Thomas Manuel is an award-winning playwright from Chennai, India. He works as a freelance journalist where his work has appeared on The Nib, The Wire, The Sunday Guardian and The Hindu's Sunday Magazine among other places. Email: thomas123manuel [at] gmail.com
by Thomas Manuel Born in France in the mid-14th century, Christine de Pizan wrote possibly the first work of women’s history that was by a woman for women. She remains one of the era’s most fascinating writers but considerably less well-known than other writes of her time like travelling scholar and professional complainer, Ibn Battuta,…
by Thomas Manuel “The last time there was a protest in this country, they didn’t just arrest everyone – they killed the protestors and carried on killing for weeks after. Ever since then, people here have been very afraid.” “When was this?” I asked. “Nineteen seventy-seven,” he said, “and they killed thousands.” – Lara Pawson,…
by Thomas Manuel Recently, the BBC published a report on the experience of fake news in India titled ‘Duty, Identity, Credibility: Fake news and the ordinary citizen in India’. The report primarily consists of two parts. The first section is based on 40 interviews with Indian citizens and a week-long analysis of their social media…
by Thomas Manuel According to Oxfam, “82 percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while 3.7 billion people that account for the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth.” In the US, the top 1% of families own more wealth than…
by Thomas Manuel In the history of mathematics in India, one of the most fascinating institutions to exist was the guru-parampara or ‘chain of teachers’ of the Kerala School. This chain of teachers was founded by the mathematician and astronomer Madhava (also referred to as Sangagrama Madhava, where Sangagrama is his family or village name).…
by Thomas Manuel In 1320, Giovanni Mauro da Carignano, the rector of a church in Genoa, made a map of the Mediterranean world that marked near the Nile Valley a land called Terra Abaise inhabited by “Christiani Nigri”. Terra Abaise or Abyssinia was apparently inhabited by black Christians. How did Carignano know this? Apparently, he…
by Thomas Manuel In Dishonoured by History: ‘Criminal Tribes’ and British Colonial Policy, Meena Radhakrishna presents rare scholarship on some of the worst excesses of the British Empire. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 was passed with intention of demarcating certain tribes in India as being “hereditary criminals”. This wasn’t necessarily genetic but rather occupational. The…
by Thomas Manuel More than ten years ago, in a now iconic pronouncement, the writer M. John Harrison decried worldbuilding as “the great clomping foot of nerdism“. He called on every science fiction story to represent “the triumph of writing over worldbuilding”, calling it dull and technically unnecessary. “Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent”, he…
by Thomas Manuel In both academia and in the minds of the general reading public, there seems to be a hierarchy when it comes to fiction. ‘Literary’ fiction is (infuriatingly) deemed to be more noteworthy than genre fiction, for example. Similarly, within the supercategory of genre fiction, there are some subtle, mystifying hierarchies. Most readers…