Interview: Radhika Singha on the need to expand our understanding of India’s role in World War I
Interview: Radhika Singha on the need to expand our understanding of India’s role in World War I
In ‘The Coolie’s War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921’, the JNU professor looks beyond just the experiences of soldiers. Indian troops guarding Baghdad railway station. | Imperial War Museum
Over the past few decades, a number of books have reminded us that World War I was far from being an exclusively or even primarily European conflict. Scholars have pointed to the presence of non-white soldiers in huge numbers, including more than a million from the British Indian Army, and the broad geographical expanse across which they were deployed, from France to Gallipoli to East Africa to Mesopotamia.
Hurt, Angst and Struggle: How the Pandemic Impacted Gender-Based Violence in Arunachal Pradesh
In the midst of the modernisation of the frontier state, what is the relevance of cultural continuity in the form of customary laws and practices that deny equality between the sexes?
A view of Tawang. Photo: Prashant Ram/CC BY-ND 2.0
This is the first article in a two-part series.
Is there hope for an ethics of storytelling? The year 2020, with its resounding global health crisis, has been catastrophic. And the seemingly inexorable impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the social, political and economic spheres of life are yet to be fully ascertained.
Traversing the overlapping print worlds of Portuguese, Konkani and English, Rochelle Pinto has been studying how colonialism and its aftermath has shaped life in Goa and the larger Goan diaspora in Mumbai and beyond. In this interview with Murali Ranganathan, she looks back at her engagement with print history and its connection with politics and land
At what point of time in your career did you realize that you had evolved into a book/print historian from a professor of English literature? How did the evolution happen?
A Master’s degree at JNU opened up a world of different methodologies thanks to an extraordinary range of teachers who introduced us to nineteenth century writing in India and to theoretical questions about the history of literary studies both in England and in India. This led to questions about how the field of literature was shaped during colonial rule and after, and about the assumptions that underlay our use of the category literature. Amo