Articles by Janaki Nair

Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India by Ania Loomba, Routledge, Special Indian Edition, 2019; pp 321 + ix, ₹ 555.

What are the pasts and futures of the public university in India? This question has come to the fore over the last year, when a series of events at some of India’s leading public universities and institutions brought a new focus on the achievements and problems associated with these spaces of higher education. This article argues that any insightful assessment of the public university in India today must take account of its histories, its achievements, and its possible futures. That alone will go a long way towards asserting its continued and vital relevance in a society such as ours.

In the controversies around, and legal and political challenges to, the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor being constructed by Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises, one can see signs of a new historical stage and urban form. Court judgments between 1997 and 2006 relating to land acquisition for infrastructure projects such as NICE tell us about the new urban form, which the courts feel obliged to bring into being, displaying a proselytising zeal in promoting corridor urbanism. The corridor project has seized hold of the planning, bureaucratic, and judicial imagination in ways that signal a consensus about the imperatives of rapid capitalist growth, uncontaminated by any early postcolonial notions of developmentalist growth.

How does one speak about a figure who has in equal measure been lionised, vilified, celebrated, denigrated, by all those whom he wished to influence, convert, contest, teach or quite simply annoy? How, except by admitting that he succeeded in doing all of the above.

Do we have the intellectual resources to comprehend the transformations that are upon us, especially in our villages? A snapshot of a village in Karnataka illustrates the complex and contradictory processes of resistance and engagement in the prodigious development of capitalism in India.