Book Launch – Half a Day for Caste?

Friday, February 7, 2020: The Madras Institute of Development Studies in collaboration with the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) and The Dr Dilip Veeraraghavan Memorial Trust hosted the launch of Half a Day for Caste?: Education and Politics in Tamil Nadu, 1952–55 at the Adiseshiah Auditorium, MIDS. The book is an edited, updated version of Dilip Veeraraghavan’s (1958–2009) MPhil dissertation, published posthumously by LeftWord Books. [...]

‘Halla Bol’: A book of modern Indian history

January 6, 2020. Breathless. I have to put words down as I read else I’ll be left with none by the end of Halla Bol. As I tumble through the first chapter, I feel I am in a film. Somewhere I have read spoilers, I know how this will end. Even so, I am on the edge of my seat praying for a miracle. Every hard detail – new shoes, a green sweater, a cycle rickshaw, bamboo stick broken like twigs, a refrigerated room – seared into my mind’s eye. The cuts are too fast, the angles too crazy. A [...]