Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Nabarun Bhattacharya [1948-2014]

  31 August 2014

  TRIBUTE
  Recently Bengal lost a prominent literary figure who never compromised with the establishment. One had worked with Nabarun in the students’ movement of the sixties and interacted with him on literary issues subsequently. While offering our sincere homage to his memory we are carrying the following tribute.
  by Bishwajit sen
  Nabarun Bhattacharya was born on June 24, 1948 in Bahrampur. His father was Bijan Bhattacharya, who wrote “Nabanna”, the play which kept alive the faith of (…)

• Defending Freedom in Perilous Times

  15 August 2014, by SC

  Editorial
  Our sixtyeighth Independence Day is being observed in the country against the sombre backdrop of the BJP’s return to power at the Centre after 10 long years.
  But it is not just the BJP’s return to power that is a matter of alarm. It has secured absolute majority in the Lok Sabha—the first party to do so after 25 years. That is doubtless a source of grave concern.
  Of course, the party used the twin planks of ‘development’ and ‘governance’ during the election campaign to storm (…)

• Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Only a few days, dear one, a few days more

  15 August 2014

  Under oppression’s shadows condemned to breathe,
  Still for a time we must bear them, and tears, and endure
  What our forefathers, not our own faults, bequeath:
  Fettered limbs, each impulse held on a chain,
  Minds in bondage, our words all watched and set down—
  Courage still nerves us, or how should we still exist,
  Now with existence only a beggar’s gown,
  Tattered, and patched every hour with new rags of pain?
  Yes, but to tyranny not many hours are left now;
  Patience a little, (…)

• Spirit of August Fifteenth

  15 August 2014, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  August Fifteenth, the day when the Tricolour of independent India was hoisted on the ramparts of the Red Fort thirtyseven years ago, not only brings back the imprishable memories of the nation’s freedom struggle in which millions upon millions participated, but also reminds us of the pledges unredeemed and the commitments unfulfilled.
  In the four decades since independence, the nation has been unified as the mosaic of petty princedoms disappeared; the economy has (…)

• Communal Challenge to Free India

  15 August 2014

  [(Desh Raj Goyal, 84, passed away in New Delhi after a brief illness in the afternoon of February 3, 2013. A veteran journalist and academic, he was the editor of Secular Democracy. From 1963 to 1967 he edited Mainstream.
  Goyal-sahb was a crusader against the growing menace of communalism in the country since he fully comprehended the threat it posed having himself been a full-time RSS pracharak (like PM Narendra Modi) in his youth. He later eschewed his connections with the RSS and joined (…)

• Habitation and a Name for India in the BRICS

  15 August 2014, by M K Bhadrakumar

  I
  If the annual BRICS summit meeting, which just ended in Fortaleza, Brazil, assumed an unprecedented level of interest in India, three reasons could be attributed to it.
  First and foremost, India has a new govern-ment which took office in late May. The new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi is not exactly a stranger to international diplomacy and foreign policy, but during the election campaign for the 2014 parliamentary poll, he almost exclusively focused on domestic issues, and other than (…)

• ’It Is Majoritarianism That Needs To Be Contested’

  15 August 2014

  (Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow and the celebrated author of The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan and, most recently, of The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide. In this wide-ranging interview, she spoke to Ather Farouqui, the General Secretary of the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), New Delhi, on a host of issues.)
  The following interview (…)

• Natwar’s Betrayal

  15 August 2014, by Nandita Haksar

  Like many of my fellow citizens I too watched the recent interview of Natwar Singh by Karan Thapar. The contents of the interview made front-page headlines in national newspapers. Having heard the interview in which Karan Thapar emphasised that the 80-year-old diplomat-turned-politician had revealed much more in the interview than he had done in his book. What has he revealed?
  This is not in defence of Sonia Gandhi. She is capable of defending herself. This is not in defence of the (…)

• Consumption and Protection: Understanding BJP’s Victory

  15 August 2014

  by Sri Ram Pandeya
  The recent outcry in responsible scholarly discussions about the secular setting of our society getting affected due to a leader becoming the Prime Minister of India, even as he vows to homogenise society, has led to a renewal of interest in some of our democratic values. While the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been attributed to the more secular development agenda, it is a victory for the majority community as well (at least) for two reasons: first, (…)

• In Defence of the Chatterati

  15 August 2014, by Uttam Sen

  We face a problem of value-judgment today. Place and time have something to do with it. Post-independence, people from the older cosmopolitan cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai were most visibly “political”. The others are now being seen and heard. We had an amorphous “intelligentsia”, which wielded power and influence disproportionate to its middle class genesis, but was bona fide nevertheless. This configuration was spawned by a rich-agrarian—political-party-bureaucracy alignment. It (…)