Andrew Whitehead reveals how a women’s militia marked a moment of political empowerment as still unresolved conflict erupted in Kashmir at the end of empire.
Author: Andrew Whitehead
Radical Objects: The Common Man’s Gandhi Cap
The Indian election has seen a re-invention of the country’s most politically iconic headwear.
Radical Objects: John Lilburne and John Wilkes
This political tract ‘The Tryal of Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburn’ links indelibly two of the most commanding figures in English radicalism, both of whom won key legal victories against the executive and so helped to establish greater freedom to publish and propagandise
The Purging of ‘Red Beryl’
The story of Beryl Lund, who was, in 1948, at the same time, an actor, a communist and a civil servant working on sensitive defence contracts
A Tale of Two Shop Signs
Andrew Whitehead on the reappearance – and disappearance – of old shop signs
Radical Objects: Bust of Charles Bradlaugh
A ten-inch bronze bust that depicts Charles Bradlaugh, one of the commanding figures of Victorian radicalism.
An Indian in Bloomsbury
India’s hugely influential progressive writers’ movement dates its inception to a meeting in the basement of the Nanking restaurant in Denmark Street – even then London’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’ – in 1934. Sajjad Zaheer was among those present. He was a student from an elite Muslim family in Lucknow, who […]
India’s Anti-Corruption Movement: Has Urban India Arrived?
Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist who divides his time between the United States and India, reflects here on the implications of the new anti-corruption movement in India, in an article first published in the Indian Express newspaper and reposted here with his and the Express’s permission.
God Gave the Land to the People: the Liberal ‘Land Song’
‘The Land Song’ dates back to the glory days of Lloyd George Liberalism, and was revived from the 1960s by a new generation of Liberal radicals. History Workshop Journal editor Andrew Whitehead pursues the song’s history – discovers its only commercial recording – and traces the song’s contemporary echoes.
There Has Always Been a ‘Big Society’
Amid talk of a ‘Big Society’, Pat Thane explores the history of voluntary organizations and the shifting boundaries between state and society. She argues that government rhetoric masks a real shrinking of the voluntary sector.
