My Time with EPW

Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) has completed 50 long and fruitful years of publication. It has become an institution that promotes research in social and human sciences. It has also acquired an enviable reputation among a transnational community of scholars for its academic standards and unique nature. Due to international circulation and wide readership, some of the prominent social scientists from the global North of leftist persuasions such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank or James Petras have also contributed to areas and debates related to development and social transformation in EPW. What is more, my friend and a senior economist George Rosen took a “life-time subscription” to EPW in the very beginning, and in his mid-90s continued to receive a copy of EPW in Chicago. He expressed his embarrassment to me for having received copies of the Economic Weekly and then EPW for all these years after having paid absolutely meagre subscription fees in those days.¹

I have been fortunate to be associated with EPW for decades, and it is indeed a privilege to be invited to write about what EPW has meant to me personally. Let me briefly narrate a few significant milestones in my association with EPW. I first recall reading one of the issues of EPW in 1969 when I was doing my master’s in politics. It struck me as an unusual periodical. By and large, it offered fairly critical insights from the left on polity, society, economy and foreign policy of India as well as other countries. I enjoyed reading it and subsequently began to subscribe to it. I also began to grow with the journal and always felt happy about capacity of EPW to handle a wide range of themes and issues through columns written by regular authors, comments, perspectives, and special articles that they published. It is quite difficult to maintain even standards of articles when a weekly periodical is being published but there was an effort to maintain it.