Shoumojit Banerjee

D. R. Bhandarkar Rarely have a father and son been pioneers in reshaping a discipline as exacting as classical Indology and the reconstruction of India’s ancient past. Sir Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (1837-1925) was among the earliest Indians to apply Western critical methods to Sanskrit and antiquities, creating what admirers would later call a rare synthesis of what the finest of the Oriental and Occidental worlds had to offer. The very existence of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research...

Eighty years on, the Nuremberg trials, for all its imperfections, remain the world’s most audacious attempt to tame barbarism with law. Robert Jackson at Nuremberg Judgement at Nuremberg (1961 film) Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg today has long been stripped of its wartime drama. The dock is empty; the headphones used for simultaneous translation - then a remarkable innovation - are now museum pieces. Yet, eighty years on, the ghosts of Courtroom 600 still stir. The...

More than a century after the Great War, the spectre of Mackinder’s ‘Heartland Theory’ continues to haunt the world’s geopolitics. Sir Halford Mackinder Each November 11, Europe falls silent for two minutes to mark the end of the First World War in 1918. The Armistice that ended the Great War was met with exhausted relief, but also with great illusions, namely that mankind had fought “the war to end war.” Until 2014 (the centenary of the start of the Great War), it is estimated that more than...