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Short Essays

Educating Rita: Who Gets to Study the Humanities Now?

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Pictures: Decay and Hope, Karachi, © Pippa Virdee, 2026

Brace yourself, this is a longer-than-usual blog piece, and one that is close and personal.

Recently, I came across a report from the Sutton Trust that reignited an old debate: is university education still worth it? A new survey found that the proportion of people who believe a degree is not worth the time and money has risen from 14% in 2005 to 34% today. As my own journey in this field keeps changing shape, I find myself constantly reflecting on why I came into it in the first place.

Where it started

I was the first person in my family to go to university, and as a recent migrant to the UK, I hardly understood the significance of a degree. And yet a few moments stand out clearly.

I had a difficult time adjusting to a grey, dull, cold country, and I struggled at school until my A-levels. That was when I discovered the power of studying and the possibilities that education could open up. My preference had actually been art, but Thatcher’s Britain left an indelible mark on me, and on my politics. It taught me how much history and politics mattered, so much so that I abandoned the idea of studying art at university. Even so, influences from the art world, such as William Morris, remained with me.

And, like the 1983 film Educating Rita, directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Julie Walters, I wanted something else. Having grown up in working-class Coventry among people with few aspirations, I found it hard to want something different, something beyond marriage and children. I took my cue from a few of the “clever girls” at school who were applying to university, and since my A-level results were decent enough, I thought: I too can do this!

My mother

While Educating Rita was the external inspiration, the real one was right at home. My single mother, who never benefited from formal education herself, constantly encouraged me to educate myself and make something of my life. She struggled throughout her life, but she was remarkably resilient and strong, rebuilding and reinventing herself every time life threw another challenge at her. I drew strength from that then, and now when she is no more.

She would have preferred that I became a doctor, a lawyer, something “respectable,” but she supported my decision to study politics and history anyway, despite pressure from other family members who looked down on these subjects. I decided to stay at home rather than leave her alone, which narrowed my choices to Coventry and Warwick. I had offers from both, and to the dismay of my teachers, I chose Coventry.

Coventry, not Warwick

I would have started in 1992, the year 35 polytechnics became universities but, after deferring, I began in 1993. With little guidance or mentorship, I had almost no sense of the difference between Warwick and Coventry. Had I known, I might have made a more calculated choice. Instead, it was an emotional decision, based on instinct and on a course on India and Pakistan that caught my eye at Coventry, taught by someone who would go on to become my PhD supervisor.

Looking back, I think it was also a choice about fitting in. I simply sensed, as someone from a working-class background, that I did not belong at Warwick. Unlike Susan in Educating Rita, who studied English, I read International and Political Studies, a combination of politics, history, and international relations. Interestingly, this kind of combined degree has now made a comeback, partly as a result of rationalisation across the sector. Single-honours degrees are difficult to sustain in today’s market, and a combined programme can be an attractive package in the age of austerity.

Degrees then and now

Returning to the Sutton Trust report: the big difference today is that a degree is now intrinsically tied to employability. Students increasingly come to get a degree, rather than to get an education, and that distinction matters. I was incredibly fortunate to study without the financial pressures students face now. Had those pressures existed then, I probably wouldn’t have gone to university at all.

My undergraduate years were instrumental in opening up my world and my life. They transformed my ability to think, to articulate, to reason, and to question what I thought I knew. I left university without much clarity about what I wanted to do next, but that didn’t matter, because the three years themselves had taught me so much. Far more than the rigour of eight courses a year, each ending in a three-hour exam meant to prove I’d learned something. There were essays too, handwritten at first, typed by my final year, but the ratio was 25% coursework to 75% exam. Everything rested on those three hours at the end of the year. We thankfully now have much more diversity in assessment, but with the challenges of AI, the classroom exam is also making a comeback.

Like Susan, I left university a different person: more confident and genuinely surprised at how much I’d enjoyed the experience. So much so that I decided to keep studying part-time while working. I wouldn’t have made it through my undergraduate or postgraduate years without paid work on the side, even though fees were nowhere near today’s levels. During my MA, I worked first in academic bookselling until I was made redundant as the early tremors of Amazon (which launched in 1998) began shaking the book trade and then in banking, which simply didn’t fulfil me. Interestingly, I was working at a major high-street bank that was closing down branches at the time. The signs were all there in the late 1990s about how innovations in technology were changing our high streets and retail habits.

A turning point

I eventually decided the private sector wasn’t for me and chose something that felt more virtuous instead: the public sector. Of course, I quickly realised that this wasn’t any better! At the same time, I continued with my part-time MA, operating on something close to a pay-as-you-go model. That kind of flexibility barely exists today, outside perhaps the Open University, yet with the support of my tutors, it was possible then. In today’s system, I would likely have been terminated from the programme for missing coursework deadlines. But in a more generous era, when academics still had some autonomy and personal relationships mattered, you weren’t just a number.

Then, one day, a letter arrived with an advert for a PhD studentship. It was from Professor Ian Talbot, Coventry University. I saw it and dismissed it almost instantly; truthfully, I barely knew what a PhD entailed. But the seed was sown, and the rest is history (pun intended).

The studentship, covering fees and maintenance for three years, had been established by the nephews of Sir Penderel Moon (Indian Civil Service). They wanted someone to examine the violence and casualties of Partition; a subject long mired in debate about the true scale of loss at the time of British departure from India. Penderel Moon had produced his classic study Divide and Quit in 1961, drawn from his postings in Punjab, and afterwards edited volumes 5 to 12 of the Transfer of Power (1970-83) documents.

The PhD years were a constant exercise in pinching myself and thinking, is this really me? Am I really doing this, meeting these amazing people and minds? Some of that, I think now, was lacking what Bourdieu meant by cultural capital: the sense that certain ways of speaking, certain reference points, certain forms of ease in a room, are themselves a kind of inherited wealth, one I hadn’t been given. And some of it was what Appadurai calls the capacity to aspire: the idea that aspiration itself is unevenly distributed, that some of us have to learn, almost from scratch, how to imagine a future different from the one we were handed.

The Sutton Trust puts it plainly: graduates from non-graduate families often don’t catch up with graduates from graduate families, because higher education improves social mobility but doesn’t erase the effects of family background. While meritocracy in education is a wonderful idea, and it has helped to uplift many, the internalised habits, manners, language and style that come from our background remain with us. That feeling of being an impostor is directly related to what Bourdieu and Appadurai describe, not a personal failing, but a structural one. But through my academic journey, and in my first monograph, I turned to Catherine Hall, who writes:

For the most part, however, in all sectors of higher education we remain on the margins. But the margins can be a very productive terrain — a space from which both to challenge establishments and develop our own perspectives, build our own organisations, confirm our own collectivities. The hopes for feminist history in the 1990s cannot be the same as they were in the 1970s, for we are living in a very different political world, and some of the harsh lessons we have learned about both exclusivity and marginality must inform our practice in the future. The dream remains — a kind of history that excites and engages, that retains its critical edge, is open to new voices, and always in a dynamic relation to the political world in which we live. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 34.

The inspiration I drew from this ultimately led me to revise and publish my doctoral research as my monograph, From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab (CUP, 2018)

Shrinking UK HE

I felt more at “home” in a post-92 institution, and the opening up of education was crucial for me, both as a student and eventually in my professional capacity. But since then, so much has changed in Britain. The optimism of the Blair years and “Cool Britannia” has given way to a “Global Britain” that is anxiously searching for a place in the world beyond Europe. We are on our way to having a seventh prime minister in the past ten years; the longevity of Thatcher and of Blair as her true successor seems like a different age in this era of musical prime ministerial chairs.

This rise and fall in political and national fortunes are being mirrored, brutally, in the education system itself, and post-92s have been absorbing the impact longest. As far back as 2015, the withdrawal of the teaching grant from non-STEM subjects hit post-92s hardest, prompting warnings that humanities provision would shrink back to “a narrower and narrower social circle of those who could afford to indulge their interests.”

A decade on, that warning reads less like a prediction than a description. Modern foreign languages provision has nearly halved since 2011; English studies have fallen by close to the same margin. In 2026, the University of Hertfordshire, a post-92 institution built on access and employability, suspended recruitment to its undergraduate history, philosophy, English, linguistics and creative writing degrees outright. As John Holmwood of the Campaign for the Public University has put it, post-92s have long been the “heavy lifters of social mobility,” the institutions through which working-class people bettered themselves through higher education. It is precisely that function that is now being dismantled.

Specific discipline studies, such as the Royal Historical Society briefing, confirmed that 88% of history departments in post-92 universities have seen explicit staffing cuts, compared to a lower (though still severe) 68% in pre-92 universities.

What makes this a class story, not just a funding story, is where the losses land. A 2025 British Academy report found large parts of the country are already humanities’ “cold spots,” with no provision at all within a commutable sixty kilometres, a divide that falls hardest on students who cannot simply relocate to wherever a course still survives. A student in a well-off city with three universities on their doorstep has choices. A student tied to a single local institution by money, family, or circumstance does not.

It would be wrong now to pretend Russell Group universities are exempt from the above; they are not. The UCU’s tracker recorded 105 institutions pursuing redundancies, restructures or closures as of late 2025, with Russell Group members accounting for 41% of the sector’s £303 million severance spend in 2024–25 despite being a smaller and wealthier cohort. Nottingham seeks to cut 150 posts, mostly in the humanities, and has withdrawn language degrees. Exeter is consulting on cutting a similar number, 85% of them in humanities, arts and social sciences. Sheffield cut 614 jobs in a year. Bristol pushed voluntary severance specifically at its humanities faculty. Leicester closed Film Studies and Modern Languages entirely, rescinding around 300 offers. A small example in a pool of many.

The consumer vs public good

So, the crisis has widened. But it has not reversed the underlying pattern: market competition means students increasingly gravitate to the universities with the strongest reputations, which makes closures disproportionately likely at exactly the lower-tariff institutions that working-class and first-generation students are more likely to attend. Post-92s were hollowed out first and hardest; the Russell Group is now losing humanities jobs too, which are largely at the margins of institutions that remain, on the whole, intact. Peter Fleming makes a good case for linking the neoliberalisation of HE and its ultimate decline in Dark Academia: How Universities Die.

That distinction matters because it is the same distinction Bourdieu and Appadurai pointed to. The people most likely to need the humanities to develop the cultural capital, the confidence, the capacity to aspire that I stumbled into almost by accident, are the people increasingly least likely to have local, affordable access to them. A degree in history or politics did not just give me a qualification; it gave me a way of thinking that money and background hadn’t. Strip that access away from the institutions serving people like the one I was, and you are not trimming a subject choice. You are closing a door that, for a certain kind of working-class kid, was the only door going.

The current implosion taking place across the sector does not seem to concern people; there is an almost visceral lack of trust and faith in “experts” and universities. This, of course, is not accidental. People who question, challenge, and think critically are inconvenient in a populist, post-truth world increasingly shaped by AI. Education should be a safe space in which we can teach and debate ideas freely. Except, right now, it is not. History itself is contested ground.

What lessons should we be learning? How do we make sense of the present through the past? Everything we experience, personally or politically, has a historical context, and that context is the key to understanding now. History gives us the tools and the language to articulate our thoughts and make sense of the world around us. I went to university as an idealist. I left with some of that idealism intact, but with a good deal of cynicism too, the kind that teaches you to always ask questions, never assume knowledge, apply reason, be critical, seek evidence, and fact-check your sources. This is why history matters, and why we must defend it. And more so in the age of AI.

India, Pakistan

A South Asian Feast at Edgbaston

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Last week, I indulged in some cricket. Not just any cricket match, but a South Asian feast at Edgbaston, for women’s T20. The morning match, like the morning itself, was relatively mild in temperature, and resulted in Bangladesh winning against the orange army, the Netherlands. But by the afternoon, the temperature was considerably higher during India’s match against Pakistan.

I’ll be honest — I’ve only been to one “proper” cricket match before, which was last year when India were playing England. The prospect of watching this old rivalry play out on the cricket pitch was enticing and irresistible, despite knowing how heated and at times even how ugly the audiences can be. It was also women’s cricket, which has come a long way, and determined to show some gender solidarity, I went along to the historic grounds.

As I arrived at the ground, I could already sense that this match was going to draw large crowds. Indian blue dominated the space, with a few patches of green. Inside, I caught the tail end of the morning match and was in time to see Bangladesh seal victory against the Netherlands. The atmosphere was pleasant and inviting, reflecting the sportsmanship we associate with sport at its best. The Dutch team was incredibly obliging, posing for selfies and engaging warmly with supporters despite their loss.

As the ground transformed between matches, the audience shifted, the tension changed, and crowds began to fill their seats. The ICC T20 match began without a handshake — mirroring the precedent set by the men’s teams and undeniably bringing politics into the sporting arena. As national flags were unfurled across the pitch and audiences rose for the anthems, I noticed the people in the row behind me did not stand for Pakistan’s anthem. From their mutterings, it was clear this was a deliberate decision. I was intrigued and irritated in equal measure. The crowd itself was multi-racial and British-born (Gujarati and East African heritages), yet they chose to imbibe and perform a fierce subcontinental nationalism thousands of miles away from home. This stood in sharp contrast to the joy of Bangladesh’s victorious chase against the Netherlands with the sudden, sharp shift in gravity when India and Pakistan took the field.

I had also been warned not to expect much from the Pakistan team, given how significantly India has invested in women’s cricket in recent years. I therefore found I was decidedly with the underdog; no one really likes a one-sided affair. Also, some years ago, I spent time at Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore for research, and while there, I was impressed by how important an institution it was, as many fine female cricketers have emerged from there. Five players in the current Pakistan squad have ties to the college, including Aliya Riaz, Ayesha Zafar, Iram Javed, Sadia Iqbal and Natalia Pervaiz.

However, despite a few glimpses of determination from the Pakistani side, the match was largely dominated by India’s women. The crowd was loud, raucous and seemingly oblivious to the fact that this one-sided contest was itself displaying the more unattractive face of nationalism. The problem with sport, of course, is that it forces you to pick a side — there is very little room to sit on the fence. As spectators, the crowd creates its own dynamic within the stadium.

Despite the crowd being very multi-racial and multi-religious, the vibe and the chants were distinctly Hindu, with the most popular in my vicinity being ‘Ganpati Bappa Morya’. This was among the sold-out crowd of 18,814, setting a new Women’s T20 World Cup attendance record for a group-stage double-header. While historic rivalries like these are great for drawing crowds and promoting women’s cricket, the flip side is that the political rivalry is imported as well. 

I slipped out of Edgbaston before the final ball was bowled, once it was clear that Pakistan’s fate was sealed. The Pakistani supporters were also gradually slipping away, as they were outnumbered by the Indian supporters and defeat was certain. I wanted to avoid the crowds, who were already in high spirits — literally and metaphorically. And yet, leaving early also meant carrying away a cleaner impression of the day. Because for all the noise in the stands, the tribalism, the political point-scoring, the refusal to stand for another nation’s anthem, it was the earlier match that offered a different story. The Dutch women who smiled and posed for photos despite their loss. The Bangladesh crowds pleasantly mingling with the Dutch spectators. The Pakistani team who played with dignity in front of a crowd that had largely already written them off.

India, Pakistan, Poetry Corner, Short Essays

Between Worlds: On Hate, History, and the Possibility of Belonging

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Peshawar © 2017 Pippa Virdee

The last three days have been an uncomfortable reminder of how far we have slipped — or perhaps how far we never truly moved — in our relationship with hatred and bigotry. Yet within that discomfort, I also found unexpected moments of beauty and hope, each one a small act of resistance against the noise.

A Sufi Voice in Leamington Spa

On Saturday, I visited the Gurdwara in Leamington Spa to hear Dr Asma Qadri, a scholar of Punjabi language, literature, and culture, speak on Punjabi poetry and the Sufi tradition. Her focus was Baba Farid (1173–1268), a figure of remarkable spiritual and literary stature. In the Guru Granth Sahib — the sacred scripture of Sikhism — there are 112 shaloks (couplets) attributed to Baba Farid, and at their heart is a message of interfaith harmony, compassion, and non-violence. That a Muslim saint’s words were enshrined in a Sikh scripture centuries ago speaks volumes about a pluralism that many today seem intent on dismantling.

Farid, if you are maltreated
Do not react with violence and projection
Visit the Other
And kiss his feet in humility and affection!

Source: Harjeet Singh Gill, Sufi Rhythms, Patiala University, 2007

Baba Farid was born near Multan, his lineage traceable to Kabul, from where his family had migrated to the Indus Valley. He later moved to Delhi, where he received spiritual instruction from Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, a saint of the Chishti Order. He eventually returned to Punjab and settled in Ajodhan (present-day Pakpattan), from where he led the Chishti Order until his death.

What is perhaps less widely known is that Farid is believed to have travelled to Jerusalem around 1200 CE — not long after Saladin had recaptured the city from the Crusaders. A small shrine there, still accessible, is said to mark his presence. Navtej Sarna, a former Indian Ambassador to Israel (2008–2012), writes about this connection in his book Indians at Herod’s Gate: A Jerusalem Tale (Rupa, 2014) — a quiet, often-overlooked thread linking the Indian subcontinent to the Holy City over eight centuries. Read further: Indians Herods Gate and Jerusalem’s 800-year-old Indian hospice

After the lecture, our group of three — drawn from different faith backgrounds — sat together for langar, the community meal served at Gurdwaras. There is something deceptively simple and profoundly radical about langar. The act of sitting together, regardless of religion, caste, or status, and eating the same food dissolves hierarchies that societies expend enormous energy to maintain. It is a challenge that remains genuinely difficult in parts of India, where communal and caste taboos still govern not just what people eat, but with whom and where. In that shared meal, something ancient and necessary was quietly affirmed.

The Descent into Dystopia

The following day, I made the mistake of listening to a News Agents podcast: Why MAGA Hates Britain. I say mistake not because the journalism was poor — it wasn’t — but because the content was genuinely dispiriting. The podcast drew on interviews conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where the blatant hostility toward Muslims was on full display. What struck me was not just the bigotry itself, but the absolute self-assurance with which it was expressed — the sense of a parallel world, hermetically sealed from doubt or nuance, in which hatred had been fully normalised and even celebrated.

It is worth noting that CPAC is not a fringe gathering. It draws senior politicians, media figures, and policymakers, including Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, Liz Truss, who has found the political validation that eluded her at home in MAGA circles. When hatred is mainstreamed in those spaces, it travels outward with authority and legitimacy. The podcast was a sobering record of that.

A Fragment from 1947

Turning away in revulsion, I returned to my own research — a space in which I can explore the ideas that still feel worth holding onto. Almost serendipitously, I came across an advertisement from September 1947 in the Bombay Chronicle, published just weeks after Partition had carved the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, leaving 1-2 million dead and over 15 million people displaced. The advert’s message was striking in its urgency and its pathos: the violence and bloodshed that had torn communities apart must now be put aside. The “children of God” must be taught how to live together rather than being “poisoned” by the hatred that had consumed the preceding years.

The text reads: If there is any image of God on earth, it is the children. Theirs is a world of purity and innocence where hatred and spite are things unknown. They play together and grow together and never care to know which of them is a Hindu and which a Moselm. Let us not poison these flowers with the venom of communalism. Let them grow with a healthy mind and a healthy outlook, so that they can build up a glorious future for themselves as well as for the country. Keep your children away from the deadly communal monster by all means. Hindu Muslim Ek Ho! Advertisement inserted by C.K. Sen & Co. Ltd.
Bombay Chronicle 26 September 1947. Photo taken by Pippa Virdee from NMML, Delhi.

What moved me most was the implicit admission within that language: that society had already been poisoned, and that the antidote required active, deliberate effort. It was a call not to innocence but to conscious repair.

The Distance That Grows

That advertisement also stirred a more melancholic reflection. There was a time, however brief and fragile, when greater openness between India and Pakistan seemed imaginable — when the possibility of travel, communication, and even reconciliation had not yet been foreclosed. The Wagah-Attari border crossing, for decades a symbol of that flickering possibility, remains closed following the Pahalgam attack of April 2025. Yet that closure is not merely a consequence of one incident. It reflects a deeper estrangement — one that has steadily worsened since the BJP came to power in 2014, as the distance between the two countries has grown not just diplomatically but also culturally, emotionally, and imaginatively.

When borders close, it is not only people who are separated. It is stories, families, histories, and the ordinary human exchanges that quietly resist the narratives of enmity.

On Connecting the Moments

What struck me, looking back across these three days, was how tightly these experiences were bound together — the lecture on a 13th-century Sufi poet, the langar table, the CPAC recordings, the 1947 advertisement, the closed border. They form a kind of map of where we are and where we might yet go.

We are constantly surrounded by voices that insist conflict is natural, that difference is danger, that the world is a zero-sum competition between faiths and peoples. But Baba Farid’s couplets, preserved across centuries and across religious traditions, suggest otherwise. The langar meal, served to strangers, suggests otherwise. Even that desperate 1947 advertisement, placed in the shadow of catastrophe, suggests otherwise — because in the middle of all that devastation, they still believed it was worth trying to preserve unity over enmity.

Conflict has never resolved anything. It only plants the seeds for the next generation’s hatred. What endures are the moments when we chose differently — when we visited the Other, and sat with them, and ate.

It remains up to us to remember our neighbours — not as symbols, threats, or abstractions, but as people, first and foremost. This message is a recurring theme in advertising campaigns that, while not so distant in time, feel increasingly remote in spirit. The YouTube clips, from just a decade ago, speak a language of interfaith harmony that the intervening years — and the political choices made within them — have done their best to drown out. That they once existed, and were made for mass audiences, is itself worth remembering.


Hindu Muslim Unity: Best Creative and Inspirational Indian Ads | Part 1 | Creative Ads

Hindu Muslim Unity: Best Creative and Inspirational Indian Ads | Part 2 | Creative Ads
Humsaye Maa Jaye by Bushra Ansari and Asma Abbas – Official Video
Poetry Corner

Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat

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Omar Khayyam Rubaiyat Persian Miniatures

Some time back, while browsing a second-hand bookshop — the name and place now lost to memory — I stumbled upon a copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, translated from Persian by Edward FitzGerald. Published in 1981, it is a beautifully illustrated edition, adorned with miniature paintings. Time-worn as it is, the book carries a warm and inviting feel, and I always thought I would one day find the right words to write about it. It usually sits on the bookshelf directly in front of my desk, front cover on full display — a small splash of colour and beauty against what can otherwise be rather dry academic reading. The richness of the text and the miniature paintings breathe both life and warmth into the room and, on occasion, inspire me to write.

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian poet and polymath of remarkable range — a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher as much as a literary figure. Born in Nishapur in present-day Iran, he flourished during the Seljuk era, a world away in time and place from the Crusades unfolding to the west. Though celebrated in his own time for his scientific and philosophical work, it is his poetry that secured his enduring fame in the modern world — largely thanks to Edward FitzGerald’s celebrated English translation, first published in 1859. FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a loose but inspired rendering of quatrains drawn from the Bodleian manuscript, and its success was extraordinary: a bibliography compiled in 1929 listed over 300 separate editions, with many more appearing in the century since.

There is, of course, much to be said about FitzGerald and the liberties — and brilliance — of his translation, but that is a conversation for another time. For now, it was the events of the past few days that compelled me to lift the book from the shelf and turn its pages. Two quatrains, in particular, stopped me in my tracks.

35

There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I could not see
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There was—and then no more of THEE and ME.

36

Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn;
Nor Heav'n, with those eternal Signs reveal'd
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn
Darius dying comforted by Alexander while his assassins are hung. From the “Book of Omens.” Qazwin style, 1550-60
India, Short Essays

Books, Films, Talks and a Nation

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My latest visit to Delhi luckily coincided with the World Book Fair, held from January 10-18 at the Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre (Pragati Maidan), which was unveiled in 2023 ahead of the G20 summit. The book fair has been held for over half a century, and I was looking forward to it, as it was going to be my first time. Once there, I felt a suitable sense of awe, amidst the sets of huge halls and the throbbing atmosphere around them.

I was told this was the first time the fair had ‘free entry’, and the crowds were substantial, particularly around the stalls of major publishing houses. Secondly, this year’s theme was ‘Indian Military History: Valour and Wisdom@75.’ Book fairs are especially popular with schoolchildren and university students, and these young visitors were enthusiastically taking selfies with statues, exhibits and soldiers positioned there.

As I approached the entrance to the main hall, I was greeted by large posters encouraging young people to read and urging people to gift books, as the Fair is organised by the National Book Trust (Ministry of Education, Government of India) and the India Trade Promotion Organisation. Once inside, the presence of the military was immediately noticeable, as were the recent conflicts with neighbouring countries.

Having visited several bookshops in Delhi and Chandigarh on the trip, what had come into sharp focus was an abundance of material on military history and security studies by retired military personnel, commentators, and journalists. Popular history writing and their shelves in bookshops were never so narrowly dominated as they appeared to be now. Trends come and go, of course, and perhaps this is simply that, or perhaps something more.

The Machinery of Nationalist Discourse

In his seminal work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson argued that nations are socially constructed communities, imagined by people who perceive themselves as part of a group despite never meeting most of their fellow members. For our purpose here, Anderson also demonstrated how ‘print capitalism’ fuelled the rise of nationalism.

For instance, are publishers actively creating a market for narratives of conflict and war, or merely responding to demand for them? The reality is likely a mixture of both impulses. Print capitalism works by maximising circulation, leading publishers to print books designed to reach the broadest possible audience. The current surge in military history books and nationalist themes is neither coincidental nor has it emerged in a vacuum.

This trend is especially clear in India’s publishing scene. Since the 2010s, nationalist-revisionist history-writing, reshaping historical narratives, and revising textbooks have been major themes. The bookstores I visited showed this change: where history sections once had a variety of socio-cultural views on India’s multi-layered past, they are now filled with books highlighting post-1947 military bravery and intelligence activities.

Alongside my visit to the book fair, I attended a seminar at the PMML/NMML (Teen Murti), which also featured a spirited assertion of nationalism, while confining narratives of peace to nostalgic readings of the past. It was argued that these readings offer little evidence to support these sentiments, in this case regarding the Partition’s impact in Bengal. These discussions align with a global rise in populist nationalism, which privileges narratives of conflict.

Cinema as Nationalist Pedagogy

The Book Fair and the seminar are part of the same cultural milieu as the current hit film Dhurandhar. A review in The Caravan magazine has argued that the film exemplifies what happens when public discourse is consistently fed propagandist narratives. The review noted that if the goal is to serve nationalist propaganda to the masses, few mediums work better than a slickly produced, multi-starrer, action-packed spy thriller.

Conversely, an alternative to this swashbuckling sensationalism is the film Ikkis. Writing on the Scroll website, the reviewer noted that the film is based on Arun Khetarpal, who was posthumously awarded India’s highest gallantry award, the Param Vir Chakra, for his actions during the 1971 war. As Khetarpal’s deeds are well documented, Ikkis aims higher, seeking to understand what unites men sworn to kill each other. 

The review added that the film eschews any vengeance-fuelled hyperbole, with scene after scene revealing the director’s efforts to resist jingoism. This sensitive reading of conflict and war has not resonated with audiences in the same way as Dhurandhar, which already has a sequel in the works. The Indian Express, describes Ikkis as a thoughtful exploration of masculinity and bravery that avoids Dhurandhar’s stylised machismo.

What do the divergent fortunes of these two films reveal, if anything important or long-term, about contemporary India’s cultural moment? Just as the book fair collection and the PMML/NMML discussion suggest a renewed contest over complex, layered narratives of identity, these two films capture two sides of the same coin. They represent the mixture of giving people what they want and offering them what their makers want them to want!

The Missing Voices

If Anderson’s ‘print capitalism’ helps us understand how mass media manufactures and disseminates narratives that shape national consciousness, it also reveals what is missing here: where are the voices of those who speak for peace and friendship? The current publishing industry, mirroring the broader political trend, seems to suggest that conflict is not only inevitable but desirable, a necessary component of national identity.

Yet surely, we do not all consider conflict the solution to our problems? When families feud, we try to keep talking and reach some form of amicable coexistence. Why should the same not apply to the family of nations? Instead, the religious-nationalist approach to history and politics, leisure and entertainment, which has gained prominence since the 1990s, aims to reduce content to a commodity and sentiment to profit.

The book fair’s public relations emphasis on military history and policy, then, reflects not only the sidelining or suppression of multiple voices but also an element of advertising to buyers and sellers of different kinds, enhancing familiarity and enabling involvement and investment. When every other book celebrates civilisational value and military valour against perennial ‘others’, alternative voices are drowned out not only by outrage and censorship but also by business. 

A Reimagined Community

What I witnessed at the World Book Fair, across bookshops, at the Teen Murti seminar, and what I read about the contrasting fates of Dhurandhar and Ikkis show a nation-state actively reimagining itself. If nations are ‘imagined communities’, shaped by those who control the means of communication, then, as that act of imagining is never neutral, it can always be reimagined as well. They are shaped by choices, and those choices remain ours to make.

The question facing urban, middle India today is which version of itself it will choose to recall and reimagine: one defined primarily by categories, conflicts, and eternal revenge, or one that acknowledges complexities, accepts diversities, and accommodates differences. The contested marketplace of bookshops, cinemas, and talking shops (and their digital counterparts) will play a determining role in answering that question. 

References:

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Verso Books, 1983.

Nandini Ramnath, ‘‘Ikkis’ review: In tribute to a war hero, a rare plea for peace and empathy’, Scroll, 1 January 2026

Surabhi Kanga, ‘The Mob Comes For Film Critics’, The Caravan, 1 January 2026

Marie Lall and Kusha Anand. Bridging Neoliberalism and Hindu Nationalism: the role of education in bringing about contemporary India. Policy Press, 2022.

Short Essays

Coventry: A Migrant City in the Making

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St Osburg’s Church, Coventry

As we approach another year-end in this season of merriment and reflection, and on the shortest day of the year, when daylight is most precious, many of us find time to catch up on projects long left pending. For me, this has meant returning to research into the city of Coventry.

While working on a chapter that uses photographic history to explore migration patterns, I’ve been reading Life and Labour in a 20th Century City: The Experience of Coventry, edited by Bill Lancaster and Tony Mason (1986). The chapter on ‘Migration into Twentieth Century Coventry’ revealed two significant threads: the presence and influence of the Irish Catholic community, and Coventry’s emergence as home to a South Asian community. At the same time, it also revealed the prevalence of racism then, which is comparable to the anxieties that are expressed today. Pages 71-76 are particularly illuminating in linking the political discourse and public fears of the post-war generation to contemporary shifts in British society.

The Myth of 1930s Cosmopolitanism

Coventry in the 1930s was often described as cosmopolitan, but this characterisation was somewhat misleading. Although the population was mixed, with migrants rising to 40% by 1935, most of these newcomers came from other UK regions. This trend continued throughout the war and the immediate post-war period. By 1951, while the overwhelming majority of Coventry’s citizens were of UK origin, some change was also evident.

Lancaster and Mason, page 71

The Irish Presence

The 9,993 Irish residents counted in the 1951 census marked a significant new wave of migration after the war. Although Irish regiments were often stationed at Coventry barracks and contributed labour during the early 20th century, the local Irish community remained small—only 2,057 in 1931. Nevertheless, this population grew rapidly during the construction boom of the 1930s.

Lancaster and Mason, page73

By the end of the Second World War, the streets around St. Osburg’s and St. Mary’s churches had taken on a unique Irish character. These inner-city neighbourhoods, filled with lodging houses and multiple-tenant buildings, and close to Roman Catholic churches, became popular stopping points for itinerant construction workers or individuals looking for factory jobs.

The growth of Catholicism in Coventry during the 20th century reflects both the expansion of the Irish community and their commitment to preserving their religious identity. Interestingly, two current Catholic churches in Coventry cater specifically to European congregations: the Polish and Ukrainian communities.

The South Asian Community and Racial Prejudice

By 1954, the small wartime Indian community had grown to about 4,000 people. Described as a “quiet, peace-loving ethnic minority,” they mainly settled in the older, rundown housing around Foleshill Road. Like many other migrants, they sought to preserve their culture and identity. In October 1952, Muslim members of the community submitted a request to the Planning and Redevelopment Committee for dedicated burial grounds and land to build a mosque.

Although small in numbers, Coventry’s Indian community was nonetheless affected by the growing racial prejudice across Britain. In October 1954, reports emerged that local estate agents were enforcing a colour bar. The week prior, the Coventry Standard published a troubling editorial — not the work of a biased junior reporter, but the newspaper’s primary editorial position:

The presence of so many coloured people in Coventry is becoming a menace. Hundreds of black people are pouring into the larger cities of Britain, including Coventry, and are lowering the standard of life. They live on public assistance and occupy common lodging houses to the detriment of suburban areas. They are frequently the worse for liquor, many of them addicted to methylated spirits, and live in overcrowded conditions, sometimes six to a room.

Lancaster and Mason observe that by the early 1950s, this racism had spread across a wide range of Coventry society. The Standard also reported that a branch of the AEU had contacted Elaine Burton, Labour MP for Coventry South, about the issue. This hostility is particularly notable given that the “coloured minority” made up less than 1.5% of Coventry’s population and, as Stephen Tolliday demonstrates elsewhere in the book, did not threaten the employment of local factory workers.

A City of Newcomers

By 1951, Coventry was mainly a city of recent arrivals, with estimates suggesting that only 30-35% of its population were born there. Many of the newcomers quickly left due to difficulties in finding housing or employment. A study noted that in 1949, 18,000 new residents moved to Coventry, while 17,000 people left.

Moreover, Coventry was hardly a melting pot. In addition to racial prejudice, residents were often unwelcoming to newcomers. Friendships and social networks usually aligned with regional and ethnic backgrounds, with clubs, pubs, and religious groups serving specific migrant communities. Ironically, Coventry’s long-standing identity as a migrant city since the early century may have reinforced the aloofness of the remaining native population – the latter is still palpable in the city’s streets and people.

Lancaster and Mason, page 75

The 1961 census revealed that the 1954 estimate of Asians in Coventry was inflated. New Commonwealth migrants made up only 1.5% of the population, whereas 6.1% was from Eire and Northern Ireland. The flow of migrants from the new Commonwealth was minimal rather than overwhelming. However, between the 1961 census and the so-called mini-census of 1966, significant shifts in migration into Coventry occurred, shifts that would help shape the political rhetoric around immigration for decades to come.

Lancaster and Mason, page 75

Echoes of the Past

Reading the 1954 Coventry Standard editorial today, with its language about people “pouring in” and becoming a “menace,” makes it impossible not to hear echoes that resonate in British political discourse. Just fourteen years later, on April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech at a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham nearby. Powell heavily relied on letters and anecdotes from the West Midlands, predicting that communities would be “foaming with much blood” because of Commonwealth immigration. His apocalyptic language gained traction in a region that was experiencing real demographic change, even though the scale was often exaggerated by fear and prejudice.

Coventry’s history shows a striking pattern: a persistent disconnect between perception and reality regarding migration. In 1954, ‘coloured’ migrants made up less than 1.5% of Coventry’s population and were described as a menace and a threat to living standards. By 1961, the actual numbers were even lower than the overestimated figures. Despite this, anti-immigrant sentiment gained strength, reaching a peak with Powell’s speech, which appeared to validate fears that years of evidence had shown to be unfounded.

This kind of hostile and often racist political rhetoric continues to thrive today. When Nigel Farage displayed his “Breaking Point” poster in 2016, depicting a line of refugees, or when he claims to feel “like a foreigner in my own country” and warns that migration levels are “unsustainable,” he uses a similar approach: heightening anxiety about cultural change while often distorting the scale and effects. Words such as invasion, being “overwhelmed,” and threats to “our way of life”—these expressions form a continuous thread from that 1954 editorial through Powell to Farage.

Coventry’s historical record is particularly valuable because it allows us to compare predictions with actual outcomes. The threat predicted in 1954 never came true. There was no bloodshed or violence. Despite the panic, racial barriers, and inflammatory editorials, and despite migrants constituting less than 1.5% of the population, Coventry’s diverse communities—Irish, South Asian, Polish, Ukrainian, and others—became an integral part of the city. They did not pose the threats to jobs or living standards that were claimed. Indeed, the post-war boom would not have been possible without this labour migration into the city.

Coventry’s history shows that demographic change is neither easy nor without real challenges. However, the most provocative rhetoric often surfaces during times of economic uncertainty. The true story of Coventry, a city that has been profoundly shaped by migration as it continues to evolve and develop.

As we enter the new year, with migration remaining one of the most contentious political issues in Britain, Coventry’s history offers a lesson worth heeding: our fears of newcomers have consistently proved more destructive than the newcomers themselves. How can we learn from the past without repeating the same anxieties and prejudices?

References:

Ewart, H. (2011). “Coventry Irish”: Community, Class, Culture and Narrative in the Formation of a Migrant Identity, 1940–1970. Midland History, 36(2), 225–244.

Lancaster, Bill and Mason, Tony (eds), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: Cryfield Press, 1986.

Virdee, Pippa. Coming to Coventry: Stories from the South Asian Pioneers. The Herbert, 2006.

India, Short Essays

Rediscovering Kamala Markandaya’s ‘The Nowhere Man’

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Kamala Markandaya (23 June 1924–16 May 2004), pseudonym of Kamala Purnaiya, married name Kamala Taylor, occupies a distinctive position in the landscape of South Asian literature. Born into a prominent Brahmin family in Mysore, India, she graduated from Madras University and established herself as a significant voice through short stories published in Indian newspapers. In 1948, shortly after independence, she uprooted herself and moved to London with literary ambitions, and thus straddled between two worlds – East and West – and also the transitional era from the colonial to the post-colonial.  

Her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), introduced readers to her unflinching examination of rural poverty and resilience and became a bestseller. The title of the novel is taken from the 1825 poem ‘Work Without Hope’, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge”

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

This epigraph establishes a thematic preoccupation that would recur throughout Markandaya’s work: the question of what sustains individuals when hope seems futile, when effort appears wasted, and when displacement renders purpose elusive.

A Voice of the Indian Diaspora

According to Sunita Rani’s critical assessment, ‘Kamala Markandaya, a pioneer member of the Indian Diaspora occupies an outstanding place among the Indian women novelists writing in English… In a wider context, she comes under the umbrella of third world post-colonial writers.’ This positioning is crucial to understanding Markandaya’s unique contribution: she wrote from the margins, giving voice to experiences of displacement, cultural alienation, and the psychological toll of migration long before diaspora literature became a recognised genre.

Writing at a time when British literature was still predominantly white and male, and when post-colonial voices were only beginning to emerge, Markandaya carved out a space to explore the immigrant experience with psychological depth and nuance. Her attention to the internal lives of her characters, their negotiations between cultures, and their struggles for dignity in hostile environments marked her as a writer of considerable sophistication and empathy.

The Story of Srinivas

The Nowhere Man tells the story of Srinivas, who embodies the rootless existence its title suggests. After spending two-thirds of his life in England—during which he sacrificed a son to war—this Indian immigrant finds himself heckled by racist hoodlums and ultimately driven to his death. The tragedy of his situation is compounded by temporal irony: he has lived in England for thirty years, yet remains perpetually “foreign,” a restless, rootless individual stripped of both his Indian heritage and denied full acceptance into British society.

As Rani observes, ‘He is bewildered as to where he belongs: he has lived in England for thirty years and yet became a rootless, restless individual disposed of India and disowned by England. He represents millions of men who, for some reason or other leave their own roots and fail to strike roots in alien soil and die as rootless, restless individuals.’

Srinivas’s predicament speaks to the fundamental existential crisis of the immigrant: the loss of one identity without the gain of another, the perpetual state of being in-between. His thirty years in England count for nothing in the eyes of the racist youths who torment him; his decades of contribution, his sacrifice of a son to Britain’s war effort, cannot purchase him belonging. Markandaya captures with devastating clarity how racism reduces a lifetime of lived experience to nothing more than the colour of one’s skin.

Cultural Neglect and Critical Oversight

What makes the novel’s obscurity particularly striking is that it addresses themes that should have resonated powerfully in 1970s Britain. As Emma Garman writes in the introduction to the new reprinted edition, ‘writing ahead of one’s time risks cultural neglect, and The Nowhere Man was all but ignored on its publication.’ The novel confronted uncomfortable truths about race, belonging, and British society’s treatment of immigrants at a crucial historical moment – an era marked by increasing racial tension, the rise of far-right politics, and heated debates about immigration.

The 1970s saw the growth of the National Front, the implementation of increasingly restrictive immigration laws, and incidents of racial violence across Britain. The Nowhere Man spoke directly to these realities, yet British readers and critics seemed unwilling or unable to engage with its challenging portrait of their society. Perhaps the novel was too close to the bone, too unflattering in its depiction of British racism and xenophobia.

Garman picks up the inter-generational tension in Markandaya’s work, when newly-wed Laxman brings his wife Pat to stay at Srinivas’s home for a week, he feels embarrassed by his parents’ perceived lack of sophistication—their appearance, dress, and English. His father’s valiant attempts to fit into an awkward social environment reveal the painful immigrant experience that Markandaya captured so effectively. Garman notes how the ‘conflict and sense of separation that can arise between first and second immigrant generations would, thirty years later, be explored to great effect in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. But at the time Markandaya was writing, it was a subject few novelists had confronted.’ Yet her pioneering work went largely unrecognised, until perhaps its re-discovery through the new edition in 2019.

A Precursor to Contemporary Voices

Perhaps the most intriguing element of The Nowhere Man‘s neglect is how its outsider perspective—particularly its diagnosis of British society through the eyes of ‘a woman and a foreigner’—felt disconcerting to 1970s readers. Garman asks whether this dual marginalization could help explain the novel’s commercial and critical neglect?

Better known for her American success, Markandaya found her adopted home, Britain, a tougher market, yet she remained committed to exploring themes of cultural displacement. Garman shows how Markandaya ‘blamed the inevitable snobbishness towards an author from a former, and very recent, British colony.’ Again suggesting someone who was ahead of her time and working on the edges. And ‘perhaps discouraged by the reaction – or rather the lack of reaction – to her harrowing portrait of modern Britian, Markandaya returned to India for the setting of her subsequent four novels.’

Historically, Markandaya occupies a fascinating position: falling between the canonical generation of V.S. Naipaul (b.1932) and later Salman Rushdie (b.1947), and those who came before her such as R.K. Narayan (b.1906) and Mulk Raj Anand (b.1905). It was perhaps Ruth Praver Jhabvala (b.1927) that remained her most literary contemporary.

Her work on diaspora and displacement anticipated the themes that would define the later writers. Her work, particularly The Nowhere Man, deserves recognition as a precursor to contemporary diaspora literature—a pioneering exploration of identity, displacement, and the meaning of home that speaks with renewed urgency to our current moment.

And given the political rhetoric around nationalism in contemporary Britian, this makes for pertinent reading as a story which is set in 1968, the year of Enoch Powell’s ‘River of Blood’ speech, should resonate so much with our times today. Srinivas’s story remains tragically relevant, a reminder that the struggles for acceptance and dignity faced by immigrants are neither new nor resolved.

References and further reading:

Nasta S, Stein MU, eds. Disappointed Citizens: The Pains and Pleasures of Exile. In: The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing. Cambridge University Press; 2020:193-310.

Nasta S. 1940s–1970s. In: Osborne D, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010). Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge University Press; 2016:23-39.

Rani, Sunita. “Probing Identities Amid Racial and Cultural Conflicts: Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man and Some Inner Fury.” Literature & Aesthetics 20, no. 1 (2010).

Harrex, S. C. (1971). A Sense of Identity: The Novels of Kamala Markandaya. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 6(1), 65-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/002198947100600108 (Original work published 1971)

Manoj Kumar Hemane and Mahindra Kumar H Fulzele. Endurance and Displacement: The Ethical Vision in Kamala Markandaya’s Novels. International Journal Research Engish. 2025;7(1):415-417. DOI: 10.33545/26648717.2025.v7.i1g.365

Short Essays

Exploring the Legacy of William Morris: Art, Design, and Socialism

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I first encountered William Morris (1834–1896) during my A-levels when I was studying Art, a subject that was always my first choice before I gradually gravitated toward politics and history. There, among images of densely patterned wallpapers and tapestries, I discovered not just a designer but a complete philosophy about how we should live, work, and create. His influence on my thinking has never waned.

A Victorian Polymath

Morris was born into a wealthy Essex family and discovered his passion for medievalism while studying classics at Exeter College, Oxford. There he befriended Edward Burne-Jones, beginning associations with Pre-Raphaelite artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and architect Philip Webb. Webb designed Red House for Morris and his wife Jane Burden, where they lived from 1859 to 1865.

Morris was a Victorian polymath, designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist, but what makes him extraordinary is how seamlessly he wove these identities together. For Morris, there was no separation between art and life, between beauty and utility, between the aesthetic and the political. This holistic vision, radical in the 1880s, feels remarkably relevant today.

Beauty and Utility

His central belief was disarmingly simple: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. This wasn’t about minimalism or austerity. Rather, Morris argued for a world where everyday objects, the chairs we sit on, the curtains at our windows, the cups we drink from, should be thoughtfully crafted and beautiful. He despised the shoddy mass-produced goods flooding Victorian Britain, seeing them as symptomatic of a deeper malaise: a society that had separated workers from the joy of creation.

John Ruskin profoundly shaped Morris’s thinking, particularly through “On the Nature of Gothic Architecture” in The Stones of Venice, which Morris called “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.” From Ruskin, Morris adopted the rejection of industrial manufacturing in favour of hand-craftsmanship, elevating artisans to artists and advocating for affordable, handmade art without hierarchies between mediums.

The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement that Morris championed was fundamentally about human dignity. He believed that factory production degraded workers, turning them into mere cogs in a machine, repeating mindless tasks divorced from creativity or pride. His vision of craft-based production wasn’t nostalgic romanticism, it was a radical reimagining of labour itself. Work, he insisted, should be a source of fulfilment, not merely survival.

In 1861, Morris co-founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, and others. The firm revolutionized Victorian interior design through Morris’s tapestries, wallpapers, fabrics, furniture, and stained glass, becoming hugely fashionable. Morris took sole control in 1875, renaming it Morris & Co.

His nature-inspired designs, those sinuous stems, intricate flowers, and medieval-influenced patterns, remain ubiquitous, adorning everything from Liberty fabrics to contemporary homeware. But beyond their aesthetic appeal, they represent Morris’s deep respect for the natural world, another aspect of his thinking that speaks urgently to our moment.

Socialism and Community

Morris’s socialism was no drawing-room affectation, it was passionately lived. In 1883, he joined the Social Democratic Federation before founding the Socialist League, throwing himself into street-corner speeches, organizing meetings, and even facing arrest for his activism. He surrounded himself with radical thinkers and artists: Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, became a close comrade; Edward Burne-Jones remained his lifelong friend and artistic collaborator despite occasional political tensions; and his Kelmscott Press brought together craftspeople and intellectuals committed to beautiful, accessible books.

Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere painted his vision of a future society without class distinctions, where work was voluntary and joyful. For Morris, socialism and craft were inseparable, both were about human liberation, about creating conditions where everyone could develop their creative capacities rather than being crushed by poverty or soul-destroying labour.

An Enduring Legacy

What captivates me most is how Morris’s ideas transcend their Victorian context. Today, as we grapple with fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and the environmental costs of endless consumption, Morris’s call for quality over quantity resonates powerfully. His emphasis on sustainability, making things that last, that can be repaired, that connect us to makers and materials, feels prescient.

Morris wasn’t without contradictions. His handcrafted goods were often too expensive for ordinary people, despite his socialist convictions. Yet his fundamental questions endure: What is good work? How do we create a society where everyone can flourish? How do we balance beauty, utility, and justice?

Nearly 130 years after his death (3 October), William Morris remains an important figure for many, reminding us about sustainability, equity, compassion, and the beauty of the everyday objects that surround us.