Articles by Hiren Gohain

While in Gramsci the term "subaltern" was never detached from the perspective of a struggle for social transformation, the Subaltern school of India gained a reputation for its determined endeavour to rescue history from the Marxist framework. Marxist orthodoxy in India had many limitations and it could straitjacket complex historical phenomena, but the Subaltern school abandoned Marxist premises instead of trying to enrich and expand its scope.

Years ago, the author's examination of the Player scenes in Hamlet seems to have aroused the collective anxiety of the bourgeois scholar-phalanx. Apart from the Players' part in a political intrigue, of which they were innocent, they embodied a form of popular culture that was held in suspicion but recognised as discharging an important function as communicator of vital social norms.

Prabhat Patnaik's article "The Left in Decline" (16 July 2011) is disappointing as it soft-pedals the worrisome significance of certain developments in the Left. As Patnaik does not believe that there has been a change in the class-character of the party to explain the empiricisation, how then does one explain its "alienation from the basic classes"?

Philip G Altbach’s recent and current views on education have been rather disconcerting to people like us who had felt a sense of liberation on reading his path-breaking articles during the 1970s.

This rejoinder to Jairam Ramesh's article, "The Two Cultures Revisited: The Environment- Development Debate in India" (EPW, 16 October 2010) argues that there are three and not two cultures in opposition to each other: the corporatedriven campaign for economic development at any cost, the elitist concerns articulated by non-governmental organisations, and the desperate struggle of indigenous people who are under the threat of extinction.