South Asia Citizens Web

A valuable paper by Shaji Joseph from 2006

It is a nightmare I acquired on May 3, 1971, when, as a guest of the Pakistan army, I visited Jagannath Hall, Dhaka University. It had been cleaned up for our benefit, I learnt. What I saw has been indelibly imprinted on parts of my conscience, sub-conscience, and maybe also my unconscious.

A woman writer who won literary trophies in her twenties. An aged artist once known and loved for his bare-foot charm and innovative brush. Both are on the run today. And no force in the vast South Asian region, stretching from New Delhi to Dhaka, can help either return home in dignity.
Forty-five-year-old writer Taslima Nasreen is being kicked around like a football for a week now within India, where she sought asylum 13 years ago.

Forget the Jammu and Kashmir angle. Sentencing Afzal to death is wrong because the facts against him don?t add up, writes Sonia Jabbar.

Debates in Colonial and Early Nationalist Anthropology of Castes and Tribes
The beginning of the study of anthropology in the 19th century coincided with the need of the colonial authorities to ‘understand’ and assert themselves over their natives ubjects. New fields such as statistics came to be used to categorise and define subjects who were then placed in relation to each other in a fixed hierarchy. As this article argues, the tenor of the dominant anthropological discourse on the (…)