Articles by Janaki Nair

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.

Nowhere does the habitual or characteristic mental attitude implied in the term “mindset” appear more debilitating than in the Indian outlook towards garbage.

While Delhi University is facing the wreckers' ball, the Ambedkar University, Delhi has become a viable, vibrant space of thinking and learning. The new political masters must simultaneously perfect the art of judicious intervention to save the former and the craft of withholding the temptation to interfere with the latter.

Has the idea of the linguistic state been rendered increasingly irrelevant or less pertinent in the current stage of capitalist development? The unfolding political scenario in Karnataka calls for a return to its founding moments as a linguistic state. In the early 1950s, Kengal Hanumanthaiah developed the idea of a "composite state" partly in order to channelise the discontent within Mysore about the possible loss of (caste) power but equally to provide an alternative matrix (that of development) within the expanded state. What were the roots of that alternative to the (linguistic) state that was being imagined, and have the recent political developments been a realisation of that imagined "composite state" or its demise? This article attempts to frame these questions through a return to the legislative assembly debates of the early 1950s.

For a long time now there has been a growing cleavage between the terms law and order. The recent attacks at Baroda, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and, most recently, in the cities of Maharashtra by forces claiming to speak on behalf of ethnic communities or even vote banks illustrate this cleavage very well. The authorities are in effect permitting and tolerating the violation of the law in order to maintain order.