Homeric-Thersitic
Robert H. Bell “But after all, what is the whole subject matter of that revered poem the Iliad but ‘the broils of foolish kings and the foolish populace’?”—Desiderius Erasmus (The Praise of...
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Narrativisationalities of Ribaldian Discourse
Dilip Simeon This is my Rifle and that is my Gun, This is for shooting and that is for fun. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text, Discourse for this life,...
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Courtesans in the Academia?
Basuli Deb The National Women’s Studies Association in the US selected “Outsider Feminisms” as one of the sub-themes for their annual conference at Denver, Colorado, in November 2010. The conference itself was...
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Lunatic Asylums Arrive in Calcutta
Amit Ranjan Basu The arrival of psychiatry in India was a disjuncture from the practices that already existed for mental healing. Not only were these practices based on concepts that did not follow...
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Who is a Malayali Anyway?
G. Arunima In 1806, an Anglican priest called Claudius Buchanan travelled to Kerala from Bengal to understand the relationship between Hindus, Jews and Christians there. In a letter that he wrote back home...
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A Life Less Ordinary
Yajnaseni Chakraborty Her tiny, birdlike frame seems lost in the embrace of a large, plush sofa in an anteroom of the business centre at the Oberoi Grand. But Nadine Gordimer still spells personality...
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The Blind Art of the Concrete
Pothik Ghosh The real when it has reached the mind, is already not real any more. Our too thoughtful, too intelligent eye. —Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer Modern man is cursed with...
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Liturgical Architecture
Dennis R. Mcnamara We live in an era that is not known for making beautiful churches. In fact, the sensus fidelium seems to indicate that something is indeed severely wrong with the unprofane architecture...
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Material Love
Nandini Chandra and Jesse Ross Knutson Indeed, love is a many splendoured thing! Different categories of age and class appropriate romantic literature offer a guide to this tremendous variety. There is a...
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Politics and Ethics in Communist Practice:From the Margins of the Indian Left
Rajarshi Dasgupta Let me begin by explaining the subtitle, which should be relatively easier than the title. Who or what exactly belongs to the margins of communist politics in India? First, let me tell...
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Spritual Politics as Marriage of Opposites
Vasanthi Srinivasan Ananda Coomaraswamy, known primarily as an art historian, deserves attention also as a philosopher of spiritual traditions. As a keeper of the Indian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts...
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In Heidegger’s Hut
Amlan Dasgupta In 1966 or 1967 (the year is variously reported) the poet Paul Celan journeyed to a place called Todtnauberg , in the Black Mountains in Germany. He was visiting the mountain...
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Trysts at Midnight: Calcutta, Now
[The Bangla film Sthaniya Sambaad (Spring in the Colony, 2009) was recently released. The film, by way of mapping the diurnal workings of a refugee colony in contemporary Calcutta, asks important questions about...
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