News Archive

If India appeared as a palimpsest to those who wrote on her history in the yesteryears, history of education in India is an equally competent palimpsest spanning thousands of years if not more. On restricting the scope to engineering education for its pedagogy and content in large that we recognize and associate with today, we need to go no further than the last 200 years.

Two terms frequently used are dhimmitude and dhimmi, terms whose genesis, consequence  and current state we will be examining here. From this examination, we also hope to make it clear why Hindus can’t take their religious processions through Muslim-majority areas, why Hindus historically never studied Islam, and why they did not mount a spirited, intellectual criticism of Islam, and why Hindus still think Islam is merciful and benevolent in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and most importantly, why even today Hindus refuse to discuss Islam and tell fellow Hindu...

November 12 holds a special significance in the history of India. For this was the day in 1969 when one of India’s most powerful prime ministers, Indira Gandhi, was expelled from her own party on charges of violating the party discipline. 

You need to bury your head in the ground like an ostrich to think that the scourge of Communism has never affected or harmed India. Only a couple of days ago, the national anthem was played in the Tripura Legislative Assembly for the first time, as the newly elected members took their seats.

History is replete with examples of valour, grit and determination exhibited by India’s freedom fighters against the British Raj. While some of them featured prominently in history textbooks, others never received their deserved recognition. Even freedom fighters, who put down their lives for their motherland, also disappeared into oblivion. Such has been the case of Bengal’s first female martyr, Pritilata Waddedar. She made the supreme sacrifice on this day (September 23), 89 years ago.

The fight for Indian Independence has generally been projected as being male dominated, with focus on well known male leaders purportedly fighting for India’s freedom. However, that has not always been the case, and in some recent studies it has been clearly seen that how women once inspired by various revolutionary leaders played active roles on their own, and how many of them were direct participants in the nationalistic revolutionary activities that took place in Bengal, Punjab, and Maharashtra.

“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten” – this quote by philosopher George Santayana holds true, especially in the Indian context. For decades, academic history textbooks featured a one-sided and distorted narrative; stories of resistance by the warriors of the soil find no place. It continues to this day.

Nowhere have the contradictions posed by an Islamist solution become more evident than in the case of a South Asian Muslim divorcee who sought support from her husband through the court system. To examine the case of Shah Bano is to call attention to the pivotal yet problematic role of one mode of governance, the judiciary, as it functions in the three major Muslim states of South Asia: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Indira Gandhi was one of the most prominent leaders who led the country. She was known for many things. Indira Gandhi was an astute and shrewd politician who waded her way through the political corridors dominated by males through sheer grit and what some say as ruthlessness. The way she handled foreign policy to the role India played in the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971 under her rule, Indira Gandhi has left an indelible mark on India's post-independence history.