Strongmen Going Strong

There is bad news and there is good news. The bad news is that the strongmen are going strong all over the world. Jair Bolsonaro, the most extreme far right leader, won the Presidential Elections and will become the new President of Brazil early next year. As pointed out by our chief editor Vijay Prashad, 'Brazil, the largest country in South America, has decided to go the way of the Philippines, the U.S., Hungary and the others.' The good news is that Strongmen is also going strong. We are ta..

'Our Renaissance leaders taught us that some customs are meant to be broken'

The RSS feed on fear. Fighting them requires depriving them of it. Pinarayi Vijayan, Chief Minister of Kerela, was born in Kannur, ground zero of RSS terror. He has seen the worst that they have to offer. At LeftWord Books, we published a collection of Pinarayi Vijayan's speeches, 'India vs. RSS'. Kerala has been a land of socio-political movements. The secular fabric of the society stands on the history of hard-fought victories at the back of long struggles. This week saw the brutal nature of ..

Facts of a ‘dirty war’: An excerpt from 'The Dirty War in Kashmir'

This is an excerpt from our new Shujaat Bukhari book  The Dirty War in Kashmir: Frontline Reports. Shujaat Bukhari was one of the most vital, balanced and well-informed voices in Kashmir. Perhaps for this reason, the 50-year-old journalist was shot dead by motorcycle-borne gunmen in Srinagar on the evening of June 14, 2018, as he was leaving the office of Rising Kashmir. This excerpt is from his Frontline report "Facts of a 'dirty war'" published on July 07, 2017 where he statistically anal..

Manto in our Times- An Interview with Nandita Das

 Saadat Hasan Manto died on 18th January, 1955 in Lahore. Sixty five years after his death, Manto remains relevant to our times. His legacy shines on with his 22 collections of short stories and multiple collections of essays, personal sketches and plays. In the last few years, there has been a significant surge in the number of biographical movies produced in Bollywood. But, most of these movies are either based on sport-persons or social achievers. In the filmography of Hindi movies, there..

Letter from the Editors- September, 2018

Dear LeftWord Books community, In 1943, in the midst of the terrible battles of the Second World War, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took a massive book – 700 pages – to the publisher Gallimard and asked them to publish it. The book – Being and Nothingness – was a dense philosophical inquiry into human existence. It came out in August 1943. The publisher felt that it would not sell. In times of war, this was not a negligible worry. Paper was scarce, readers of such books even..