Those seeking religious or spiritual instruction may need a guru, who teaches and even orders them toward what he considers the correct path. The shishya is asked to follow the guru implicitly and even blindly. However, those who wish to become scholars would be ill-advised to look for a guru. Critical enquiry and original research require [...]
A term greatly beloved of the Modi Government is ‘surgical strike’. It was first invoked in September 2016, after a cross-border raid undertaken by the Indian Army on camps in Pakistan. In November of the same year, the Prime Minister’s sudden, catalysmic, withdrawal of the Rs 1000 and Rs 500 currrency notes was also termed a [...]
This essay is inspired, or more accurately perhaps provoked, by an invitation to participate in a cross-cultural symposium on ‘New Trends in South Asian Studies’. The symposium’s organizers suggested that while ‘Europe has long developed research traditions and produced much scholarly work on Asia’, it was ‘only in the last two decades that an increased production [...]