Scroll Adda

In 1966, a 22-year-old Zoramthanga joined the Mizo National Front and started an armed struggle to secede from the Indian Union. Over the next two decades, he was on the move: India, East Pakistan, Burma and, after East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, Rawalpindi. In 1986, the MNF ended their rebellion with the signing of the Mizoram Peace Accord with Rajiv Gandhi’s government. Today it is seen...

Based on the 1988 aircraft crash that killed Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan, A Case of Exploding Mangoes made a big splash in the South Asian literary world when it was released in 2008. Readers loved that a desi writer was nailing political satire. Since then Mohammed Hanif has written three more novels, masterfully blending politics and the absurdities of life. He’s so captured th...

Very few things are as controversial in today’s India as its history. The academic discipline now sits at the heart of popular politics, with the Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindutva supporters using India’s medieval past to power its politics. Into this battlefield rush in writer Namit Arora and India’s most famous historian, Romila Thapar. In their new book “Speaking of History”, Thapar and A...

Few people know more about Indian publishing than Scroll's books editor, Arunava Sinha. Sinha has translated an incredible 100 books from Bengali to English. On this episode of Scroll Adda, he tells Shoaib Daniyal about his experience as a translator and what it takes to render a work from one language – and culture – to another. He also delves into the weeds of Indian publishing. Why are Indians...

Over the past months, the entire world watched in surprise as Iran stood up to the most powerful militaries in the world. On February 28, when the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran, killing its head of state, Trump was hoping for a quick, Venezuela-style regime change. Instead, Iran fought back, attacking Arab states in the region which host American military bases and even successfully closi...

We all know someone who has been scammed over the internet. It could be a dramatic digital arrest scam or something milder like a phishing scam. In her new book, Scamlands , journalist Snigdha Poonam explores this epidemic. For many Indians, desperation drives them to become scammers. Shut out by the iron gates of caste, communal prejudice and poverty, tricking the elite is often the only way out...

“In the age of monetisation, we cannot judge the internet based on morality,” argues Anurag Minus Verma, podcaster and multimedia artist . In this episode of  Adda , the host of the widely popular  Anurag Minus Verma Podcast  speaks with Shoaib Daniyal about his book  The Great Indian Brain Rot . The conversation jumps from “cringe” creators to the economics of virality and the...

In A Sixth of Humanity , political scientist Devesh Kapur and economist Arvind Subramanian set out to do something ambitious: chart India’s development journey from Nehru to Modi. In this episode of Adda , they sit down with Shoaib Daniyal and break down the four stages of India’s development. Starting with Nehru’s planned economy, which they argue did not do what it set out to: import substitutio...

In almost any other city in the world, Delhi’s apocalyptic pollution levels would have sparked alarm. In India, however, it is business as usual. Governments are wary of taking action and even the once-activist judiciary is now lying low. This state of affairs is untenable, Sunita Narain, director Centre for Science and Environments says in this episode of Scroll Adda. The situation is severe and...

On September 24, shots rang through the otherwise idyllic town of Leh. Four people were killed and many more injured in police firing as protests for statehood turned violent. Sajjad Kargili, one of Ladakh’s most popular leaders and a part of the delegation that is negotiating with the Modi government joins Shoaib Daniyal on Scroll Adda to explain why Ladakhis are so angry with Delhi. Ladakhi dema...

From the 1950s to the 1990s, left-wing thought played a major role in Indian society. From shaping the nascent Indian state after the British left, with Indians turning to socialist ideas to combat the ravages of colonialism, to the stasis of the big Central government measures like the license permit raj and freight equalisation. Things, however, are quite different now. India’s youth has little...

India has, in theory, a cabinet system of government. A group of popularly elected politicians are meant to rule using consensus. In practice, of course, we have a strongman (or strongwoman) model, where one powerful politician rules via a clique of Indian Administrative Service officers. So much do politicians like the IAS that since independence, they have given the cadre more and more power. Th...

The Indian state is an almost mythical animal. Inherited by Indians from the British Raj, the state is responsible for great injustice: Indians are generally more scared of the police than they are of goondas. Nearly every Indian also thinks the state is corrupt: bureaucrats and politicians are out to fleece them. But paradoxically, Indians also look to the state for help and as a beacon to buildi...

India’s largest Opposition party is levelling an explosive charge against the Election Commission: vote rigging to favour the Bharatiya Janata Party. In August, party leader Rahul Gandhi took the example of an Assembly Constituency in Karnataka to illustrate significant errors in the voter rolls. A belligerent Election Commission refused to accept any wrongdoing and instead attacked Gandhi in resp...

Contribute to Scroll's studio fund: https://pages.razorpay.com/scrollstudiofund Varun Grover describes himself as an anti-establishment artist. And as a writer, filmmaker and comedian, he has carved a distinct voice for himself in these politically charged times. Of course, none of this is easy. Never in its history as an independent country has India seen this level of censorship. The threat of v...

While completing her PhD in 2012 in New York, Audrey Truschke did not imagine that her work would one day rile up a section of Indians so much that she would feel physically unsafe. So much so that Truschke tells Shoaib Daniyal in this episode of Scroll Adda that she fears coming to India. Truschke's work on medieval Indian history has severely angered India's ruling Hindutva ideologues. She has w...

As a prolific mythologist with more than 60 books, Devdutt Pattanaik has single-handedly created a new genre of writing in India. His thoughtful commentaries on India’s epics have allowed everyday people to think and reflect on their mythology. In this 1.5-hour conversation with Shoaib Daniyal, Pattanaik explains why Indians might have a genius for mythology and why we all live in mythos. Many rat...

Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Kayastha, Baniya – the Indian subcontinent has more varieties of food than possibly any other place on Earth. So much so that food writer and historian Pushpesh Pant argues it’s difficult to identify anything as “Indian food” at all. On the fourth episode of Scroll Adda with Shoaib Daniyal , Pant speaks with erudition and humour about popular Indian food myths (did you kno...

India’s caste system is unique. Nowhere else in the world does this system of thousands of graded endogamous groups exist. At the top of the pyramid are the dwija savarna castes: Brahmins, Baniyas and Kshatriyas. Nearly two millennia of caste privilege mean that Savarnas dominate Indian society. Culture, politics, and the economy in India are Savarna-controlled. Yet, there exists very little study...

Few things seem more contested today than history. From politics to Bollywood, this once sleepy school subject dominates headlines. In an extensive chat with Shoaib Daniyal on the Scroll Adda podcast, however, historian Manu Pillai contextualises this. People of every age think they are living through unique circumstances. But maybe it’s not so different today as it was earlier. That said, Pillai...

India is drowning in fake news. And much of it is produced by its own political parties. Dedicated so-called IT cells supported by highly paid consultants push disinformation on social media with the aim of converting voters to their point of view. This isn’t limited to elections. Disinformation is warping Indian society itself. The past decade has seen an explosion of hate, a significant part of...