It is a pleasure to present you the 11th issue of GJH. While apologising for the delay, we are committing to bring out the 12th issue in the following month itself. Sincere self-criticism has given us renewed energy.
It is a pleasure to present you the 11th issue of GJH. While apologising for the delay, we are committing to bring out the 12th issue in the following month itself. Sincere self-criticism has given us renewed energy.
This issue starts with an interview of a dedicated knowledge seeker, Dr Baldev Raj, a renowned metallurgist and nuclear scientist by Shivanand Kanavi. Dr Baldev Raj has dedicated his life to dealing with complex issues in Fast Breeder Technology. He has firmly believed it could lead India towards harnessing its enormous Thorium resources for electricity and mitigate the effects of burning coal, oil and other hydrocarbons for the same. However, his scientific mind is not one dimensional and has applied itself to unravelling India’s cultural, historical and technological heritage from antiquity to medieval times. He has explained the importance of a new scientific discipline called archaeo-metallurgy that tries to uncover our past based on the study of antique materials. In the absence of development of such science, we are prone to depend on gleanings from our epics, legends and myths, of doubtful authenticity, as sources to reconstruct our civilizational past.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rabindranath Tagore—a many splendoured creative personality. His contributions; as a poet, playwright, painter, musician, educationist, short story writer, student of folklore and so on, made him a cultural giant of our colonial era. We publish some extracts from his essay on the Bauls of Bengal in the section Perspectives. Bauls, a community of nomadic singers whose poetry and music is influenced by Bhakti and Sufi have been a major cultural influence in Bengal despite their small numbers. Rabindranath Tagore was fascinated by their thought and life and brought them to the notice of modern world.
Kannan Kasturi and Shaniyan have reviewed for us two interesting books on personalities on the opposite sides of colonial divide. While Kannan Kasturi has reviewed an eyewitness account of Rani of Jhansi, Shaniyan has reviewed a recent biography of Charles Babington Macaulay.
Sucharita has translated for us a nationalistic poem of Tagore for the back page. As we mentioned earlier you will have next issue of Ghadar Jari Hai very soon and we thank you for your patience and empathy.
Many authors have been sending us long articles and papers which we are not able to publish in the print version of the magazine due to space constraints. Sometimes we carry an abridged version of the said article or paper. For the benefit of our readers we will be posting the entire article or a link to the article on our website – www.ghadar.org.in. Also news and events related to India’s rich heritage will be regularly posted on our website. In this way we hope to be in touch with our readers much more frequently than what a quarterly magazine allows us to do.