Sudipta Kaviraj

There are three ways of looking at the question of regionality in India: “generalisation,” “fragmentation” and “composition.” Generalisation means gathering primary information from a determinate region, and assuming that all parts of India possess identical or similar characteristics. Fragmentation means believing that, since the regions are so fundamentally real, nothing existing beyond the regional level has any serious, compelling historical reality. Composition asserts that regions are historical and remain bound together within one single frame of some kind: political, economic or cultural.

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Remembering Pandian

Vol. 49, Issue No. 47, 22 Nov, 2014

Ajay Skaria, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gautam Bhadra, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Susie Tharu, Gyan Prakash, Gyanendra Pandey, Partha Chatterjee, Shahid Amin, Shail Mayaram, Sudipta Kaviraj

M S S Pandian, who passed away in New Delhi after a cardiac arrest on 10 November 2014, at the age of 57, was among the younger members who joined the editorial collective of the Subaltern Studies in 1990.

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Languages of Secularity

Vol. 48, Issue No. 50, 14 Dec, 2013

Sudipta Kaviraj

An intellectual history of ideas regarding secularity in India is a useful way to think through the relationship between secularisation and secularism. This article focuses on the latest period in the development of the idea of secularity in India, from the 1990s onwards, while providing some context from the previous ones. A key argument is that modernity and tradition are not doctrinal positions, but alphabetic "languages", through the elements of which quite dissimilar doctrinal positions can be fashioned.

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A Critique of the Passive Revolution

Vol. 23, Issue No. 45-46-47, 19 Nov, 1988

Sudipta Kaviraj

Sudipta Kaviraj The story of Indian politics can be told in two quite different ways, through two alternative but mutually reinforcing constructions. One of these would tell the story of structures

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Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics

Vol. 21, Issue No. 38-39, 20 Sep, 1986

Sudipta Kaviraj

Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics Sudipta Kaviraj This paper tries to see Indira Gandhi's period in Indian politics historically. It does not try to give a detailed historical account of its events, but to make sense of what happened. Do the events, beyond their quotidian diversity, show some pattern? Did Indira GandhVs actions weaken, retard, rework, redirect the scheme of national reconstruction laid down by the earlier regime? What are their likely long-term consequences? This paper tries to ask some of these questions through a division of her term into four fairly obvious periods: 1966 to 1971, 1971