Posts

Red Books Day 2022 by Nitheesh Narayanan, Sudhanva Deshpande and Vijay Prashad

In 1999, Fidel Castro of Cuba travelled to Caracas, Venezuela, to deliver an important speech at the central university. The USSR had collapsed, Fidel said, and the 'extremely powerful empire', the United States and its global tentacles, mounted a 'ceaseless ideological battle with all their resources'. Structures of globalisation weakened the national projects of many states, whose agendas were increasingly set by the International Monetary Fund and by transnational corporations. We are a 'pe[...]

Who Are the Killers of Govind Pansare?

International Union of Left Publishers On February 16, 2015, Govind Pansare and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk. Men on a motorbike stopped near them, shot them, and fled. Govind Pansare died four days later, on February 20; Uma Pansare survived, but continues to suffer from the attack. Govind Pansare was a communist, whose book – Who Was Shivaji? (New Delhi: LeftWord Books) – rankled the right-wing which did not agree with his factual presentation of the life of this 17th century icon.[...]

Amazon's Westland plan: game-changing or gaming the book industry? by Vinutha Mallya

[This post was written and published on 1 February 2022, the day Amazon announced that Westland was going to be wound up.] Just five years after it acquired Westland as a wholly owned subsidiary, Amazon today announced to its employees the decision to shut it down. The news, first reported by Mint Lounge (February 1, 2022), has raised concerns about the future of Westland’s catalogue even as it has generated wide-ranging responses of disappointment and ‘heartbreak' from authors and readers [...]

Commemorating Venmani: Flame of Resistance by Kalpana Karunakaran

‘Huts without roof.Huts without walls.Huts ground to dust.To ash.Huts with broken bangle pieces’. These were the opening lines of an essay on the Keezhvenmani massacre where forty-four Dalit agricultural labourers, members of the kisan union of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), were trapped inside a small hut and burnt alive in a village in the former Thanjavur district, the ‘rice bowl’ of Tamil Nadu. The author of the essay Mythily Sivaraman, then a young woman of twenty-nine yea[...]

The Wretchedness of Caste – Ambedkar, Fanon, and the Blocked Indian Revolution, part one by Vijay Prashad

This is part one of a three-part blog post. Read also part two and part three. Caste, like race, is wretched. It denigrates the human being, reduces people to inferiority and to cheaper labour. Caste, unlike race, predates the colonial era. It is a wretchedness that comes out of older histories. One sees the caste system sharply in India, but this kind of rigid, birth-derived hierarchy can be found in most cultures, from the mibunsei system in Japan to the osu system in today’s Nigeria and Ca[...]