Articles by Shiv Visvanathan

The article makes a case for the reinvention of the commons in the social sciences. The individual treatment of rights reduces the collective to a mass of persons. Instead the commons acknowledges the inviolate place of humans as part of the cosmos. The marginal and dissenting imagination must invoke the poetry of nature as it engages the current politics and economics. The commons, in its diversity, seeks wisdom through a dialogue of knowledges, moving beyond traditional “publics,” and “time.”

Waiting is so much a part of everydayness, including waiting for peace, waiting for your loved ones to come home, waiting for curfew to end, waiting for the army to go home. Between silence and waiting one can create a narrative of the Kashmir conflict. Unlike the Holocaust or partition, which have the gigantism of epic memories, the sadness of Kashmir is forged, crafted out of thousands of little memories, unwritten diaries merging quietly together. It is this alchemy of memories that is struggling against government policy, which sanitises violence and erases memory to create this strange machine that moves from violence to violence in facile amnesia.

This paper looks at Rabindranath Tagore's relationship and interaction with two scientific legends, Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist, and Jagdish Chandra Bose, and also between him and Gandhi. Each is an event on its own, but each telescopes into the other to give an intriguing picture of a multifaceted man. The letters that Tagore wrote and received from the two scientist-intellectuals are also analysed. Tagore was no ordinary nationalist and went beyond the tired categories of the modern nation state. He wanted India to smell the West, taste it and understand the differences within it. He realised that imperialism is only one phase of the West, that there were other Wests that one could talk to and conspire with.

As the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement moves to the legislative phase it has to rid itself of the panacea model. The Hazare group has to realise that it has no monopoly on diagnosis or the cure for corruption. The Lokpal is no magic bullet which will solve the problem of corruption. Corruption needs a more cautious and nuanced problematic and a wider set of solutions. To put it facetiously, Hazare's group should not look like an A grade version of the Munna Bhai effect. Life is like a duller form of documentary. One needs to summon history for a more fruitful understanding of this situation.

Biotechnology was created within a politics of anxiety and desire in India. The paper attempts to understand the social construction of biotechnology. It locates biotechnology within the wider debates on development and describes an orchestra of positions each of which captures one part of the debate.