December 2019
Why Authoritarianism is Bad for Science, But Bigotry is Even Worse
There have been many protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill (now Act), and there will be many more. This piece of legislation strikes at the heart of the Constitution, seeking to make India another country [...]
From Indo-Pak to Chindia and Back Again to Indo-Pak, Hindustan Times
On 26th January 2006, the New York Times ran a story headlined ‘India Everywhere in the Alps’. The story began: ‘Delhi swept into Davos on Wednesday, with an extravagant public relations campaign by India intended [...]
History Against Sectarianism, The Telegraph
In December 1947, the annual Indian History Congress was held in Bombay. The President-elect that year was Professor Mohammad Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University, a historian of early medieval India, known especially for his [...]
October 2019
The Cities That Shaped Gandhi, The Cities That Gandhi Shaped, Hindustan Times
Mahatma Gandhi famously claimed that ‘India lives in her villages’. The focus of his political and social work, and his philosophical writings, was that India was essentially an agrarian civilization, and that it must remain [...]
Searching For Gandhi, Hindustan Times
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) run to one hundred volumes. Many years before I read these volumes, one by one, their Chief Editor, Professor K. Swaminathan, had satirised scholars like myself in verse: [...]
September 2019
Gandhi and The RSS: The Historical Record, The Telegraph
This column appears days before the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. That anniversary shall be observed at a time when a former pracharark of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh is the country’s Prime Minister, and [...]