Humanities Underground

Nerves are at Ease, Nerves are Tense

Prasanta Chakravarty On August 4, 1943, a few days before her death and amidst war, Simone Weil began to describe to her parents, Selma (Mime) and Bernard Weil (Biri), from her little room in London...

Of Newspapers and Governments

Malarvizhi Jayanth The memoirs of a former journalist who is using the Wikileaks context to settle old scores Once upon an election, the ruling party was bullying and booth-capturing recklessly. I was...

Cordial Old Mates: Adorno-Marcuse Exchanges

Correspondence on the German Student Movement Theodor Adorno/Herbert Marcuse Prof. Dr. Theodor W. Adorno 6 Frankfurt am Main Kettenhofweg 123 14 February 1969 Dear Herbert I wrote to you on 24 January...

Sexuality, Identity and Censorship

Charu Gupta What I am going to say is nothing new. While exploring the linkages between sexuality, identity and censorship, I want to talk about certain key elements, which reveal the intersection of...

No Hideouts Found

Avishek Parui   Dialogues “Say something” you throat across our table where three plates of grapes and the leftovers furl a forest between us in which something had been lost or maybe cleverly hidden...

Armies Are Now Obsolete

The 19 th century history of the Internal Wars of the New Zealanders is fascinating and gruesome. Tens of thousands of Maori died in the intertribal Musket Wars of the opening decades of the 19th...

Guddu, I and the Qawallis at Vijay Mandal

Sambudha Sen Several years ago, when I was only twenty eight, I spent an extended period as a tenant in a flat in Vijay Mandal Enclave. The Delhi Development Authority  had built this relatively new...

The Blind Kingdom

Véronique Tadjo Chapter One; Earth Jolts The earth jolted, violently – all of a sudden – while most inhabitants still slept. In a matter of seconds, the world turned upside down. The ground split...

Subjects and Persons

Supriya Chaudhuri  In the preface to his late and incomplete novel Jogajog (1929; trans. Relationships, 2005), Rabindranath Tagore attempted to distinguish, in a way that might seem eccentric to...

Excerpt from The Folded Earth

Anuradha Roy   My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a card; you must come for my wedding!” I got...

The First Strawberries in India

John Plotz Born, bred, and married in India, the octogenarian Harriet Tytler in 1903 still described herself and her fellow Anglo-Indians as “exiles in a foreign land” . That obdurate...