Humanities Underground

Countless Transcendentals: Kant on Discourse and Quantity

Debajyoti Mondal “Always quantify writing.” – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus This essay is a mad enterprise in dismantling Kant’s philosophy, particularly his project of...

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)...

The Politics of Shaming

 Manash Bhattacharjee As the 5th annual gay parade in Delhi walked the streets with colourful pride on 25th November, 2012, I remembered the outrageously disturbing story two years back, which shook...

On Space (s)

    Ronojoy Sircar This screen is space. Moving in and out of this space, are these words as they are being written/read right here and now. These words form a direction. Not just a path...

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