is able to unburden and pull us deeper into relentless entanglements and by doing so, sets us free. “The woman who wishes...

An Animal, A Night, A Scream

Constant Nieuwenhuys   —————————  Translated by Leonard Bright    The dissolution of Western Classical culture is a phenomenon that can...

Symbol

Ritwik Kumar Ghatak   Symbol—what we call prateek in Bangla.  The thing is the fruit of proliferating human thinking and meditation. These days, I feel, its behaviour and movements have also had...

The Final Womb: A Script

  Falguni Roy   ——————————————-   Shot One: A raging pyre—around which a bevy of beautiful and ugly looking naked...

Premchand’s Fantasies and the Nation as Allegory

Paresh Chandra I This essay comes after, and is an attempt to rethink, parts of a longer study of Premchand’s novels that I had completed (after a manner) almost a year ago. In that study, I had...

‘Event, Metaphor, Memory’ Or A Tale of Two Disciplines

  Brinda Bose   Event I: At the Social Sciences Building, DU, on an April afternoon Shahid Amin has about a year to go for his retirement from the History department at Delhi University, a base from...

The Vision of Drythelm

  Jacques Le Goff —————————————————————- The vision of Drythelm...

This Beautiful Parable of the May-Be Land

Prasanta Chakravarty     आँखों देखी—The film begins with flying and ends in flying. A man takes a leap off a cliff and piercing wind brushes against his face and lo, he is a bird! Elevated and...

Heaven, Hell and Five Books

  Ma Jian, in a conference on ActivistHumanities at SOAS, University of London last week, said that Tiananmen made a writer out of him. And travelling 10,000 miles after the event made him a Chinese...

Hiuen Tsang

  Temsula Ao   When I was assigned to a regular House after about a week of my arrival, I was ‘appropriated’ by some seniors who were already in class X. As a result, I had to perform all...

Vernaculars Underground: Histories, Politics, Aesthetics–ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

March 7th and 8th, NMML, New Delhi I           Speakers Anil Yadav, Sinews of the Political in the Hindi Underground The world of blogs is a mystery. It comes in small doses, and the way it connects...