The Social Lens: Insights on Institutions, Inequality, and Innovation

Book Review Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Bernard S. Cohn. Princeton University Press, 1996. Xvii+189pp. The acceptance and maintenance of colonial power in any country is not dependent only upon the military strength or the capacity to coerce the voices of masses but also on the development of knowledge to understand the subjects. The development of knowledge by the imperial power of East Indian Company and crown (after 1858) to invent the history of the colonized and see through it the ways and means of ruling and maintaining the empire was the ‘cultural’ domain of the colonial history. Bernard Cohn uses the principles of anthropology in sync with the methods of history to study colonialism and its forms of knowledge. This book consists of four essays, foreword by Nicholas Dirk and introduction to the book. These essays are written in the time period between 1950s and 1980s. In this era, the Chicago school’s method of ‘ethnosociology’ wa...

The trajectory of the development of the concepts of Economics has varied in different forms and after the advent of complex form of market mechanisms Economics left many concepts without giving them proper meaning and definitions like property, labour, money etc. these concepts in economics are like monochrome inhibiting no resplendence. Economics, somehow, alienated human social existence from the macrocosm of economic concepts. The ‘being’ has been totally alienated from the human labour, production process and reproduction of material entity. So, the discipline which finds its root in the writings of those thinkers who were primarily students of morality and ethics like Adam Smith finds no mention of this dimension of social existence in contemporary economics. Economic Anthropology starts from this and sees the economic phenomena in totality to attach all the subjectivity and objectivity in this academic domain. Marx, On the Thefts of Wood, in Rheinische Zeitung (1842) writes th...

A city of Order: the Masterplan and Media Urbanism (Page 52-106) In 1959 a significant gathering of India’s architects took place in Delhi to discuss the future of Indian cities and urban forms and Charles Correa in this gathering criticised Corbusier’s Chandigarh project as  ‘savage’ but the patronage of Nehru to Chandigarh project created  confusions in the minds of present architects about the future of Indian cities. Ravi Sundaram discusses about the MARG’s role in planning, Hume Report of 1930, G.D. Birla Committee Report and the epidemic of 1955 to find the trajectories of the development of Masterplan of Delhi.   The launch of Masterplan in 1962 was inaugurated with many responses from the media, Town Planning Organization and various other groups for the need of ‘urban psyche’ for the transformation of Delhi into well integrated city. This urban psyche was defined as the specific practices of living; work and community organisations and these soci...