Individual protests, like those in Hong Kong, may be defeated. But the global protest movement is only beginning.
Tag: South Asia
Living with the Future in South Asia
For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
“Mississippi Masala” @30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times
What might it mean to forge a politics explicitly based in the places we are, rather than a politics of the places from which we came?
The World of Asian American Studies
Last summer marked a watershed of sorts. Crazy Rich Asians became one of the most successful romantic comedies ever, grossing over $165 million in the US ...
Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the ...
Virtual Roundtable on Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons
Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?
Cosmopolitans in Indian Fiction
“What does it take to stop dreaming of alternative lives?” Two versions of this question from Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans speak to challenges now faced around the globe. First: what would it ...
Seeing Things
December 1, 2015 — One of the great myths of our time concerns the promise of a global vision, of seeing things with the power, distance, and clarity of an all-encompassing vantage point, what Donna ...
O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s ...
Gems, Monsters, and Broodmares for Corpses
“No Hindu ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time,” A. K. Ramanujan, the celebrated poet, translator, and linguist, once wrote. The same cannot be said of the reader of contemporary literary ...
Complicity and Critique
In a posh Delhi neighborhood, in a walled estate with glass chandeliers and bathrooms of Italian marble, a 25-year-old heir to his family’s business and real estate fortune dreams of transforming the ...
Lahiri, High and Low
Before beginning graduate school, I promised myself that I would never write about Jhumpa Lahiri. I had studied Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake (2003), in a maddening undergraduate literature ...
Margaret Mead’s Countercultures
If you were raised in the United States during the 1960s, as I was, and if you came of intellectual age in the 1980s, as I did, chances are that you too have inherited a strangely black-and-white ...
Calcutta’s Via Negativa
Amit Chaudhuri is, as is perhaps not widely enough recognized, the author of five remarkable novels, as well as a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, a work of academic literary criticism ...
To Chuck or Not to Chuck
Cricket has a certain charge in writings on the postcolonial world as a site of political contestation between decolonized subjects and their former colonial masters. Scholars such as C. L. R. James ...
The American Dream Outsourced: India and the Genre of Growth
For much of the twentieth century, the conjugation of “India” and “economic growth” invoked either despair or derision. The phrase “Hindu rate of growth”—coined by economist Raj Krishna to ...
The City as Literary Field
Sujan Singh Park is a tiny neighborhood by Delhi standards—more of a large square than a full-fledged “colony,” as the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of South Delhi are called. But this one happens ...
Lives at the Urban Margins
“Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden ...