2012

With this Annual Number, this journal enters the fiftyfirst year of its publication. On the occasion of our Golden Jubilee we warmly greet all our readers as well as well-wishers who have stood by us through thick and think.
Mainstream was born fifty years ago. In its first issue, dated September 1, 1962, the editor’s letter to the reader spelt out the purpose for which the weekly had been launched:
....Mainstream owes allegiance to no political party or group. Its loyalty is wholly and (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
As, Mainstream completes fifty years, we reproduce N.C.’s ‘Editor’s Notebook’ that appeared in this journal’s Twentyfifth Annual Special on October 10, 1987 as it brings out the purpose believed the publication of this periodical.
Thoughts at 25
Twentyfive years ago, on a September morning, when Mainstream was born, many thought it was too ambitious a venture and were nearly convinced that it would not live beyond a couple of winters. Only after it survived many a (…)

The author sent a note alongwith the following article to the editor that read: “Gujral’s role was perhaps more appreciated in Bangladesh than it was in his own country which should be recognised, at least by your readers.”
Inder Kumar Gujral, a former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of India, is no more. In his passing Bangladesh has lost a true friend whose support remained steadfast whether he was holding public office, sitting on the Opposition benches in Parliament or just a (…)

One hears a lot of Islamic fundamentalism these days and the tone and context make it clear that fundamentalism is being equated with orthodoxy and obscurantism. The established image is that of a Mullah with a gun. Indeed fundamentalism has become a derogatory term, just as two generations ago pan-Islamism had become a dirty word, an emotive term. In course of time, political terminologies change in sartorial fashion. However, the task to explain the happenings in the Muslim world has to be (…)

In a brief compass, the following article aims at an indepth focus on the history of female infanticides as we see in some of North Indian States. The materials used are drawn from the archival source of the colonial administration.
Perhaps many parts of India are unaware of the word, kuri mara, and its connotation. This means persons “who kill their female infants”. In his several writings, Guru Gobind Singh (December 31, 1666-October 21, 1708) severely condemned the kuri maras.1 His (…)

More than fifty years back people in the newly formed State of Kerala created history by voting to power, through the democratic election process, a Ministry led by the Communist Party. For the first time the hegemony of the Indian National Congress was challenged in the country.
In the first Lok Sabha, the Communist Party—undivided at that time—was the major Opposition and A.K. Gopalan, from North Malabar which at that time was part of the Madras Presidency, was the Leader of the (…)

It was the night of March 29, 1978. A young woman in Hyderabad, Rameeza Bee, was subjected to rape by three policemen and her husband beaten to death for resisting them. Public outrage and frenzy brought the city to a halt the following day.
Rameeza Bee is just one more name in the long, never ending roll-call of survivors of violence against women in India. That egregious assault on her is only one among countless others—many of them unaccounted, unacknow-ledged, unpunished—that women in (…)

The Indian discourse on development has no doubt taken a new turn since the initiation of the globalisation-liberalisation paradigm and the free flow of the global capital as well as capitalist forces into our country. It is invariably realised that the inflow of not just the ‘capital’ but its interventionist influence has resulted in a tremendous change in the country’s landscape as well as the land use. The opening up of the land has made all our natural resources accessible and available (…)

How soon does time fly away? Mainstream is fifty years old. Yet it seems only yesterday when Nikhil Chakarvartty founded the magazine. He wanted to give the intelligentsia a mainstream where streams of different thoughts would pour in. His belief was that every idea, however conservative or parochial, was worth debating.
The contributor had every right to place his or her viewpoint freely and independently so that there was an interplay of ideas for a consensus to emerge. Even if there was (…)

Long ago, in the late sixties of the last century, the Planning Commission of India constituted a Committee on Land Reforms under the chairmanship of Dr Z.A. Ahmed, a redoubtable CPI leader, who among other things distinguished himself as a strident and vociferous peasant leader betraying his own class interest. That way he was quite a “non-Marxist” as he went against the interests of the class to which he belonged. He came from a family of landlords in Uttar Pradesh. Having worked under (…)