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...

Everybody say Ye-Ye!

Michael E. Veal A humid weekend night in the early 1990s. The scene: outside the Afrika Shrine nightclub in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria, home base of the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and...

What Makes a Pamphlet?

Joad Raymond Though already venerable the word pamphlet prospered in the 1580s, as its meanings shifted and it entered into common use. In 1716 Myles Davies claimed it as ‘a true-born English...

North Indian Classical Music in the ‘Long’ 1940s

  Amlan Das Gupta   Two Photographs   Let me start by telling you about two photographs (that I usually show), one taken probably in the early or mid- 1930s; the other in the early...

Walking (an excerpt)

  Henry David Thoreau I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do:...

Force and Adoration: Ambedkar’s Maitri

Aishwary Kumar In his final work The Buddha and His Dhamma, Bhimrao Ambedkar returns frequently to the concept of maitri, which he most often renders, for the first time in his essay on Marx, as...

Aphorisms Twelve

Abhi Choudhury 1. Actually, every pronunciation has an objective. Some kind of outlandish and beautiful objective. As and when the speaker makes an utterance, every word brings forth a definite...

I’m not a Hollywood Star

Henri Alleg from: The Algerian Memoirs And , since our house was one of the few with a working telephone—the other lines had been cut for lack of payment—people would drop by often to make a call...

The Political Economy of Reading

William St Clair Last year, some of us were privileged to hear the first John Coffin Memorial Lecture given by Robert Darnton entitled ‘The Devil in the Holy Water.’ In that talk, by...

Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong — and Why It Matters

Jim Hinch One year ago this month, Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt stepped to the podium at the Cipriani Club in New York City to accept the National Book Award for nonfiction...

What’s in a Name!

Bhasha Singh Dabbuwali (Bengal), Baaltiwali (Kanpur), Teenawali (Bihar), Kamaai-Ka-Kaam Karne wali (Large swathes of North India), Tokriwali (Haryana-Punjab), Thottikar (much of South India)...