Discussion Maps
Academic debates are curated from the pages of EPW, to build a repository for specialists and non-specialists. Readers will gain fresh insight on topics and see how current debates have evolved over time. This project ensures that academic debates are made accessible and stay relevant in the public domain.
India’s first international queer film festival was held in Mumbai in 2003, followed by its second edition in 2004. The festival was called Larzish, tremors of a revolution: An International Film...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In a provocative article published in mid-2009, Ramchandra Guha argued that, while modern Indian thinkers were intellectually...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Language is a complex human phenomenon that provides us with the agency to derive meaning from our human experiences with ourselves...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The first global poverty estimates generated by the World Bank in 1990 employed a poverty line of $1.08 per day anywhere in the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
India’s potential as a science and technology powerhouse has been widely recognised. However, Meera Nanda argues in her paper...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In the aftermath of Narendra Modi’s 2019 victory Dipankar Gupta, in an article titled “Caste and Electoral Outcomes: Misreading...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The age-old debate between the subjective methods and objective methods of doing research in natural as well as social sciences,...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Nupur Kataria’s Special Article...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In a special article in the 26 June 2021 issue of EPW, Tirthankar Roy argues that famine studies in India have been too...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The articles that make up this discussion map are a response to efforts to carve out a "Hindutva historiography" that, in the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
During the controversy involving the hijab in educational institutions of Karnataka in February 2022, two short articles—one, From...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The phrase "the third world," now considered derogatory, emerged during the Cold War in reference to countries that were unaligned...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In the study of untouchability, the concepts of purity, impurity and pollution are crucial for understanding the practice of...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The practice of witch-hunting — the persecution, often until death, of women accused of being witches — has persisted in India...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Historically, language has played an important role in the formation of nation states. While selecting an official language plays an...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Rajan...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
India has been witnessing a trend where dissent is being met with charges of sedition. What has been the response of the Indian...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 1989, Biswamoy Pati published a paper in EPW, which outlines the way the peasants and tribals figured in the Oriya literature of...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
A call attention motion on dance bars in the Maharashtra legislative assembly on 31 March 2005 culminated with a ban on dance bars...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In October 2002, the Tamil Nadu assembly promulgated an...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2006, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government proposed a 27% reservation of seats for Other Backward Classes (...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 1968, at a seminar hosted by All India Radio, three papers criticising the communal approach to Indian history, written by Romila...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In a 1996 discussion on gay rights in India, an article written by H Srikanth as a response to Vimal Balasubrahmanyan’s piece on the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In his column, Nuclear Notebook...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2003, Anirudh Krishna et al published two papers in EPW on the characteristics of household poverty in southern...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
A year before India’s most recent national census of 2011, public debates ensued about whether caste should be enumerated, and if...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2007, the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
For Gopal Guru, universities are not merely institutions that exist within a physical structure but sites that cultivate and...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In May 2012, several lawmakers raised the issue of a 1949 cartoon by Shankar Pillai in Parliament that allegedly...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 1992, the Infant Milk Substitutes, Feeding Bottles and Infant Foods (Regulation of Production, Supply and Distribution) Act was...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Gopal Guru, in his 1991 article, writes that Hindu communal forces are attempting to “Hinduise” Ambedkar and assimilate Dalits...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Lata Mangeshkar, as Sanjay Srivastava, Ashwini Deshpande, and Lakshmi Subramanian agree, is India’s most famous playback singer....
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
In her 2017 article, Prabha Kotiswaran analyses the various reforms in the law following the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2002, Sharmila Rege documented the political struggles between two “caste-based forms of cultural labour,” Lavani and Powada....
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
2021 marks two decades since the release of Lagaan, a sports-musical film set in pre-independence India. Boria Majumdar reads Lagaan...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In their 2019 paper, “Burden of Child Malnutrition in India,” Akshay Swaminathan et al analysed population data at the level of...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
R Vijay, in his 2012 article, provides evidence for the rise of a new “class” in rural India—non-cultivating “peasant” households (...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
On 21 November 2020, one person...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In her 1990 article, “Mother-Politics,” C S Lakshmi examines the concept of the “mother” in the context of Tamil culture and...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2014, the National Sample Survey Office released a preliminary report on the state of healthcare in India. In their 2015 article...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
How did the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) succeed during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Assam despite widespread protests against...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
On 28 January 2010, University of Delhi’s Department of Sociology (DOS)...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 1978, clinics in India started offering amniocentesis to detect “foetal genetic abnormalities.” According to Patricia Jeffery,...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2013, Jaipur Police filed a first information report (FIR) against Ashis Nandy under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
Will a Marxist approach to politics today result in a just democracy?
Murzban Jal, in his 2011 article, calls for rethinking...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2011, Markar Melkonian wrote that Western capitalist nations present three broad arguments to justify the collapse of the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In his 2011 article, Montek Singh Ahluwalia reviewed the health of the Indian economy and evaluated the effectiveness of the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
With the advent of the green revolution in the mid-1960s, agriculture in India became increasingly industrialised and capital-...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Akshay Mathur’s 2013 article argues that global mechanisms to calculate crude oil prices, especially the Brent benchmark, need...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In her 2006 article, Rita Kothari investigates the role of the Arya Samaj, an institution for social “reform,” and argues that it...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in 2014 was premised on an anti-corruption development narrative, a key feature of which was...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
M K Gandhi’s approach to issues of caste-based exploitation and subordination has been critiqued and scrutinised by theorists and...
How did the Emergency shape India’s current political climate? Arvind Rajagopal’s 2019 article reviews Gyan Prakash’s book Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point, and...
A recent report in the Indian Express found that in...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 2016, a study by the National Institute of...
On 1 December, the price of a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder...
In 2019, EPW reviewed over 100 books. Read excerpts from 19 reviews that left an exceptional mark on our editors.
EPW publishes two reviews of books written by established and emerging scholars and...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The Indus Water Treaty (IWT),...
There is a long-standing and contentious debate on whether the benefits created by genetically modified organisms (GMOs) outweigh the costs. Currently, in India, the use of GM seeds that are not...
India’s first prototype fast breeder reactor (PFBR),...
In 2010, the National Council of Applied Economic Research published a report titled “A Study of the Contribution of...
Reading Gandhi today is more than just an engagement with his written word. For several decades, scholars across disciplines have attempted to arrive at a holistic understanding of Gandhi by...
India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Kimberle Crenshaw theorised “intersectionality” as a concept in a 1989...
Is patriarchy more concerned with sexual repression or social reproduction?
In 2018, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavaat was met with protests upon its release for...
Incessant rainfall across India’s western coast during the 2019 monsoon has led to ...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
On May 10, 2019, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) youth leader Priyanka Sharma was...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
In 1976, Mohammad Yunus set up the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
What does “doing sociology” in India today entail?
In 2016, Sujata Patel...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW
According to the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Rahul Pandita’s memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, recounts the author’s experience of having...
The contribution of the livestock sector to India’s agricultural gross domestic product has been increasing since the 1970s. Dairying accounts for more than two-thirds of the value of total livestock...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Is the left still relevant among the masses?
Prabhat Patnaik in his 2011 article “The Left in Decline” introduces the term “...
The Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in Madhya Pradesh was set up by the state government to universalise primary education and ensure access to it for the marginalised sections of the society.
R...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Can there be a “factual” discussion of Bangladesh’s Liberation War?
Naeem Mohaiemen’s article, “Flying Blind: Waiting for a...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s 2014 electoral campaign was built around the Gujarat “model” of development—...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
How strong is India’s democratic order?
Bernard D’Mello’s 2013 article “'The Near and the Far': Why Is India’s Liberal–Political...
Are Solar Irrigation Pumps a Panacea for Indian Agriculture? A Discussion on Gujarat’s SPaRC Project
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Can solar irrigation pumps give farmers income security?
The Solar Power as a Remunerative Crop (SPaRC) project, implemented in...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
The annual Pratham–Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER) survey repeatedly points to learning deficiencies prevalent in...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Can music resolve conflict?
Tejaswini Niranjana’s 2013 article examines the social role of Hindustani music in Karnataka’s...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Did Gandhi refuse to denounce the caste system?
"The Doctor and the Saint"—written by Arundhati Roy as an introduction to B R...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Over 40 lakh people have been excluded from Assam’s National register of Citizens (NRC) published in July 2018. The Assam...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
What effect did colonial rule have on the Indian economy?
Is economic modernity a justifiable excuse for nearly 200 years of...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
How much should India contribute to mitigating climate change?
The Paris Agreement signed by the Conference of Parties (CoP)...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of EPW.
Should reservation in education and employment exclude the prosperous among the backward classes?
On 26 September 2018, the...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
Is there an effective blueprint to conserve tiger habitats?
In Ajay Dubey v National Tiger Conservation Authority (2012),...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
Does the caste system travel with us when we cross the seas?
In 2005, the United States-based Hindu Education Foundation (HEF...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
Politics in West Bengal has differed from the rest of the country in terms of ideology as well as agenda. The left with its...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
The Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009 aims to provide free and compulsory education for all children between the age of 4 to...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
Language has been a point of contention in the Indian subcontinent, especially since the introduction of English education, and...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
January 1993. A cinema hall in Hyderabad. The Telugu version of Maniratnam's film Roja is being shown. Every show displays...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
EPW's special Postscript of four articles...
The world of work, the relationship between capital and labour, and the nature of exploitation has interested feminists for a long time. They have been concerned with the idea that labour is seen as...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
The conflict over land (and its acquisition) has become an important issue in the process of industrialisation. In 2007, the...
The last two decades of the 20th century were marked by the increasing visibility of third world feminist struggles. In the Indian context, specifically, there was an assertion of caste identity and...
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj—written in just nine days, aboard a ship while he was travelling from London to South Africa in 1909— is often cited for its considerable influence on...
The Discussion Map charts important debates from the pages of the EPW.
In 1994, Alan Sokal, a theoretical physicist at New York University, submitted an essay to a leading cultural studies...
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