History constantly forms constellations of circumstances. Within the constant of these ever-changing constellations roils the constant of human struggle, first for survival and then for that thing cal...

One of the things I love about old cities like Calcutta or Chennai is what I call the availability of eccentrics. These are outstanding, outspoken people who have lived a full life and now play philos...

Sir — One agrees with Ramachandra Guha’s view that communist thought should be indigenized (“Homely traditions”, June 22). Karl Marx’s economic theory was designed for an industrialized nati...

History does nothing, it does not possess immense riches, it wages no battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.Karl Marx’s theory of history — an attempt to describe the way humans change...

History, we are told, is invariably written by victors. We are not certain whether this is what prompted Amit Shah, undoubtedly the second most powerful person in India, to declare that “there is a ...

After Arun Jaitley did not extend his term as governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 2016, Raghuram Rajan went back to his chair in Chicago and resumed teaching. He is a remarkably articulate econom...

Sir — It seems that bad timing lies at the heart of the Central Bureau of Investigation’s actions against Calcutta’s police commissioner, Rajeev Kumar. In his article, “Behind the high drama�...

This is a study of the non-communist or centre-Left in Europe, with an explanation connecting its decline and the rise of xenophobic right-wing populism as the major response to economic hard-Right ne...

I became interested in the phenomenon of increasing violence during the 1990s. The demolition of the Babri Masjid was only the tipping point for my interest. It had started interesting me much earlier...

When historical narratives become semantic beggars, anecdotes help in lighting up collective memory. Some years back, I was in Berlin. This was the post-perestroika and unified Berlin. As I was walkin...