On the back of new DNA findings from Rakhigarhi, scientists speak of deep, unbroken indigeneity, local evolution of farming and...the thoroughly nativist ‘Out of India theory’. What's the truth?

If politics is in our blood, the slogan is the pulse. Its rhythms aren’t partisan­: they create a community of words.

In its ‘Hindu Lite’ avatar, Congress has abdicated on one of the biggest issues of our times when it could have been of genuine use.

Prof V.S. Shinde, senior archaeologist and vice-chancellor of Deccan College, explains how Rakhigarhi extends our understanding of the Harappan civilisation.

The Rakhigarhi project shines light on an old enigma: the ­Harappans were genetically ‘Ancestral South Indian’ stock. Which is to say, all of us in South Asia are their children.

Indians take the interpretation of their past with a degree of seriousness found virtually nowhere else in the world, says Sheldon Pollock, one of the world's most eminent Sanskritists, in a exclusive interview withOutlook.

A little Jayasi Ramayan can be carved out of Padmavat, writer-scholar Purushottam Agrawal tells Outlook in an exclusive interview.

The tomb is gone. The Africans are gone. The Pashto-speaking Punjabis are vanishing too. Sunil Menon takes a walk through a city as a form-shifting memoir.

Everyone gets hit by bullet or shrapnel today. Here’s when Outlook got trolled.

The ’50s wasn’t a placid pool of idealism. In grappling with the Partition and forging a new polity, it fashioned modern India. This wide-angle view serves it well.

What does a magazine do when the coherent world of letters shatters around us? Open ourselves up to the beautiful cacophony.

Ratan Thiyam, the world-renowned theatre director from Manipur, who won the Outlook SpeakOut Award for Best Artist, reminisces about his life’s journey.

The story-strands in Arundhati Roy's new novel 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness', spin out to encompass and tie up almost all the themes that drove her non-fiction in the 20 years since her first novel, but it's also a vision of dark, comic-fabulist genius.

When the refusal of ‘the new normal’ takes fictional form, what comes out is a sprawling tale of the triumph of ­broken lives—blossoms cutting defiantly through rock

“The more you watch Japanese television, the more you feel it’s watching you....”

If society is the sum of its contraries, can BDSM coexist with khap?

The centrality of Tamil culture within the Dravidian space may have been an error of the imagination.Even history reflected chauvinistic trends...

YouTube inverted the entire logic of scarcity and desire that drove us on hot, lonely afternoons to tiny cassette shops

Excerpts from a conversation between five diverse voices—architect Raj Rewal, activist Bezwada Wilson, conservationist A.G.K. Menon, poet-linguist Rukmini Bhaya Nair and artist-photographer Dayanita Singh