ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The uproar over Priyanka Gandhi’s speech in Parliament reveals far more about the condition of public discourse in India than it does about the speech itself.

Within hours, an entire ecosystem had mobilised to accuse her of insulting a distinguished academic. Television debates, social media campaigns and partisan commentators all converged on a single phrase she used. Almost no one bothered to engage with the question she had actually raised.

That question was simple. Should those who publicly advance scientifically unverified claims be entrusted with shaping the future of Indian education?

It is a question that deserves an answer.

Priyanka Gandhi did not deny Professor V. Kamakoti’s accomplishments as a computer scientist. Those achievements are real, substantial and deserving of respect. Scientific excellence in one discipline, however, does not exempt anyone from scrutiny when making empirical claims in another. Science does not recognise authority. It recognises evidence.

That principle is the very foundation of modern civilisation.

Every scientific proposition, whether it concerns quantum computing, vaccines or the medicinal properties of cow urine, must pass through the same process of observation, experimentation, peer review and reproducibility. Reputation cannot substitute for evidence. Institutional office cannot replace scientific proof.

Yet this elementary distinction has increasingly become blurred in India’s public life.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Incident

The controversy surrounding Professor Kamakoti’s appointment is not an isolated episode. It belongs to a much larger pattern that has unfolded since 2014, one in which the language of science has repeatedly been appropriated to legitimise assertions that belong either to mythology, faith or speculation rather than empirical inquiry.

One of the earliest signals came from the highest political office in the country.

At the 2015 Indian Science Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to the story of Lord Ganesha as evidence that ancient India possessed plastic surgery and cited Karna’s birth in the Mahabharata as suggesting knowledge of genetic science. Many defended these remarks as expressions of cultural pride or metaphor. That defence misses the point entirely. The issue was never whether Indians should celebrate their civilisation. The issue was whether historical and scientific claims made before an audience of scientists should be supported by evidence rather than sentiment.

The distinction matters.

Civilisations earn respect through what they actually achieved, not through claims made on their behalf centuries later.

India possesses one of the richest scientific traditions in human history. Aryabhata transformed mathematics and astronomy. Brahmagupta developed concepts that changed numerical thought. Sushruta’s surgical observations continue to command scholarly attention. Ancient Indian metallurgy produced achievements that remain objects of admiration. None of these accomplishments requires embellishment through extravagant assertions unsupported by historical or archaeological evidence.

Ironically, exaggeration diminishes genuine achievement. It replaces scholarship with mythology masquerading as history.

The same tendency became visible in successive sessions of the Indian Science Congress, where presentations claiming the existence of ancient aircraft, interplanetary travel, advanced stem-cell technology and other extraordinary achievements received national attention. Many eminent Indian scientists expressed deep embarrassment that one of the country’s oldest scientific institutions appeared willing to provide a platform for claims that would not survive elementary scientific scrutiny.

The criticism came not from enemies of Indian civilisation but from some of India’s most respected scientists. Their concern was straightforward. Scientific conferences exist to test hypotheses against evidence, not to confer legitimacy upon ideological preferences.

Science has only one language.

Evidence.

Everything else is opinion.

The Erosion of Intellectual Independence

Unfortunately, a wider intellectual climate has emerged in which evidence increasingly appears negotiable. Mythological narratives are presented as historical fact. Ancient texts are treated as repositories of modern scientific discoveries. Rational criticism is dismissed as hostility towards Indian culture. Scholars who ask inconvenient questions are frequently accused of lacking patriotism rather than being answered with evidence.

The consequences extend well beyond academic debate.

Universities are not merely institutions that award degrees. They are where societies teach future generations how knowledge itself is created. Students do not merely learn physics, biology or history. They learn habits of mind. They learn whether difficult questions are welcomed or discouraged, whether evidence matters more than authority, and whether intellectual disagreement is an essential feature of scholarship or an act of ideological disobedience.

It is precisely for this reason that appointments to educational bodies matter.

Following repeated controversies surrounding public examinations, particularly the NEET crisis, India expected committees composed of specialists in assessment, pedagogy, psychology, educational administration and examination reforms. Instead, the debate once again shifted to the public positions of some of those appointed. That was entirely avoidable.

The deeper concern is not one appointment. It is a philosophy of governance that increasingly appears comfortable allowing ideological symbolism to occupy spaces where intellectual independence ought to prevail.

The consequences are already visible across education.

School textbooks have been repeatedly revised in ways that many historians, scientists and educationists have criticised as privileging ideological narratives over established scholarship. Historical complexity is often replaced with simplified civilisational binaries. Mythological traditions are sometimes presented alongside historical evidence without clearly distinguishing between the two. Universities have witnessed growing pressure over curricula, appointments and research priorities. Academic disagreement is increasingly interpreted through political rather than scholarly lenses.

One need not agree with every criticism levelled against these developments to recognise the cumulative direction in which they point.

The Constitutional Promise

The Constitution anticipated precisely such dangers.

Article 51A(h) declares that every citizen has the duty “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.” These words were not inserted accidentally. They reflected the conviction that democracy depends upon citizens capable of asking questions, evaluating evidence and resisting dogma, irrespective of its source.

Scientific temper does not require hostility towards religion.

It requires honesty about the difference between belief and evidence.

A citizen may believe that the universe was created through divine intervention. A scientist investigating the origins of the universe must nevertheless rely upon observation and demonstrable evidence. Both occupy different domains. Confusing them impoverishes both science and faith.

Jawaharlal Nehru understood this distinction better than most. For him, scientific temper was not merely the cultivation of laboratories or the expansion of technological education. It was an attitude of mind. It meant intellectual humility, respect for evidence, openness to criticism and the willingness to abandon cherished assumptions when facts demanded it.

That ideal now appears under strain.

The Real Tragedy

The real tragedy is not that politicians exchange sharp words in Parliament. Parliamentary democracy has always thrived on vigorous disagreement. The tragedy is that asking for scientific evidence has itself become controversial.

When demands for proof are portrayed as insults, when criticism of pseudoscience is interpreted as disrespect for civilisation, and when loyalty to ideological narratives becomes more valuable than intellectual honesty, science ceases to function as science. It becomes political theatre.

Priyanka Gandhi’s critics have concentrated on a phrase.

They have carefully avoided confronting the principle behind it.

The issue was never one professor. Nor was it one speech.

It is whether India wishes to be governed by a constitutional commitment to scientific temper or by the political convenience of pseudoscience.

A civilisation confident of its past does not invent discoveries it never made. A nation confident of its future does not fear evidence. It welcomes it.

India has produced some of humanity’s greatest mathematicians, astronomers, physicians and philosophers. Their legacy was built upon observation, argument and intellectual courage.

If we truly wish to honour that inheritance, then the highest offices in our scientific and educational institutions must stand for one principle above every other.

Not ideology.

Not mythology.

Not political expediency.

Evidence.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Few concepts have assumed greater prominence in the contemporary discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran than Jihād al-Tabyīn (‘the Struggle for Clarification’), and few books attempt to present this concept as systematically as Tabyeen: The Neglected Obligation. Published by the Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission (AIM), this substantial volume gathers speeches delivered by Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei over several decades and organises them into a coherent thematic exposition. Rather than being an original treatise, it is an editorial reconstruction of Khamenei’s thought on one of the defining concepts of his intellectual and political project.

The editors have arranged the material into five broad sections covering the conceptual foundations of tabyeen, its practical requirements, methods of implementation, areas requiring clarification, and the responsibilities of various sections of society. The organisation succeeds remarkably well in transforming scattered speeches into what almost reads as a unified philosophical work. Detailed references to the original speeches further enhance its scholarly value as a documentary source.

The central thesis of the volume is straightforward but far-reaching. Khamenei argues that clarifying truth has itself become one of the highest forms of jihad. The struggle is no longer confined to military confrontation but encompasses education, scholarship, journalism, media, cyberspace and public discourse. The principal battlefield of the twenty-first century is the arena of ideas and narratives. Scholars, students, writers, teachers and ordinary believers all become participants in this intellectual jihad.

One of the book’s strengths is its insistence that jihad should not be narrowly understood as armed conflict. Khamenei repeatedly defines jihad as sustained, purposeful struggle against obstacles, whether intellectual, political, educational or cultural. This wider understanding has deep roots in Islamic thought and allows the concept to be relocated within the domains of scholarship, research and public communication.

To appreciate the full weight of Khamenei’s argument, one must first understand how Shi’i tradition conceptualises jihad. In classical Shi’i jurisprudence, jihad is typically divided into two categories: the ‘greater jihad‘ (al-jihād al-akbar), which denotes the inner struggle against one’s own baser desires and spiritual shortcomings, and the ‘lesser jihad‘ (al-jihād al-asghar), which refers to external armed struggle in defence of the faith. This distinction, rooted in a famous saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, has long given Shi’i thought a rich vocabulary for discussing moral and spiritual endeavour alongside military defence. However, Shi’i scholars have also historically recognised a third category: the jihad of the tongue and the pen (jihād al-lisān wa al-qalam), which encompasses the duty to speak truth, refute falsehood and disseminate religious knowledge. It is this latter tradition that Khamenei revives and expands, elevating intellectual and communicative struggle to a status comparable with, and in the contemporary context even surpassing, physical combat. By anchoring his doctrine in this established jurisprudential framework, Khamenei presents tabyeen not as an innovation but as the recovery of a neglected obligation whose time has now come.

Equally noteworthy is the ethical framework within which this struggle is situated. Throughout the opening chapters Khamenei insists that clarification must not descend into slander, rumour, deception or abusive polemics. Rather, it should proceed through reasoned argument, ethical conduct and intellectual honesty. These passages represent some of the strongest sections of the book and distinguish tabyeen, at least in principle, from mere political propaganda.

The work also demonstrates how deeply Shi’i historical memory informs Khamenei’s political theology. Karbala occupies a central place in his conception of clarification. Sayyida Zaynab’s speeches in Kufa and Damascus are presented as the paradigmatic example of preserving truth through testimony after military defeat. Likewise, Imam ‘Ali’s teachings on truthfulness and moral steadfastness are repeatedly invoked to provide scriptural and ethical legitimacy to the concept of Jihād al-Tabyīn.

Yet the real significance of this volume becomes apparent only when it is situated within the broader tradition of modern Shi’i political thought.

Although Khamenei presents tabyeen as an essential Islamic obligation, the underlying idea is by no means entirely new. The duty to explain truth (tablīgh), remove misunderstanding and defend religion has long occupied an important place in Shi’i scholarship. What distinguishes Khamenei is the unprecedented scope he gives to the concept by making it the central organising principle of political communication in the age of mass media and cyberspace.

The intellectual lineage begins most obviously with Imam Khomeini. Indeed, the editors themselves open the volume with an extended selection from Khomeini’s speeches emphasising the responsibility of scholars and preachers to awaken society and defend Islam through explanation. Khamenei’s work therefore represents continuity rather than rupture. Yet there is also an important evolution. Khomeini generally discussed propagation in the context of revolutionary mobilisation, whereas Khamenei transforms it into a comprehensive doctrine governing media, education, universities and digital communication. The battlefield shifts from revolution itself to the contest over public consciousness. To fully grasp the evolution from Khomeini to Khamenei, one must consider how Khomeini’s concept of clarification was inextricably tied to his doctrine of Wilāyat al-Faqīh (Guardianship of the Jurist). In his seminal essays and lectures collected in Wilāyat al-Faqīh: Islamic Government, Khomeini argued that religious scholars bear not only the authority but the sacred duty to guide the political community in the absence of the Imams. Within this framework, propagation (tablīgh) served primarily as an instrument of revolutionary awakening and institutional consolidation. Khomeini’s speeches during the 1970s and early 1980s were characteristically urgent and mobilising, calling upon clerics, students and the broader public to expose the tyranny of the Pahlavi regime and rally behind the nascent Islamic state. His famous lectures in Najaf and Paris were exercises in clarification aimed at transforming passive believers into active revolutionaries. Yet for Khomeini, the ultimate objective remained the establishment and preservation of the Islamic polity itself; explanation was the means, not the end. Khamenei, by contrast, operates in a very different context. Having inherited a fully established Islamic Republic, he confronts not the challenge of building a state but of sustaining its legitimacy across generations in an environment saturated with competing narratives and digital misinformation. Consequently, Khamenei’s deployment of tabyeen is more systemic, more institutionally embedded and more defensive in character. Whereas Khomeini used clarification to dismantle an old order, Khamenei uses it to fortify a new one, embedding the duty of explanation within the very fabric of governance, education and media policy. This shift reflects not a departure from Khomeini’s vision but its adaptation to the demands of longevity, as the revolutionary movement transforms into a permanent civilisation project requiring constant intellectual renewal.

The comparison with Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr is equally illuminating. Like Khamenei, al-Sadr regarded intellectual struggle as indispensable for preserving Islamic civilisation against competing ideologies. His Falsafatunā and Iqtisādunā were themselves exercises in explaining Islam rationally before an educated audience. Yet al-Sadr’s engagement remained primarily philosophical. He debated Marxism and capitalism through systematic reasoning. Khamenei, by contrast, is less concerned with constructing philosophical systems than with countering what he regards as organised campaigns of misinformation. His principal adversary is not philosophical materialism but media distortion.

A similar distinction emerges when one compares this work with the writings of Murtaza Mutahhari. Mutahhari consistently argued that misconceptions about Islam should be removed through reasoned explanation and that every generation requires a fresh intellectual presentation of religion. In many respects Khamenei follows this educational impulse. Nevertheless, Mutahhari’s concern remained principally pedagogical and philosophical. In Tabyeen, clarification becomes inseparable from preserving the political order established by the Islamic Revolution. The educational project is thus incorporated into a theory of governance.

Perhaps the greatest contrast is provided by Allama Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i. His monumental al-Mīzān fi Tafsīr al-Qur’ān is itself an exercise in clarification, but one grounded in Qur’anic hermeneutics, philosophical reflection and rational inquiry. Khamenei shares Tabataba’i’s confidence that truth must be explained rather than imposed. Yet whereas Tabataba’i asks how revelation should be interpreted, Khamenei asks how truth should be defended amidst global information warfare. Hermeneutics yields to communication strategy.

The most significant divergence within contemporary Shi’ism appears in comparison with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Both scholars regard clarification as a religious responsibility, but they locate its institutional expression very differently. Sistani’s Najaf tradition generally favours moral authority exercised from a distance from state power, intervening directly only during exceptional crises. Khamenei, writing from within the doctrine of Wilāyat al-Faqīh, frequently identifies the defence of the Islamic Republic with the defence of Islam itself. This distinction reflects the continuing divergence between the Najaf and Qom schools of political thought.

Historical comparison with Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Naini is equally revealing. In Tanbīh al-Ummah wa Tanzīh al-Millah, Naini viewed public explanation as a means of exposing tyranny and limiting arbitrary authority through constitutional government. Khamenei similarly opposes falsehood but directs his attention primarily towards foreign intervention, sanctions, media campaigns and ideological infiltration. Whereas Naini feared despotism from within, Khamenei emphasises manipulation from without.

The comparison with Ali Shariati reveals another important dimension. Both thinkers stress intellectual awakening, youth mobilisation and resistance to cultural domination. Yet Shariati frequently challenged established religious institutions themselves, whereas Khamenei speaks from within the clerical establishment. Shariati’s primary concern was stagnation within Muslim society; Khamenei’s is distortion imposed through hostile narratives.

Ali Shariati’s understanding of jihad departed significantly from both traditional jurisprudence and the clerical establishment of his time. For Shariati, jihad was not primarily a military or even a defensive legal category, but rather an existential and revolutionary call to action against all forms of oppression, injustice and intellectual stagnation. He reimagined jihad as the perpetual struggle of the oppressed (mustad’afūn) against their exploiters, drawing heavily on his distinctive synthesis of Islamic symbolism and Third World liberationist thought. In Shariati’s reading, the tragedy of Karbala was not merely a historical event to be mourned but a revolutionary paradigm requiring active emulation: Imam Husain’s stand was the ultimate act of jihad against tyrannical power, regardless of the odds. Crucially, Shariati also emphasised what he called the ‘red martyrdom’ (shahādat-i surkh) – a dynamic, life-affirming struggle against injustice – over the passive, otherworldly piety he associated with established religious authority. His jihad was thus thoroughly this-worldly, politically engaged and deeply suspicious of clerical quietism. This stands in marked contrast to Khamenei’s more institutionally anchored vision, where jihad is channelled through state structures and framed as defence of the Islamic Republic against external threats. Where Khamenei sees clarification as a duty to protect an established order, Shariati saw clarification – or what he termed ‘enlightenment’ (rūshanfikrī) – as a weapon to dismantle all established orders that perpetuated inequality, including, at times, the very religious establishment from which Khamenei now speaks.

Seen against this wider background, Tabyeen emerges not as a novel theological doctrine but as a distinctive synthesis. Khamenei combines Imam ‘Ali’s emphasis on truthfulness, Imam Husain’s witness against oppression, Sayyida Zainab’s preservation of Karbala through testimony, Imam Khomeini’s revolutionary activism, Mutahhari’s intellectual defence of Islam and al-Sadr’s ideological confidence into a unified theory for the age of digital communication. His original contribution lies in identifying information itself as the principal arena of jihad.

At the same time, the volume inevitably reflects its ideological location. Discussions of Yemen, Syria, Iraq, sanctions, the Pahlavi monarchy and Western media all proceed from the perspective of the Islamic Republic. Alternative interpretations receive relatively little attention, and criticism of the Revolution is frequently interpreted as the product of organised external distortion. From an academic standpoint, this represents the principal limitation of the work. The concept of clarification occasionally risks becoming synonymous with defending a particular political order rather than facilitating genuinely open intellectual inquiry.

Another weakness arises from the nature of the source material itself. Since the volume is compiled from speeches delivered over many years, certain themes recur repeatedly. While this repetition reinforces the centrality of the concept in Khamenei’s thinking, tighter editorial condensation and fuller historical introductions explaining the circumstances of each speech would have enhanced the book’s scholarly utility.

The English translation is generally smooth and readable, successfully preserving the sermonic tone of the original Persian. The editors have also performed a valuable service by documenting the provenance of individual passages, enabling researchers to locate the original speeches and trace the evolution of Khamenei’s thought over time.

Ultimately, Tabyeen: The Neglected Obligation should not be read simply as a work of religious instruction or political advocacy. It is a major primary source for understanding the intellectual vocabulary of the Islamic Republic during the twenty-first century. Whether one agrees with its political assumptions or not, it reveals how contemporary Shi’i political thought has reconceptualised jihad, authority, communication and historical memory in response to the age of digital media.

For historians of modern Iran, scholars of Shi’i Islam and students of political theology, the book provides invaluable insight into one of the most influential contemporary Shi’i conceptions of religion and politics. Its greatest significance lies less in its originality than in its successful synthesis of classical Shi’i ethical traditions with the realities of modern information warfare. It therefore deserves careful reading not merely as a statement of Ayatollah Khamenei’s views, but as an important document in the continuing evolution of modern Shi’i political thought.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The historiography of women and gender in South Asia has undergone profound transformations over the past four decades. Early scholarship sought primarily to recover women who had been marginalized or overlooked in conventional historical narratives. More recent work has shifted towards interrogating the very categories through which femininity, masculinity and sexuality have been historically imagined. Making the ‘Woman’: Discourses of Gender in 18th–19th-Century India, edited by Sutapa Dutta and Shivangini Tandon, belongs firmly to this latter tradition. Rather than merely asking how women participated in history, the volume asks how the category of “woman” itself was historically produced through competing political, literary, social and cultural discourses. It is an ambitious undertaking that opens several important avenues of inquiry, even if it does not always fully realize all of its theoretical promises.

The editors provide an extensive introduction that serves as the intellectual backbone of the collection. Drawing upon contemporary feminist theorists including Judith Butler, Natalie Stoljar, Nancy Chodorow and Sally Haslanger, they reject essentialist understandings of womanhood and instead argue that “woman” is a historically contingent category shaped by intersecting structures of caste, class, religion, language, region and political authority. Their objective is not simply to write women back into history but to investigate the historical processes through which particular notions of femininity came to acquire legitimacy and normative force. This is an important and welcome intervention, particularly in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century India, where discussions of gender have often remained confined within the familiar framework of colonial social reform and its nationalist responses. However, it is worth noting that the editors have not contributed individual essays to the collection themselves, confining their scholarly engagement to the introductory framework. While this is not unusual in edited volumes, the absence of their own case studies means that readers must look to the contributors for the empirical instantiation of the theoretical perspectives laid out in the introduction.

One of the major strengths of the volume is its chronological perspective. The editors resist the temptation to treat colonialism as the sole catalyst for changes in gender relations. Instead, they argue compellingly that many of these transformations had their origins in the late Mughal and regional polities of the eighteenth century. This longer historical perspective enables the contributors to situate colonial modernity within earlier processes of political, cultural and intellectual change. Such an approach represents a useful corrective to narratives that privilege colonial intervention at the expense of indigenous historical developments and pre-colonial trajectories of transformation.

The volume is organized into four thematic sections dealing with the public and private worlds, normative constructions of gender, marginalised identities and narratives of femininity. The range of subjects is impressive. Essays discuss Kashmiri hafizas, the Awadhi zenana, Mughal masculinity, Dalit counter-histories, tribal identities, goddess iconography, tawa’ifs, eunuchs, Tamil literary traditions, Bengali ritual songs and Assamese women’s writing. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of gendered experiences across the subcontinent and successfully undermine any notion of a singular or universal Indian womanhood. This diversity is not merely additive but fundamentally challenges the conceptual frameworks through which South Asian gender history has often been narrated.

Several contributions are particularly noteworthy. Tara Sami Dutt’s study of Wajid Ali Shah’s Ishqnama effectively challenges the long-standing assumption that the zenana was merely a secluded domestic space, demonstrating instead its political and cultural significance within the Awadhi court as a site of artistic patronage, intellectual exchange and political negotiation. Riya Gupta’s examination of the Mirzanama offers a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on masculinity by showing that elite Mughal masculinity was itself a carefully cultivated social performance rooted in prescribed conduct manuals rather than a natural or stable identity. Lubna Irfan’s chapter on eunuchs similarly stands out for bringing architectural and spatial history into conversation with gender studies, thereby broadening the evidentiary base beyond textual sources and illuminating how built environments both reflected and constituted gendered hierarchies. These essays exemplify the interdisciplinary possibilities that the volume seeks to promote and suggest productive directions for future research.

Another commendable feature is the geographical breadth of the collection. Too often studies of gender in colonial India gravitate towards Bengal, with occasional forays into Maharashtra or the Punjab. Here, the inclusion of material from Kashmir, Awadh, Delhi, western India, Assam and Tamil Nadu significantly broadens the discussion and reminds readers that gender was negotiated differently across regional contexts, each with its own literary traditions, political structures and social formations. The volume also makes effective use of diverse source materials including paintings, literary texts, songs, manuscripts, colonial records and visual culture. Such methodological plurality enriches the historical narrative and reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of gender studies, though it also raises questions about how these different genres of sources relate to one another.

Farhat Hasan’s foreword deserves particular mention. It is much more than a conventional prefatory note. By situating the volume within wider debates on early modern South Asian modernity, multilingual literary cultures, household politics and the relationship between textuality and gender, the foreword provides an elegant historiographical framework that complements and occasionally even extends the arguments developed in the chapters themselves. Hasan’s insistence on the need to historicise gender categories without assuming their universality sets the tone for the collection and offers a concise statement of the volume’s intellectual commitments.

Yet the collection is not without its limitations. The first concerns the relationship between theory and practice. The introduction presents a sophisticated theoretical critique of essentialist notions of womanhood and promises a sustained interrogation of the category of gender itself. However, not all the subsequent chapters engage with these conceptual concerns to the same degree. While some contributors critically interrogate categories such as gender, agency and identity, others employ these terms rather conventionally without fully exploring their historical contingency. Consequently, there is occasionally a discernible gap between the theoretical ambitions announced in the introduction and the empirical analyses offered by individual essays. A more sustained dialogue between conceptual frameworks and case studies would have strengthened the collection’s overall coherence.

The quality of the contributions is also uneven. Some chapters make substantial historiographical interventions and engage critically with both primary sources and existing scholarship, advancing novel arguments that reshape our understanding of specific contexts. Others remain closer to descriptive case studies that, while informative, do not fully exploit their analytical potential. This unevenness is perhaps inevitable in any edited collection, yet the volume sometimes resembles conference proceedings rather than a sustained collective intellectual project. Greater editorial cross-referencing between chapters, or a concluding essay drawing together their wider implications and identifying shared themes, would have enhanced the coherence of the collection and helped readers navigate its diverse offerings.

A more substantive criticism concerns the nature of the archive upon which the volume rests. Although the editors repeatedly emphasise recovering women’s agency and exploring marginalised voices, much of the evidence is drawn from elite literary, artistic and courtly sources. Consequently, the women who emerge most vividly are dancers, courtesans, royal women, literary figures and members of educated elites. The experiences of peasant women, artisans, labouring women and those inhabiting more ordinary social worlds remain largely absent from the analysis. This undoubtedly reflects the limitations of surviving sources and the archival biases that privilege elite and textual materials, but the implications of these archival silences could have been explored more explicitly. A more sustained reflection on what cannot be known, and on the methodological strategies available for approaching subaltern gendered experiences, would have added depth to the volume’s critical project.

Closely related to this is the volume’s overwhelming emphasis on discourse and representation. Most contributors are concerned with how women were imagined, depicted and represented across various textual and visual genres rather than how they actually negotiated economic, legal or institutional structures in their daily lives. Questions of property, inheritance, labour, taxation, commercial activity, education and legal rights receive comparatively limited attention. Yet these were precisely the arenas in which gender relations were materially constituted and contested. A closer engagement with social and economic history would have provided a stronger balance between representation and lived experience, and would have grounded the discursive analysis in the material conditions that shaped women’s lives.

From the perspective of Mughal historiography, another omission is noteworthy. The collection convincingly argues that domestic spaces were deeply political and that the boundaries between public and private were porous and contested. However, relatively little attention is devoted to the institutional dimensions of gender within the machinery of the Mughal state and its successor polities. Recent scholarship has increasingly demonstrated the importance of women, eunuchs and members of the imperial household in diplomacy, patronage, commerce and administration. These broader political implications remain only partially explored here. As a result, the discussion occasionally risks replacing one binary, namely public versus private, with another that continues to privilege representation over institutional practice.

The treatment of colonial modernity also offers less that is genuinely new than the discussions of the eighteenth century. The volume revisits familiar debates concerning social reform, domesticity and nationalist constructions of womanhood that have already been extensively analysed by scholars such as Lata Mani, Tanika Sarkar, Mrinalini Sinha and Partha Chatterjee. While these discussions are competently synthesised and provide useful overviews, the collection’s most original contributions lie elsewhere, particularly in its exploration of the late Mughal and regional worlds where different configurations of gender were in play. A sharper focus on these less familiar terrains would have distinguished the volume more clearly from existing scholarship.

This points to a broader chronological limitation. Although Farhat Hasan’s foreword invokes the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, situating the volume within a longer history of early modern gender relations, the essays themselves confine their analysis to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The classical Mughal centuries, the period of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, remain largely unexamined here. This chronological boundary is not a flaw in itself, as the volume is explicitly framed around the later period. Yet the foreword’s invocation of an earlier era creates certain expectations that the essays do not fulfil. The reader is left with a sense that the history of gender in the Mughal world is only partially told, and that a companion volume addressing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would be a necessary complement to this collection. The present volume thus opens a door but leaves the earlier period, with its own distinctive configurations of gender, power and cultural production, awaiting a similarly sustained treatment.

Despite these reservations, Making the ‘Woman’ remains a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on gender in South Asian history. Its greatest achievement lies in demonstrating that gender identities in eighteenth and nineteenth century India cannot be understood through static categories or simple binaries. Instead, they were continually negotiated across multiple linguistic, political, cultural and regional contexts, shaped by both pre-colonial trajectories and colonial interventions. The volume successfully broadens both the geographical and methodological horizons of gender history and encourages historians to move beyond narrowly colonial or nationalist frameworks in their analyses.

The collection also raises important questions that future scholarship might address more fully. How did gender intersect with caste in the production of social identities beyond the elite spheres represented here? What were the economic dimensions of gender that shaped women’s lives in more ordinary circumstances? How did regional literary traditions produce different gender norms and subjectivities? And how did women themselves respond to, appropriate or resist the various discourses that sought to define them? The volume opens these questions without fully answering them, which is perhaps a measure of its generative potential rather than a failing. Moreover, the chronological gap between the foreword’s framing and the essays’ focus invites further inquiry into the classical Mughal centuries, suggesting an agenda for future research that the volume implicitly establishes.

Ultimately, this is a stimulating and thought-provoking collection. It is stronger in posing questions than in providing definitive answers, and stronger in cultural analysis than in social or institutional history. Nevertheless, these are limitations of emphasis rather than of scholarship. The editors have assembled an impressive group of contributors who collectively challenge readers to rethink familiar assumptions about women, gender and power in South Asian history. The volume will be read with profit by historians of early modern and colonial India, as well as by scholars of gender studies, literary history and cultural history. It deserves a place in the continuing conversation on how gender was imagined, contested and lived in the complex world of eighteenth and nineteenth century India, while also pointing towards the need for a complementary study that would extend this analysis back into the classical Mughal centuries.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Few books capture the moral energy, intellectual seriousness and emotional texture of a social movement as compellingly as David Halberstam’s The Children. Although widely recognised as one of America’s greatest journalists, Halberstam was also a historian of remarkable sensitivity. In this monumental work he reconstructs, with extraordinary narrative power and meticulous research, the story of the young men and women whose courage transformed the American Civil Rights Movement from an ideal into a political force capable of reshaping a nation. More than two decades after its publication, The Children remains one of the finest studies of student activism and democratic resistance in modern historical writing.

Unlike many histories of the Civil Rights Movement that revolve around Martin Luther King Jr. and the major legislative victories of the 1960s, Halberstam deliberately shifts attention away from the celebrated leaders towards the largely unknown students who became the movement’s driving force. His central argument is deceptively simple. Great historical transformations are not achieved by extraordinary individuals alone but by ordinary young people who discover within themselves an extraordinary capacity for courage, discipline and sacrifice.

The opening pages immediately establish this theme through the unforgettable figure of Diane Nash. Halberstam dismantles the popular myth of the fearless revolutionary. Nash is portrayed not as someone devoid of fear but as someone who experienced fear more intensely than almost anyone around her. Before every demonstration she trembled with anxiety, sat through university lectures unable to concentrate, and wondered whether she possessed the strength to continue. Yet every day she chose to return to the streets. It is precisely this distinction between fearlessness and courage that gives the narrative its enduring moral force. Courage, Halberstam suggests, is not the absence of fear but the determination to overcome it.

The psychological depth with which he reconstructs these experiences is one of the book’s greatest achievements. He does not merely chronicle demonstrations and arrests. Instead, he recreates the inner lives of those who participated in them, showing the doubts, friendships, rivalries, hopes and fears that accompanied every act of resistance. The result is history written with the sensitivity of a great novelist while remaining firmly anchored in documentary evidence and extensive interviews.

Equally impressive is the author’s insistence that the Civil Rights Movement was fundamentally a movement of students. The young activists who gathered in Nashville came from different regions, social backgrounds and educational institutions. Many hardly knew one another when they first met. Yet through shared commitment they forged a new political identity that transcended these differences. Halberstam beautifully captures how they gradually ceased thinking of themselves primarily as students of Fisk University, Tennessee A&I, Meharry Medical College or American Baptist Seminary. They became, above all else, the “sit-in kids”, bound together by a common moral purpose.

This transformation lies at the heart of the book. Halberstam demonstrates that political commitment itself creates community. Friendships formed in struggle often become stronger than those inherited through family, class or region. Many of these relationships endured throughout life. Some participants later entered politics, others academia, medicine and public service. A few became nationally known figures, while others quietly returned to ordinary lives. Yet all remained united by the knowledge that, for one defining moment in history, they had stood together in defence of justice.

One of the most fascinating dimensions of The Children is its treatment of nonviolence, not merely as a political tactic but as a disciplined ethical philosophy. Here Halberstam introduces Jim Lawson, whose years in India studying Gandhian methods profoundly shaped the direction of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Lawson’s return from India and his meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. at Oberlin constitute one of the pivotal episodes in the narrative. Halberstam demonstrates that the movement’s commitment to nonviolence was not spontaneous. It emerged from sustained intellectual engagement with Gandhi’s philosophy and its adaptation to the American context.

These chapters possess particular significance for Indian readers. They remind us that Gandhian ideas did not remain confined to India’s struggle against colonialism. They travelled across continents and became one of the intellectual foundations of the American Civil Rights Movement. Lawson’s years in Nagpur studying nonviolence and King’s recognition that Lawson possessed precisely the experience the movement required underscore the global influence of Indian anti-colonial thought.

Halberstam’s narrative method deserves particular appreciation. Although trained as a journalist, he writes with the patience of a historian. The book rests upon years of interviews, archival research and contemporary documentation. Yet he never allows the weight of scholarship to overwhelm the narrative. Conversations flow naturally, personalities emerge vividly, and historical events unfold with remarkable immediacy. Readers are made to feel the uncertainty of the moment. Unlike retrospective histories that impose inevitability upon the past, The Children restores contingency. The participants themselves never knew whether they would succeed. They simply believed that remaining silent was no longer morally possible.

The portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. is equally nuanced. King remains central to the movement, but Halberstam resists reducing history to the biography of one great man. Instead, King appears within a wider network of organisers, ministers, students and local leaders whose collective efforts sustained the movement. Leadership is shown to be collaborative rather than solitary, moral rather than hierarchical.

As a work of history, The Children also exemplifies the best traditions of oral history. Halberstam demonstrates how individual memory, when critically examined and woven together with documentary evidence, can illuminate dimensions of the past inaccessible through official archives alone. The emotional landscape of history, its fears, aspirations and everyday acts of courage, emerges with unusual clarity.

No work of this scale, in my opinion, is without limitations. Halberstam’s admiration for his subjects is evident throughout, and at times his narrative becomes almost hagiographical. Readers looking for sustained analysis of internal ideological disagreements within the Civil Rights Movement, questions of gender politics, class divisions or later historiographical debates may find these issues less fully explored than in more recent scholarship. Likewise, broader structural analyses of race, capitalism and state power occasionally recede behind the vividness of individual lives.

These, however, are relatively minor reservations. The achievement of the book lies elsewhere. Halberstam succeeds in reminding us that democracy survives only when ordinary citizens refuse to surrender their moral agency. His history restores dignity to those whose names rarely appear in textbooks but whose courage made history possible.

For readers in contemporary India, The Children possesses a relevance that extends far beyond the history of the United States. At a time when the country witnessed a massive resurgence of student participation in public life, with young people increasingly raising their voices against what they perceive as injustice, discrimination and the erosion of democratic rights, Halberstam’s work acquires a renewed urgency. Whatever one’s political position, it is difficult to ignore the symbolic significance of young citizens reclaiming the public sphere and insisting that they, too, possess a stake in the future of the republic. The book reminds us that transformative social movements rarely begin in the corridors of power. They begin in classrooms, university campuses, churches, community halls and on the streets, where young people discover that silence is itself a political choice.

The students of Nashville possessed neither wealth nor institutional authority. They confronted entrenched systems of power armed only with moral conviction, careful organisation and the willingness to bear personal costs for a larger public good. Their example speaks powerfully across generations. It reminds us that youth is not merely an age but a historical force. The awakening of young minds has repeatedly altered the course of history, whether in the struggle against colonialism, in the Civil Rights Movement in America, or in countless democratic movements across the world.

It is in this context that The Children becomes much more than a history of the American South. It becomes a meditation on the enduring relationship between youth and democracy, between moral courage and political transformation. Just as those young men and women changed the direction of American history in the 1960s, the youth of India today possess the capacity to shape the moral and political future of their own country.

I remain grateful to Mr Masoodul Hasan, former Chief Bureau, Hindustan Times, Lucknow, who drew my attention to this remarkable volume at precisely such a historical moment. His recommendation proved both timely and invaluable. Reading Halberstam today is not simply an exercise in understanding another country’s past. It is an invitation to reflect upon our own present. The lesson of The Children is ultimately timeless: history belongs not only to rulers and governments, but also to those young men and women who, despite fear, find the courage to stand for justice.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Let’s be honest about what just happened. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister wasn’t some gracious political gesture. It was a surrender. A government that had spent years brushing aside student grievances finally found itself cornered by the very people it had ignored. And that is what makes this moment historic. Not the fall of one minister, but the rise of thousands of young Indians who refused to be treated as statistics.

This was never really about the Cockroach Janata Party. The CJP provided a name and a structure, sure. But the heart and sinew of this movement belonged to the students who flooded the streets, who slept on pavements, who travelled for days on crowded trains just to add their voice to the chorus. They were not symbols. They were not props. They were the real deal.

The anger that propelled them was entirely justified. Leaked papers. Botched exams. A system so riddled with incompetence that merit became a joke. Young people who had studied for years, who had sacrificed sleep and sanity, who had pinned their entire futures on fair assessment – they were being cheated. And not quietly. Not politely. They were done with being patient. They were done with being fobbed off by bureaucrats and ministers who had never known what it felt like to have their dreams hinge on a single mark sheet.

So they gathered. First in small clusters, then in growing crowds, and finally in a roar that could not be ignored. They organised through WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram – the very platforms that establishment politicians dismiss as frivolous. They built networks that transcended cities, states, and languages. They turned a scattered cry of frustration into a unified, unstoppable demand for accountability.

And here is the part that really rattled the powers that be: they did it with discipline. No riots. No vandalism. Just a quiet, stubborn refusal to go away. That discipline was their superpower. It stripped the government of every excuse. They couldn’t be painted as goondas. They couldn’t be dismissed as anti-nationals. They were just students – angry, articulate, and absolutely right.

Now let’s address the elephant in the room. There were whispers from the very beginning – and not just from cynics – that the CJP, along with figures like Wangchuk and Dipke, might have been playing a different game altogether. Some suspected they wanted to act as a cushion for the government. The theory went like this: give the students a platform, let them blow off steam, absorb the criticism, take the heat out of the protests, and then quietly negotiate a face-saving exit for the minister. In other words, provide a release valve so the real pressure never reached the boiler.

We don’t know the truth of that thinking. Maybe it was fair. Maybe it was paranoia. Maybe the CJP and its prominent faces genuinely believed in the cause. But here is what we do know: whatever cushion they might have intended to create, the students blew right through it.

The young participants were not interested in being managed. They were not interested in backroom deals that would let the government off the hook. They were not there to be a photo opportunity or a talking shop. They kept the pressure on. They refused to be pacified by vague promises. They refused to disperse when asked. They kept the streets alive, the conversation loud, and the government uncomfortable.

And that is where the real story lies. The students became the Achilles heel of this government. Think about that for a moment. The farmers, with all their numbers and moral authority, could not bring this administration to its knees. They marched, they sat, they endured brutal police action, and still the government held firm. Political parties, with all their resources and machinery, could not land a decisive blow. They debated, they criticised, they formed alliances, and still the government remained unshaken.

But the students did what none of them could. They exposed the Modi government. Not through grand politics. Not through media campaigns. Simply by being young, stubborn, and utterly unwilling to be ignored. They laid bare the government’s vulnerability. They showed that beneath all the bluster and bravado, this administration is far more fragile than it pretends to be.

What the farmers could not achieve, what the opposition could not achieve, the students achieved with nothing more than their voices, their feet, and their refusal to back down. They did not have deep pockets. They did not have political backing. They had only their conviction that they deserved better. And that was enough.

Now let’s talk about what made these young protesters genuinely dangerous to the political establishment. Not dangerous in a violent sense, but dangerous in a way that keeps politicians awake at night. They refused to play the communal game. In an era when every election, every policy, every media debate is coloured by religion and region, these students looked at one another and saw equals. They sat together, ate together, marched together, regardless of whether they worshipped in a temple, a mosque, a church, or nowhere at all.

That was the real subversion. They tore up the divisive script that has become so comfortable for our ruling class. They reminded everyone that a student is first a student – not a Hindu voter, not a Muslim voter, not a pawn in someone else’s identity war. They reasserted a shared citizenship that has been under systematic assault for years. And they did it without grand speeches or ideological posturing. They simply lived it.

The government’s response was telling. First, they tried to ignore the protests. Then they tried to dismiss them as political mischief. Then they tried to divide the protesters along familiar communal lines. Nothing worked. Every attempt to fracture the movement backfired spectacularly because the students had already chosen solidarity over division. They had already decided that their common future mattered more than the ancient hatreds that politicians love to stoke.

So Pradhan fell. And good riddance. But this was never just about one man. It was about the government being forced to acknowledge that it is not invincible. That even a ruling party with a massive parliamentary majority cannot trample on young people with impunity. That when thousands of determined citizens refuse to look away, even the mightiest administration must blink.

What happens now? The formal protests have ended. The tents at Jantar Mantar have been folded. But anyone who thinks this is over is dangerously naive. Movements don’t evaporate just because organisers declare victory. They leave behind something far more enduring: a generation that has learned its own strength.

These students now know how to organise. They know how to communicate. They know how to sustain pressure. They know how to make themselves heard in a political system that was designed to ignore them. That knowledge cannot be unlearned. It will seep into every future campaign – unemployment, university autonomy, environmental justice, you name it. The establishment has sown the wind, and it will reap the whirlwind.

And here is the uncomfortable truth for those in power: the students are not going away. They are not returning to their dormitories to quietly finish their degrees and become obedient professionals. They have tasted collective action. They have seen their own power reflected in the panic of a government that scrambled to respond. They know now that democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a muscle that must be exercised, and they have just done a very heavy workout.

The communal agenda that has dominated Indian politics for the past decade looked resilient. It looked unshakeable. But these young protesters exposed its greatest weakness: it cannot survive genuine human connection. When students of different faiths stand shoulder to shoulder, when they share food and water and hope, the walls that politicians have spent years building start to crumble. That is not a threat the government can legislate away. That is not a problem they can solve with a reshuffle.

So let us call this what it is. The kids have just served notice. They have shown that they are no longer content to be passive recipients of policies made in distant corridors. They have shown that they are willing to take risks, endure hardship, and stand up for what is right. And they have shown that they are not interested in the tired, toxic politics of division.

The resignation of one minister is a beginning, not an end. The real battle lies ahead – over jobs, over education, over the very soul of this country. And if the government thinks it can return to business as usual, it has another think coming. The students have arrived. They have found their voice. And they are not backing down.

What the farmers could not do, what the politicians could not do, they have done. They have exposed the Modi government. They have made it susceptible. They have shown that the emperor has no clothes. And what follows next – well, that is entirely up to them.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Yesterday it was Jantar Mantar, today it is Patna, and tomorrow…. Who knows? The entire nation!

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Matthew Pierce, Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiʿism. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. ix + 257 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-73707-5.

Matthew Pierce’s Twelve Infallible Men is an ambitious and methodologically innovative study of the collective biographies of the Twelve Imams. Rather than reconstructing their historical lives or tracing the development of imamate doctrine, Pierce examines how medieval Twelver Shiʿi communities narrated the lives, sufferings and deaths of their sacred leaders, and how these narratives forged a distinct religious identity.

Pierce treats these biographies as acts of communal memory rather than repositories of historical fact. Their importance, he argues, does not depend entirely on whether every event can be verified. What matters is that successive generations found these accounts meaningful and authoritative. Through preservation, repetition and reorganisation, the stories created a shared sacred past and gave the community a vocabulary for understanding suffering, loyalty, authority and salvation.

The book draws principally on five Arabic collective biographies composed between the tenth and twelfth centuries, including works attributed to al-Masʿūdī, al-Shaykh al-Mufīd and al-Ṭabrisī. The author identifies these as forming a recognisable literary genre organised around the sequential lives of the Twelve Imams. This is one of the book’s key contributions: these texts have rarely been examined together as a corpus with its own narrative conventions, emotional logic and communal function. Pierce shifts attention from isolated traditions to the overall architecture of the biographies.

The opening chapter situates the literature within the late Abbasid period, cautioning against projecting modern Sunni-Shiʿi divisions backwards. In that fluid environment, collective biographies helped define the Twelve Imams as a closed sequence of divinely appointed guides. The end of the Lesser Occultation posed a profound problem: the Imam was alive yet inaccessible. The biographies responded by organising the past into a coherent sacred history, retrospectively establishing the unity of the Twelve and transforming their lives into a complete age of guidance.

The thematic chapters examine martyrdom, betrayal, bodies and birth narratives. Pierce shows how the biographies extended the paradigm of suffering from Imam Husain to encompass the entire line of Imams. Their deaths became variations on a story of truth rejected by worldly power. Poisoning proved an especially effective narrative device, preserving the Imam’s innocence while identifying political authority as treacherous.

The chapter on loyalty demonstrates how betrayal functions as an organising principle. The Imams are betrayed by rulers, relatives and followers, establishing moral boundaries. Readers are invited to locate themselves within the narrative: would they have recognised the Imam and remained loyal? The past becomes a continuing test of conscience.

The most innovative chapter examines vulnerability and masculine ideals. Drawing on gender studies, it shows that the Imams were presented not as disembodied abstractions but as physically beautiful, disciplined and powerful, yet vulnerable to imprisonment and poison. Their capacity to endure suffering without surrendering moral control became a high expression of sacred manhood. The inclusion of Fāṭima al-Zahrāʾ broadens the discussion, though she sometimes appears chiefly in relation to the male Imams.

The final thematic chapter examines birth narratives, which place the Imams within a cosmic genealogy extending from Adam to Muḥammad. The transmission of light through purified loins transforms genealogy into cosmology. These narratives also solved problems of recognition: in a world of rival claimants, miraculous births and precocious knowledge distinguished the true Imam.

Pierce’s theoretical framework draws from social and cultural memory studies, particularly the work of Maurice Halbwachs and Jan Assmann. This allows him to ask why communities preserved certain stories and how narrative produced belonging. However, the near suspension of historicity is occasionally problematic. Medieval authors often rested a narrative’s persuasive force precisely on the claim that it reported actual events through reliable chains of transmission. A more sustained engagement with isnād analysis might have added an important dimension.

There is also a danger in importing models from Christian hagiography too readily. Pierce is aware of this and offers caveats, but the theoretical literature sometimes shapes the reading more strongly than internal Shiʿi categories such as naṣṣ, ʿiṣma and walāya. A closer integration of these concepts would have rooted the study more firmly in the theological universe of the texts.

The chronological claims also deserve qualification. He argues that collective biographies shaped Twelver identity from the tenth century onwards, yet he occasionally extends his conclusions to “the tenth century to today”. The later transmission of these narratives through Persian, Urdu and Turkish literary cultures receives little attention. The transformation of written biography into ritual performance, popular print and vernacular poetry is acknowledged but not systematically traced. A fuller account would need to follow these stories beyond Arabic scholarly literature.

Despite these reservations, the book is a significant contribution. The author successfully directs attention towards narrative as a constitutive force in religious history. Twelver Shiʿism was not produced by doctrine and political conflict alone. It was also made through stories: stories of poisoned bodies, miraculous knowledge, abandoned leaders and faithful companions. These stories taught believers how to remember and, through remembrance, how to recognise themselves.

The prose is clear and accessible. The organisation into thematic chapters creates a coherent argument, though the selection of individual Imams as case studies sometimes gives the impression that themes belong more exclusively to particular figures than the sources warrant. The appendices are useful, and the bibliography makes the volume valuable for specialists and advanced students.

Ultimately, Twelve Infallible Men is an original and illuminating work. It encourages historians to read sacred narratives neither as straightforward chronicles nor as fanciful accretions, but as texts that actively shaped communities. Pierce has opened an important field of enquiry and demonstrated that the making of Shiʿism took place as much through the disciplined remembrance of the Imams as through formal theology, law or political allegiance.